NEW SPANISH CUSTOM

Evening Star, Issue 22383, 6 July 1936, Page 11

NEW SPANISH CUSTOM

FOOTBALL IN A GAOL Eleven o'clock on a Sunday morning and outside the new prison of Madrid is a constant stream of wealthy-lookiug cars, wrote Oliver Baldwin from Spain to the ‘ Daily Mail ’ recently. Packards and Hispano-Suizas. Chryslers and Hudsons, stop outside the prison gates and deposit the welldressed wives, mothers, and sisters of the Fascists who were arrested for assumed implication in an expected Coup d’etat. With food and clothing for their menfolk. the families enter the prison and pass an hour or two in free conversation with them, then, happy and undisturbed, return to their homes. I suppose that nowhere else in_ the world could such a thing occur in a country which is still in a sfcate_ of polltical tension; nor could the friends or political prisoners be given such freedom anvwhere else. When' the Socialists were in prison before the last election, many of them were fed better than they had ever been in their lives, and now that the shoe is on the other foot there is an. extraordinary absence of revenge or hatred. ...

One of these prisoners is Antonio Prime de Rivera, the sou of the former Dictator of Spain, and the young leader of the Spanish Phalanx —a group of well-to-do young men supported by members of the bourgeois and artisan classes, which is a Fascist organisation calling itself the National Phalanx on the lines of the German National-Socialism. ' As ’ I have heard many tales of Socialist victims of Right persecution. I asked Senor Primo de Rivera of his present conditions, and whether he had any complaints. He assured me he had only one, and that was that his country was not, a serious country, and that if a man was condemned to two years he should serve his full sentence and not be let out as a favour. Here, I thought, is a real conception of a disciplined State. There were many hundreds of exofficers in prison with him, but few belonging to his organisation, which he insisted was not affected by his temporary absence. He was afraid he was taking too much liking to football, which ho played every day. and hoped it would not affect his political keenness, as ho would he out soon. What was his programme?—National Syndicalism. Had he many supporters?—About so.ono. Were they all well-to-do?—No; they included shopkeepers and artisans. Did he believe in direct action?—Ho smiled. Was he mt surprised that a newspaper man should come to sop him?— Not in the least; anyone could co^e. So I honed ■ he would H es le-nent to others if he ever ruled the Stata as the present Government wrs to hnn, and left him to his friends and the s’x-year-old son of a fellow prisoner, who saluted him with hand on high. This, then, was the ultimate hope of big business on the Right_ Wing, thoso people for whom everything in. _Spain is in chaos and who, living in their own cfrcle, recount strange tales one to another. Within an hour T have met two big business men of different foreign nations, both anti-Socialist; the one had no word bad enough for Senor Azart and his Government; the other had found nothing upsetting to his interests.