Daniel Vulliamy and Simon Martinez on their family links to the children who fled the Spanish civil war on the Habana and were evacuated to the UK

On this day 80 years ago, after German planes had bombed the north of Spain, particularly around Bilbao and Guernica, an old cruise liner, the Habana, docked at Southampton. On board were almost 4,000 refugee children from both sides of the conflict plus 230 teachers, helpers and Catholic priests. The children were accommodated for some weeks in tents, with latrines and kitchens rapidly built by local trade union branches and others, before being moved to houses all over the country, financed by churches, councils, trade unions, generous local benefactors and thousands of volunteers.

The British government was extremely reluctant to accept the refugees, preferring to adhere to a non-intervention agreement that the German and Italian fascists were clearly ignoring. The prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, thought the climate would not be to the liking of the children. The eventual agreement was that the children would only stay for a few months and that no public money could be used to support them; the tents provided by the army were actually rented to the organisers.

The media were largely hostile to the children, none more so than the Daily Mail, which sent reporters to expose every instance of misbehaviour by children clearly traumatised by the experience of being bombed.

I am immensely proud that my great-aunt Grace Vulliamy was involved with the initial arrangements for the Basque children’s arrival and that my aunts Chloe and Poppy ran some of the homes, particularly in Suffolk.

More importantly, I hope your readers might recognise shameful parallels with the behaviours of governments and newspapers in 1937 and 2017, and also the honourable parallels with the behaviour of churches, councils, trade unions and the general public both then and now.

Daniel Vulliamy

Brigham, East Yorkshire

• What “good” news to see that Spain has passed a non-binding law to remove the remains of Franco from his uneasy resting place in the Valle de los Caídos (MPs vote to take Franco’s remains from Valley of the Fallen tomb, 12 May).

General Francisco Franco was interred in this mausoleum in 1975 and the transition from dictatorship to democracy has been successful but incomplete because Spanish state funding still goes to glorifying his side of the civil war and no funding towards recovering the memory of those on the defeated side, and he rests in post-fascist glory in this carbuncle of a complex near Madrid.

My grandfather Tomás Martínez Gomez died in March 1939. His final resting place is not marked or remembered. He may be in fact interred in the Valley of the Fallen along with the 30,000 war dead, including many republicans, who were interred there without their family’s consent and who are not resting in peace.

My father, Enrique, and his two brothers were evacuated from Bilbao and came to Britain on the Habana, disembarking on 23 May 1937 – an anniversary being celebrated by the Basque Children of ’37 Association UK. Then the British public massively supported the nearly 4,000 children evacuated from Spain to the UK in the face of opposition and obstruction from the Conservative government. I hear echoes of those times when the plight of unaccompanied child refugees is ignored today.

I commend all those that are supporting child refugees through aid, food banks, etc. And I look forward to better news from Spain when the wrongs of 80 years ago, and the missed opportunities of the transition from dictatorship to democracy, can be corrected.

Simon Martinez

Sheffield

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