Outposts (16 page)

To get the guns into position—specifically, up to a projection known as the Knotch, from where a blind spot on the Mediterranean side could be covered—required still more imagination; this was provided by another of the Rock’s favourite sons, a Sergeant-Major Ince of the Military Artificers. He, and fifty stone-cutters, masons, miners and lime-burners, drove a tunnel behind the Rock’s northern face, along which the cannon could, it was thought, be trundled. On their way they punched a number of fresh-air vents through the face itself, and then made the discovery that they could poke the cannon through these portholes, and command huge fields of fire while remaining more or less invulnerable. And so the frustrated Spanish Army—including the Walloons (and Maltese cavalrymen, who occasionally charged towards the British lines)—watched while great black holes opened in the white cliffs, gun barrels were thrust out, and withering fusillades of shot flew down at them.

The tunnels—galleries, as they came to be called—were the first of a vast subterranean network. Today there are more than thirty miles of them, some carrying roads, thirteen specially designed as cavernous reservoirs to hold drinking water, some protected by steel blast doors and containing secret communications equipment and, by reliable though unconfirmed accounts, atomic bombs, and some put to even stranger uses. An entire Northern Irish village was built in one very big tunnel; it had a Roman Catholic church (St Malachy’s), a pub (the Hope and Anchor) and a fish-and-chip shop (Tom’s). British soldiers, some kitted out as IRA men, others as Irish civilians and still others in their usual battledress, would make war on each other, practising for Ballymurphy and the Bogside. It made a fine irony, I thought, for the interior of one British colony to be used to learn how to subdue the post-Imperial wrangling in what some regard as, strictly speaking, another.

By 1784, British rule in Gibraltar was unquestioned, and the Rock had become, in Britain and across much of the world, a monument to tenacity, grace under pressure and bulldoggishness in general. Before the siege there had been many plans to dispose of the colony, or to use it as a diplomatic bargaining chip. Lord Stanhope had offered Gibraltar back to Spain if Madrid would relinquish her claims in Italy; the French had offered Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean if Spain could be given back Gibraltar; and there were other trading schemes advanced besides. But after 1784, after the failure of the Great Siege, it was clear the British public would have none of it. ‘Safe as the Rock of Gibraltar’ was the phrase invented at the time, and variants of that most thunderous Imperial assertion have determined British policy towards the Rock ever since.

It was a squalid possession in those early days. The garrison was largely composed of ne’er-do-wells, drunkards and smugglers; the civil population, ignored and despised by the military establishment, was Genoese, Maltese, Moorish, Portuguese, British and—despite a specific provision of the Treaty of Utrecht barring them from settlement—Jewish. (Spain points to that provision, coupled with a
ban on Moors living in the colony as well, as yet another indication that her cession of the peninsula was temporary and conditional.) And while the Genoese and the Maltese attended to the more mundane duties of urban life—though the Genoese fished, grew vegetables on the neutral ground between La Linea and the Rock’s north face, and dealt in tobacco, as they still do today—the Sephardic Jews attended to the essentials of Empire—they lent money, opened trading houses and warehouses, had no overweening pride to prevent them from the vulgar business of trade, and thus managed swiftly to dominate the colony’s commerce. The result was their early prominence among the successful—if not social—élite of the colony, and their continuing power today. ‘Gibraltar is full of Jews,’ people will tell you as you step on to the plane at Gatwick; well, it is not, but occasionally it feels as though it might be, or might once have been. Spain rather likes to note how the British have pointedly ignored the Treaty of Utrecht’s ban on Jews and Arabs by occasionally, and mischievously, reminding the world of the name of the present, and seemingly indomitable Prime Minister of Gibraltar. It is Sir Joshua Hassan.

The social élite—the Governor and his entourage, the senior soldiery and admiralty, the British nabobs—generally kept aloof from the noisome and mongrel crew down in the town. To them, Gibraltar town was dirty and smelly, ill-constructed and primitive, cursed with disease and vagabondage, and they rarely ventured from their elegant mansions up on the hillside, or from behind their barrack walls. Except, that is, in matters of sport: the élite and the more skilled of the native Gibraltarians played polo, and the British and the Spanish, whatever their politically inspired loathing for each other, rode to hounds.

The Calpe Hunt, one of the Empire’s oldest and oddest, still exists, or at least is revived from time to time, and gentlemen in hunting pink can still be seen driving through the boundary gates for a rendezvous with their hounds. But no one is quite sure how it all began: some say, a little improbably, that a foxhound couple was actually kept on the Rock, and that foxes were to be found on
the scrub on the slopes of Mount Misery and Middle Hill, scurrying among the apes.

Others say the first hounds were kept in San Roque under the mastership of one Reverend Mackareth, and that more hounds from the Duke of Wellington’s pack, stationed near his great estates around Cadiz, were brought down in 1817, given to the interested officers of the 29th Regiment, and named after Gibraltar’s classical title. By the end of the nineteenth century Colonel Gilbard was able to say that the hunt was ‘the’ great institution on the Rock, ‘and a well-conducted establishment at the North Front gives accommodation to the huntsmen, hounds and their attendants’. The hunting was no longer confined to the peninsula’s slopes, but had extended to the hills and meadows of neighbouring Andalucia, with the local landowners gladly allowing the Englishmen to ride their ‘little coarse-bred Spanish horses’ in pursuit of the exceptionally cunning native foxes.

The colonel saw his sport as an antidote to diplomatic disharmony. Were the Spaniards themselves to follow the pack ‘this would wonderfully smooth the difficulties which occasionally crop up and threaten to spoil sport, and the members of the hunt would gladly welcome the Spanish officers, gentry and farmers joining in the sport in friendly rivalry’. Which is exactly what happened; and grandees of both English and Andalucian parentage rode together and once went over to Tangier ‘where a wolf gave an excellent run of over forty minutes and a distance of nine miles’.

The garrison’s élite may have rid the Rock of its foxes, and there may well now be fewer hares and rabbits on the upper slopes; but the Rock apes are still there, and in abundance. As well they might be: Spanish legend holds that when the apes go, then the British will surely follow, and British Governments and Imperial representatives have striven mightily—and seriously—to ensure that the animals remain healthy and numerous to this day. The serenity and fecundity of the apes is of great moment to both the Convent and, as a symbol, to Downing Street.

The little gang of Rock apes—
Macacus inuus
—are the only
monkeys to be found in Europe. Theories about their having swum across from Africa, or having arrived drenched, clinging to Moroccan logs, have long been discounted; zoologists believe these are the relict clan of a great tribe of Macaques which once frolicked in Germany and France, and came as far north as Aylesbury. The last Ice Age forced them steadily southwards: Gibraltar was their final peninsular refuge, the closest they ever would come to their native home. Had the blizzards and hailstorms swept through Spain they might have been driven into the Straits, and drowned.

But here they still sit, begging for food on the Monkey’s Alameda, swinging from wall to tree to tourist shoulder, spitting, lunging, hawking, puking and displaying their unpleasant and oddly tail-less backsides to the daily busloads of the curious. They are truly loathsome creatures, in a state of permanent distemper, ogrous packages of green and grey fur, all teeth, stale fruit and urine. How little these true barbarians know of the solicitous
tendresse
to which they are subject, or of the colonial telegrams that have passed to and from the Gibraltar cable station, attesting to their contentment, or their decline.

Decline, strangely portentous, does seem to have been invariably linked with periods of British misfortune. In 1910 there were 200 apes, so many that they split up into two gangs, battled bloodily with each other—and by 1913 only three female apes were left. The war that began the following summer was thus not unexpected by the ever-superstitious Spaniards.

London was alarmed. It told the Royal Regiment of Artillery to look after the remainder, and offered a grant to buy them olives, locust beans and green figs (though not loquats, which make them vomit). For a while, under the paternal invigilation of the gunners, the apes went forth and multiplied; but by 1931—the start of the Great Depression—they had fought so much and so wildly with each other (they like to bite each other’s spines, which can be disabling and fatal if the bite is deep enough) that only ten remained.

The Colonial Government, earnest and determined, stepped in. The Governor, Sir Alexander Godley, a man who had commanded the western defences at Mafeking, had been staff officer to Baden
Powell and had raised an army in New Zealand, was put in overall charge of this crucial Imperial task. He imported two male apes from Morocco, and then five more. But they refused to breed, and murder and mayhem kept the numbers down. At the outbreak of the Second World War only eleven were left, and by 1943, just seven.

The crisis needed a solution of Churchillian dimensions, and it was the Prime Minister himself who issued the order that finally turned the tide. More apes, hand-picked for their fertility and energetic application to their conjugal duties, were flown in from North Africa—and, to the blessed relief of all concerned, they bred, the numbers increased, and the base of today’s tribe of fifty-three of the dreadful animals was laid.

Sergeant Alfred Holmes, who was deputed to look after the apes’ welfare in 1962—and who sends them for treatment in the Gibraltar naval hospital should they fall seriously ill—reported during my last visit that the colony (of apes, that is) was very healthy indeed. Eleven had been born during 1984, and one had been named after Princess Alexandra. (Tradition has it that apes are named after prominent Rock politicians; the one called Joshua Hassan dropped dead in 1964, and Lady Hassan sensibly refused to have anything to do with the beasts, which is presumably why the royal princess came to be so dubiously honoured.) Fecundity and serenity thus assured for some while to come, superstitious fears about the future of this tiny colony have, for the time being, been allayed.

A short while before I arrived on the Rock a young man named Allen Bula had created a small sensation by leaping over the steel border fence, into Spain. He was arrested by the Policía Nacional, and taken (via Tangier, naturally) back to his colonial home. Someone asked him what had prompted the gesture, and he replied, in tones of profound misery, that he was simply ‘tired of seeing the same faces, and always having to walk the same streets’. A faint rumble of mute sympathy could be heard from every corner of the colony, for few would take issue with the heresy that Gibraltar has become—perhaps always has been—a prison, comfortable enough
in a dingy sort of way, but its charms rendered utterly disagreeable in a matter of a very few days.

And it does have charm, especially to the British. It has a suitably reliquary appearance and feel to it. Where other than in a British colony could one find, peeking from behind orange trees and palm fronds, Mess House Lane, London Pride Way and Drumhead Court? What sweet relief, after all the bullfight posters and the cheap white wine and the guards in their silly tricorn hats, to see discreet notices advertising Wally Parker’s XI versus the Garrison B Side (weather permitting) after lunch on Sunday, cups of Typhoo and Shippams-and-Sunblest sandwiches on the terrace of the Rock Hotel, and policemen in dark blue serge who will gladly tell you the time, in English, and the directions to the Angry Friar, where they have Bass and Whitbreads and Tia Maria and onion-flavoured crisps, and where one of the customers is sure to know the latest plots of
The Archers or Coronation Street
. You can buy the
News of the World
in Gibraltar late on a Sunday afternoon, and all its tales of cheerful scandals back in Britain will be common currency in the colony’s buses the next morning as they grind up and down the slopes in clouds of diesel smoke, and dirty rain.

It rains a lot in Gibraltar, particularly when the due easterly wind, known as the Levanter, is blowing, as it does one day in two. Wet Mediterranean air is hoisted up over the colony’s summit, forming a plume of cloud which hangs heavily and damply over the western side of the Rock. In the town below it is smotheringly hot, humid, dull, and there are fitful showers.

The streets are choked with people—army wives from Aldershot and Catterick in cotton tee-shirts and jeans and high-heeled shoes, pushing prams and getting in each other’s way; old Spanish women in black, shuffling along slowly and silently, looking unhappy; women from Morocco, appropriately veiled, who look away from any male glance; Indians stretching and scratching and spitting into the gutters; swarthy traders of Genoese or Maltese cast beckoning you into their little shops to buy curios and postcards and fizzy drinks.

Outside the Convent a troop of British soldiery, glittering and
crisp in their brass and white duck summer uniforms, stand guard for Her Majesty’s Governor; and each Monday morning the prams and shopping carts make way for a parade, all screamed commands and polished toecaps, and over which the Governor and Her Ladyship preside, beaming, from the balcony of their residence. And inside the Convent the splendour of Empire gently reasserts itself; thick red carpets, a leather-bound visitors’ book with an embossed crown, portraits and flags and banners, polished oak dining tables, a private chapel (with a soldier-organist practising a fugue for a concert the following week), smooth young diplomats and ADCs, white-coated servants, tea from Fortnums, Bath Olivers and Tiptree jam. There is even a pretty indoor garden, with jacarandas and roses and lilies; and the Governor keeps a cow in his orchard—the only cow permitted in Gibraltar, which provides properly English milk for the gubernatorial Weetabix.