Paul Preston - Franco

While waiting to leave for the Canary Islands, Franco spent time talking about the situation with General José Enrique Varela, Colonel Antonio Aranda and other like-minded officers. Everywhere he went, he was followed by agents of the Dirección General de Seguridad. 4 On 8 March, the day before setting out for Cádiz on the first stage of his journey, Franco met a number of dissident officers at the home of José Delgado, a prominent stockbroker and crony of Gil Robles. Among those present were Mola, Varela, Fanjul and Orgaz, as well as Colonel Valentín Galarza. They discussed the need for a coup. They were all agreed that the exiled General Sanjurjo should head the rising.

The impetuous Varela favoured an audacious coup in Madrid; the more thoughtful Mola proposed a co-ordinated civilian/military uprising in the provinces. Mola believed that the movement should not be overtly monarchist. Franco said little other than to suggest shrewdly that any rising should have no specific party label. He made no firm commitments. They departed, having agreed to begin preparations with Mola as overall director and Galarza, as liaison chief. They undertook to act if the Popular Front dismantled the Civil Guard or reduced the size of the officer corps, if revolution broke out or if Largo Caballero was asked to form a government. 5

After leaving the meeting, Franco collected his family and the inevitable Pacón and headed for the Atocha station to catch the train to Cádiz where they would embark for Las Palmas. At Atocha, a group of generals, including Fanjul and Goded came to wish him farewell. On arrival at Cádiz, Franco was shocked by the scale of disorder which greeted his party, churches having been attacked by anarchists. When the military governor of Cádiz informed him that ‘Communists’ had set fire to a convent near his barracks, Franco was furious: ‘Is it possible that the troops of a barracks saw a sacrilegious crime being committed and that you just stood by with your arms folded?’ The colonel replied that he had been ordered by the civilian authorities not to intervene. Franco barked ‘Such orders, since they are unworthy, should never be obeyed by an officer of our Army’ and he refused to shake hands with the colonel.

Franco’s anger reflected his own deep-seated attachment to Catholicism inherited from his mother. It was inextricably entangled with his military-hierarchical view of society. From revulsion at the Left’s disrespect for God and the Church it was but a short step to thinking that the use of military force to defend the social order was both necessary and justified. He was even more dismayed when a crowd on the quay which had arrived complete with a band to see off the new civil governor of Las Palmas sang the Internationale with their fists raised in the Communist salute. The constant reminders of popular enthusiasm for the Republic led Franco to comment to his cousin that his comrades were wrong to imagine that a swift coup was possible. ‘It’s going to be difficult, bloody and it’ll last a long time – yet there seems to be no other way, if we’re going to be one step ahead of the Communists’. 6

The boat, Dómine , reached the Canary Islands at 7 p.m. on the evening 11 March 1936. On arriving at Las Palmas, Franco was greeted by the military governor of the island, General Amado Balmes. After a short tour, he set off again with his family in the Dómine for Tenerife where they docked on 12 March at 11.00 a.m. On the dockside, they were awaited by a mass of Popular Front supporters. The local Left had decreed a one-day strike for workers to go to the port in order to boo and whistle the man who had put down the miners’ rising in Asturias. Ignoring the banners which denounced ‘the butcher of Asturias’, Franco remained calm, said goodbye to the ship’s captain, descended the steps and inspected the company of troops which awaited him. According to his cousin, his display of cool indifference impressed the crowd whose derision turned to applause. 7

Franco immediately set to work on a defence plan for the islands and especially on the measures to be taken to put down political disturbances. He also took advantage of the opportunities offered by the Canary Islands and began to learn golf and English. According to his English teacher, Dora Lennard, he took lessons three times a week from 9.30 to 10.30 and was an assiduous student. He wrote two exercises for homework three times a week and only once failed to do so because of pressure of work. Five out of six of his exercises were about golf for which he had quickly become an obsessive enthusiast. He acquired a reading knowledge but could not follow spoken English. His favourite subjects in their conversation classes were the Popular Front’s enslavement to the agents of Moscow and his love for his time at the Academia General Militar in Zaragoza. 8 Franco’s own later efforts to wipe away his hesitations during the spring of 1936 led him to imply, in numerous interviews, that he had been anxiously overseeing the conspiracy. As so often in his life, he remoulded reality. It is a telling comment on this particular case of remembered glory that, in fact, in early July 1936, he was planning a golfing holiday in Scotland to improve his game. 9

Golf and English lessons aside, Franco and Carmen led a full social life. Their guides to the society of the Canaries were Major Lorenzo Martínez Fuset and his wife. Martínez Fuset, a military lawyer, and an amiable and accommodating character, became Franco’s local confidant. 10 Otherwise, Franco’s activities were slightly inhibited by the scale of surveillance to which he was subject. His correspondence was tampered with, his telephone tapped, and he was being watched both by the police and by members of the Popular Front parties. This reflected the fear that he inspired in both the central government and in the local Left in the Canary Islands. There were rumours inside his headquarters that an assassination attempt was likely. Pacón and Colonel Teódulo González Peral, the head of the divisional general staff, organized the officers under Franco’s command into a round-the-clock bodyguard. Franco was reported to have declared proudly ‘Moscow sentenced me to death two years ago’. 11 If indeed he made the remark, it reflected the heady propaganda that he was receiving from the Entente in Geneva rather than any interest in his activities on the part of the Kremlin.

Despite the air of clandestinity which seems to have surrounded Franco’s activities in the Canary Islands, he was openly being talked about as the leader of a forthcoming coup. 12 Pro-fascist and anti-Republican remarks made by him, some in public, suggest that he was not as totally cautious as is usually assumed. On the occasion of the military parade to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Second Republic, Franco spoke with the Italian consul in the Canary Islands and loudly ( ad alta voce ) expressed to him his enthusiasm for Mussolini’s Italy. He was particularly fulsome in his congratulations for Italy’s role in the Abyssinian war and said how anxiously he awaited news of the fall of Addis Ababa. He appears to have made a point of ensuring that he was overheard by the British Consul. On the next day, the Italian Consul visited Franco to thank him and was delighted when the general’s anti-British sentiments led him to speak of his sympathy for Italy as a ‘new, young, strong power which is imposing itself on the Mediterranean which has hitherto been kept as a lake under British control’. Franco also talked of his belief that Gibraltar could easily be dominated by modern artillery placed in Spanish territory and talked enticingly, for his listener, of the ease with which a fleet anchored in Gibraltar harbour could be destroyed by air attack. 13