Julian Bell has followed in Julian Bell's footsteps in Madrid.
Julian Bell, the one who is alive, is a renowned 72-year-old British painter, lives in Sussex (United Kingdom) and was born 15 years after the other Julian Bell, his uncle, who in turn was the nephew of the writer Virginia Wolf , died at the age of 29 in the middle of a bombing in the battle of Brunete (Madrid), in 1937, in the middle of the Spanish civil war.
Bell traveled to Madrid in 2011 to retrace the last steps of his uncle who, in an act of rebellion, joined the ranks of the International Brigades that supported the Republican side during the war.
He passed by the road that leaves Villanueva de la Cañada where, he calculated, the bomb that killed his uncle fell while she was driving an ambulance.
“Then, I went to the Fuencarral cemetery, I went to the wall where the plaques of the international brigade members are and looked for the British plaque.
"It was very small compared to the plaques of the French and Polish volunteers... Much smaller compared to the enormous monument of the Soviet volunteers!" says Bell, laughing, in a telephone interview.
The plate, in fact, is not even an exclusively British plate, but also pays tribute to Americans and Irish.
“There I paid my respects, before a mark on a wall.
I knew nothing about the long history of the relocation of bodies,” Bell confesses.
Much less did he imagine what that story would trigger.
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Neighborhood success in the canton of Montecarmelo: work will have to stop to discover if there are remains of international brigade members
At the beginning of 2024, Bell learned that the whereabouts of the body of his uncle and that of 450 other international brigade members has been one of the cards that a neighborhood association in the Madrid neighborhood of Montecarmelo has played to stop the City Council from construction of a garbage canton.
He has learned this from the press, which has mentioned, first as a local issue, the neighborhood opposition in Montecarmelo due to the impact that this cleaning facility may bring.
The matter, however, came to the international level when the neighbors contacted the Association of Friends of the International Brigades (AABI) to find out more about the possible location of a mass grave where, it is suspected, the remains of 451 international brigades are located.
Neighbors who are history buffs and members of the AABI rescued historical documents and set off alarms, as EL PAÍS reported.
There were indications that the brigade members' grave could be on the immense site, or in the surrounding area, from where the Town Hall corner was projected.
The AABI points out that the brigade members ended up in the grave after being exhumed from the Fuencarral cemetery, where they were buried until the 1940s. The neighborhood platform No to the Canton of Montecarmelo and the AABI sent letters to around twenty embassies of the countries that have nationals buried in that grave warning of the canton project.
They also had contact with international media, including
The Guardian
.
It was there that Bell learned of the story of the grave where his uncle is believed to be.
J3R31D Julian Bell and Elizabeth WatsonAlamy Stock Photo
Bell also learned that the General Directorate of Democratic Memory was preparing an “archaeological survey” project to find out whether or not the mass grave is located in that plot, which is next to the Fuencarral cemetery, as EL PAÍS reported.
“I'd like to hear from the media that they found them,” Bell says.
“If it were discovered that the bodies were in that area, clearly the City Council's plans must change.
“There are many places to put that facility, but only one where the dead lie.”
It has been 13 years since Bell stood in front of the international brigade members' memorial in the Fuencarral cemetery.
From that visit, she took a couple of photos with her digital camera: one of the wall in the cemetery where the plaques are in memory of the brigade members and another of a field on the outskirts of Villanueva de la Cañada.
“I took the photo in what I believed was the approximate location where the bomb that killed my uncle fell,” explains Bell, “in the distance, you could see the mountains.
The whole landscape gave a quiet beauty.”
In the photo you can see an immense esplanade of grass and flowers.
He acknowledges that perhaps it is not the same as what his uncle saw before she died: “It was in July 1937. I suppose that, by that season, all the grass must have been dry.”
Bell has thought about painting something from those photographs.
“Unfortunately, I never have,” he admits.
At home, he says, there was little talk about that man who went to war in Spain.
“It was very difficult for my father [Quentin Bell] to talk about his brother.
It was a kind of trauma,” he recalls.
“My father and his brother grew up together.
Julian was only two years older, they were very close.
“They spent a lot of time during their childhood and his youth talking about politics and war,” he adds.
The brothers' parents, along with Virginia Woolf, were members of the Bloomsbury Circle, a group of British intellectuals who spoke about literature, art and society.
Julian Bell, his nephew claims, was a person very interested in politics: “He wanted to work for progressive causes that mattered to him, he wanted to be involved in anti-fascist groups in the 1930s. The family tried to convince him not to go as a soldier with the International Brigades.”
They only got him to drive an ambulance because they thought he was safer.
The artist Julian Bell is the only member of the family who has been in Spain in the footsteps of that relative who did not return from the war.
“If they give you a name, it has a meaning.
Of course for me there were questions, who was that person and why was he so important,” says Bell.
He does not rule out returning to Madrid if, in the midst of the tastings prepared by the Government, the bones of the other Bell come to light.
“Symbolic battles matter.”
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