Author: Eduardo Freire Canosa
Cando chove e fai sol, anda o demo por Ferrol
When it rains and the sun shines, the devil wanders over Ferrol
The modern history of Ferrol begins in the year 1726 when the Spanish monarch named the fishing village of Ferrol plus Cartagena plus Cadiz respective seat of three newly created administrative and operational jurisdictions for the Spanish Navy. The designation eventually transformed the obscure fishing village into a shipyard and a major naval base that attracted and employed many local people whose mother tongue was Galician and many Spaniards whose mother tongue was Castilian.
The working language of the Spanish Navy is of course Castilian, and so to get ahead in Ferrol you had to speak Castilian fluently. Here originated a division of classes along mother-language lines that remains fairly true to this day: the establishment of Ferrol spoke Castilian exclusively, the working class spoke Castilian and Galician indistinctly.
Historical dates of particular significance to the Ferrolian working class are commemorated in Galician. One such date of paramount importance every year is the tenth of March, called the "Day of the Galician Working Class." This sombre remembrance day calls up March 10, 1972, when paramilitary police opened fire on a demonstration of shipyard workers in Ferrol killing two and wounding sixteen others.
At the start of 1972 the Ferrolian proletariat rejected new labour regulations announced by the state-sponsored union of shipyard workers and demanded negotiations. The shipyard's management responded with sanctions and with the layoff of many workers, and this in turn provoked the workers to undertake industrial action on February 11 by refusing to work overtime. The overtime boycott became indefinite on the 22nd.
From March 1, 1972, onward, the workers assembled daily, deliberately lowering productivity. Meanwhile many small businesses of Ferrol started partial shutdowns in solidarity with the shipyard workers.
On March 6 the state-sponsored union made their collective agreement official.
On March 9 paramilitary police in Ferrol expelled the assembled workers from the shipyard with "extreme violence" after they had voted to start a general strike to protest management's new sanctions and the arrest of six trade union representatives. Scuffles broke out in several parts of the city, and at this point the shipyard initiated a lock-out.
On March 10 a throng of some 4,000 workers demonstrated through the streets of Ferrol before heading to the suburbs for the purpose of drawing more workers into the struggle. The photograph to the left, taken from an upper floor of the Medical Centre, shows a cluster of workers assembled in Plaza de España debating what to do next.
Note: This equestrian statue of General Franco can be seen in the photograph's background standing where the luminous fountain used to be; the statue had been installed on July 5, 1967.
Eventually the workers decided to head out to the Astano shipyard. The march took them past the photographer. A minute or so later a detachment of sixty paramilitary police arrived and a violent confrontation ensued. The workers defended themselves with sticks and stones; Franco's police returned a volley of live fire, killing two workers and wounding sixteen others.
The Spanish government declared a state of siege and harsh repression followed, torture and beatings the norm, but the unrest in Ferrol lasted ten more days. The political unrest gradually spread to other industrial and student centers of Galicia and peaked for the second time in the autumn.
No democratic Spanish government has dared to conduct an inquiry into the events of March 10, 1972, exhibiting a reluctance that validates the belief that Ferrol and Spain remain politically polarized territory, apprehensive of another military coup d'etat like the one that started the Spanish Civil War in 1936 if said enquiry were ever carried out.
To its credit Ferrol's City Hall erected a memorial monument on the spot where the two workers, Daniel Niebla and Amador Rey, both born in 1933, fell dead. They belonged to the Communist workers' organization, Comisiones Obreras.
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Youtube: March 10, 2021
Abridged Voice-Over Translation: On such a day as today, one tenth of March, Amador and Daniel were assassinated right here by Franco's fascist police. And they were so for demanding rights for the working class. For demanding freedom and justice. And forty-nine years afterward we are demanding that same thing (Manel Grandal, Secretary-General of the Ferrolterra branch of the Confederación Intersindical Galega).
At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Ferrol was the birthplace of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. The photograph to the left shows the house where he was born.
When I was a child the city's official name was "El Ferrol del Caudillo" (Ferrol of the Strongman) in reference to the general. Some detractors revised it to "El Ferrol del Bocadillo" (Ferrol of the Sandwich).
Franco was a bit of an enigmatic figure. Although the last thing to associate with his dictatorship is respect for the Galician language or national aspirations, at the conclusion of a gala dinner held in A Coruña on September 6, 1958, maestro Adolfo Anta Seoane asked the general permission to play the proscribed Galician anthem, and to everyone's amazement, the dictator granted it and stood up, a gesture immediately seconded by everyone present. A similar event took place on August 25, 1975, the final year of his life. In another mystifying episode, Mário Soares the former Prime Minister of Portugal affirmed that declassified American documents reveal that Franco refused in 1974 to co-operate with the Americans in their planned invasion of Portugal after the Revolution of the Carnations by alluding to his Galician roots, "I am Galician," he said, "and I do not accept that Portugal should not become what it wants to become."
I remember as a child not seeing the Generalissimo even though he, surrounded by Navy brass in their immaculate white uniforms, stood on a raised platform. The occasion was a military parade along the service road that rings the shipyard. The parade over, my mother pointed him out to me repeatedly as we passed by, but hard as I looked I could not make him out. I guess it was because he was shorter than what I supposed a Generalissimo to be.
Since the royal decree of 1726 the economic future of Ferrol has in last instance been linked to the willingness of the central government in Madrid to continue funding the shipyard and to the procurement needs of the Spanish Navy to guarantee a medium-term workload. This dependence triggered a sequence of economic busts and booms for the city. Thus the nineteenth century began in Ferrol with a profound bust. Under twelve vessels were built between 1800-1850. Beginning in the year 1847 government policy fostered the resurgence of the shipyard. The next crisis came toward the end of the nineteenth century due to a slow start in the construction of ironclads. Between 1909-1937 the Spanish government ceded management of the shipyard to a private company owned mostly by British interests. A boom in employment and production ensued, the tonnage launched increased fivefold. The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) reduced activity until the constitution of Empresa Nacional Bazán in the year 1947.
British Movietone Reviews the Year 1953
Ferrol's municipal library archives did not have newspapers from the year 1953 as I undertook this project, but the first 1954 newspaper had some information about the preceding year. Thus the number of births registered in Ferrol during 1953 had been 709 boys and 721 girls. I was one of the boys. The city library had welcomed 25,532 readers, 28,721 books were read and 6,536 delivered to private households. Spain had signed a religious agreement with the Holy See and a defence pact with the United States, and General Franco asserted in his New Year's address that 1953 had been "one of the most outstanding and fecund of our History" in spite of the "great drought" prevailing.