Picasso's War: The Destruction of Guernica, and the Masterpiece That Changed the World by Russell Martin & Oliver Wyman

Author:Russell Martin & Oliver Wyman [Martin, Russell & Wyman, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, History, Non-Fiction, Art
Publisher: HighBridge Company
Published: 2002-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

Fearing that The Times might not publish it, Steer copied his original telegram to the Labour Member of Parliament for Derby, Philip Noel-Baker, urging him to use it in the House of Commons and get the information to the still influential ex-Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden.47 He rebutted Francoist denials again in The Times on 6 May and, on 15 May, was able to report the shooting down near Bilbao of a German pilot whose log-book showed that he had taken part in the attack on Guernica.

Accusations that Steer had lied about Guernica continued to be made until the 1970s. In the early days, material that was found by the occupying forces in the telegraph office in Bilbao included The Times’s cable to Steer requesting more information. It was given by Bolín to the American Catholic propagandist for Franco, Father Joseph Thorning. When he published it in 1938, Thorning claimed that it proved that The Times had suspected the accuracy of his report. The cable was among large quantities of documents seized by the rebels in Bilbao and taken to Salamanca for sifting for information to be used in the repression. A British partisan of Franco, Major Francis Yeats-Brown, went to Salamanca where the Francoists showed him correspondence between ‘an English M.P.’ (Noel-Baker) and ‘a journalist in Bilbao who excelled himself in describing the Guernica affair’ (Steer). Without any sense of the irony of his own position as a propagandist for Franco, Yeats-Brown wrote delightedly that the cables showed conclusively that ‘both were very much mixed up in Basque affairs, too much so in fact’.48

Although the publication of the despatch had probably led to the Nazi expulsion of Norman Ebbutt, The Times man in Berlin, the paper continued to accept the veracity of Steer’s report. The Times had published Steer’s despatch in the period of the most avid appeasement exhibited by the paper’s editor, Geoffrey Dawson. In response to the virulent Anglophobia with which the controlled German press had reacted, Dawson wrote to The Times’s acting correspondent in Berlin, H. G. Daniels: ‘I did my utmost, night after night, to keep out of the paper anything that might hurt their susceptibilities. I can really think of nothing that has been printed now for many months past which they could possibly take exception to as unfair comment. No doubt they were annoyed by Steer’s first story of the bombing of Guernica, but its essential accuracy has never been disputed, and there has not been any attempt here to rub it in or harp upon it.’ It was to no avail. As Daniels informed him, Nazi propagandists had noticed that ‘Times’ spelt backwards is ‘Semit’ which was broadcast as proof that the newspaper for which Steer wrote was a Jewish-Marxist operation.49 George Steer’s name was placed on the Gestapo’s Special Wanted List of 2,820 persons who were to be detained after the Germans occupied Britain in 1940.50 Steer received threats from abroad that, if he was caught alive by the Francoists, he would be shot immediately.

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