Basque Refugee Children in Kingsdown, 1937
The Lord Mayor of Bristol makes friends with some of the Basque refugee children after he had welcomed them on their arrival in Bristol. They are staying at the old Training Centre in Kingsdown.
Reproduced by kind permission of the the Visual Studies Workshop Collection
(Soibelman Agency News Picture Archive) .
Anyone know more about this?
March 5th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
The children were refugees from the Spanish Civil War - sent by their parents from Bilbao in 1936. They stayed at no.10 Kingsdown Parade, previously the Institution for Deaf Children, for a year when the war was at its peak in the Basque area, before returning home once the worst of the fighting was over.
(The Basque area was keenly fought over: Bilbao had declared for the left wing Republicans at the start of the war and its capture in 1937 was an important victory for the right wing Nationalists. In April 1937, the nearby ancient city of the Basques – Guernica – was bombed and destroyed in the first ever deliberate aerial bombing of a city.)