Milk and human kindness: Maggie Brookes-Butt on Quaker relief in the Spanish civil war

‘Immediately, Quaker companies began to donate.’

A tiny handful of dedicated British Quakers saved the lives of countless children during the Spanish civil war. They stepped in during the autumn of 1936 as refugees began to trek north, escaping the advance of Franco’s fascist army. Madrid was under heavy bombardment, and trainloads of women and children headed towards Barcelona.

On November 19, 1936, the Society of Friends wrote to the Times: ‘Untold miseries are being inflicted on the child population of this unhappy country, not only by wounds and death but also in shattered nerves and ruined health.’ It said that Quaker Relief was working with Save the Children and the Red Cross to evacuate children from the worst war zones. A thousand youngsters had already been moved to ‘colonies’ in safer districts of Spain and France, but thousands more needed to be evacuated in ‘the impartial rescue of children’.

Alongside the evacuations there was an urgent need for food. One of the first on the scene was the indomitable Friend Edith Pye. She went to Barcelona to assess the needs of the children and found the situation was already grave. Her report said ‘food supplies are diminishing rapidly’ and she identified serious shortages of ‘milk, sugar, farinacous foods and cod-liver oil’. Immediately, Quaker companies like Cadbury and Fry, and others like McVitie’s and McFarlane, began to donate chocolate, biscuits and porridge oats.

It was decided that representatives of Friends Relief were needed on the ground to coordinate the work, and a young couple called Alfred and Norma Jacob volunteered. They were in their twenties, with two young children, but Alfred spoke Spanish and was able to leave immediately. By December 1936 he had arrived in Barcelona and met local activists Domingo and Margarita Ricart. Until Domingo met Alfred he had thought he was the only pacifist in the world. They welcomed Alfred into their home and on Christmas Day they opened a canteen in Barcelona station, giving warm milky drinks to the women and children who arrived on the night train from besieged Madrid. The Cadbury’s hot chocolate was particularly welcomed. Soon 1,000 refugees were arriving a week and Alfred found local people to staff the canteen, but they spoke Catalan and the refugees spoke Spanish, so he continued to be heavily involved himself.

The Society of Friends and Save The Children made the first of many joint appeals in the UK for the children of Spain, and enough money was raised that within six months of his arrival in Barcelona, Alfred had set up five canteens (one run by Norwegian Quakers under Elise Thomsen) and was serving 3,000 children and mothers every day with breakfasts. Children under six were given half a litre of milk a day. The canteens were staffed by local people and refugees. By February 1938, fifteen canteens were feeding 5,000 children a day, all coordinated by Alfred. He was also in charge of distributing huge shipments of clothing and blankets which arrived from the USA.

Save the Children sent massive loads of condensed milk, but that sparked a huge row between Alfred Jacob and the Save the Children representative Marie Pictet. Save the Children wanted to supply condensed milk, believing its fat and sugar content to be more ‘healthful’ for children. But the tins were heavy to ship, and Alfred argued that twice as many children could be fed for the same cost if dried milk powder was used. He commissioned a report from Cadbury’s on the relative health benefits of dried and condensed milk, but Mrs Pictet was having none of it and continued to send tins.

Alfred was also working with local agencies to set up children’s homes or ‘colonies’. By January 1937 the Spanish government’s Council for the Protection of Childhood was already responsible for 7,000 displaced children and International Red Aid had placed 2,000 children in 200 ‘children’s colonies.’ Although the colonies were set up like orphanages to house and educate youngsters, many of the children were sent there by their parents to get them away from the areas of worst bombardment.

Edith Pye now had a new idea. She persuaded the British Foreign Office to pledge £10,000 for the children of Spain provided she could persuade other governments to do the same. Her scheme was so successful that, before long, twenty-four governments were contributing, and the organisation was designated the International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain, with headquarters in Geneva. The organisation coordinated international fundraising and the supply chain, but it didn’t have any workers on the ground. It appointed the British Quakers under Alfred Jacob to run operations in Catalonia. The US Red Cross and US Quakers sent donations including 6,000 tons of wheat flour. Alfred moved his increasingly-complex operation to a large rented house. There were twelve foreign nationals on the team including their housekeeper Lucy Palser, and twice as many local people. The typewriters clacked and phones rang all day.

Meanwhile, Franco’s army, supported by German and Italian forces, was advancing along the north coast of Spain, and the Basque government appealed for foreign countries to accept child refugees. Alfred Jacob was furious. He did not agree with children being sent abroad, but France, Russia, Belgium, Mexico, Switzerland and Denmark between them accepted almost 29,000 children. After the bombing of Guernica, Britain also accepted 4,000 child refugees.

Other members of his team were busy with their own projects. Audrey Russell and sculptor Kanty Cooper set up a scheme for two- to four-year-olds who were neither getting the food supplied to babies, nor breakfasts at school. Teacher and journalist Francesca Wilson headed south to Murcia, where she found 20,000 refugees housed in squalid ‘night shelters.’ An unfinished nine-storey apartment block without running water or sanitation housed 4,000 Malagan refugees, many of whom were children. Francesca Wilson described the din, the stench, the filth, the flies and mosquitoes. ‘This is the greatest misery I’ve ever seen in my life,’ she said. ‘And I’ve seen some terrible sights.’ Food supplies were sent by truck from the Quaker stores in Valencia.

Hunger gripped Barcelona. By September 1938 Kanty Cooper was running seventy-four canteens, feeding 15,164 children a day. By January 1939, 132 canteens were serving 27,532 every day.

As Franco closed in on Barcelona, with terrible daily bombing raids, people began to flee towards the French border. The roads though the Pyrennes were choked with refugees. Norma Jacob, Kanty Cooper and Lucy Palser drove to the border where they set up a mobile canteen which gave out 200,000 rations. As the fascists entered Barcelona on January 26 1939, a few of Alfred’s team remained to close up the operation which had saved the lives of so many children.

The important work of this handful of untrained volunteers laid the foundations for the professional teams which arrive so quickly nowadays in disaster zones. Their efforts were acknowledged in 1947 when Quakers were awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for their ‘silent help from the nameless to the nameless’.

Maggie’s novel about Quaker aid during the Spanish civil war, Acts of Love and War, is out now.

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