ABSTRACT
It has long been assumed that the British banks should be counted amongst the enemies of the Spanish Republic during the civil war. On 31 October 1936, for instance, the Secretary General of the Spanish Ministry of State complained to the British charge´ d’affaires in Madrid about the deterioration of relations between their two countries. ‘Business and especially banking circles,’ he went on, ‘were unfriendly and unnecessarily denied credits and other facilities.’2 In May 1937, the Spanish Ambassador in London complained to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that commercial relations were being ‘aggravated by the attitude of certain British banking elements who have improperly retained funds remitted by the Bank of Spain’.3 Many historians have subsequently endorsed this interpretation. Angel Vin˜as, the leading historian of the financing of the civil war, criticizes the role of specific British and US banks under the heading of ‘Bancos anglosajones contra la Repu´blica’ (Vin˜as, 1979, p. 218). Enrique Moradiellos, an expert on British government policy during the conflict, has argued that the Republic’s dealings with British banks were ‘subject to such numerous obstructions and acts of sabotage’ that they influenced its decision to make exclusive use of the Soviet banking network, and may even have been a factor in the fateful decision to deposit the Republic’s gold reserves in the Soviet Union (Moradiellos, 1996, p. 96).4
