John Masters (41 page)

The fighting which enabled Susana Toledano and her father to slip past San Roque took place on July 27, 1936, when a Republican column about 3,000 strong arrived from Malaga and retook the town. Troops from Algeciras and La Linea, who had joined the rebellion, soon drove them out, and the Campo de Gibraltar remained under the Rebels' control until the end of the war.

Gibraltar saw many refugees those early days. Many more tried to get in than it could hold or than was safe for its security. Throughout the war it was also used as a handing-over point for prisoners condemned to death by one side or the other and here exchanged instead. It saw a little action, too, since the Republicans held control of the sea until near the end. Republican destroyers harried a Rebel troop convoy all the way across the strait from Ceuta to Algeciras on August 5, 1936, and next day the battleship
Jaime I
and the cruisers
Libertad
and
Miguel de Cervantes
bombarded Algeciras.

Toward the end of 1938 the heavily damaged Republican destroyer
Jose Luis Diez
limped into Gibraltar for repair. She crept out on the night of December 30-31, hoping to evade the Rebel ships waiting for her; but someone "accidentally" fired a rocket from Gibraltar, and she was attacked round the back of the Rock and driven ashore at Catalan Bay. The British later refloated her and interned her till the end of the war.

Most of the rest of the world had signed a pact of nonintervention, but the pact was observed only by the democracies, which alone had the power to save the Republic from its internal and external enemies. The pact was ignored by Hitler, who wanted to test war theories and also attach an ally; by Mussolini, for the same reasons plus a wish to humiliate the British, who had organized sanctions against him for his Abyssinian aggression of the year before; and by Stalin, who wanted to ensure that the Republic should not be democratic or anarchist but Russian Communist. These helping hands strangled Spain, slowly, until on April 1, 1939, Generalissimo Franco, who had early succeeded generals Mola and Sanjurjo (both killed in air crashes) as the head of the rising, was able to announce that the war was over.

The new nationalist Spain was a country bankrupt, split, and shattered. It had suffered more casualties, proportionately, than England was to suffer in the coming Hitler's war or than the USA had in its own Civil War, and incomparably more material damage. It needed enormous foreign aid, capital investment, and above all, peace....

Hitler armed, planned, and maneuvered with ferocious efficiency. France of the Third Republic staggered from one political crisis or scandal to the next. England dithered. The United States looked the other way.

The inhabitants of Gibraltar were in for a rough time ... but let us pause now and examine the apes. Later we shall not have time.

As already mentioned, these beasts must have been imported into Gibraltar by the Moors. History does not record the origins of the legend that the British would leave Gibraltar when the rock apes did, but it sounds like a not-so-subtle Spanish joke. From the beginning of this century the huge new dockyard, increasing population, urbanization, and mechanization all worked to restrict the areas where the apes could live and to reduce the plants on which they fed. Their numbers fell drastically, until in 1924 only four apes could be found on the whole of Gibraltar. These had taken to raiding down into the town, fouling roofs (always used to collect drinking water), and stealing vegetables from barrows and backyards. The year before—whether moved by concern for the apes or for the people—the Secretary of State for the Colonies applied for permission to have the remaining apes transported back to Africa. This was refused on account of the legend, and more attention was paid to the preservation of the surviving animals.

The "head keeper" was the artillery general in Gibraltar, who appointed one of his officers as Officer in charge of Rock Apes. A master gunner was appointed to see that they had enough to eat, supplementing their natural food with scraps and leftovers begged from military kitchens and civilian institutions. At last the Colonial Office was persuaded to make an allowance for their care and feeding. The master gunner's post became that of cageman-cumstoreman. The "cage" part of the title came in because by then covered cages had been built to provide shelter for the apes, who now consisted of two mutually hostile packs, one at Queen's Gate and one at Middle Hill.

When Winston Churchill began to take a personal interest in the apes, during Hitler's war, the numbers were again very low. By 1943 there were only seven, even after imports from North Africa. Gradually, with the devoted attention of the famous cageman Gunner Portlock and his successors, the numbers increased. Now the apes have assumed an importance which makes a look at the
Ape
files like a glimpse into the mind of Edward Lear....

Telegram from the Secretary of State for the Colonies to the Governor of Gibraltar, February 3, 1951:

"Parliamentary question, APES: Following is text of question down for oral reply February 7: To ask S of S for the C if he is satisfied that subsistence allowance of 4d a day paid out of civil funds for maintenance each Barbary ape at Gibraltar is still sufficient; when amount was fixed at 4d; and to what extent the ape population has increased or decreased since the end of the war...."

And in May, 1953, after the queen made Winston Churchill a Knight of the Garter:

"After careful consideration the Commander Royal Artillery has decided not to authorize a change in the name of the ape 'Winston'. Winston Churchill himself is still called Winston, even though now knighted."

About this time, with the population in the low thirties, apes were offered to zoos all over the world, with free transportation by Royal or United States navy, although a monkey expert thought that to keep the pack going needed a strength of about one hundred. The reason for this apparently reckless generosity was that the Gibraltar civil government, which had taken over financial responsibility for the apes, announced that it would not pay the subsidy of fourpence a day for more than thirty apes.

The humorless Hitler, caring not a fig for the havoc he would cause in the files and among the apes and their keepers, invaded Poland on August 31, 1939. At this point Neville Chamberlain became suspicious of his intentions, and preparations were hurriedly made to teach the bounder a lesson. Gibraltar's days of leisure, hunting, and upper-class dalliance were over forever, and Pablo Larios had died with them.

Nothing much was done until the fall of France in June, 1940. Then, with a thunderstroke of astonishment, Whitehall realized that only Spain lay between Hitler's armies and the Rode; and Spain's ruler owed his position in part to Hitler's help.

Between July and November, 1940, all male civilians, except about 4,000 engaged in vital work, and all females, to the total number of 16,700, were evacuated. To be more precise, they were evacuated twice, first to Tangier and French Morocco, whence they soon had to return owing to the hostility of the Spanish and Vichy French governments installed there; and then reevacuated to Britain, Jamaica, and Madeira. Those who went Home found it less homelike than it had seemed from the Rock; the Jamaican climate and landscape, which some have thought idyllic, were too lush and tropical for the Gibraltarians; only those who went to Madeira found anything to rejoice over—as much as anyone can rejoice uprooted from home and/or separated from husband, lover, family. The only women in Gibraltar were nurses, a few in the services, and the senoritas who still came every day to work from Spain and could sometimes, by a well-worded offer to carry their bags, be persuaded to spend the night in the fortress.

The civil population had been about 20,000. Britain now put in that number of troops. And the troops laid barbed wire and sandbags and installed guns, mortars, machine guns: and above all, under all, they dug, like fear-crazed moles. Under the personal omnipresent drive of the governor, Field Marshal Lord Gort, V.C. (recently defeated at Dunkirk), the engineers tunneled and bored. Rock began to be thrown out by thousands of tons. At first all the excavated stone went to make a runway, for when Hitler defeated France, it was considered that even the racecourse would have to be sacrificed for the making of an allweather airfield large enough to take modem fighters. While this runway crept out westward into the bay from under the north face (the Spanish protesting all the time that Gibraltar had no territorial waters and no right to build out from the isthmus), the tunnelers hammered and blasted and gouged deeper into the bowels of the Rock....