When Nancy Johnstone and her husband Archie set off for the Costa Brava in 1934 they dreamed, like so many Britons have since, of a new, tranquil life on the shores of the Mediterranean, but within two years the Spanish civil war put an end to what they called their “blue paradise”.

Now their books, which can be placed alongside George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia in their depiction of the war that ripped the country apart in the 1930s, are to be made into an English-language film by the award-winning Catalan producer Isona Passola, whose Pa Negra (Black Bread) won best picture at the 2010 San Sebastián festival.

Nancy, then in her late 20s, had convinced Archie to quit his job as a subeditor on the News Chronicle and go with her to Tossa de Mar, where they planned to build a hotel. They chose Tossa, now a popular resort, because Archie said no one he knew had ever been there before.



When they arrived they found a thriving artistic community, many of whom had fled Nazi Germany. Among them was the architect Fritz Marcus, who designed the hotel that became Casa Johnstone. Other new residents included the artists Marc Chagall, Oskar Zügel and Dora Maar.

Using their Fleet Street links, the hotel soon became popular among London journalists, writers and artists. Nancy learned Catalan and the couple settled into the local community.

Then war broke out and one day in 1936 a Royal Navy destroyer appeared in the bay to rescue British residents. Nancy and Archie refused to go, saying they would not abandon the people of Tossa.

“We had nothing against people defending themselves from a fascist coup,” Nancy wrote in Hotel in Spain (1937), her perceptive and often witty account of their early years in Tossa.

Book cover of A Hotel on the Costa Brava. Photograph: Tusquets editores

That book was followed two years later by Hotel in Flight, both published by Faber but long out of print and forgotten, until they were discovered by Miquel Berga, a professor of humanities at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and a leading Orwell scholar, who translated the books into Catalan.

“I knew of Nancy Johnstone through an [unflattering] review by Orwell in the late 1930s, but I became fully aware of the potential of fusing the two books in a single narrative when I read the second one and I realised how what began as a sort of ‘A Year in Provence’ became, in the end, a tragic, political, and highly moral tale,” Berga said.

“The fascinating story of the Johnstones is unique in the sense that they didn’t come to the war for political reasons (as was the case of almost all of the reporting by British authors), the war came to them when they had already decided to make Catalonia their adopted country,” he said.

“Nancy Johnstone’s account constitutes the most comprehensive chronicle ever written about the republic and the civil war by a full-time British resident.”

Production is due to start soon on the film adaptation of the books, says Passola, whose company Massa d’Or will make the film – in English – with Scottish and German partners.

“We will shoot it in Tossa,” Passola said. “The old town hasn’t changed. The view that Nancy would have had from her hotel is exactly as it was then.

“Nancy is a powerful character and she gives us an outsider’s view of the war in Spain,” she added. “Above all, it’s an emotional story of this woman who is struggling to make her hotel a success and, when that is interrupted by war, is capable of adapting and showing solidarity with the cause against fascism, as did many English people.”

As the fascists advanced northwards in the 1930s, Casa Johnstone soon become home to 50 children orphaned by the war, while Nancy and Archie eked out a living covering the conflict for the Manchester Guardian and the News Chronicle. The day before Tossa fell, the couple piled 60 children into a truck and drove them to safety in France, joining a long line of refugees.

By then Nancy’s mood and the tone of her writing had changed from can-do cheerful to undisguised cynicism. After describing the harsh conditions in a refugee camp close to Perpignan in southern France, she concludes Hotel in Flight saying:

The relief work depended on what help the British government cared to give. Voluntary organisations were drained. But one organisation was still going strong. A contingent of plus-four clad gentlemen arrived from England to shoot painlessly the wandering, starving Spanish mules. It seemed a pity that they did not first shoot painlessly the cooped-up, starving Spanish refugees.

The couple split up shortly afterwards. Archie spent the war back at the Chronicle and was then seconded to the British embassy in Moscow, but after two years defected to the Soviet Union where he lived until his death in 1978.

Nancy went to Mexico where she remarried. She returned to Tossa in 1951 but was so dismayed by Franco’s Spain that she sold the hotel and after that there is no trace of her.

Nancy Johnstone (far left) in 1947 on a return trip to Tossa after the war. Photograph: Tusquest editors

Casa Johnstone still exists, but has been engulfed by the much larger Hotel Don Juan.

Nancy, bitter about what she saw as Britain’s betrayal of the republic, writes in Hotel in Flight about the Catalans’ blind faith in the British: “They had complete faith in England. England could not allow such things as the bombing of Gernika. England would protect the Basques who had always been her friends.

“In spite of one fact after another, all showing clearly that England was favouring the other side, the local people still clung to their belief.”