FOR the more superstitious inhabitants of the Basque village of El Regato, the beginning of the Spanish civil war was portended not so much by Francisco Franco’s coup as by the onset of a sudden turmoil in the heavens.

“People were saying the war is starting because all the stars in the sky are rushing around,” says Herminio Martinez, who, even as a six-year-old, was beginning to grow sceptical. “I would look up in the sky but I couldn’t see the stars rushing around.”

More material proof of the conflict was not long in coming. Soon enough, German bombers were rumbling through the skies towards Bilbao.

As the food shortages worsened and the bombing intensified, the Basque government decided the area around Bilbao was becoming too dangerous for children, and many were evacuated to France, Belgium, Russia and Mexico.

Far less keen to take the Basque children was the British government, which was still hoping that the non-intervention agreement it had signed would prevent the war spilling over the Pyrenees.

Hitler had fewer scruples. Less than a month after the Nazi bombing of Guernica on April 26, 1937, the British government reluctantly gave in and 3,840 young Basques — among them young Herminio and his older brother, Victor — were taken to the port of Santurce and put aboard the steamship Habana, bound for Southampton, on the south coast of England.

To this day, the Expedicion a Inglaterra, as the evacuation was christened, remains one of the least-known chapters in the history of 1930s Britain. To mark its 75th anniversary, some of the surviving ninos vascos will gather at Southampton University to meet and to remember their exile.

“I remember saying goodbye to my father, who was very upset,” recalls Martinez, who had turned seven a week before leaving Spain. “He just handed us over and left.” As well as the gales of homesick weeping, Martinez particularly remembers crossing the Bay of Biscay in a storm.

If the British government was less than thrilled by the Basques’ arrival, the people of Southampton — and many of the other English towns where the young exiles subsequently ended up — were only too happy to help.

Although most of the children were repatriated by the start of the Second World War, a few remained because their parents were dead, imprisoned or had started new lives abroad. By 1945 there were about 250 ninos in the UK. — The Guardian, London