| |
In 1948 Dr J. M. Batista i Roca was permitted to start a Catalan option within the Cambridge Tripos and he himself taught Catalan language and literature to students of Spanish. From Cambridge he fostered the introduction of Catalan Studies into other British universities. He was later to award scholarships to a small number of students (not necessarily Cambridge students) to go to Catalonia to further their studies of Catalan culture. Some of those pupils of Batista's were later to hold chairs at British universities in which Catalan studies flourish. In those dark post-war years the relationship between British Hispanists (whose interests were essentially in Castilian culture) and the Catalan community in Britain grew closer and closer until there emerged a group of people who felt a common interest in Catalan culture. It was around this relationship that the Anglo-Catalan Society was built.
To begin with, English and Catalans simply met for lunch and discussed topics of mutual interest, but by 1954 there were enough of them sufficiently keen to link themselves formally as an association with a proper constitution setting out the structure of the new Society and specifying its objectives. From its inception the Society was conceived of as a clearly non-political organization, and this feature has been preserved throughout the Society's history. The reasoning behind this policy, which may seem a strange one in view of the times in which the Society was founded and the circumstances of its creation, lay in the principle which in part guided its founding members. This was to challenge in the British mind, and above all in the university mind, the notion that Castilian culture was the only Hispanic culture worthy of the attention of British academics. With the Franco regime at its height it was of course quite possible that an idea of this kind could easily have become entrenched. Any attempt therefore to give the Society a political character could soon have led to its failure, since the majority of its members were also, indeed mainly, engaged professionally in teaching Castilian language and culture, even though they all expressed strong opposition to the Franco regime and the obliteration of non-Castilian cultures in the Spain to which it aspired. And so the task which the Anglo-Catalan Society set itself was limited to the dissemination and promotion of Catalan culture throughout the British Isles by every available means; to destroy wherever possible the myth of Castilian cultural monopoly; to establish the facts of Catalan culture; to correct the balance and to present a true image of the cultural reality of the Iberian Peninsula. |
|
