extensively on this fact in the realm of fashion:
Sartorially, he is impeccably British, will buy nothing but British cloth and shoes, and used to go - three men out of four - in the dark double breasted blazer and flannel trousers which form the off-duty uniform of the Royal Navy (Stewart,
1967: 69).
This choice of dress codes is echoed in the detailed knowledge of military life and performance which is the average inheritance of many Gibraltarians. As Martens (1987) suggests:
Gibraltarians are well informed about regimental uniform differences as well as the differences in band performance styles and competence in the marching, speed, and patterns specific to each particular regiment. The status of such things as general knowledge amongst Gibraltarians illustrates the w ay in which British military performance is incorporated into the rhythms of the local community (p. 181).
Stewart puts his finger on these questions when he describes his initial encounter with a certain class of Gibraltarian: ’The English was w hat I
would call 'hahu\ as used by the book educated Hindus. It is ’anglo- English’, more English than the English them selves...’ (p.5). This is very much the Gibraltarian as Babu, ’More British than the British’ and it calls to mind very strongly the comments of Nandy (1988) to the effect that the only true Englishmen left in the world are to be found in India (p.35).
Does this identity not have its roots in alienation? Some clues can be gleaned from Gilbert Adair’s (1986) comments on the place of the Barnardo boy in Victorian society:
...the social specificity of a nineteenth-century orphan was contingent upon an uncompromisingly normative conception of society, from which he [the Bamardo Boy] was therefore - if in this manner alone - not alienated, since he had been assigned a codified place within it, however luckless (p.95).
Orphans, like natives, had a part written for them in Victorian social life, but while the former have now ’lost’ their status in Adair’s words, the latter are taking on a new role compounded, however, of elements of the old definitions combined with an outsiders view of Britishness. The pride in giving takes them back to the rigid coda of the days when they were natives too and need not have dealings with far-flung spots such as Ethiopia.
Hope on the Rock is childish and there is a special savour to the Gibraltarians as they try to justify their existence in the world, without realising the odds which are stacked against them. This hope is best seen in the Miss Gibraltar competition. The pages of The G ibraltar Chronicle
are given over to photos of all the competitors arranged in their bathing costumes - provocatively high-cut, but evoking no comment in this censorious place. Miss Gibraltar is not about sex, just as the eight-year old girls fawning in Catalan Bay in the self-same costumes emphasise virginity, but utilise an idiom which in other contexts would be construed as sexuality. For a week the people of Gibraltar can focus upon them selves in their most alluring guise - our women. In a small community such as this everybody is part of the contest and fictive kinship spreads through the
Rock like convolvulus; if not distantly related, then linked by common schooling, the same workplace or the mere fact of having seen a contestant in the street. Fuelled by this orgy of communitas the Gibraltarian is ready to stand against the world and the competition’s eventual winner is dispatched to London to take part in the Miss World event. Gibraltar’s womanhood stands the equal to that of all the nations of the world. Back on the Rock the papers follow the girl’s every move: she is sharing a room with Miss Spain, has talked to Miss Mexico, is well liked by the other contestants because of her out-going friendly nature. In short she is Gibraltar. On her return the interest continues for the year of her reign, at the end of which she is suddenly dropped and becomes the secretary she once was and everything seems like a dream. In Gibraltar people have their fifteen minutes over and over again, but by this very fact it becomes unreal or else there is a touch of the home video to everything, lives governed by the family photo album. By the usual canons adopted in such contests many of the girls stand no chance of winning, but still they strut the catwalk in their skimpy swim wear, encouraged by nearest and dearest and in the end it’s the taking part which counts.
All the more surprising, given its apparent role in the community, comes the news that the Miss Gibraltar competition is a relatively recent arrival to the Rock and was initially devised by a young Liverpudlian entrepreneur, the Baron (who in 1987 was rumoured to be languishing in a German jail on drug smuggling charges). Something about the show hit a nerve and for a decade it was an important feature of the seige world. With the reopening of the border I detect that it has had its day and more serious matters are impinging fi'om the outside world. Increasingly now there are difficulties getting enough girls to sign up for the event.
Perhaps this seige world, with events such as the Miss Gibraltar has effectively seen off the babu-type Gibraltarian. Their’s was not an invented identity or tradition such as those postulated by Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) or Samuel (1989). They did not see anything odd in their appropriation of the dominant signifiers of British status, the blazers, the
up-right bearing; they could not reconcile themselves with the laughter in the voice of a commentator such as Stewart. But now, in any case, there are fewer and fewer of them. They were frozen in a museum for the years of the seige, but they grew older. Now they occasionally don their blazers to visit the restaurant at the Monoprix supermarket in Spain on a Sunday. But such a sight is somehow pitiful. These visits cannot regenerate the very sense of identity which subjugation to hierarchy gave, the very strength of the British presence, the rigidity of the military gave substance to their identity. Now there is no spine to the British presence, there are too many of the home country’s ordinary products to maintain these illusions and even the military is slowly but surely quitting.
Very few of the young will tread this path, the fading traces of which are being covered by the bombardment of television waves from across the border (a rather superior product to the output of the Gibraltar Broadcasting Corporation, if in Spanish). Youngsters are in thrall to the less parochial call of international youth culture in its various guises - although it has the allure of its own parochialism here, as it would in a small west-country market town (or across the border in La Linea). Theories of consumption no longer point to the specific make-up of the Gibraltarian psyche in the twentieth-century form, but the old memories live on in some heads: the tearooms, the Tbull’, the bands, the regimental codes, pre-modem types when there were such things as certainties.
The British way of life or an abstraction called the British way of life is as prevalent as ever, but underneath there are other rustlings. Tinned
callos (tripe) from Spain were allowed to be imported into Gibraltar for
Christmas 1987. The Chief Environmental Officer, Alex Almeda, has been ’under considerable pressure from housewives campaigning for pork reform’, reported the Chronicle. So what has this faith now become? How have the system of features which it describes been transformed and disturbed by changes in the world outside Gibraltar?
Figure 29: Dockyards Workshops and Waterfront, Gibraltar.
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O verview
In this chapter the birth of the Gibraltarian, the inhabitant of the Rock recognised by modern history, has been analysed. Attention has been paid to the historical relations with the Mediterranean region in general and the historical Moors in particular. This strategy has been necesary in order to re-introduce the influence of the southern Mediterranean, and Morocco in particular, on the development of Gibraltar in various guises. As in Chapter 1 a variety of sources have been utilised. In many cases it has been possible to read a tone which is very close to that of the voices cited in Chapter 1. This is no accident a it links to the world view of the Victorian period which divided space in a very strict fashion. Gibraltar actually gives us an insight into the dissolution of this world view. In Chapter 3 , 1 shall consolidate various histories which have been eclipsed by the birth of the modem Gibraltarian, an exercise that will add to our understanding of this process.