Franco. Paul Preston
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at Las Palmas, Franco was greeted by the military governor of the island, General Amado Balmes. After a short tour, he set off again with his family in the Dómine for Tenerife where they docked on 12 March at 11.00 a.m. On the dockside, they were awaited by a mass of Popular Front supporters. The local Left had decreed a one-day strike for workers to go to the port in order to boo and whistle the man who had put down the miners’ rising in Asturias. Ignoring the banners which denounced ‘the butcher of Asturias’, Franco remained calm, said goodbye to the ship’s captain, descended the steps and inspected the company of troops which awaited him. According to his cousin, his display of cool indifference impressed the crowd whose derision turned to applause.7
Franco immediately set to work on a defence plan for the islands and especially on the measures to be taken to put down political disturbances. He also took advantage of the opportunities offered by the Canary Islands and began to learn golf and English. According to his English teacher, Dora Lennard, he took lessons three times a week from 9.30 to 10.30 and was an assiduous student. He wrote two exercises for homework three times a week and only once failed to do so because of pressure of work. Five out of six of his exercises were about golf for which he had quickly become an obsessive enthusiast. He acquired a reading knowledge but could not follow spoken English. His favourite subjects in their conversation classes were the Popular Front’s enslavement to the agents of Moscow and his love for his time at the Academia General Militar in Zaragoza.8 Franco’s own later efforts to wipe away his hesitations during the spring of 1936 led him to imply, in numerous interviews, that he had been anxiously overseeing the conspiracy. As so often in his life, he remoulded reality. It is a telling comment on this particular case of remembered glory that, in fact, in early July 1936, he was planning a golfing holiday in Scotland to improve his game.9
Golf and English lessons aside, Franco and Carmen led a full social life. Their guides to the society of the Canaries were Major Lorenzo Martínez Fuset and his wife. Martínez Fuset, a military lawyer, and an amiable and accommodating character, became Franco’s local confidant.10 Otherwise, Franco’s activities were slightly inhibited by the scale of surveillance to which he was subject. His correspondence was tampered with, his telephone tapped, and he was being watched both by the police and by members of the Popular Front parties. This reflected the fear that he inspired in both the central government and in the local Left in the Canary Islands. There were rumours inside his headquarters that an assassination attempt was likely. Pacón and Colonel Teódulo González Peral, the head of the divisional general staff, organized the officers under Franco’s command into a round-the-clock bodyguard. Franco was reported to have declared proudly ‘Moscow sentenced me to death two years ago’.11 If indeed he made the remark, it reflected the heady propaganda that he was receiving from the Entente in Geneva rather than any interest in his activities on the part of the Kremlin.
Despite the air of clandestinity which seems to have surrounded Franco’s activities in the Canary Islands, he was openly being talked about as the leader of a forthcoming coup.12 Pro-fascist and anti-Republican remarks made by him, some in public, suggest that he was not as totally cautious as is usually assumed. On the occasion of the military parade to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Second Republic, Franco spoke with the Italian consul in the Canary Islands and loudly (ad alta voce) expressed to him his enthusiasm for Mussolini’s Italy. He was particularly fulsome in his congratulations for Italy’s role in the Abyssinian war and said how anxiously he awaited news of the fall of Addis Ababa. He appears to have made a point of ensuring that he was overheard by the British Consul. On the next day, the Italian Consul visited Franco to thank him and was delighted when the general’s anti-British sentiments led him to speak of his sympathy for Italy as a ‘new, young, strong power which is imposing itself on the Mediterranean which has hitherto been kept as a lake under British control’. Franco also talked of his belief that Gibraltar could easily be dominated by modern artillery placed in Spanish territory and talked enticingly, for his listener, of the ease with which a fleet anchored in Gibraltar harbour could be destroyed by air attack.13
On 27 April, Ramón Serrano Suñer made a journey to the Canary Islands with the difficult task of persuading his brother-in-law to withdraw his candidacy for the re-run elections about to take place in Cuenca. In the wake of the so-called Popular Front elections of 16 February 1936, the parliamentary committee entrusted with examining the validity of the outcome, the comisión de actas, had declared the results null and void in certain provinces. One of these was Cuenca, where there had been falsification of votes. Moreover, once the defective votes were discounted, no list of candidates reached the 40 per cent of votes necessary to win the majority block of seats.14 In the re-run elections scheduled for the beginning of May 1936, the right-wing slate included both José Antonio Primo de Rivera and General Franco. The Falange leader was included in the hope of securing for him the parliamentary immunity which would ensure his release from jail where he had been since 17 March.15
Serrano Suñer was behind Franco’s late inclusion in the right-wing list announced on 23 April.16 On 20 April, a letter from Franco to the secretary of the CEDA expressed his interest in being a candidate in one of the forthcoming re-run elections, preferably Cuenca. Gil Robles discussed the matter with Serrano Suñer. When he approved Franco’s candidacy, Serrano Suñer set off immediately for the Canary Islands to inform his brother-in-law. The monarchist leader Antonio Goicoechea offered to give up his place in the right-wing list but Gil Robles simply instructed the CEDA provincial chief in Cuenca, Manuel Casanova, to stand down. The support for Franco manifested by the CEDA and Renovación Española was not replicated by the third political party involved in Cuenca, the Falange. When the revised list of right-wing candidates was published, Gil Robles received a visit from Miguel Primo de Rivera who came to inform him that his brother was firmly opposed to the list, regarding the inclusion of Franco as a ‘crass error’.
Since Varela was also standing in the simultaneous rerun at Granada, José Antonio Primo de Rivera shrewdly wished to avoid his chances of election being diminished if the rightist eagerness for military candidates were too transparent. He also, in the wake of his unfortunate meeting with Franco before the February elections, regarded the general as likely to be a disaster in the Cortes. He threatened to withdraw from the Cuenca list if Franco’s name was not removed, something which Gil Robles felt unable to do. Efforts by various right-wing leaders including Serrano Suñer failed to persuade the Falange leader to withdraw his opposition to Franco. José Antonio said to Serrano Suñer: ‘This is not what he’s good at and, given that what is brewing is something more conclusive than a parliamentary offensive, let him stay in his territory and leave me where I have already proved myself’. Serrano was then obliged to inform Franco. He managed to persuade his brother-in-law that he would not take well to the cut-and-thrust of parliamentary debate. The argument that Franco would be risking public humiliation did the trick. On 27 April, Franco withdrew and Manuel Casanova returned to the list.17 Franco was aware of the Falangist leader’s hostility to his candidacy and subsequent events would show that he neither forgave nor forgot.
The Left, and Prieto in particular, were concerned that Franco planned to use his parliamentary seat as a base from which to engage in military plotting. This was a reasonable interpretation and was indeed adopted by Francoist propaganda once the Civil War was under way. However, it is not clear whether Franco’s quest for a parliamentary seat was motivated by the need to effect his transfer from the Canary Islands to the mainland in order to play a key role in the conspiracy or by more selfish motives. Gil Robles suggested that the desire to go into politics reflected Franco’s doubts about the success of a military rising. As yet undeclared vis-à-vis the conspiracy, he wanted a safe position