Spilling the Spanish Beans is an article, in two parts, by George Orwell, that first appeared in the New English Weekly of 29 July and 2 September 1937. Background Orwell travelled to Spain in December 1936, 'to gather material for newspaper articles etc..' and he had also, 'some vague idea of fighting if it seemed worthwhile.' He carried a letter from Fenner Brockway to Paris and dropped in on Henry Miller. He arrived in Barcelona on 26 December 1936 : " ... it was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle... I recognised it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.' He had arrived with Independent Labour Party (ILP) papers and the ILP was affiliated with the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), an anti-Stalinist party. Its leader, Andrés Nin, had once been a close ally of Leon Trotsky. Nin had just been forced out of the Catalan government, a result of Communist influence which had grown in Spain since the first Russian supply ships had arrived in October 1936. In July 1936 the POUM paper La Batalla condemned the Moscow Show Trials - the Spanish Communists were complaining about the anarchists and 'Trotskyists'. In September general Alexander Orlov of the NKVD arrived in Madrid. Communist influence and Orlov's power began to extend itself throughout Republican Spain. Orwell did not know at this time that the POUM was quite separate from the Communist-dominated International Brigade. After Orwell had spent 'a day or so absorbing the atmosphere he told McNair [the ILP's Barcelona representative] that he had decided to enlist. A 20-year-old journalist, Victor Alba, from La Batalla had spent some time showing him the scenes of the July street fighting and given him the story of what had happened in Barcelona. From Barcelona Orwell was sent to Alcubierre on the Aragon Front. Argument of the essay In the first part of the article Orwell argues that in the case of the Spanish Civil War, even more than pro-fascist newspapers like the Daily Mail, left-wing papers such as the News Chronicle and Daily Worker had "prevented the British public from grasping the real nature of the struggle." Orwell describes the imprisoning of those whose opinions were too much to the left and that the people responsible for putting them there were the Communists: "The real struggle is between