A Fur Coat and a Typewriter

As yet another fearless female reporter in a flak jacket flashes on to our television screens to tell us in rapid bursts how British troops came under fire that day, I often think of the handful of women eighty or so years earlier who fought for the privilege of being in a war zone and communicating that horror to those at home.

I have an indelible image of one beautiful young woman in particular: Virginia Cowles, a Lauren Bacall lookalike. Cowles, an American, was in her mid-twenties when she arrived in Spain in March 1937, just after the devastating battle of Guadalajara. She was deposited in the middle of a square in Valencia with three dresses, a fur coat, a hat and a typewriter but no Spanish money or preparation for war. She had to ask a stranger for directions and realized later that one reason she was attracting unwelcome attention was because the band around her suitcase was red and yellow – Franco’s colours. She certainly looked glamorous but, as she herself said, her knowledge of foreign affairs was negligible. However, for the next five years she reported tirelessly on world affairs as Europe hurtled towards war, and several American and British newspapers relied on her vivid first-hand accounts of how Britain and her allies were failing to stop the march of the dictators. Her natural intelligence more than filled any gaps left by her inexperience and she was taken up by leading politicians and newspaper magnates as well as other male foreign correspondents. After several months in Spain she was sent to Germany, then Moscow and Kiev in the freezing winter of 1938–9, Romania, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland. She was in France when that country was invaded, having been helped by the French Ministry of Information to acquire official accreditation in a war zone (the British were less co-operative). After the fall of France she returned to London and it was there that she wrote an extraordinary first-hand account of that perilous time. She called it Looking for Trouble. In 1941 no one could predict with confidence the outcome of the war, and Cowles’s observations, based on both diaries and memories, have an immediacy that takes the reader to the heart of that desperately uncertain time. Her articles had brought her to the attention of many in the upper echelons of British society and one of her friends at this time was Randolph Churchill, Winston’s son. He took her to meet his father at his country home, Chartwell, in the year before war was declared and Cowles writes of a man who spent hours by the pond in a torn coat and battered hat prodding the water with a stick looking for his pet goldfish. All the while he was bemoaning the government’s inability to see the rising storm on the continent. On the day before Hitler’s inflammatory Nuremberg speech in 1938 she was in Germany. She saw Hitler for the first time at a banquet and described him as seemingly ‘an ordinary and rather inconspicuous little man’. When everyone was seated Hitler’s gaze suddenly lit upon Unity Mitford, who adored him. ‘His face broke into a smile, he nodded and gave her the Nazi salute.’ Hitler’s ADC then went over to Unity and whispered that the Führer wanted her to come to his suite afterwards. Cowles commented: ‘I couldn’t help thinking how odd it was that on the brink of war between Germany and Great Britain the only person that the Führer would condescend to see was a 24-year-old English girl.’ The following day she was leaving for Paris, and the travel writer Robert Byron came to say goodbye. He told her that Unity’s mother, in Germany to see her daughter, was in difficulty because she had lost her embroidery needle. ‘Lord Redesdale was searching for it on his hands and knees in the middle of the Grand Hotel lobby while a flow of heavily booted storm troopers and SS men strode past in every direction.’ That sort of detail sheds a more powerful beam on the leading personalities than any diplomatic exchange. Virginia Cowles was born in 1910 in New Hampshire to Edward Spencer Cowles, a renowned and pioneering psychiatrist, and Florence, who wrote occasional magazine articles. After her parents divorced, she went to live in New York and, aged just 16, tried to scrape a living from writing assignments. There was no money for university but she earned enough to buy a second-hand car and drove across America, finding original stories to send to a wide variety of magazine and newspaper editors. In 1931 she landed a job at a small magazine called Entre Nous which led to her being taken on by the Hearst Sunday Syndicate where she became a regular contributor. In 1933 she and her sister decided to spend part of a legacy on round-the-world tickets, and she persuaded Hearst to take her articles about the countries she visited. During the next few years her articles for Hearst included pieces on the surprising independence of women in Burma, the effects of purdah on Muslim women in India, the restricted lives of Hindu wives, gambling in China and a marriage bureau in Tokyo. What strikes me today is not only how incredibly modern some of her titles for these articles still sound but also how brave this adventurous and enterprising young girl must have been. In 1935, after Mussolini had invaded Abyssinia, she secured a rare interview with the dictator. He shouted at her during most of the interview, but she turned this to her advantage by writing a story about his menacing tone and aggressive actions. Largely on the strength of that piece, Hearst agreed to send her to Spain to write a series of articles contrasting the two sides in the civil war. The majority of correspondents there, most famously Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, felt passionately about one side or the other, usually passionate outrage about the wrongs inflicted on the Republicans by Franco’s nationalists. But journalists who covered both sides risked being expelled for taking up partisan attitudes. It is Cowles’s coverage of the Spanish Civil War – arguably the last chance the Western democracies had to stop Hitler and the first time women in any number showed that war could be reported in a different way – that makes Looking for Trouble such a valuable document. Once she had been directed to the Hotel Florida in Madrid, where almost all the correspondents were staying, she became part of that intimate coterie. Sensibly she did not cable anything back to Hearst until she had left Spain and was safely in Paris. She did not write about military hardware or ground captured but about daily life, about ‘how a great European city had been reduced to such a state of barbarism’. This style of reporting was once called ‘soft’ news. Nowadays many journalists consider it is just as valid as the traditional ‘hard’ news. But Virginia had her own take on hard news too: one of my favourite stories is about the time she was ‘invited’ to spend three days in lavish captivity by a Spanish general hoping to convert her to Communism. She had been making a trip to the Morata Front, where the international brigades were fighting to defend the vital Madrid-Valencia road. This front, regarded as the most important sector in Spain, was commanded by a Soviet general. But the existence of Russian experts in Spain, sent to train the Republican army, was being kept secret from foreign journalists. Virginia had discovered the Morata HQ by accident. When I first came across Looking for Trouble I admired it for its honesty and straightforward attempt to tell, without analysis, exactly how it felt to be alive then. On re-reading it, I still do.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 30 © Anne Sebba 2011