The death of General Franco

 Today, 20 November 2025, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco.

As a young woman, my mother had worked for a time for an organisation evacuating Basque refugee children from Spain to Scotland, and because of her experience of seeing the trauma of these children she always held the view that there was a special place in hell reserved for Franco.

However, that's not the point of this post.

When Franco died I was at uni and living in a share house about a hundred metres from the rather grander nineteenth century building that housed the Centre for Latin American and Hispanic studies.

 About an hour or so after the newsflash on tv, we were startled to hear someone playing the Republican "A las barricadas" very loudly and Hispanic centre was ablaze with light.

Out of curiosity we walked past and we could see all these elderly and respectable professors and their partners in the hallway embracing each other and clutching bottles of wine.

I didn't join the dots at the time, but of course some of these men and women may have lived through the civil war in Spain and others were the children of exiles who had fled to Latin America and elsewhere...