Henry, English hero for Catalans

Come to Eng­land with me for a few mo­ments. Let's talk of he­roes.

You might think that the set­ting of my wild Eng­lish child­hood - of a one sock up, one down, scruffy, bare-kneed boy roam­ing along the dan­ger­ous coast of flat Nor­folk - is a world away from Cat­alo­nia. Not en­tirely so.

I re­main scruffy (con­stant) and bare-kneed (fre­quent), but that is not what I mean.

That great bul­bous curve of the East­ern coast of the is­land where I was born, butting out like arse into the grey North Sea to­wards the Nether­lands, is open to the clean, bit­ter Arc­tic wind that will cut you in half. The place has a rare beauty, a good­ness, and is, un­der­stand­ably, in my heart.

The same is true for some Cata­lans, and I am not just re­fer­ring to those who I know now live there.

The boy­hood be­wil­der­ments for me were many, not least the count­less wrecks of ships lit­ter­ing the shal­lows, and of the sto­ries they told. And then there were the local he­roes, the vol­un­teer lifeboat men, who went out into vi­o­lent storms to res­cue souls. One such was the late Henry Blogg, coxswain (cap­tain) of the Cromer lifeboat who, 75 years ago, went to the aid of Cata­lan refugees.

Those flee­ing Franco aboard the mer­chant ship Cantabria must have thought they had fi­nally es­caped the hor­rors of the civil war as they steamed past Nor­folk, bound for Leningrad. But they were being shad­owed by the Nadir, a Na­tion­al­ist armed mer­chant ship, and within sight of the Nor­folk beach the Nadir opened fire.

With night falling shells and bul­let rained down on the Cantabria, de­stroy­ing her bridge and en­gine.

It was so close to shore that ma­chine gun fire broke the win­dows of houses. The Cantabria was sink­ing and the cap­tain Manuel Argüelles is­sued an SOS.

Into this Span­ish war chaos Blogg and his lifeboat crew plunged to help those on the stricken ship. A trawler, the Pat­ter­son­ian, also re­sponded, the cap­tain bravely putting his ves­sel be­tween the Nadir and the Cantabria to give the lifeboat a chance to make a res­cue at­tempt.

With fire rag­ing on the ship and the Nadir's clos­ing in many peo­ple had taken to the boats. Some were picked up by the Pat­ter­son­ian but oth­ers, in­clud­ing two chil­dren, were taken by the Nadir.

Cap­tain Argüelles, his wife and two chil­dren aged six and eight, were still aboard the sink­ing Cantabria. Blogg saved them, pulling away just sec­onds be­fore the ship rolled and sank.

Last No­vem­ber Cromer com­mem­o­rated the an­niver­sary of the res­cue and in so doing fur­ther ho­n­oured the great Henry Blogg and his crew. We must re­mem­ber, too, those aboard the Pat­ter­son­ian.

What hap­pened within sight of my child­hood home had been a shock­ing por­tent of what all of Eu­rope was to about to face from Fas­cism, and per­haps pro­voked (one can only hope) some chill­ing re­flec­tion by the British par­lia­ment that had ab­jectly failed to stand up for democ­racy against bru­tal dic­ta­tor­ship in Spain.