Roy
Campbell was
born in Durban, South
Africa in
1902. After being educated at Oxford University
he published his first collection of poems, The
Flaming Terrapin (1924). He returned home where he established
the magazine, Voorslag. Disillusioned
with South African cultural life he published the satirical poem,
The Wayzgoose (1928).
In 1928 Campbell
moved to France where he published Adamastor
(1930), Poems (1930), The
Georgiad (1931) and the autobiographical
Broken Record (1934). He then moved on to Spain
and during the Spanish
Civil War he
supported General Francisco
Franco and
the Nationalist Army.
Campbell moved back to
England in 1936 where he attempted to obtain support for the Nationalists.
This was reflected in his pro-fascist book Flowering
Rifle (1939).
During the Second
World War Campbell served in the British
Army in
Africa. After being invalided out in 1944 he worked for the BBC.
In 1952 Campbell moved
to Portugal
where he published his second volume of autobiography,
Light on a Dark Horse (1951). Roy
Campbell died
in a car accident in 1957.
(1)
Roy Campbell, Light on a Dark Horse
(1951)
One noticed, during the restless period that
preceded the 1936 elections, that the working class was divided in
two.
The bootblacks, an enormous class to themselves in Spain, the waiters,
and most of the mechanics, along with the miners and factory workers,
were either anarchists or Reds. It was expected that the anarchists
would abstain from voting: or might even vote for the Right, with
whom, in their liking for liberty, they have more in common than with
the Communists. Amongst the anarchists were to be found some of the
most generous idealistic people, at the same time as the real "phonys"
- like the ones that dug up the cemetery in Huesca,
held parades of naked nuns, and out-babooned in atrocity anything
I had ever read of before. But they were warm-blooded - unlike their
ice-cold compéres, the "commies", who were less human.
You could beg your life from an anarchist. It was not long before
most of the anarchists wished they had gone Right for they were unmercifully
massacred by their Red Comrades.
(2)
Roy Campbell, Light on a Dark Horse
(1951)
Hostilities broke out between Anarchists and
other Republicans simultaneously with their persecution of Christians,
Royalists, and Nationalists. That was one of the typical paradoxes
of Spanish history during the last twenty years. It was because I
saw this fission, so often, at first-hand, on the spot, that I knew
and said, repeatedly, and without ever hypocritically turning in my
tracks, that the mutual loathing of the various factions of "republicans"
would eventually preponderate over their hostility to the common adversary,
and the so called "loyalists" would collapse on account
of mutual disloyalty.
When the elections had
come and I had been hauled into a lorry on the road to Getafe with
a dead man's ticket and a shot gun at my kidneys, to vote Red, I took
it as a joke: but shortly after, I began to see red, too. Except under
compulsion, I had never voted in my life, and now I have twice seen
a majority of Red members get in on a minority vote - I have lost
all faith in that sort of thing. Voting has become obsolete since
(as in England) the minority usually wins most seats. I had been persuading
my wife and kids to leave Toledo, but it seemed the civil war would
never reach us from Madrid, in spite of a Red Mayor, since the Province
was loyal to Spain, in spite of unpunished murders. The wicked are
always the first to act and the good are slow.
(3)
Roy Campbell wrote to his brother denying he was a fascist (December
1938)
A considerable part of my attraction to the
Right and aversion from the Left is due to the fact that there is
more laughter and less grumbling among the soldierly people. I believe
in family life and religion and tolerance: and I find far more tolerance
to Britain in Italy than I find tolerance of Fascism in England.
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