The dockyard—protected by the north and south moles, and the long and crucial ‘detached mole’—slipped astern, and we berthed close to the airstrip (built where the racetrack used to be, just inside the frontier) and the Royal Gibraltar Yacht Club, the oldest outside
Britain (it was founded in 1829, and its members regularly race against Spanish sailors from La Linea Yacht Club, making the border regulations seem all the more needless).
The customs and immigration men were as bleakly unwelcoming as in any British possession, and searched diligently for any illicit imports of the products for which Morocco is well known. A thump of rubber stamp and, some twenty-four hours, 200 miles and one extra continent after being turned away at the double gate, here I was in the Crown colony itself—a red telephone box on one side, a pillar box labelled ‘ER’—for Edward VII, not Elizabeth—on the other; policemen in shirt-sleeve order, soldiers in khaki drill, customs men in tropical shorts, advertisements for Watneys and Hovis, Rocola shirts and Tootal ties, and fleets of Morris Minors, Austins and Land-Rovers on the roads. (But there is one signal difference: in Gibraltar, alone of the remnant colonies, traffic drives on the right.)
Gibraltar is, and long has been, Britain’s smallest foreign possession. (Ignoring, that is, such infinitesimal outstations as Diamond Rock, near Grenada in the Caribbean, granted in the Napoleonic Wars and given the preface ‘HMS’ the next smallest inhabited colony is Pitcairn, two square miles, compared to the Rock’s one and seven-eighths. Pitcairn, as we shall see, belongs to the Crown still.) Gibraltar is three miles long, three-quarters of a mile wide and, at the Rock Gun, a third of a mile high. As perhaps the only colony it is practicable to express in terms of its weight—about 1,500 billion tonnes of Jurassic limestone, plus a few million tonnes of shale—it looks almost identical to that odd-shaped protuberance on the Dorset coast, Portland Bill, and geologically, it is.
It is the only present British colony that was known to the ancient world. The Romans called it Mons Calpe; it was twinned with Mons Abyla—the Mountain of the Apes—on the African side of the Straits, and the pair were known, so it is generally accepted, as the Pillars of Hercules, the limits of the known and navigable world, and beyond which lay Atlantis. It was a part of the Gateway of the Hesperides; and some scholars will claim, rather more fancifully,
that Gibraltar was Scylla, and Abyla was Charybdis, and the Straits of Messina had nothing to do with the story at all. (Since there is no whirlpool in either Strait, Charybdis remains very much a mystery, amenable to all sorts of claims.)
Tarik-ben-Zayed, Moor and Mussulman, brought Islam into Europe and gave Gibraltar its name—Jeb’el Tarik, or Tarik’s Rock—in AD 711. He snatched the Rock, without being noticed, from the Visigoths (though for good measure he went on to kill their king, Roderic, near Tarifa, and began a march of Mohammedanism that was to trundle northwards for 400 years and reach almost to the gates of Paris). He was a military man of considerable prescience, and realised at once the strategic importance of his peninsular conquest—the keystone, as it were, to Spain. But neither he nor his successors, who ruled Tarik’s Rock as an Islamic extension of the Moroccan Rif for the next six centuries, laid down constructions to denote their rule: today there are the ruins of a wall, fragments of two mosques, and the keep of the Moorish Castle, part of which is now used as the Gibraltar Prison, and which the Howard League for Penal Reform have denounced as ‘grotesquely primitive’, and its inmates as ‘zombie-like’.
The Spaniards briefly regained Gibraltar in 1309, when the Archbishop of Sevilla, his soldiers armed with catapults, drove the thousand Moors of the garrison back home to Morocco. The Moors recaptured the Rock soon after, and the Spaniards attacked again soon after that; over the next century and a half of the slow and painful—but never-to-be-forgotten—
Reconquista
, Gibraltar changed hands eight times; Don Alonso de Arcos, who finally succeeded in stamping out the Moor for ever, marched across the isthmus in 1462: his tomb in Sevilla, which every Briton and modern Gibraltarian should perhaps take trouble to see, records the fact with due eloquence: ‘
Aqui yace sepultado el honrado caballero don Alonso de Arcos, alcaide de Tarifa, que gano a Gibraltar de los enimigos de nuestra Santa Fe
.’ (‘Here lies buried the honoured knight Don Alonso de Arcos, Governor of Tarifa, who wrested Gibraltar from the enemies of our Holy Faith.’) It would be as well for Whitehall to remember that in Spain’s eyes, today’s occupiers—the Protestants of England—are
every bit as noisome and villainous a bunch of usurpers as were the Moslems of Fez; the spirit of the
Reconquista
is still a powerful motive force—some might say the only motive force—in the continuing diplomatic wrangle over when Britain will abandon her own claims to sovereignty.
Spain managed to hang on to Gibraltar for only two and a half centuries, and her invigilation was neglectful, if not downright malign. The place went to ruin: nothing of note was built, it was peopled by convicts whose sentences were suspended while they lived there, it was a hotbed of religious intolerance (the Jews were all thrown out in 1492), it degenerated into a dreary wasteland of wrecked buildings and wharves, where undisciplined soldiers waited for a Moorish attack that never came—and for pay that never came either—and watched without understanding the steadily increasing number of ships from other nations that sailed on trading missions between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.
The British had their Imperial eyes upon it from early on. Cromwell lusted after it as fortress and strategic base. ‘Gibraltar, if possessed and made tenable by us,’ he said, ‘would be an advantage to our trade and an annoyance to the Spaniard.’
And yet when finally it did fall to British guns, and to the naval cannonade of Admiral Sir George Rooke, it did so not precisely on Britain’s behalf, but rather on behalf of the Hapsburg Pretender to the Spanish Throne, Charles, the Archduke of Austria. And to add further complication to the story, Rooke was aided in his conquest by the Archduke’s agent, the Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, who is still remembered with affection by Ulster Protestants for having been wounded at the Battle of the Boyne by the same ball that hurt King William.
The cannonade must have been terrifying, and overwhelming to the Spaniards, who could muster only eighty trained soldiers, 470 peasant militiamen, 1,000 civilian territorials and twenty working heavy guns. Rooke’s forces, which he deployed over the first weekend of August 1704, included seventy-one warships, 26,000 artillerymen, 9,000 infantrymen and 4,000 cannon. His attack, which began at dawn on Sunday, 4th August, needed only a few
hours; he poured 15,000 balls on to the tiny city, clustered above the docks and on the comparatively gentle slopes of the Rock’s western flanks. Barely a building stood the onslaught—one reason why so little of historical importance remains in the colony today.
Rooke’s men landed at daybreak, and by midnight the last of the Spaniards emerged from their foxholes. The Spanish Governor, Diego Salina, surrendered and marched the remains of his garrison and almost the entire population of 6,000 civilians northwards, and to La Linea and San Roque. Gibraltar was now, in fact if not in law, British. In fact the Prince of Hesse, installed as first Governor, first raised the Spanish flag, on behalf of his Pretender’s claim; and even when Rooke tore this down, and protested that the peninsula was British, a second Governor was installed who was most definitely Spanish—a General Ramos. Then Archduke Charles himself was brought to Gibraltar in 1705 and formally declared King of Spain, which must have seemed very odd, given that there were no Spaniards there at all except Ramos, and a population of what were called ‘shacombe filthies, raggamuffings and scrovies’ from Rooke’s seventy-one warships.
Total British dominion began in 1707, when Colonel Roger Elliot took office as Governor; and finally, on 13th July 1713, the document that confirmed it all—or didn’t confirm a thing, depending upon your nationality and persuasion—was signed by Queen Anne and King Philip, and a host of other European monarchs besides, in the small town of Utrecht, on the banks of the Crooked Rhine, in central Holland.
The Treaty of Utrecht, which brought to a formal end the War of the Spanish Succession, spread Europe’s Imperial tentacles across the world. It dealt with Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Hudson’s Bay and the island of St Kitt’s (with France handing them over to Britain); it recognised Frederick of Prussia’s claim to Neuchatel; it said that the Duke of Savoy could rule Sicily and Nice, permitted Portugal suzerainty over the banks of the Amazon, and cut back French territory in Guiana. Spain gave to England the exclusive right to supply her colonies with Negro slaves; and it gave her Minorca, and, in the famous Article X, it gave her Gibraltar, too.
The first paragraph is crucial, because it is said to be ambiguous. Interpretations of it by scholars, lawyers and historians, together with ever more subtle interpretations of other paragraphs of the massively formal document, have led to the perpetuation of arguments between Britain and Spain over just who actually owns the peninsula—and not over just who ought, by rights and tradition, to own it. The claims have led to not a little violence, but more often to acts and decisions of sheer lunacy. One recent example is said to have befallen a Spanish painter who was applying green gloss to the gates on his side of the frontier. He dropped the brush, and it fell through the gate and into Gibraltar. According to the tale, which I suspect to be apocryphal, he was told that to retrieve it he would have to travel via Tangier, just as I had done. It is difficult to imagine that he supposed the brush worth the time and money, or that he didn’t just search out a convenient coathanger, and pluck the brush back to safety.
The supposedly ambiguous first paragraph of Article X reads as follows:
The catholic King does hereby, for himself, his heirs and successors, yield to the Crown of Great Britain, the full and entire propriety of the town and castle of Gibraltar, together with the port, fortifications and forts thereunto belonging; and he gives up the said propriety to be held and enjoyed absolutely with all manner of right forever, without any impediment or exception whatsoever.
The lawyers argue that, watertight though the paragraph may seem, the use of the word ‘propriety’ is ambiguous, and does not necessarily constitute complete title to Gibraltar. The Treaty is wheeled out on almost every public dispute over the matter: it has been suggested, for instance, that by placing soldiers on the peninsula Britain was violating one of the Treaty’s cardinal provisions. Since there is no other reason for Britain being in Gibraltar—the civilians of Gibraltar have always been thought of by the colonists as second-class, tiresome types who get under the feet of the soldiers and the matelots—this particular grumble was, certainly in the heyday of
Empire, met with a weary and sardonic shrug of the Imperial shoulders.
The Treaty came after the Spaniards had tried to prise the British off the Rock by laying siege; they failed then, and failed twice more, once in the spring of 1727, and again—for three years and seven months—beginning on 11th July 1779. This latter, the Great Siege, was from the Spanish point of view a monumental waste of time and money.
In one six-week period in 1781, for example, the Spanish artillerymen hurled 56,000 shot and 20,000 shell into the fortress, but managed to kill only seventy men. The following year they held a contest for the best way of subduing the British on the Rock, and came up with the superb folly of the floating batteries, great stripped-down ships roofed with nets and hides and crammed with guns of the heaviest gauge. Dozens of them were hauled out into the bay, and began firing a wild cannonade at the British forces on the west flank from a range of half a mile. The British were serenely undismayed, and fired down at the batteries with red-hot cannonballs, which set the juggernauts on fire, sinking them and drowning 1,500 crew.
When it was all over someone calculated that one ball in 2,000 killed a Briton, and scarcely an excavation made in Gibraltar today fails to come up with at least one of the tens of thousands that failed to connect. The Spanish—and actually the besiegers were a mongrel army, with three Walloon battalions, one from Switzerland, some from Flanders, Ireland and Savoy—never tried again. Diplomacy, tempered by occasional excursions into mild forms of violence, has dominated the argument ever since.
The Great Siege has left many legacies—not least the indomitable spirit, or obtuse cussedness, of the Gibraltarian, and his professed loathing for the Spaniard. ‘There are two kinds of apes on the Rock,’ remarked a taxi driver, a Mr Ferrary, as his old Ford Prefect laboured up the hill to the place where he promised I would be able to see the famous monkeys. ‘Yes, two kinds—the animals, and the Spaniards.’
It left more practical memorials as well. One emerged from the simple difficulty the British artillerymen experienced in defending their fortress. What would happen, one of them mused, if a cannon perched high on the cliff were fired horizontally, its ball going out into space? Ballistics was evidently then an imperfect discipline, since the conventional assumption had it that the ball would proceed outwards in a straight line until the force pushing it diminished to nothing, whence it would plummet, suddenly, like a stone. No truck with parabolas in those days: a cannonball would be like a waterfall, going straight out and straight down, its course impossible to aim, its consequences impossible to predict.
Naïve—and plain wrong—though such wisdom was, it set the gunners’ brains to work. One of their number, a Lieutenant Koehler, found the answer: the gun should be pointed downwards so that it could be aimed at the enemy below, and a clever device (which Koehler patented) would stop the ball rolling out before the powder charge went off. Moreover, a cunning recoil system had to be devised so that the gun wouldn’t rupture itself every time it was fired in this highly unnatural position. Koehler came up with the recoil mechanism too, and the two devices became standard equipment on British heavy guns for generations to come.