Search starts for remains of poet Julian Bell in civil war grave

Hanging above Vanessa Bell’s bed at Charleston, the bohemian Sussex farmhouse that was the summer retreat of the Bloomsbury Group, is an oil painting of a young man reading a book half in bright sunlight.
The reflective work by the artist Duncan Grant, who often stayed at Charleston, depicted Bell’s first-born son, Julian, in about 1928, when he was a student at the University of Cambridge.
After graduating, Julian — a supporter of China’s Communist Party — would travel to Wuhan to take up a professorship and start an affair with a prominent, married author. Then he found a cause that changed, and ultimately ended, his life: the Spanish Civil War.
Despite his mother and his aunt, Virginia Woolf, trying to dissuade him, Bell was determined to travel to the war, joining the International Brigades fighting Franco’s fascists in 1937. Before that, he visited his mother and agreed at her request to travel to Spain as an ambulance driver.
Yet a month after arriving he was wounded during the Battle of Brunete, west of Madrid, by bomb shrapnel on a stretch of road near Villanueva de la Cañada, suffering a massive lung injury. He later died in a military hospital.
Today visitors to Charleston can still see the painting of Julian, hanging in the same place as when his mother died in 1961. It is a far cry from the scrap of land on the outskirts of Madrid, earmarked to be the site of a municipal rubbish dump, that is believed to be the poet’s resting place.
More than 80 years ago the dictatorship of General Franco disinterred from a Madrid cemetery the remains of 424 members of the brigades who fought in Spain’s civil war from 1936 to 1939 and dumped them in a mass grave near by. The remains are thought to include Bell’s.
The exact whereabouts of the mass grave is a mystery — and the subject of a row, with left-wing politicians and activists claiming that Madrid’s conservative city hall has impeded a search for it.
This week, however, an archaeological excavation started with the aim of finally determining if the mass grave lies beneath the soil next to the cemetery in Fuencarral in northern Madrid.
Fernando Martínez López, the Socialist-led government’s secretary of state for democratic memory, said: “We would like to find the remains here where they are being searched for, with great difficulty. If we don’t find them here, we would ask them to let us search in other areas.”
Locals have protested against the city council’s plans to build a huge waste management plant and vehicle depot next to the cemetery. So too has the Association of Friends of the International Brigades, which sent letters of protest to the Spanish embassies of more than 20 countries whose former nationals were among those removed from the Fuencarral cemetery, including the UK.
The government and activists allege that city hall tried to block the excavation, claiming officials had stopped a study that suggested the potential presence of human remains at the site. The authorities denied the claim.
Borja Carabante, Madrid city council’s delegate for urban planning, said: “What was a legitimate neighbourhood demand has been turned into a political issue managed and directed by the left. It is incomprehensible that in this case they are also using the joker in the pack, which is democratic memory, Franco and the Civil War.”
The International Brigades were military units made up of volunteers from more than 50 countries who supported the army of the Second Republic in the Spanish Civil War. The 451 brigadistas whose remains are being sought in Madrid’s Montecarmelo district died between 1936 and 1937 in fighting and bombing. They were originally buried in a cemetery owned by the Brigades located next to the municipal cemetery of Fuencarral.
Members of Bell’s family are following the search. His nephew, also called Julian Bell, a 72-year-old British painter who travelled in his uncle’s footsteps to Madrid in 2011, told El Pais: “I would like to hear from the media that they found them.”
He added: “If the bodies were found to be in that area, clearly the council’s plans need to change. There are plenty of places to put [a rubbish dump] but only one where the dead lie.”
Before the dig started, Ashley Aarons, an English resident of the area and an alumnus of the University of Cambridge who studied Bell’s poems as a student, told the newspaper: “As a foreign national, my suggestion to the Spanish government is to investigate this further and try to find and properly bury the bodies of these foreigners.”
He added: “I can think of no more disrespectful way to treat these deceased than to leave them in unmarked graves with no information to their families and build a dump on top of them.”