The Rock of Gibraltar^^ has come to have a meaning distinctly separate from the reality of the place. It has become a metaphor for solidity and permanence which, by extension, stands in for the British Empire itself - of which Gibraltar is a glorious outpost. The Rock is even equipped w ith its own myths of apocalypse cast in animal form. The Barbary apes function in a similar fashion to the ravens in the Tower of London. In the febrile imaginings of school history texts, their disappearance would spell some sort of ending: to Empire, to Britain, to England.
At tim es of national danger such stories become paramount in the national consciousness. During the Second World War it was brought to the attention of those in high office that the ape population had suffered a dire
reverse. In a secret telegram, Churchill ordered that the ape numbers be boosted, and maintained in future at higher levels. Britain and her allies emerged victorious in that war, and the telegram was celebrated in fiction on at least two occasions in the years that followed: in Warren Tute’s (1957) novel. The Rock, and in a book by Paul Gallico (1962), Scruffy. These apes are part of the myth or fiction of Gibraltar.
The myth of Gibraltar, as I shall call it, would appear to stretch back a long way, back in fact to the fashion in which resistance to certain military sieges in the eighteenth century was perceived by the population at large back in Britain. In 1757, Pitt considered the idea of returning Gibraltar to Spain in return for a pledge of alliance against France. The G ibraltar
Directory of 1948 records the popular reaction to these political
manoeuvrings:
The gallant defence during the last siege was a military achievement that excited the popular imagination, and Gibraltar became valuable in the eyes of the public when its name was associated with British gallantry and blood (p. 11).
The story of Gibraltar and Empire is like many of those stories told when the map was red, and while we can now see the hollow centre in many Empire yam s the tenacious Rock endures. The Empire has all but passed and this empty space has been sympathetically unravelled in Jam es Morris’s Pax Britannica trilogy^^. Let us examine briefly a denuded version of the Empire myth, stripped down to the bones of popular history and chewed upon, in its time, by the young seeker after fortune. Outposts
o f Em pire, written by John Lang early this century and part of the
’Romance of Empire Series’, makes no attempt ’to write a history of any of the places touched upon; the endeavour rather has been to extract from their history a portion of the Romance with which it is saturated’ (Lang,
^^While not the work of an academic, Morris’s history (Morris, 1968, 1973, 1978) strikes me as very ’modem’ not to say ’post-modem’ in its concerns; his sensitive use of illustrative anecdote and his [/her] sense of the way in which Empire was able to inscribe itself in buildings, song and general language is reminiscent of the work of Walter Benjamin.
p.vii). To set the scene the author admonishes his reader:
To us in this twentieth century, who are wont to consider no part of the globe as being very far distant; who have, as a general rule, but little knowledge of the sea beyond what may scantily gleaned from a more or less brief sojourn on some huge steamship, it is hard to realise that one hundred years ago a voyage to Gibraltar probably took longer time than it now does to reach Bombay (p.l).
Lang’s description of the sieges of Gibraltar is prefaced with the heart warming story of the ’little English privateer cutter, the Buck, of Folkstone’, running the Spanish blockade against all odds in 1779 and delivering much needed victuals to the beleaguered Rock. The privations of the garrison and the bravery of the men who surmounted them then follow before we depart for other outposts: Malta, the Caribbean and beyond. The exact content of this romance is something I wish to examine in the Gibraltar context. This is in line with the general project of this thesis: an investigation of representations at various levels, and the power they have come to exercise in specific sociological circumstances. The British Empire was a romance, it was in love with itself. Meaning in Gibraltar is still struggling with the weight of this love and finds itself transformed and deformed by it. J[ -bo look at the stoiy of one group of migrants, the Moroccans who came in the late 1960s, but in isolation their story would be featureless and impossible to differentiate from the story of exile for many of their compatriots, the story of all those exiled to work ’partly because they wanted to, partly of necessity’, to paraphrase the Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun^^. The romance that draws them on is what this author brands a lie, and the many myths which surrounded Empire; all linked, more or less to concepts of racial superiority and notions of divine providence, have the self-same singular quality. In some quasi-mystical sense Gibraltar came to represent, for the British, the beginning of the
^^Specifically in his novella. Solitaire (1988). But the theme is dealt with in his non-fictional account of migrant life in France, H ospitalité
Empire and its mission of Empire. The Gibraltar Diocese, in the words of Bishop Collins, ranged ’from the Rock of Gibraltar to the Golden Horn and the mountains of Kurdistan.’^"^
Empire too had its exiles. It was the romance that drew the British forth from their hive-like island redoubt to swarm around the world bearing images of their Queen. Britishness and Empire are crucially linked, articulated through the notion of monarchy, but time began to change them in the end. At the turn of the century:
Britishness itself has become a debatable condition. In Victoria’s day it had been embodied above all in the Monarchy, the distant, unfailing source of power and justice. The Crown was the gauge by which a man could claim him self to be British. It was the one abstraction that could unite the loyalties of disrespectful Australians, half-American Canadians and distinctly un-English South Africans. It was veiy, very grand, surrounded by a mystical sheen of tradition: even the Viceroys, Governors, Captains-General and Commanders-in- Chief who represented it in the field were but suggestive reflections of its splendour (Morris, 1978: 319).
It is not far from monarchy to nationalism and here I want to trace some features of nationalism in Gibraltar, its early stirrings, its sponsors and, latterly, its catalysts (that is to say specific events which led to the arrival of the Moroccans and their presence there). Like the Gibraltarians the Moroccans too have made their journey from native to nationalist. These journeys are also described by Benedict Anderson (1983) as pilgrimages. But the joum ies’ of modem migrant Moroccans, rather than those of clerks, intellectuals and students which are Anderson’s concern, will come to change the world is not certain, but the truth remains that all such journeys are dreams of community: a community of Empire or Nation, or
^^Quoted by H.J. Buxton (1954), A Mediterranean Window: Fourteen
Years in the Gibraltar diocese^ Guildford: Biddles, p.2. Despite fourteen
years as Anglican Bishop of Gibraltar, Buxton’s own brief account of the time spent there makes no specific mention of the Gibraltarians themselves. They were, largely speaking, of a different flock or else, more likely, his concerns, like those of his predecessor, F.C. Hicks, author of The Fullness
exile with the dream of a return to simple community - the postponed return to the family and homeland. In France now some of the keenest collectors of the types of postcards used to illustrate Chapter 1 are, them selves, of Maghrebi descent. The myths of the colony take on a new role. Firstly, however, we must return to Gibraltar and unravel its peculiarities for, as Macauley (1949 [1986]) once wrote, ’Gibraltar is, in fact, so far as I know, like no other place on this earth’ (p. 184).
G ib ra lta r in th e m id-1980s
The standard definition can be found in innumerable guides and histories of Gibraltar^^: the British Crown Colony of Gibraltar with a civilian population of less than 30,000 and an area of only 5.82 square kilometres. Some may be more precise and state that much of this area is the Rock itself and that the habitable area is much smaller: Punch magazine, now a victim of modern times, described Gibraltar as ’two square m iles of underdeveloped limestone, partially covered with tarmac and souvenir
^^Many books deal with the martial aspects of Gibraltar’s history. Of books taking a more general line, the best contribution is that of Hills (1974). The contribution of an ex-governor, who, indicatively set out to correct the alleged pro-Spanish bias of Hill’s work is something of a disappointment (Jackson, 1987). The most quirky, however, and perhaps the richest in human insight, remains the contribution of Stewart (1967),
Gibraltar: the Keystone. The first work to really be interested in the civilian
conception of Gibraltar is Howes’ 1951 book. The Gibraltarian. From an anthropological perspective, the particular trajectory taken by this thesis would not have been possible without the research undertaken by Janet Martens (1987) in her own work on Gibraltarian ethnonationalism. Martens documents the extensive literature on the diplomatic battles between Britain and Spain for control of sovereignty of the Rock. The most recent contribution to the literature is the survey carried out by D.S. Morris and R.H. Haigh (1992), but the analysis gives us very little from the anthropological perspective. Finally, nobody researching subjects which touch upon Gibraltar can do so without giving thanks to M. Greene for her extensive bibliographic researches (Greene, 1980; Greene, 1981).
shops’^®, but who are the inhabitants of Gibraltar? A visitor from the UK in the mid-1980s might first have been struck by the military presence on the Rock. The constant coming and going of jeeps, the preponderance of uniforms of one sort or another. Prior to this the traveller might have been struck, as Rose Macauley was in 1949, by a certain linguistic anomaly:
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 (Macauley, 1949 [19861: 183).
In more recent times the day-tripper from the Costa del Sol would be able to distinguish at a glance the fellow tourists drifting aimlessly up and down Main Street, but the others would appear an indistinguishable mass. Certainly the Hindu traders who have taken over most of the electrical goods shops would appear foreign, as would the groups of Moroccans drifting back and forth - to and from work - but the tourist would be hard pressed at first to distinguish the rest with real certainty: the Gibraltarians proper, that is, and the British 'ex]pat' and other foreign nationals. Going into a bar for a refreshment, the tourist might have struck up a conversation with one of the bar staff who, should they turn out to be British - rather than Gibraltarian British which is quite likely - might provide some answers and shed light on the Gibos, as the B rits call the Gibraltarians. In such a situation the judgements are sometimes harsh: the
Gibos are always on the make; childlike; don’t do anything for themselves;
arrogant; hard headed; very thick. Gibraltarian skilled workers are often viewed as irredeemably incompetent by their UK counterparts. The chief interests of the Gibraltarian are his or her family and money.
These sorts of remark reflect a dented pride. The ex^patriotaBritish are often structurally in a weak position, often they are escaping their own pasts or failure to find work ’back home’. They have come to somewhere which is British, but can find no place for themselves. Their scorn for the
^®The remark was republished in the weekly local paper. The G ibraltar
Moroccan workers or Rockies^^ as they call them is even greater. They emphasise outright rejection. The Moroccan workers are strange, stupid, untechnical, exceedingly lazy: ’Moroccans and work? Are you joking? I’ll tell you what, they work at two speeds, dead slow and stop...’
The Spaniards are the Spicks. They live in a dirty country, eat greasy food, but the booze is cheap. Some venture the opinion that there is little to choose between them and the Gibos. Indeed shorn of the derogatory connotation of the term, this was also Franco’s opinion:
There are no English people in the place except the families of the garrison and the employees of the administration and the warehouses. The Llanitos (Gibraltarians) are entirely Spanish, though they take advantage of their British citizenship, and the rest, the Jews and aliens, can live as well under one flag as under another (quoted by Jackson, 1987: 301-2).
These are not the views of all Britons in Gibraltar, but they are more likely to be those articulated by the British ex-patriot or when off the record, some military personal. The tourist might conclude that this is not the ideal place to settle. Indeed, the modem tourist, drawn by a vision of Gibraltar, is often as disabused about the place as Macauley was on her visit:
The Rock bristles with regulations, bayonets and guns, and casual explorations about it are let and hindered. The climate is tiringly hot in summer, often with an exhausting wind, and in winter beaten by the Levanter and by chilly and damp Atlantic gales. "Gibraltar is with reason called the Montpellier of Spain," one reads; but with what reason is not clear. [...] Could there be, has there ever been (I enquire without dogmatism, pre-judgement or enough information), art, letters or music created in Gibraltar, by any race or mixture of races? One imagines not (Macauley, 1949 [1986]: 193).
Even the modem package tourist fails to flourish. In 1987 worries surfaced over the threat of one of the big tourist carriers to Gibraltar
^^This might seem slightly confusing, but the derivation is simply a contraction of Morocco. I shall retum to this question of British migrant labour in Gibraltar in Chapter 3.
withdrawing their hotel-inclusive holidays. The company, Marshall Sutton, claimed that 50 per cent of their complaints concerned Gibraltar, while the Rock accounted for only 4.4 per cent of their trade. The main problems, a company spokesman told The Gibraltar Chronicle rather blandly, lay ’in the state of the town and the environment’ (21/9/87).
A C h a n ce E n co u n ter?
At a historical crossroads the English writer, Charles Doughty, met someone who might himself, had he too been bom British in the 19th century, have been described, like Doughty, as a great explorer. He was the custodian of a caravanasarai on the road to Mecca, a Moroccan. The Maghrebi knew Doughty’s people, the Engleys, occupying Jebel Tar, and deemed them a fair race in their dealings with others (Doughty, 1983: 29). The official histories of Gibraltar play down the links between Gibraltar and Morocco in the same way that anthropological portrayals of Morocco have often played down movement and eschewed history. Here I w ant to breakdown these separations, to use a different optic that sets the particular in relation to the movements of history and not the dictates of theory.
Morocco has always been a real presence in the history of Gibraltar, and there would be no voices of dissent in this respect, but its influence has always been regarded with some suspicion. In fact, it would probably be fair to say that many of the historical hangovers which exist in Spain and Portugal^®, not only from the period of Arab rule in the peninsula, but also relating to the Spanish Protectorate period in northern Morocco and the
^®This inheritance is surveyed in an accessible form in Jan Morris’s (1979) celebrated travel guide, Spain. Nicholas Luard (1984) discusses some of the cultural hangovers in Andalucia in his book of that name. Such books, however, no more than scratch the surface. The relevance of this material for anthropology in the region is highlighted in Corbin (1989).
domestic problems which the Rif war posed^® are to a limited extent shared in the image which Gibraltar projects across the Straits. There is a sentim ent in this approaching xenophobia, a real fear of pollution. Howes, in his pathbreaking book on Gibraltarian identity. The G ibraltarian
(1951 [1982]), is at pains to point out that while the Gibraltarians might be something of a mongrel race in origin, their sires did not figure among them any Muslims. In rejecting Tangye’s 1944 contention that 'Now the population is a mixture of Italians, Genoese, Maltese and Moors, in addition to some Spaniards’, Howes (1951) writes:
Those who have spoken and still speak of the Moorish element in the Gibraltarian, have been shewn [sic] to be completely in error. The Moors seen in the streets were nearly all visitors from North Africa, engaged in the cattle and poultry trades (p. 160).
He reiterates his point further on in the book. While the 1891 census figures gave a figure of 133 ’Natives of Morocco’, he argues that they were not necessarily Moors. ’The 133 Natives of Morocco meant that practically all were people of European race having been born in that land’ (Howes, 1982: 187). In substance his claims are probably true, once an effort has been made to separate the Moroccan Jews who settled in Gibraltar fi*om their Muslim compatriots, but there remains some place to examine the historical evidence to be garnered on the relationship between Barbaiy and the British military presence on the Rock.
^®This whole point could be explored in greater depth and indeed, it could be argued that the view of the Moroccan in the Spanish mind was given a new tw ist with tales of the ferocity of Franco’s Riffi troops, although this links to imagery and forms of representation which developed during the period of the protectorate and have been described, as discussed in