75th anniversary of the Basque refugee children

The Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick has recently scanned and uploaded more than 13,000 documents to create the largest online English language archive of material relating to the Spanish Civil War. The collection is called ‘Trabajadores’.

This online collection, which took 13 months to digitise, contains letters, reports and publicity material from the Trades Union Congress files and other key archive collections.

Among the documents are reports and photographs of a makeshift refugee camp set up for the Basque children who were evacuated to the UK: around 4,000 children from the Basque region of Spain arrived by boat in Southampton on 23 May 1937.

The children  were taken to the North Stoneham camp, based near Eastleigh in Hampshire,  until more permanent accommodation could be found. The camp was closed down in September 1937 when the children were sent to other centres across the UK.

You can find out more about the digitisation project at the Modern Records Centre website