.png)
4 hours ago
1
The first of the myriad anglosajón peculiarities that would bedevil, confound and exasperate Julio Camba in his 15 months as London correspondent for El Mundo revealed itself when a porter tried to help the young Spanish journalist with his luggage as he arrived at Victoria station in December 1910.
“The worker grabbed my suitcase and shouted, so I started to shout, too,” he wrote shortly afterwards. “Given that I’m Spanish, I shouted much more than he did and, finally, he shut up.” Camba swiftly concluded that, unlike their Spanish, French and Italian neighbours, the English were not given to passionate outbursts. Or passion. Or, indeed, outbursts.
“The English,” he noted in an aphorism that has hardly aged over the past 115 years, “endure the proximity of the continent with the same irritable gestures as a man who lives next door to a young music student.”
That observation – and many others, ranging from the pithy to the waspish, the sarcastic and the downright horrified – are gathered together for the first time in an anthology of Camba’s London dispatches called Viviendo a la inglesa (Living the English Way).
Despite a taste for adventure – Camba had stowed away on a boat to Argentina at the age of 13, flirted with, and rejected, anarchism, and chronicled the progress of the young turks in Constantinople – the fog, starch and impenetrable social rituals of Edwardian England proved something of a challenge for him. But he distilled his frustrations into some exquisite sketches.
Take his thoughts on the contrasting English and Spanish attitudes to time – thoughts that echo his contention that, “Deep down, all Englishmen are policemen … Deep down, every Spaniard is an anarchist.”
“In London, you simply have to have a watch,” he wrote in April 1911. “These English genuinely believe that time is an important thing, and that there’s a big difference between 4pm and 5pm … In Spain, when you want to meet a friend at 11, you agree to meet at 10 or half past 10, and then you don’t turn up … [But] if an English person summons you to meet at 12 minutes past three and you turn up at quarter past three, it’s as if you’d turned up the following day.”
Then there was the weather: “England is a waterproof place. The rain bounces off the English the way it bounces off English buildings.”
And then, of course, there was the miraculous effect of alcohol on the national character. “The English people appeared to become a little more human as long as they were drinking,” he noted not long after his arrival. “They spoke with great animation and their movements appeared almost spontaneous. Some of them even roared with laughter, like people do.”
Camba was just as scathing about the English capacity for romance.
“This is what English people do with their sweethearts: they buy them chocolates,” he grimaced. “For an English lover, an evening of love is an evening in which many chocolates have been eaten.”
The journalist was also aghast at the insistence on adhering to medieval displays of chivalric manners, such as removing one’s glove when shaking hands.
“You arrive in London and lodge in a cheap boarding house, and yet you have to greet a haberdasher’s assistant using the same protocol that the first Duke of Norfolk employs with his relatives,” Camba complained. “Raise your visor and proffer a naked hand. No. This all needs to stop once and for all.”
Although there are occasional references to the events of the period, including the siege of Sidney Street, the campaigns of the suffragette movement and the coronation of George V, most of the 69 short articles in Viviendo a la inglesa are barbed reflections on the English and their peculiar way of life.
As Camba’s most recent biographer, Francisco Fuster, points out, the reporter was not exactly someone you would turn to for an objective, factual account of an historical event.
“He doesn’t really talk about Churchill or elections or politicians – although he does sometimes touch on social affairs,” says Fuster, a cultural historian at the University of Valencia. “He’d been sent by his newspaper to explain how people lived in London. The title of the book gives you a clue: it’s not a story of objective facts, which is what you’d get from a normal correspondent.”
To Fuster’s mind, Camba’s writings are more akin to those of a sociologist or a writer like Stefan Zweig.
“Camba, in his way, was a chronicler of the 20th century,” says the historian. “Reading his work is like reading a history book, but a completely different kind of history book because you don’t get the names of kings or the dates of battles. You get a history of Europe from another point of view – from the point of view of daily life on the street.”
The writer Ricardo Álamo, who edited the collection, says part of the appeal of Camba – who had a huge and devoted readership during his lifetime – is that his work remains as arresting as when it first appeared.
“To read Camba is to read something modern, something that doesn’t go out of date,” he says. “His style is fresh and subtle – not pompous or rhetorical – and his ideas are original and full of irony, and are sometimes hilariously sarcastic.”
Although Camba’s work has enjoyed a renaissance over the past 10 years or so, it was neglected for decades, largely because of the articles he wrote in support of the Franco regime.
But Álamo and Fuster both argue that Camba’s opposition to the Republican government that Franco overthrew was personal rather than ideological.
“Following the arrival of the Second Republic, at the beginning of the 1930s, Camba felt ignored and ostracised by the Republican politicians, from whom he had hoped to receive an ambassadorial post,” says Álamo.
When the Republican government declined to give him a diplomatic job – which would have allowed him to stop relying on journalism for his income – Camba turned on them.
“He reacted by beginning to write articles against the republic,” says Fuster. “But although he did write some articles in favour of Franco, it wasn’t a deeply held conviction, because he went to live in Portugal during the early years of Francoism. He never wanted a dictatorship and was never part of any political party.”
After his exile, Camba returned to Spain in 1949 and lived the last 12 years of his life in a modest room at the Palace hotel in Madrid, where he wrote very little and seemed unconcerned by the notion of securing his legacy.
But for all the inertia of Camba’s final years, and the long decades of neglect, Fuster believes he was “the best Spanish correspondent of the 20th century”. During the first third of the 20th century, the correspondent travelled to Turkey, Paris, England, Germany, Italy, the US and Portugal, filing dispatches that “helped create the image that people in Spain had of Europe and the US”.
It was, as Fuster points out, a very different era. And Camba was a very different breed of journalist.
“We’re talking about a time when there was no television or internet; that image was created by newspapers,” he says.
“And, what’s more, Camba was a very special kind of correspondent: he doesn’t really report on objective facts. He’s just wandering around London going to a bar or a club and talking to people on the streets.”
