Doves of War: Four Women of Spain

To say that she had left her heart in Spain was an understatement. In mid-December, she received a visit from Últano Kindelán and his English wife Doreen. Most of her diary entries recount a lively social life that left her deeply miserable and a sense of alienation. Now ‘a breath of my beloved Spain’ filled her with joy. ‘The realisation that Spain is not all a dream, that they all exist and want me back and that one day I can go. It was wonderful and I felt alive and interested in life again for a moment.’ She wished she could accept their invitation to go back to Spain with them. As it was, she had to meet her colleagues from the medical unit: ‘hard-faced wispy old hags except one pop-eyed nit-wit’. She was gratified by a telegram on 16 December from Ataúlfo: ‘Thanks letters. Can’t see why you shouldn’t come here for next five years.’ On the following day, it was backed up by another from Consuelo which read: ‘For the Lord’s sake do what Ataúlfo says in his telegram. You will regret it all your life if you don’t come.’ Her reaction – that, despite her longing, to go without a prospect of fulfilment would just be to condemn herself to unhappiness – was both courageous and momentous. ‘For five years I have chased after Ataúlfo like a fool. Now if he wants to, he can come and fetch me but if he does not want me I won’t go back.’ She began sporadically to get angry with Ataúlfo by way of reconciling herself to what was likely to be a final break. Her wretchedness was not diminished by the packing-up of Seaford House in advance of it being abandoned by the family for good.136

Nineteen-forty started with more telegrams from Ataúlfo, more heartache for Pip and relief that she would soon be off to France. The telegrams provoked tears and intense hurt by forcing her to contemplate her impossible situation. As departure for France beckoned, she began to regret rejecting the invitations to Sanlúcar. In bitterly freezing weather, she left London on 29 January 1940. She spent a pleasant fortnight in Paris, shopping and taking advantage of well-stocked and cheap restaurants. With the war seemingly a long way off, she bought clothes, gramophone records and ‘material for curtains etc for my future rooms’. On 12 February, the unit moved to northeast France, setting up a hospital between Nancy and Sarrebourg in the Moselle. Although the hospital was near the front, there was virtually no military action and the work was inconsequential and tedious. It was enlivened by one daring visit to the Maginot line to peer at the Germans and by occasional concert parties.137 Her hopes were raised by a possibility that Ataúlfo would come to London as adjutant to Juan Antonio Ansaldo who had been named Spanish Air Attaché.138 She was pleased too when her experience and her good French and English saw her given considerable responsibility. As the work increased, she was moved to write: ‘I am gradually getting happier here and more or less contented. All bothers of life are so far away from one here that one can’t worry so very much.’ She forged a friendship with another English woman in the unit, Dorothy ‘Dodo’ Annesley, and even had a mild flirtation with an American officer called Etienne Gilon.139

However, Pip’s version of the phoney war was coming to an end. On 22 April, the hospital was shelled, which stirred unpleasant memories of her ordeal at Escatrón. Her combat experience in Spain singled her out in the unit and gave her a maturity not shared by her older companions. On the other hand, she never entirely escaped from her time and class, writing after one day in the operating theatre, ‘We had two buck niggers today. I hate niggers.’ Rumours of Mussolini joining the war at Hitler’s side led to speculation that Franco would not be far behind. The idea caused her deep disquiet. ‘I can’t imagine anything very much more hellish than fighting against Spain. It was bad enough worrying about Ataúlfo when I was on the same side, but it will be far worse when we are on opposite sides with no news.’ The German assault on the Low Countries provoked an ambiguous reaction – ‘Altogether the Germans have been very spirited. They have bombed masses of French towns last night … Winston Churchill is now Prime Minister of England instead of Chamberlain. I think he is dreadful but perhaps he will do something for a change because so far the Germans seem to be having everything all their own way.’ She was quite blasé about the advancing Wehrmacht. ‘Evidently the Germans have dropped some men in parachutes near here and they have not been caught. So we are all to expect to be murdered in our beds or something.’

The surrender of the Dutch on 15 May did not affect her good humour. A newly arrived and pompous new nurse, a friend of Lady Hadfield, seemed to Pip to be ‘an awe-inspiring old hag if I ever saw one’. As the Germans reached Amiens and Arras, the stream of casualties increased somewhat. When they took Abbéville and were closing in on Boulogne, she began to get concerned for the British Expeditionary Force – ‘Hopeless pansy performance we are putting up.’ She bitterly regretted not being nearer the front line and felt that her unit, being ‘smart’, would never be put in serious danger. When wounded German prisoners came in, Pip was appalled by the hostility that they provoked. ‘We are nurses. And to a nurse, there is no such thing as nationality. One patient is the same as another whether black or white, a Frenchman or a German.’ The fall of Belgium at the end of May left her worried about the BEF being cut off and massacred. Orders came on 30 May for the unit to be evacuated but nothing happened for a week. With the patients packed off, the nurses spent the time drinking, partying, picnicking, fishing and squabbling, with Pip distributing succour to those who had lost fiancés. With no newspapers and only sporadic news on the radio, it was an idyllic interlude – ‘I have not been so happy since goodness knows when.’140

The unit left Alsace for the south on 7 June. Pip found it all a great adventure until Mussolini’s entry into the war on 10 June once again provoked her worries that Franco would not be far behind. The unit was to set up as a poste d’embarquement, with two hundred beds in a tent at a railway station near Rosnay. However, the speed of the German advance saw them swept up in the flood of refugees heading south. The German occupation of Paris forced the abandonment of plans to set up a new hospital to back up a French defensive stand. The group moved on, staying in requisitioned chateaux. By 16 June, they were near Vichy. News of Pétain’s request for an armistice left Pip weeping with ‘the sudden feeling of the bottom dropping out of one’s world’. As they neared Bordeaux, there was deep anxiety that their convoy would run out of petrol or be cut off by the vertiginous German advance. In either case, Pip was determined to start walking along with other refugees and head for Spain. Depressed and frightened by the prospect of being captured and sent to a German concentration camp, they pressed on, without food, towards Bordeaux.

On 22 June, with wounded British soldiers and a motley group of refugees, they were taken out to sea. There they were picked up by the British light cruiser, HMS Galatea, which took them to St Jean de Luz to pick up the British Ambassador. By 24 June, the unit was on board a troop carrier, the SS Ettrick, en route to England. Among those on board were a group of Polish troops. Pip was instantly entranced – ‘wonderful tall, dark, strong-looking people’. She nursed the wounded soldiers on board and, since her friend Dorothy was ill, Pip also looked after her. Despite her lack of sleep and the cramped conditions, her irrepressible optimism reasserted itself – ‘the Polish troops on board are heaven and have wonderful singing orgies on deck every evening’. The ship reached Plymouth on 26 June. She reached Chirk only to discover, to her horror, that her mother was in Liverpool on the point of leaving for Canada with her four granddaughters.141

Chirk and London were equally depressing. On arrival in the capital, she was told that a young man, James Cassell, who had written to her in France and proposed to her, had committed suicide, leaving a note which read simply ‘Goodbye, Pip.’ When she made enquiries about the Orléans family, she was devastated to be told that they were so pro-German that the British Royal family was livid with them and that Ataúlfo had not been allowed into the country as assistant air attaché to Juan Antonio Ansaldo. Such gossip was wildly exaggerated but it was true that the Civil War had left enormous admiration for the Third Reich on the Spanish Right. The men of the Orléans family had flown with German and Italian aviators throughout the war. Although upset by these rumours, Pip’s reaction was not without shrewdness.

Why do I have to go on being nuts about a man who has always behaved like a prize shit to me and is now violently pro-German. I ought to be furious but it is exactly what I expected of him, the great spineless sod. He is led by his parents wherever they fancy. And to think that we have all been brought up together for two generations and that they are monarchists and Catholics and yet pro-German. They deserve all they would get if the Nazi regime spreads to Spain.142

The mental turmoil occasioned by the Catholic royalist Orléanses’ pro-German stance helped Pip to see Ataúlfo in a slightly harsher light – ‘I still like him better than anyone else in the world which is probably why I mind so terribly his upholding the other side. I hope I never have to see him again, the filthy bastard.’143 Her mind was taken off Ataúlfo by an encounter with ‘Dodo’ Annesley and Marjorie Fielden who had been with her in the nursing unit in France. Dodo intended to organise a hospital for the Poles in Scotland and wanted Pip to take charge of the nursing staff. In fact, she had to do everything – find suitable premises, raise the necessary funds, purchase surgical equipment. Having committed herself to Dodo, she was then offered a job in Spain by a man called Hugh Smyth. He told her, implausibly, that it would be with the British diplomatic corps. Other evidence suggests that this was a tentative approach by the intelligence services. She felt relieved that the Polish undertaking saved her from making a fool of herself with Ataúlfo. By 3 August, she was on her way to Glasgow where it was arranged that there would be a mobile field hospital, half surgical and general medical complete with operating theatre, laundry and fumigating plant. It was eventually to accompany the Polish units into battle in Italy but by then Pip would have moved on. The entire enterprise was going to be extraordinarily expensive and the initial costs were readily met by Margot Howard de Walden. Pip looked for locations, continued further fund-raising and started learning Polish.144

It was sufficiently hectic to keep thoughts of Ataúlfo at bay. However, at the beginning of September 1940, she recalled the German invasion of Poland one year earlier when she had been at Sanlúcar. ‘How miserable I was and how justified I was. I have not enjoyed myself for a single day since, and don’t see that I shall again for a long time.’ A year had passed but she was still not cured of her longing for him – ‘I still feel just the same cold, empty feeling without the sod as I always did.’ Life was made thoroughly difficult throughout the German bombing offensive on London during the autumn of 1940. Although inevitably appalled by the damage done by the Blitz, Pip’s sense of humour did not desert her. She found it ‘rather exhilarating being frightened like this all the time, it peps me up, but I do wish it would not give me diarrhoea. However, that at least is slimming.’ She moved around between the homes of various friends and relatives after being forced out of her father’s studio in Cadogan Lane by an unexploded bomb in the garden. Later, after she had got back into the studio, it was badly damaged by another bomb while she was sleeping. In the same air raid, across Belgrave Square, the façade was blown off Seaford House.145

A letter from Princess Bea expressing her anxiety that Franco might join the war alongside Hitler left Pip wondering if Ataúlfo would end up dropping bombs on London. The mid-September visit to Berlin of Franco’s brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Suñer, was assumed to herald Spanish belligerence. Her analysis of the strategic consequences if Spain went to war, in terms of the loss of Gibraltar and the closing of the Straits, was extremely acute. Her rhetorical question as to why Britain did not try to keep Spain neutral by offering to return Gibraltar after the war exactly echoed Churchill’s own thinking. Her personal anguish at the implications of Spain at war with Britain could hardly have been more intense.

I can’t imagine a greater hell than knowing that Ataúlfo is fighting against me and is bombing day after day. He will never live through a whole other war. It just isn’t possible. And I shan’t even know if he is alive or not. I can’t fight against a country I have fought with for two years, and I would rather die than fight against Ataúlfo. But still women don’t fight and anyhow it is no good feeling that way because we have to win this war and if all the people I love best have to be my enemies meanwhile I will just have to put up with it … For a year I have been miserable because I can’t go back to Spain or see Ataúlfo, but at least I was happy to know that he was safe and enjoying himself and now even that consolation looks like being taken away.146

In the midst of her distress, she received an insouciant letter from Consuelo asking ‘is London as destroyed as they say? What a shame, such a nice town, it is a great pity.’ A philosophic Pip pondered, ‘how very far we are from our fellow human beings, even great friends. It is funny to think how I worry about Spain joining in this war and how little they worry about us. And we are supposed to be the unfeeling, unemotional ones.’ However, news of Franco’s historic meeting with Hitler at Hendaye on 23 October 1940 renewed all of her anxieties. On that day, she had a terrifying attack of depression, – ‘all of a sudden I began to feel utterly lonely and futile and within about two minutes was lying on the floor sobbing my heart out at the misery and beastliness of life … I felt imprisoned by an impenetrable barrier of wickedness and pettiness and knew that I should never get out. I just lay in the middle of a circle of evil, wicked, mean things sobbing and exhausted with despair.’ No doubt this was a delayed reaction to the terror that she was experiencing during the night-time bombing attacks. And further considerable anxiety was provoked by the fact that Franco, in whose cause she had given so much, was toadying up to Hitler, who was in the process of destroying London.147

Her reaction to another letter from Consuelo revealed a Pip who was growing up fast. Consuelo wrote that Ataúlfo was behaving very badly, was constantly drunk and deliberately provoking rows with his mother and father. He had told her that ‘he did not care a damn any longer about pleasing his parents as they had ruined his life by not letting him marry the person he wanted to’. Pip’s reaction was extraordinarily mature and wise. ‘What a fat head he is. Too weak to defy his parents in anything important so he just drives them crazy in small ways and no doubt makes himself miserable in the attempt.’ Her romantic longings of old seemed to be replaced, consciously at least, by sadness that Ataúlfo was squandering his talents. Some days later, she awoke in tears after a dream about him: ‘We were in a crowd of panic-stricken women and swarms of babies. He kept trying to reach me and getting swept away. I was terrified of something. At last he reached me and just as he stretched out his hand to catch mine I woke up simultaneously as he was swept away right out of sight.’148

That Pip’s heart remained in Spain was revealed when Juan Antonio Ansaldo made a visit to London prior to taking up his duties as Air Attaché. When she was invited to have a drink with him and some friends, she assumed that they would have forgotten all about her ‘the same as all my friends here did while I was in Spain’. ‘The only reason they were ever so friendly was because they thought I was engaged to Ataúlfo, but by now they will have forgotten that and I am just another dim English girl who once went to Spain … Now maybe I will wake up to the fact that I don’t belong in Spain and no one there cares two damns about me any longer outside of Sanlúcar.’ Her anxieties were totally misplaced. When they met at the Dorchester, Ansaldo fell upon her effusively. She was so moved by his affectionate response to her that she wrote later: ‘It was a feeling like coming home again after a long exile. I felt as if someone had removed a ton weight off me. Despite all my longing for Spain, I had not realised till then just how much I loved it.’ Her delight at being able to reminisce in Spanish was short-lived. As dawn was breaking on her way home from an extremely alcoholic dinner, she witnessed rescue squads trying to retrieve people trapped in the cellars of bombed houses. When she saw her Spanish friends again on the eve of their return to Madrid, she wept uncontrollably. ‘I know this is my country but it does not feel like it. I feel like an exile from home and I can’t go back.149

Nostalgia for Spain made it all the more difficult for Pip to throw herself into her Polish project. Having got embroiled in it so as not to be tempted to run back to Spain, she was now regretting the decision. She even began to wonder if she should not have accepted one of the several offers that she had had to go to Spain to work for British Intelligence. The visit of Ansaldo had left her feeling that her love for Spain was not just about Ataúlfo. ‘I love that country and anything to do with it.’150 Nevertheless, she put aside her distress and knuckled down to making a success of the Polish Hospital. In late October and early November 1940, all the preparatory work began to come together. Pip forged an alliance with Diana Napier, a minor film star and wife of the great Austrian tenor, Richard Tauber, who was in charge of organising ambulances for the Polish Army. A base was found at Dupplin Castle, between Perth and Dundee on the Firth of Tay. At first, Pip faced considerable difficulties in getting the hospital up and running: ‘More and more I hate this Hospital and all the Poles … Loathe the Poles, loathe the Hospital and want to be back in Spain. Even without Spain I should still loathe the Poles.’ Inevitably, as always happened, the more she threw herself into her work, the more engrossed and therefore the less unhappy she became.151 The hospital was called SEFA – from the initials of Scott-Ellis, Marjorie Fielden and Dorothy Annesley.

There were occasional flashes of news from Ataúlfo, mainly when he was in Madrid, which convinced Pip that he was frightened of showing his feelings for her when he was at his parents’ home. At the end of November, a brief stay in London was prolonged after a car crash in the blackout. She was recovering from minor facial surgery when she was visited by Peter Kemp. Her old comrade from the Nationalist ranks told her that he had seen Ataúlfo in Madrid just after he had received news of her flight from France. Pip was amused to be told that he had been furious to hear of her French adventure. He had said that he wished that she had been taken prisoner so that his family could have arranged for the Germans to send her to Spain. She was even more delighted to hear that while in Madrid liaising with the German military representatives, Ataúlfo had ‘received a delegation from all the brothels of Madrid to ask him to ask the Germans to take their boots off!’152

In December 1940, Pip was given the title of honorary colonel in the Polish Army. She found it ‘rather fun’ being called ‘Pani Pulkownik’ (Madame Colonel). Life settled down into a monotonous routine. Pip worked immensely hard and learned a lot of physiology and anatomy.153 Her Polish became as fluent as her Spanish. Beyond her work, her main preoccupation regarding the outside world was that Spain did not enter the war on Hitler’s side. She was as distressed as many of her Polish comrades by the idea of alliance with Soviet Russia. Her class prejudices, and her experiences in Spain, shone through in her remark that ‘I should hate to fight with a lot of bloody Communists almost as much, though not quite, as I should hate to fight against Spain.’154

The next years are difficult to reconstruct. Her diary comes to an abrupt end in January 1941. Pressure of work is a possible explanation for the silence although she had managed to write daily under far more trying circumstances in Spain. The survival of a later fragment suggests that the diary was simply lost. Nevertheless, the value of her work can be deduced from the fact that, in 1943, she was awarded the Polish Golden Cross of Merit with the approval of the Foreign Office.155 What is known is that the cold and damp of the Scottish climate intensified her tendency to very poor circulation. The chief surgeon at the hospital told her that smoking and drinking so much was exacerbating the problem. She seems to have tried sporadically to cut down but the daily stress of life at the hospital made abstention impossible for her. Life became unbearably difficult and she was diagnosed as having circulatory difficulties, known as Raynaud’s disease. It was recommended that she go to live in a warm climate. Throughout her time at Dupplin Castle, she longed for the day when she would return to Spain although a lengthy affair with a Polish surgeon, Colonel Henryk Masarek, had helped her finally to put aside hopes of marrying Ataúlfo.

As a result of her experiences in Spain during the Civil War, the various informal approaches from the Secret Services in 1939 and 1940 were entirely understandable. Keeping Spain neutral was a major preoccupation and an upper-class English woman with Pip’s impeccable political connections was an obvious target for recruitment. She was close to both the Orléans and Kindelán families, the two most important centres of the monarchist opposition to Franco within Spain itself. In mid-July 1941, the Special Operations Executive ran a security trace on her. The trace request to MI5 stated: ‘It is our intention that the Honourable Miss Scott-Ellis should be employed in the investigation of the possibility of evacuating Polish prisoners-of-war from Spain. We would be glad to know, if you have any reason from the security point of view why this person should not be so employed.’ The reply from MI5 cast doubt on her discretion citing a report that, at a dinner held at the Savoy for the Spanish Aid Mission in December 1940, she had blurted out that she had been asked to go to Spain as a spy, as she knew so many people there. She proudly stated that she had refused this request – probably the repeated approaches by Hugh Smyth made in the course of 1939. She had said that she would never work against Spain.156 The reported remarks were entirely consistent with the heartfelt declarations in her diary.

Finally, in February 1943, the Continental Action Force of the Polish Government-in-Exile in Britain requested that Pip be sent to Spain to help in the evacuation of escaping prisoners-of-war. In the light of the earlier security report, the proposal was accepted only after some hesitation. It is difficult to reconstruct her work in Barcelona with the Special Operations Executive from the exiguous surviving files. However, she later hinted at what she did to her mother, her sister, to José Luis de Vilallonga and to her son, John. Her official position, or cover, was as a secretary working in the dissemination of pro-Allied information to counteract the domination of the Spanish media by the Third Reich. However, the Consulate in Barcelona was the main conduit for Allied personnel escaping across the Eastern Pyrenees. It would seem, therefore, that her role was to help in the safe passage of British and Polish pilots shot down over France and other escapees through Spain and into Portugal. Her language skills and her connections with the most prominent and influential pro-Allied monarchists make it eminently plausible that she was indeed organising their transit on to Lisbon.157

She had the perfect excuse for trips from Barcelona across Spain to a point relatively near the Portuguese border in her friendship with the Orléans Borbón family. In any case, her first port of call in Spain was the family’s Montpensier Palace at Sanlúcar de Barrameda where she went to convalesce from the illness exacerbated by the Scottish climate. Thereafter, her visits to the family were as frequent and as lengthy as they had been during the Civil War. There is plentiful photographic evidence of Pip, looking thin but happy, riding with Ataúlfo in April at the Feria de Sevilla, helping Ataúlfo with his animals at the Botánico at Sanlúcar de Barrameda in May, then again riding with Ataúlfo at the Rocío in June, and then at a party at Sanlúcar de Barrameda in August 1943. In the autumn of 1943, she went to Estoril to spend some time with her mother who was there returning from Canada with her four granddaughters. She travelled to Estoril again in late January 1944 to see Gaenor who was returning from America with her children. She had been with her husband Richard who had been working in the economic warfare section of the British Embassy in Washington.158 By late 1944, with Allied forces controlling the south of France, Pip’s role was coming to an end.