Luis Bolín

Luis Antonio Bolín Bidwell (1894 Málaga; 3 September 1969) was a Spanish lawyer, journalist and an expert in tour operating. This led to his appointment as Head of the National Union of Catering and Allied Attorney in Parliament during the first four legislatures of Francoist Spain. In his memoirs he simply uses the English orthography, Bolin.

Bolín was born into a well-to-do family of wine merchants, of Málaga, Spain in 1897. His mother was English. He studied at the universities of Granada and Madrid, and later in London.

During World War I he worked in France at the British front as a war correspondent. In 1920 he was press attaché at the Spanish Embassy in London. He also became a correspondent for the conservative and pro-monarchy Spanish newspaper ABC and in 1921 he became a member of the information section of the League of Nations. He was an ardent monarchist and opposed the coming of the Spanish Republic in 1931, after the abdication of Alfonso XIII. He was even more alarmed by the revolutionary tendencies that started after the electoral success of the Popular Front in early 1936 and could not be controlled by the legal government.

In July 1936, Bolín played an important role in the events leading up to the Spanish Civil War, when he organised the flight of a de Havilland Dragon Rapide aircraft from Croydon to the Canary Islands, in order to transport General Franco from the Canaries to Spanish Morocco. Franco arrived on July 19 in Tetuan to lead the insurrection and prepare the transport of the troops to the mainland. This was some days before the murder of Calvo Sotelo, that triggered the generals to start their rebellion earlier than foreseen, on July 18. Otherwise the rebellion would have come probably a few weeks later. The flight itself was planned over lunch at Simpson's-in-the-Strand, where Bolín met with Douglas Francis Jerrold, the conservative Roman Catholic editor of The English Review, and Major Hugh Pollard. Pollard contracted Captain Cecil Bebb as pilot, also taking his daughter Diana Pollard and one of her friends, to pose as tourists.

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