Joan Pujol Garcia - Early Life

Early Life

Pujol was born in the Catalan city of Barcelona, Spain on 14 February 1912 (or possibly 28 February 1912) to Juan Pujol, a Catalan who owned a factory that produced dye, and Mercedes Guijarro Garcia, from the Andalusian town of Motril in the Province of Granada. The third of four children, Pujol was sent at age seven to the Valldemia boarding school run by the Marist Brothers in Mataró, twenty miles from Barcelona and remained there for the next four years. The students were only allowed out of the school on Sundays if they had a visitor, so his father made the trip every week.

His mother came from a very strict Catholic family who took communion every day, but his father was much more secular and had liberal political beliefs. At age thirteen, he transferred to a school in Barcelona run by his father's card-playing friend Father Mossen Josep, where he remained for three years. After an argument with a teacher, he decided that he no longer wished to remain at the school, and became an apprentice at a hardware store.

Pujol engaged in a variety of occupations prior to and after the Spanish Civil War, such as studying animal husbandry at the Royal Poultry School in Arenys de Mar and managing various businesses, including a cinema.

His father died a few months after the Second Republic's birth in 1931, while Pujol was completing his education as a poultry farmer. Pujol's father left his family well-provided for, until his father's factory was taken over by the workers, around the Spanish Civil War's start.