By Martin Tyrrell
The writer Máirín Mitchell (1895–1986) is remembered, if at all, for her 1937 book Storm over Spain. It was one of the scores of books published during the Spanish Civil War, when public interest in that country was at an understandable high. In the event, the book was a commercial failure, never to be reissued. It is known primarily because George Orwell gave it a good notice in Time and Tide magazine, describing it as essential reading for anyone looking for something factual on the Spanish anarchists. Other admirers included Kate O’Brien, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and former Labour leader George Lansbury. More recently, Katrina Goldstone, in her Irish writers and the Thirties, has commended it as ‘one of just a few texts of witness by an English-speaking woman who also happens to be a fluent speaker of Spanish’.
In spring 1936 Mitchell had mentioned to a Spanish journalist that she was thinking of going to Spain ‘to follow up Irish tracks’, whereupon the journalist had urged her to go immediately—‘In a few months something is going to happen that will keep you out of Spain for a long time’. She duly set out at the start of April, returning in early May, just two months before the start of the conflict. Storm over Spain is an account of that journey. Early drafts focused more on the author’s travels and those Irish tracks than on anything political and were therefore rejected as irrelevant by several publishers. Only when some war content was added along with a chapter reminiscing on an earlier visit by Mitchell to the Basque Country did the book find a home with Secker and Warburg.
‘CONVENTIONAL REPUBLICAN’ RATHER THAN ANARCHIST
Storm over Spain’s war commentary was taken largely from the British anarchist press, which in turn took its cue directly from its Spanish counterpart (whose stalwarts included the redoubtable Captain Jack White from Broughshane, ‘a well-known Irish rebel’, as Mitchell puts it). Mitchell, a devout Catholic and self-styled ‘conventional Republican’, was no anarchist, but she had had a long association with anarchism in London and was predisposed to be fair to it. The Spanish anarchists she had met in the last few weeks of peace were educators, anti-militarists and creators of a spontaneous communism, one that she hopes, in Storm over Spain, might become a model for the world in general. If anarchists have of late been violent, she writes, their violence has been ‘in proportion to the oppression of the workers’. And where it was not proportionate—where it was mindless and inexcusable—she suggests somewhat limply that those involved were not proper anarchists or anarchists at all.
It is what Mitchell saw in Spain on her travels rather than what she read after her return that makes Storm over Spain essential reading—an engaging account of a country on the brink, narrated with just the right amount of hindsight. At the Alhambra, say, towards the end of April 1936, Mitchell saw an aeroplane circling overhead, innocent this time but a portent of the bombardments soon to come. In Cordoba and elsewhere she saw ‘bold drawings of a figure swinging from a gallows’, a warning to the supporters of Gil Robles and the CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas, Spain’s main conservative grouping). It was an image, she wrote, that ‘had become almost inseparable from Spanish scenery … In a wilderness of rock, on the barest plain or on the decorative device on some Moorish ruin, the awful warning told of the fate of the man who would not vote for the United Front.’
Not that Mitchell’s sympathies are with the right, but she is fair to all sides, even Eoin O’Duffy and his followers. The Church gets a mixed report. The Spanish hierarchy, she argues, has brought many of its troubles on itself through what she sees as its failure to side with the poor and marginalised. It could, she suggests, take a lesson from its Basque equivalent, which she describes as being genuinely of its people. Her sympathy is with the ordinary clergy and the congregations for whom the local church is ‘the one comfort they know’. It is on this account that she most regrets that so many churches had been burnt, even before the civil war began. And in this she notes a difference between English and Irish outrage. The English, she says, regret the destruction of heritage buildings, the Irish the destruction of places of worship.
AN IRISH TAKE ON THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
It is odd that Orwell failed to notice that Mitchell was an Irish writer since Storm over Spain is almost unmistakably an Irish take on the civil war. Almost every chapter, for instance, opens with a quotation from an Irish writer—Pearse, Connolly, Yeats, Mangan. Those ‘Irish tracks’ that Mitchell went to Spain to follow up are reported: Richard Wall, for instance, the son of emigré Jacobites from Coolnamuck, who undertook the eighteenth-century restoration of the Alhambra and later served as Spain’s ambassador in London and as a minister in the Spanish government; James Cavanagh Murphy, an architect and author of The Arabian antiquities of Spain; and Leopoldo O’Donnell y Jorris, Conde de Lucena and Duque of Tetuán, a liberal in politics but an imperialist in his military career, whose descendants would prove helpful to Peadar O’Donnell (no relation) and Frank Ryan. ‘In her past history’, Mitchell comments, ‘Ireland’s orientation was European’, an idea previously explored in her earlier Traveller in time (1934). Ireland, she argues, as it manoeuvres towards full independence, should again locate itself culturally and politically in Europe.
WHO WAS SHE?
So, who was Máirín Mitchell? From the autobiographical hints in Storm over Spain and Traveller in time she comes across as a free-spirited, cosmopolitan eccentric who grew up somewhere in rural Ireland before setting out on her travels. A writer ever on the go, from Canada, where she was, she said, made an honorary Iroquois, to tiny Liechtenstein, where the final version of Storm over Spain was supposedly dashed off. The reality is less exotic though still interesting. Máirín Mitchell was born in England in 1895, and for the first twenty or so years of her life went by her given name, Marian. Her mother, Gertrude Pease, was English; her father, Thomas Houghton Mitchell, was Anglo-Irish and well connected—his father, Adam Mitchell, having been Sessional Crown Solicitor for Offaly, with offices at Oxmantown Mall in Birr. (When Máirín Mitchell died in 1986, a James Mitchell of Birr was the only Mitchell mentioned in her will. She bequeathed him a signet ring, presumably a family heirloom.) The Mitchells of Birr connect Máirín Mitchell to the poet Susan Langstaff Mitchell, the ‘red-headed rebel’, whom she quotes in Storm over Spain:
Bring back the people of my heart again With me to dwell upon the lovely plain Human as I once knew them.
Susan Langstaff Mitchell had stayed briefly with her relatives at Oxmantown Mall but found the unionist atmosphere there uncongenial, Susan having been both a cultural and a (mildly) political nationalist.
I do not know whether Thomas Houghton Mitchell was himself unionist or nationalist. The details of his life—Trinity College, Freemasonry, postgraduate study in Scotland, and a long and successful career in England—suggest either unionism or no particular connection to Ireland. He, Gertrude and their four children lived in some style in Ambleside in the Lake District, where their family home, Rothay Garth, is today a luxury hotel.
Marian Houghton Mitchell, the future Máirín, appears to have had a conventional upper-middle-class English upbringing, including attendance at a private boarding-school in Wales, then Bedford College in London. In London, however, in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Mitchell appears to have fallen in with a circle including anarchists, socialists and Irish nationalists that was associated with the German bookseller and publisher Charles Lahr and the anarchist magazine Freedom. She lived in the Lahr family home, stood godmother to one of Lahr’s daughters, and played the part of the nurse in an early silent film version of Romeo and Juliet. This was where her admiration for anarchism began, a time she recalled fondly in Storm over Spain: ‘There was an Irish member of the Freedom Group who had some attics off the Euston Road … in summer three or four of us would climb up some shaky steps, wriggle through her skylight and sit on the roof, with a glorious view … talking of Marx, St Thomas Aquinas, Hegelian dialectics, fourth dimensional vistas, Whiteway Colony …’.
GAELIC LEAGUE
It was around this time that Mitchell converted to Catholicism and joined the London branch of the Gaelic League, learning Irish and changing her name from Marian to Máirín. Through the League she met William Ryan, a Parnellite and liberal journalist, and his son Des Ryan, an author, journalist and 1916 veteran. She also attended a Gaelic League Oireachtas in Dublin in 1920, from which comes the only photograph of her that we now have (p. 42). Mitchell joined the League at a time when it had become politically suspect on account of the Easter Rising and the Irish War of Independence. And she went to Dublin as part of a League delegation when the War of Independence was ongoing.
How did Thomas and Gertrude react back in Rothay Garth? Conceivably, these new enthusiasms—fringe politics, Catholicism, Irish republicanism, speaking Irish—estranged Máirín from her family. Her younger brother, a pilot with the Royal Air Force, had died in the First World War. Now, though, Máirín had joined the people who saw that same war as an opportunity for national liberation. While Traveller in time is dedicated to her mother and there is a passing and friendly reference to her father in the later Back to England (1941), neither of her sisters gets a mention in her will and, for all her family’s wealth, she herself lived and died in something close to poverty.
Mitchell’s wartime writings such as Back to England suggest that she was changing politically. Ireland, she writes, should locate itself not in Europe as before but in a new Atlantic alliance dominated by Britain and the United States. While Back to England revisits her earlier European travels, the books that followed are more crudely propagandist. If Mitchell continued to identify as Irish, she did not do so in print. Post-war, she would focus on Spain and the Basque Country, the places where she is today best remembered.
Máirín Mitchell died unknown in a Catholic care home in late 1986, and her final book, on Berengaria of Navarre, queen consort to Richard I, was published posthumously. It is a pity that Mitchell is not better known, and that Storm over Spain, an exceptional work of considerable value to anyone interested in Spain in the 1930s, has stayed out of print.
Martin Tyrrell is currently completing a book on George Orwell for Athabasca University Press, assisted by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland under its Support for the Individual Artist programme.
Further reading
P. Davison (ed.), Orwell in Spain (London, 2001).
K. Goldstone, Irish writers and the Thirties: art, exile and war (Abingdon-on-Thames, 2000).
B. McLoughlin & E. O’Connor, In Spanish trenches: the minds and deeds of the Irish who fought for the Spanish Republic in the Civil War (Dublin, 2020).
M. Mitchell, Storm over Spain (London, 1937).