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Explorers Podcast. Hello everyone and welcome to History of the Second World War. On this episode of our Spanish Civil War

interview series, I was joined by Stephen Rainbert. Stephen's research focuses on the political

relationship between Spain, Britain, and Portugal in the years before and during the Second World War.

Our conversation focuses mostly on the reaction of British political leaders to the

events in Spain that led up to the Civil War, and then some of the reasons that the British government

chose the path that it did during the conflict. We also discussed the very important matter

of piracy in the Mediterranean during the war, where the pirates somehow got a hold of Italian

submarines, spoke Italian, and

were getting paid by the Italian government. A weird situation, really.

Hello everyone and welcome to the Spanish Civil War interview series. Today I'm joined by PhD researcher Stephen Rainbert, whose research focuses on the relationships between Spain, Portugal, and Britain during the years before and during the Second World War. Stephen, thank you for joining me here today. How's it going? Yeah, very well, thanks. A little dark. It's all well. How about you?

It's going okay here, quite chilly today, but I'm working from home due to 2020, and so it's

not a problem.

So in the time period before the Spanish Civil War, what was the feeling in London towards the political developments that were happening in Spain?

So I think that it's important to give a little bit of background to the British kind of political outlook at the time and to focus

sort of momentarily on what was happening in British politics domestically and then to explain

why this sort of affected British political responses to what was going on in Spain. So in this

...