George Orwell never fulfilled his wish to visit Huesca when he fought in the Spanish Civil War, but nearly 90 years on, his son Richard Blair has made the trip to unveil a statue in honor of his famous father.
With a tender kiss, George Orwell’s son made a quiet gesture to his father: in a way, the writer had finally come home. When Orwell fought on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war, his division was poised to take the eastern city of Huesca. Confident of victory over the Nationalists, the generals promised the troops they would be drinking coffee in the city the next day, but it never came to pass.
Now, almost 90 years after the writer of Homage to Catalonia nearly lost his life in the 1936-1939 war, his son Richard Blair has finally realized his father’s wish to make it to Huesca – symbolically at least – when a bronze relief of Orwell was erected last month in his honor. Blair has led a campaign with Victor Pardo, a Spanish historian, to preserve his father’s memory in the eastern Spanish city. Campaigners in Britain and Spain mounted a campaign to raise about €25,000 to fund the memorial.
After the ceremony, Blair kissed his hand and put it on his father’s face. A band played “Viva La Quinta Brigada,” a Republican civil war song, but with the words changed to include the members of the Independent Labour Party contingent, of which Orwell was a member.
“As Orwell wrote in ‘Homage in Catalonia,’ the generals were saying every day ‘tomorrow we will take coffee in Huesca’ but of course it never happened. Now he finally has in very much a symbolic way,” Blair told Euronews Culture. “(I felt) very proud and very emotional. It has been the highlight of our visits to Spain.”
“What it has done, of course, has cemented our relationship with Huesca. I think a lot of people in Aragon recognized that Orwell was reporting in an honest way what was going on.”
Today, the region in eastern Spain is embroiled in a modern-day controversy over the conflict that tore the country apart in the 1930s. Regional governments in Aragon, Castile and Leon, and Valencia are run by a coalition of the conservative People’s Party (PP) and the far-right Vox. Last month, these right-wing coalitions were accused by the United Nations of trying to “whitewash” the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.
Two years ago, Spain’s socialist-led government introduced a Democratic Memory Law designed to bring “justice, reparation and dignity” to the victims of the civil war. It contains dozens of measures which are intended to “settle Spanish democracy’s debt to its past”. Among these are setting up a DNA bank to help locate and identify the remains of tens of thousands of people who lie in unmarked graves; a ban on people who glorify Franco; and a redefinition of the Valley of the Fallen, the giant basilica and memorial where Franco lay for 44 years.
However, the PP and Vox coalition have been trying to replace this with ‘harmony laws’ in the regions where they govern. In a letter sent to the Spanish government in April, UN experts said the information they received about the proposed laws “could affect the Spanish state’s obligations when it comes to human rights, especially its obligations to guarantee the preservation of historical memory on serious human rights violations”.
Despite his father’s involvement, Blair is rather reluctant to become mired in a Spanish political controversy. Orwell fought in the Spanish Republican POUM militia during the civil war. He was shot in the neck in 1937 on the Aragon front but survived through luck. He died in 1950 when his adopted son was five years old.
To help the campaign, Blair matched every £1 donated by giving £1 of his money. Eton College, Orwell’s alma mater, gave money to the project. Pardo believes that for Orwell, his time in Spain was the most important in his life.
“Orwell came to Spain in 1936 as a journalist, but he changed the pen for a gun. We celebrate a man who looked for truth and defended liberty,” Pardo told the memorial ceremony.
Quentin Kopp, the chair of the Orwell Society, has been a key figure in the campaign. His father, Georges Kopp, was Orwell’s commanding officer in the civil war. Later, after the war, Kopp married into the Orwell family, so Richard Blair and Quentin Kopp are cousins as well as firm friends.
“It was emotional for me in a different way to Richard. It was an important project and this was a project that was more than necessary,” Quentin Kopp told Euronews Culture.
“It was very special. It is what ‘Homage to Catalonia’ means to those on the Republican side during the war. Orwell spoke plainly about what he saw going on around him at the time. That is valued so much more in Spain than anywhere else.”
