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When the BBC gave a voice in Galician to reprisals and persecuted by the Franco regime
That April 14, 1947, exactly 16 years following the proclamation of the proclamation of the Second Republic, Felipe Fernández Armesto inaugurated the broadcasts in Galician on the BBC. His biography was intricate. journalist from The vanguard, a communist sympathizer, covered Hitler’s unstoppable rise in Berlin. The Nazis expelled him in 1933. He went to London. In August 1936 he returned to Spain, but to Spain under the boot of Franco, and joined the Press Section of the Government of Burgos. He returned to London in ’39 and wrote World War II and the Nuremberg Trials. It was at that time that he collaborated with Alejandro Raimúndez, an exile from Ourense determined to return the Galician language to the radio waves.
“I have never been a very ardent admirer of inventions. I see them with the distrust of a race for which the benefits of progress have always brought untold pain and calamities to their backs,” said Fernández Armesto, also known as Augusto Assía, in Galician, “however, for tonight, at least Blessed be the radio that allows me to speak to the Galicians from London, in the mountains of the Serra Secundeira, on the banks of the Miño, or along the estuaries”. Thus he greeted him in the first of the 83 Galician Programme that the public corporation issued between 1947 and January 1956. The space, lasting between 10 and 15 minutes, was part of the Spanish Programme of the BBC, and in it reprisals, persecuted and exiled writers spoke. Strictly cultural, yes. There were also sections in Basque and Catalan, but their trace has been lost.
Not so the Galician. Antonio Raúl de Toro located a typed copy of the scripts and published them in 1994 under the title Galicia from London. Galicia, Great Britain and Ireland in the BBC’s Galician programs (1947–1956). “It is a very interesting and unknown document”, he explains to elDiario.es, “which I was able to recover thanks to Francisco Fernández del Riego”. Del Riego, internal exile and one of the fundamental Galician intellectuals of the 20th century, was the coordinator in Galicia of the collaborations with which Raimúndez organized the program. He sent them by post. And they were paid, “not altruistic, which is not a minor matter,” considers De Toro. Many of its authors were experiencing difficulties, including financial ones. The dictatorship did not forgive and some of those who managed to avoid physical repression suffered fascist revenge in their jobs. This was the case of the writer Ramón Otero Pedrayo, deposed in 1937 from his History chair at the University of Santiago de Compostela. The first of his contributions to the Galician Programme It was in December 1947: The spells of autumn [Los hechizos del otoño].
Another Galician writer, Rafael Dieste –exiled in Mexico and later in Argentina–, also participated in the broadcasts. As did Ramón Piñeiro, theorist of the culturalist strategy of Galicianism – abandoning clandestine politics and focusing on the cultural field – who had spent time in Franco’s prisons; or the poets Celso Emilio Ferreiro and Manuel María, who just a few years later would end up connected with Marxist-inspired nationalism. “The theme was strictly cultural”, recalls Antonio de Toro, “although with incursions into the economy or agriculture, never into politics”. Franco’s dictatorship was beginning to leave behind its first stage, that of autarchy, and was regarding to reestablish relations with the United States. “At that time, I think there was an implicit deal with the British government. And a lot of censorship. That is why Raimúndez’s programs do not directly address the political situation”.
Because the BBC foreign service signal did reach Galician territory. “They told me how people listened to it with crystal radios, sometimes on rooftops or in trees,” says De Toro, “or they gathered surreptitiously in a house to do so. Not everyone had a radio. As was the case with the Pyrenees [promovida por el Partido Comunista], which broadcast from Andorra”. What hardly remains is a sound trace of the Galician Programme. It is known that the opening tune was Cock O’the North, a Scottish military march with which Raimúndez intended – the Real Academia Galega correspondent Alfonso Vázquez-Monxardín explains in an article on the institution’s website – “highlight the musical connection between both lands”. And he closed with recordings by the Coral de Ruada –founded in 1918 and still active today– of traditional Galician music. Placido Castro, a repressed Galician who lives in London, lent his voice and his writing for six of the program’s nine years.
The broadcasts in Galician were turned off in 1956. The last one was on January 23, and included the only remaining audio fragments: recitations by eight poets, including Álvaro Cunqueiro, Aquilino Iglesias Alvariño and Fermín Bouza Brey. They survived the disappearance of the files – due to “union issues”, says De Toro – because they were also used in a BBC 3 program for English audiences. In any case, the investigator is not aware that there was diplomatic pressure that led to its cancellation. “They were popular and well-known programs. And although being mainly cultural they did not bother, the Franco regime did not like them because they were in Galician”, he points out. In addition, Mr. Marshall arrived and with him, the acceptance of the the status quo Francoist by the liberal democracies. Everything changed and in the new political scheme, the Galician Programme and the proof that there was another Galicia did not fit.