Outposts

by Simon Winchester

  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 BadenPowell 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.

  But the Imperial splendour here is all illusion. True, the Gibraltar Conservation Society makes an almighty fuss whenever a new block of army flats or a multi-storey car park threatens some of the magnificently immense fortifications—the great gates and bastions and casemates and galleries, the mighty limestone blocks and rusty iron stanchions, bolts, hasps, anchors, cannonports, naval guns and sea walls—which are undeniably grand reminders of such splendour. The fortress and all its remnant bits and pieces tell of Trafalgar and Cape St Vincent and the wartime convoys, of heroism and valour and tragedy, and there is the whiff of convict ship and merchant venturer, the memory of sail and steam and majesty and power.

  And true, there is a flourishing democracy here, though of recent invention, and of limited democratic ability. Until the Thirties the only form of local government was the Sanitary Commission, run by a cabal of traders and lawyers, and which was set up in 1865 after an epidemic of plague which killed nearly 600 people. The commissioners had powers that extended well beyond a purely sanitary remit; in 1920 they were able to report that a poor law was unnecessary in the colony, and there was no one to suggest they should stick to the study of tuberculosis (which was then raging) rather than poverty. The Legislative Assembly, which gave a semblance of power to the Gibraltarians, was opened in 1950 by the Duke of Edinburgh; it became an even more powerful House of Assembly in 1969, though the Governor—who is also Fortress Commander—still has very considerable powers.

  But the glorious ruins of yesterday and the laudable institutions of today cannot disguise the fact that Gibraltar is, above all, a garrison town, with all that implies. Its function is precisely that of a Tidworth or a Fort Bragg—it supports and supplies a military function, and its civilian servants exist only in a symbiosis with the forces, with no real function other than to service the machinery of war.

  During the Falklands War Gibraltar was of major importance—a fact that nearly led to one of the more daring undercover operations of the century. A team of Argentine frogmen arrived in Spain with plans to swim over to the Rock and blow u
p the Royal Naval ships in the dockyard, and then lay charges inside the more important of the tunnels, and blow the entire Rock up, too. But the Spanish police, tipped off by British intelligence, arrested the quartet at San Roque, just a few miles from the border. The Spanish Government, which despite its antipathy to Britain wanted membership of the Common Market and had good reason to want to stay friendly, deported the men and sent them back to Buenos Aires. I was told the story in Hong Kong, which was ordered to keep on guard in case the plucky Argentines tried to pull a similar stunt there. People on the Rock knew nothing at the time; on the day the men were detected a parson friend of mine was sailing back from a day’s shopping in Tangier, and remembers ‘sitting on the boat as we rounded Europa Point, shelling Moroccan peas so they were ready for the deep-freeze the moment I stepped ashore’.

  Today the Rock draws its military significance wholly from its membership of NATO (of which Spain is a member, too). America, in particular, regards Gibraltar as crucial, for though her own submariners use the port of Rota, just a few miles westwards, for their nuclear patrol boats, there is inevitable doubt about Spanish stability, and thus no long-term certainty inside the Pentagon that Rota will be perpetually available, unlike Gibraltar, which will so long as it remains British. Washington regards the defence of the Rock with almost as much passion as do the politicians in London. The Pentagon counts the apes as well.

  No garrison town holds many attractions, and Gibraltar is not an exception. Though geologically interesting and thus topographically unforgettable, it remains, as Jan Morris noted in 1968, ‘only a fly-blown, dingy and smelly barracks town, haunted by urchins fraudulently claiming to be Cook’s guides, or Spanish hawkers wandering from door to door with straggly flocks of turkeys’.

  It was grander once. You could, on a day when the fleets were in, stand under a palm tree on the terrace of the Rock Hotel and gaze down with wonder and amazement at the glittering array of grey steel and holystoned decking, at the signal flags and the jolly-boats, at the jackstaff ensigns waving lazily in the air, arrogantly proclaiming raw and unchallengeable British power. But now there is no Orient route that needs guarding, nor any fleets of substance with which to do it. Gibraltar, so far as the British are concerned, is a pointless sort of place: we hang on because the Gibraltarians want us to, because we have a certain haughty pride about the Rock’s impregnability, and because the Supreme Commanders of the North Atlantic like us to act as proxy for them in this convenient corner of a geopolitically important inland sea.

  Britain has offered a special gift to those whom we regard as of such special military significance—even if we have no further grand wars to fight, and even if the natives of the Rock are mere supporters, not participants. In gratitude for all their help the British Government has made the Gibraltarians, unlike most of their colonial colleagues, full-blown British subjects, able to come and live in Britain with no restrictions at all. They were given the privilege in 1981, when the House of Lords voted that they should not be treated like Bermudians, the Pitcairners, or the Hong Kong Chinese, who would no longer be allowed to enjoy full citizenship of the motherland. (The Falkland Islanders were not given citizenship either on this occasion, though after the war the Government changed its mind. The Gibraltarians and the Falklanders are thus unique in two respects—unlike all other British colonial citizens they can come and live in Britain at any time they wish; and unlike all other British colonial populations, they are overwhelmingly coloured white. Any connection between the two is not, as one might suppose, rigorously denied. The British Nationality Act, the basis of all this complicated regulation, was specifically designed to minimise racial disharmony by keeping the number of yellow and black colonials out, while letting whites of British ancestry come home if they wished. The Genoese and the Sephardim of Gibraltar have much to be thankful for.)

  And, like the apes, so the British Gibraltarians cling on. At the last count, just forty-four of them thought it a good idea to join back with Spain. Twelve thousand voted for Gibraltar to remain a member of the Empire. So every night the fortress keys—cast iron, weighing ten pounds, and kept by some of the more nervous governors under their pillows, it is said—are handed into safe keeping by the sentries who still yell out the Imperial formulae of three centuries continual use:

  Halt! Who goes there?

  The Keys

  Whose Keys?

  Queen Elizabeth’s Keys

  Pass, Queen Elizabeth’s Keys. All’s Well.

  All illusion, though. From the Rock Hotel, with no fleet in view, and no reliable kippers available, and Brown Windsor soup and rolls served at nearly every meal, and the same faces passing along the same streets, the same soldiers inviting you to the same drinks parties, the same films on at the same cinemas, and the same awful weather and the same awful apes, I, too, felt like Mr Bula, trapped and claustrophobic, wanting to get off to the apparent freedom of Algeciras, whose lights twinkled invitingly from across the bay.

  The terminal was crowded with servicemen bound for home leave; few Gibraltarians were planning to desert the peninsula this particular Saturday. I sat on the right side of the aircraft, and watched with a mixture of awe and some relief as we rose beside the mighty white cliff, dotted with its cannonports, topped with artillery and radio aerial and the Union flag, and headed back home to England. As a structure, it had been an impressive place, all right; but when a soldier caught my eye and grinned and said how glad he was to be getting away, I knew exactly how he felt. The Rock, he remarked, as he tucked into his first beer of the holiday, was also the name they gave to Alcatraz.

  5

  Ascension Island

  5

  Ascension Island

  One of the more eccentric practices of the Empire was to decide that certain of the more remote island colonies were not really countries at all, but ships.

  There was, for example, a tiny morsel of granite in the Grenadines that was taken over by the Royal Navy in Victorian times and commissioned as HMS Diamond Rock; then again, during the Second World War the Navy possessed a craft called HMS Atlantic Isle, which in more peaceful times was the four-island group of Tristan da Cunha. And in 1816 a Mr Cuppage, a post-captain of the Cape Squadron, took command of a brand-new ‘stone frigate’, as the Lords of the Admiralty liked to call it: the thirty-five-square-mile, oyster-shell-shaped accretion of volcanic rubbish that was assumed into the service of the Crown under the title of HMS Ascension.

  I first saw the vessel—‘a huge ship kept in first-rate order’, Darwin had recorded—from the flight deck of a Royal Air Force VC-10, one steaming day in late July. We had flown from a base in Oxfordshire to Senegal, and I had become rather bored by the curious Air Force practice of putting its passengers facing backwards. (They say it’s safer.) So I asked to sit behind the pilot for the next leg; and as we reached the equator, and summer became technical winter and in a million bathrooms below the water began to swirl down plugs the other way, so the loadmaster called me forward, unlocked the door to the cockpit, made a series of perfunctory introductions to the crew, asked me to avoid sudden movements and unnecessary conversation, and strapped me into the jump seat.

  Ascension Island came up on the radar a few moments later. A tiny pale green dot, lozenge-shaped and utterly alone—it might well have been a ship adrift in the sea below. We started to go down for the approach. The orange numerals of the satellite navigator showed our position six times a minute. We were at fourteen degrees west of Greenwich, seven degrees south of the equator, somewhere in the hot emptiness of the sea well below the bulge of West Africa. The dot on the radar was bigger now, and we were low enough to see the white curlers on the swell.

  And then the pilot muttered softly into his microphone, ‘Island in sight. Ahead fifty miles. Plume of cloud.’ And on the curved line of horizon a patch of cloud appeared, like a ball of cotton wool on a glass ledge. Beneath it, and speeding nearer at six miles a minute, was a patch of reddish-brown land, tinged with dar
k green and ringed by a ragged line of surf. ‘Wideawake Airfield in sight, sir,’ sang the co-pilot—and there, on the southern side of the island was the aerodrome, its straight runway undulating over the contours like the final run on a roller-coaster. A smooth American voice came on the line. ‘Ascot Two zero one niner—good day, sir. Welcome to Ascension Island. Wind eight knots. Clear skies at the field. No traffic. Come right on in, and have yourselves a nice day!’ And so we slid down the glidepath to this loneliest of ocean way-stations, until with a bump and puff of iron-red cinder-dust we touched down on board and I, who alone in the cockpit had never been here before, thought we had landed on the surface of the moon.

  Ascension is indeed an eerie place. It is a volcano, placed on the very crest of an abyssal suture line, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and is in consequence very new. (St Helena, which lies some miles off the ridge, but is one of its products, is one of the oldest oceanic islands known. Geologists explain it by asking one to imagine a mid-Atlantic conveyor-belt moving islands out and away from the ridge. Those on it—Tristan, Iceland, Ascension—are still being formed; those away from it—the Azores, Jan Mayen, the Canaries—are old, and have drifted miles since their formation.)

  Ascension looks as though it should still be smouldering. ‘Hell with the fire put out,’ someone called it—and it looks rather like a gigantic slag-heap, with runs of ashy rubble, piles of cinders, and fantastically shaped flows of frozen lava. Nothing—at least, not among the peaks and plains I saw as I drove from the airport—had been carved by weather, nor has anything had its outline smoothed by millions of years of erosion. Ascension is the earth in its raw state, unlovely and harsh, and grudging in its attitude to the life that clings to it. It gives uncomfortable seismal shudders from time to time, and lets out puffs of sulphur gas and gurgles of hot water and mud, as if to warn those who have dared make this a colony of the British Crown that the lease is far from permanent, and the titanic forces beneath the rocky skin are merely slumbering, biding their time.