The British Council opened its first office in Madrid in 1940. The London Blitz had begun and Britain was alone at war: Paris had fallen to the Nazis three months earlier, while the Soviet Union and the United States would not enter the war until June and December 1941, respectively. The Council’s first branch in Spain included an English language institute, a cultural centre and a school for children—to date, the British Council’s only school in the world. Therefore, 2020 marked the eightieth anniversary of not only the Battle of Britain, but also the foundation of the British Council in Spain. Its first director, Professor Walter Starkie, mused later: ‘It seemed paradoxical […] that the necessary effort to found the British Institute in Spain was not made until the most precarious and dramatic months of the World War, when Great Britain lay under the threat of immediate invasion’.
Surprisingly, scholarly research has not yet properly examined the British Council’s foundation in Spain nor the institutional history of the British Council School in Madrid, even eight decades after its foundation. Limited awareness of the institution’s history constitutes a significant knowledge gap not only for the research community, but also in the public sector, where it may have policy implications for the future. Exceptionally well-informed and talented senior British diplomats have served in Spain and even chaired the school board without knowing that Starkie, an Irish Hispanist, musician and travel writer, had founded the British Council in Spain and the school.
In order to counter the strongly institutionalized and well-funded Nazi German and Fascist Italian propaganda in Spain, Starkie masterminded an educational and cultural programme for the British Council in Madrid that reflected and profited from his unique range of multidisciplinary academic and research interests and vast personal network and experience in Spain. Starkie exercised a highly successful dual policy of attracting the attention of the Spanish population while curbing German and Italian influence in Spain, thus supporting Britain’s war effort and furthering British foreign policy aims.
This research, published in two parts due to its length, innovatively brings together all three aspects of the British Institute’s activities during the Second World War: education, intelligence and cultural diplomacy. Indeed, while the Institute conducted education through the school and cultural diplomacy via the cultural centre and the language institute, it also supported British secret intelligence operations in furtherance of the war effort. All three dimensions have been addressed separately in the scholarly literature, with varying degrees of academic rigour, but never together.