Fabled Shore

by Rose Macaulay

  From the base of the San Roque hill the road forked for La Linea and Gibraltar, curving, hot and dusty, round the blue bay. La Linea is not particularly interesting, but has a good market, and a plaza with palms. Just beyond it begins the great frontier fuss, first with the officials of Spain, then with those of Gibraltar. They confiscate all one’s pesetas, and keep them till one comes into Spain again. Only English pound notes are allowed to enter; these can be changed for Gibraltar pound notes; the coins are the same. You also have to get a permit to stay. The Gibraltar frontier officials (not the La Linea ones) are, like the police, all bilingual; they speak English with a queer, clipped accent, rather like Eurasians. When at last I cleared the frontier and drove into the town, I felt that I had entered into a fantastic dream. Travellers have always said of Gibraltar that it was a piece of England set incongruously down in Spain. It is not, however, in the least like England, this extraordinary, exotic, bilingual fortress town, yielded to the crown of Britain by the crown of Spain two hundred and thirty-five years ago, ‘to be held and enjoyed absolutely with all manner of right for ever without any exception or impediment whatsoever.’ Gibraltar is, in fact, so far as I know, like no other place on this earth. Its lines of fortification, its bastions, moles, gates, aerodrome, batteries (named after the wife and daughters of George II) great wall (put up, with other strong defences, by Charles V), steep roads zigzagging up the fortified, galleried and intimidating great rock, all the appurtenances of a strongly guarded, highly efficient garrison fortress, make a piquant contrast with the strip of town that climbs along the Rock’s western side and consists of one long narrow street and a few side streets and squares off it. The street (Main Street) is full of shops; outside most of them stand their owners or vendors, looking and talking like the Jewish decoys who stand outside shops in Soho and Wardour Street; if you pause to look, they address you in an identical strain, only in Gibraltar English instead of Jewish Cockney. It seems that a very large proportion of Gibraltarians are Jews by origin Others are Spanish-British, Genoese, Indian, Moorish and Maltese; some are pure Spanish. The original Spanish population fled en masse inland when the British took their town in 1704, and no wonder. Apart from their natural distaste for living under foreign conquerors, the behaviour of the eighteen hundred British soldiers and sailors whom Rooke landed in the town after its capture was atrocious; they seem, according to the contemporary records, both Spanish and British, to have become (as always when they took towns) excessively intoxicated, and to have rushed about sacking and looting houses, violating women and churches, attacking the many shrines (such as the famed and revered Our Lady of Europa) and convents in which old Gibraltar (a religious centre) abounded, and destroying and mutilating images and relics in an orgy of drunken lust, robbery, anti-popery and anti-Spanish triumph. The diary of a British chaplain with the troops gives a shocked and shocking account of the behaviour of these men; the crews of British ships were often a disreputable and brutal set drawn from the lowest part of the population; released from their hard life on board and given carte blanche on foreign soil, and among a conquered enemy whom they despised, they ran riot in an orgy of drinking, raping, sacking and church destruction. Every church was sacked but that of Santa Maria la Coronada, where a courageous priest stayed behind to guard it; to the credit of the troops, they gave this priest the respect that the British are apt to feel for courage, and did not molest either him or his church. Later on, many of its images and treasures were smuggled out across the frontier to San Roque. Many churches, after being sacked, were turned to secular uses. Six thousand Spanish fled from the town, leaving behind them a good many Jews, Genoese and Moors, who were prepared to adapt themselves and their commercial activities to any regime, and a few women, whose activities were also adaptable. The houses of the refugees were taken and occupied by those who remained, and by the invading power. The poor Spanish, waiting hopefully at San Roque, Algeciras and Los Barrios, and in towns further inland, to return to their homes when the enemy should be ejected, are there still - ‘the citizens of Gibraltar residing at San Roque.’ They still hope one day to recover the ‘plaza de guerra importantísima enclavada en nuestro territorio.’ But few Spanish think it possible to take Gibraltar by force, the only point of access being a narrow isthmus of land defended by such formidable batteries; and as for attrition by a long siege, that is impossible while Great Britain commands the sea.

  For the restoration of this part of our territory [wrote a Spanish historian eighty years ago] we must wait the decline of British power, or for an act of abnegation, which would be a very laudable step of which we see so far few indications; the English do not seem at present disposed to repent their past sins.

  What the present expectations of Spaniards are in this matter, I am not sure. There has indeed been a slight decline in British power of late years. But one has not observed that British repentance in this matter is any nearer than it was eighty years ago; indeed, recent history may have confirmed us in our sound view that Gibraltar is a useful place to hold. It played, of course, a key part in the winning of the last war. Also, we think that if we returned it to Spain some other rapacious power would soon be there, which would be more than a pity. It would be convenient to have Ceuta too, and we might one day play the Spanish for that and Algeciras against Gibraltar, double or quits.

  Few Gibraltarians are pure Spanish, except those who come daily over from Spain to work. They are less handsome than the Spanish; in fact, they are, for the most part, not handsome at all. In complexion they range from the coffee colour of Indian and Moor, through the lighter brown of the Genoese, the sallowness of the Jew, the uncertain fair-to-dark of the British-Spanish (an Irish-Spanish cross is very common) to the ruddy fairness of the English. They are, on the whole, a smallish people. Such pure Spanish as there are, are many of them descended from refugees (political or criminal) from Spain. The English spoken often has a chi-chi sound; often, too, it has a touch of brogue, owing to having been learned from Irish schoolmaster priests. Compared with the Spanish, the Gibraltarians have an uneasy, rootless, rather diffident, yet amiable and animated air; in a sense they are more sophisticated and cosmopolitan; anyhow, they naturally take British visitors for granted, without stares.

  Moving about among them are the garrison and their women; sunburnt soldiers, white-jacketed, simple-faced sailors, slim, sandy, long-legged English women with shopping baskets, frowning against the sun that freckles and burns their light skins, young men driving cars and trucks at breakneck speed about the narrow streets, intimidating other road users with the somewhat domineering air of Visigothic conquerors or of Black-and-Tans. Gibraltar is their fortress, and they are its privileged garrison.

  The Governor and his wife were (as Baedeker says of hotels at which he has not stopped) well spoken of; one heard of them nothing but good, and they are popular figures. Indeed, the thankless job of an occupying power in a corner of some one else’s country seems, anyhow in these days, as inoffensively performed as may be. No technique can make the occupation anything but offensive to Spaniards; in spite of the commercial and financial advantages conferred by Gibraltar trade and employment of labour, they naturally want their peninsula and their fortress back again, as we should if they occupied Dover and commanded the Channel straits. But there we seem likely to remain, piling defence on defence, leading our curious British garrison life, and writing blandly in our guidebooks, ‘There are still traces of the Moorish and the Spanish occupations.’

  There are indeed. We have not succeeded in expunging the several thousand years of the Rock’s past, whereon our own less than two centuries and a half lies like a thin but formidable palimpsest. ‘The fabulous Greeks seem to have selected this neighbourhood as the scene best adapted to their fictions,’ as Ayala, the eighteenth-century Spanish historian of Gibraltar, observed. The fabulous Greeks left on Calpe, it must be owned, no traces but the wreathing mists of myth; if there was a temple of Hercules, it has long since perished; no
r did the Phoenicians or the Carthaginians who had a trading settlement here, build a town to endure. There are Roman traces, and Ayala and his predecessor, Hernandez de Cortillo, the historian who wrote of Gibraltar in the early seventeenth century, describe an ancient tower on the higher part of the Rock that was ‘probably used by the Carthaginians or the Romans’ as a look-out tower, from which to warn the rich neighbouring port of Carteia of attack. The great cistern of the Punta de Europa may also have been pre Moor. No doubt there was always an Iberian population living round the lower part of the Rock, fishing and trading. In old Spanish plans of Gibraltar, the town lies in two parts, at the foot of the Castle; one part, says Portillo, was crowded and poor, the other, above it, had good houses and gardens and streets. The Castle, built by the Moors above the town, was a magnificent fortified and walled group of buildings stretching down the slope to the beach; of it only now remains the great square Tower of Homage, that familiar landmark seen from the surrounding seas. Portillo describes the fortress as of immense strength, capable of resisting any enemy. Apart from the fortress, the Castle ranged over the hill like a palace, with its beautiful Moorish apartments and domes, its mosque chapel, inscribed in Arabic ‘To the God of Peace,’ its gardens, fruit trees, vines and water tanks; they covered a space little less than that of the whole city. Below, where now is the Dockyard Fort, stood ‘the Tower called Tuerto,’ parts of which were possibly also pre-Moorish; it was used by the Moors, and later by the Spanish, who watched from it to ring the great clanging alarm bell when the eternally adventitious infidel foe was sighted on the sea; it was enlarged and strengthened in the seventeenth-century. The fortifications added to the Rock by Charles V were immense; that slow and patient Teuton emperor piled defence upon defence; his dreams were ever of huge works and impregnable castles of war, and in the Rock he had a fortress to his mind.

  Its beauty, before we spoiled and spoilt it, must have been great. Vineyards and gardens covered the long slope to the north (wine was one of the exports of the province of Gibraltar), and all over and all round the Rock and the colony of crowded dwellings there were churches, convents and shrines. On Europa Point stood the chapel of the Virgen de Europa, a shrine to which pilgrimages were continually made, for she directed the fortunes of sailors, was held in great veneration, and performed many miracles, her chapel and image were decorated with gifts, and great silver lamps, presented by grateful or hopeful commanders of galleys, burned night and day before the holy image, serving also as a lighthouse for sailors (the present lighthouse stands on nearly the same spot). This chapel was originally Moorish, and from its tower-the One God was for centuries daily declared. Till the British sacked it, it was full of treasures and saintly relics.

  The principal church, Santa Maria Coronada, now the Roman Catholic Cathedral, was once a mosque, built on the foundations of a temple; Portillo refers to ‘marble in the buildings, cloisters, and the court of orange trees, which resembles that in the church at Cordova,’ and describes its numerous chapels. Then there was San Juan de Lateran, with a prior, priests and chaplains, and many other ancient churches, some in the Vila Vieja, some, like San Juan el Verde (under the Knights of Malta), with its green glazed tiles and its neighbouring Calvary, scattered over the slopes of the Rock. There were many religious houses, Benedictine, Franciscan and others; one of these is now Government House; the others were long ago, like the churches, either secularized or destroyed. A traveller in 1772 wrote that the church of Government House was the only one in Gibraltar open for divine service,

  all the other chapels and places of worship having been turned into store-houses, to the great scandal of the Spaniards and inconvenience of the protestants: the bells of the Tower, incommoding the Governor, were by his order unhung, so that the inhabitants are forced to repair to church by beat of drum.

  Looking back to the Moorish centuries, to Gebel-Tarik, one sees a rich and populated promontory, beautifully adorned with marbled mosques, arcaded houses and courts, lovely fountained gardens, vineyards and orange groves, with a closely built city crowding narrowly beneath and up the steep climb of the hill, while bells rang from minarets and watch-towers, and Moorish feluccas sailed in and out of the bay, which was guarded on the south by the white stronghold of Algiers, while Tarifa jutted out beyond it, and African fleets passed to and from across the Straits, between Calpe and Abyle, their sailors noting at dawn how the Rock took the golden light from the east before the sun rose, the flame from the west after it had sunk beneath the hills, and how it shone, as an Arab writer said, as if it were on fire, a beacon to the Straits.

  After the Spanish conquest, in 1462, Gibraltar dwindled in strength, in riches, in trade and in population. The inhabitants were frightened, with reason, of plundering and kidnapping raids from across the Straits; they had a tendency to seek safety inland; and in the year 1500 Gibraltar had less than fifteen hundred residents. The Spanish kings did their utmost to keep it populated, by employing men on building and road works and by using the Rock as a place of transportation for convicts and an asylum for criminals. In these days it is crowded enough, with the British garrison, the permanent residents in the town and on the fishing beaches, and the Spanish who come in daily from Spain to work. When the Rock goes into action, it is cleared; the redundant occupants are exiled, lest they be a nuisance, and because their houses are required for the military. The war evacuees had a dismal time. Those of them sent to London hated its weather and its bombing, as Londoners who encountered them will remember; as a Gibraltarian said to me, ‘You see, in Gibraltar we are not used to crime and violence,’ and the guns that all too often go off on the Rock are fired, normally, rather in ceremony than in anger. They had a terrible time, these poor evacuees, what with the horrors of London, and, later, the desolation of camp life in Ulster in the rain; they died a hundred deaths from fear, homesickness and cold. Now they are home again, and so happy in the familiar sunshine, gaiety and security of their Rock, that they beam on and chatter to visitors from England, exchanging memories of London.

  The shops are lavishly full of gaudy trash from the bazaars across the Straits, from India (Indian-owned shops and Indian sellers are many) and from Britain. Oriental rugs hang cheek by jowl with silk and cotton goods from Manchester; cosmetics, stockings, shoes, bright dresses, cheap jewellery, fountain-pens, Moorish boxes like those in the Alhambra shops but cheaper, everything to catch the eye of the starved visitor from austerity-ruled lands, a meretricious vanity fair of the gaudy commonplace. It all makes of Main Street a bright, fantastic nonsense, which seems to connect with no European country. Turning off it, into its adjacent squares, one finds none of the picturesqueness of Spanish plazas; they are business-like, set about with offices and with those British-looking houses built after the smashing up of the town by the great French and Spanish siege of 1779–83, which left, it seems, few houses standing, and accounts for Gibraltar’s modern look. What an opportunity was here, and how it was misused! For, ‘the English being a nation who, in all their colonies spread over the face of the globe, study more the useful than the grand,’ the houses were replaced by these dreary-looking English dwellings of brown-grey stone, slate roofed, solid and unbalconied, called by such names as ‘Cumberland Buildings,’ and standing among the eucalyptus trees as if they had been transported from Margate, drab little gardens and all. Yet not altogether, for here and there there is an exotic touch, green persiennes, a verandah, a portico, or what not; some slight involuntary gesture to Spain. In the largest square, which lies off Irish Town and is called John Mackintosh, I saw on Sunday afternoon, believe it or not, two young men with a harmonium, exhorting people to accept Jesus. Their small audience may or may not have possessed enough British blood to know what they were talking about.

  There are more attractive squares than John Mackintosh. There is, on the Rock side of Main Street, Convent Place, where stands the Convent, the residence of the Governor, a beautiful yellow sixteenth and seventeenth-century Franciscan house;
like Santa Maria Coronada, it was one of the buildings that survived the great siege. There is now also an Anglican cathedral (the see being held by a roving bishop); built in Moorish style, it looks common; better is the garrison church, King’s Chapel, which is full of rather touching monuments. Before these churches were built ‘in this sink of Moslem, Jewish and Roman Catholic profligacy,’ as Ford sternly puts it, protestant services were held in the Convent chapel. The Spanish cathedral has now little of interest in it; and restoration has robbed it of distinction; confessions are heard there in English, Spanish, Italian, French, German and Maltese. In Gibraltar all religions and all races live together in neighbourly amity.