United Kingdom

London was something more than a Delegation of the Basque Government. In the first years of the Second World War, with the Government scattered, the Basque exile was held together from there, and it was there that the body created to avoid a power vacuum was born.

The 1936 Delegation

A few months after the one in Paris, and with the war still going on in Euskal Herria, the second Delegation of the Basque Government outside the Spanish state began to work in London. According to Eneko Sanz Goikoetxea and Óscar Álvarez Gila, the city was chosen for two reasons. One was the hope that Britain would temper the war and lift the blockade that the rebel navy was imposing on the Basque ports; the other was the reception of the refugee children, which needed a structure to coordinate it.²

The Delegation set up in December 1936 at 7-9 Hobart Place, next to Eaton Square. It was headed by José Ignacio Lizaso, with Ángel Gondra as secretary and Antonio Gamarra and Jesús Hickman Urrutia working with them. Part of its work was propaganda: it published the British edition of Euzko Deya-The Voice of the Basques, which lasted only from July to September 1938.²

The Consejo Nacional de Euzkadi (1940)

When the world war broke out, the London Delegation was the only one in Europe that did not come to a standstill. Quite the opposite: in the first two years of the war it was the centre of the Basque institutional network in exile, at a time when the Government had been scattered and there was no lehendakari (president of the Basque Government) who could be located. To avoid a power vacuum, on the initiative of the minister Manuel de Irujo, a provisional body, the Consejo Nacional de Euzkadi, was created at the Delegation’s premises in July 1940, and it presented itself publicly with a statement headed “Al pueblo vasco” (“To the Basque people”).²

The Council stepped up its contacts with the Foreign Office and offered the contribution of the Basque exile to the Allied war effort. It was not a rival power: its decisions were later taken on by the Basque Government once it had re-formed.²

Lizaso was at the head of the Delegation from 1937 to 1945, with Irujo as extraordinary delegate between 1940 and 1946. After that it was headed from 1945 to 1954 by Ángel Gondra, who had started there as secretary.²