As Spain is gripped by the Catalonians’ demands for independence, Rosie Gilligan meets the former Chesterfield College Principal who has spent eight years of his retirement uncovering dramatic new evidence of the tragedy that was the Spanish Civil War.
WHEN Dr David Lyon, the former long-serving Principal at Chesterfield College, retired in 2001, he hadn’t planned to spend eight years travelling across a country as big as Spain, thousands of hours studying documents in dusty archives and writing a book about the Spanish Civil War. “One thing simply led to another,” he explains. “All I knew was I’m not a pipe-and-slippers sort of person and that I was determined to do something….