by The Rock
The Gibraltarians had a very British respect for law, which in Gibraltar was generally sound and well and honestly administered. Judge, counsel, and clerks all looked as though they had been borrowed from the Old Bailey; the police wore British bobbies' helmets, acted with the bobby's vaguely bored patience, and went unarmed. The people drank strong tea and heavy beer and worshiped Manchester United, an English soccer team. The upper classes were always snobbish, and their attitude toward the royal family would have done credit to a third footman in the days of "God bless the squire and his relations and keep us in our proper stations." Wherever royalty has stopped, looked, or visited in Gibraltar, the fact is recorded in fawning brass and concrete. Yet several old-time visitors and non-Gibraltarian residents have insisted that the general sentiment of the Gibraltarians—except for that uppermost crust—was anti-British; and this should surprise no one.
How these fascinating people, flotsam from the wreck of an empire, lived, apart from taking in each other's washing, was something of a mystery. The official report stated that "Gibraltar has no agriculture or other natural resources and apart from small coffee, tobacco-processing and garment-making industries, opportunities for employment continue to be provided mainly by the Official Employers (the Government of Gibraltar, the [British] Ministry of Defence, the [British] Ministry of Public Building and Works, and the City Council) and by the wholesale or retail trades, the hotel and catering trades, shipping services, the building industry and private domestic service."
"Retail trade" covered the sale of many goods to ships' crews, particularly Russians, and cruise passengers. Sometimes there were seven or eight Russian freighters and tankers anchored in the bay at one time, and the streets, were full of square-faced men carrying huge brown-paper parcels. They would clean the stores out of one or two items, for example, blankets or shoes, caring nothing for size, style, color, or quality. It was rumored that when they returned to Russia they held public auctions on the quayside.
There was a fair amount of tourism. Foreigners came to see the famous Rock, and Gibraltar was also home base for many English who retired to the Costa del Sol. It combined two qualities which many British regard as essential for a foreign holiday resort: it must have sunshine, and it must be as unforeign as possible. The weather was usually good, the pubs just like those in a small English town, and the restaurants the same, but even worse. The more sophisticated tourist tended to avoid Gibraltar, for he could get much more for his money in Spain, where the truly foreign atmosphere was for him not a drawback but an inducement. Gibraltar had the added attraction of being inside the sterling area, so a visit there did not bite into the Briton's tiny allowance of foreign exchange when currency restrictions were in force.
To increase tourism gambling was permitted and a casino built. Some members of the Gibraltar administration wanted to restore the eighteenth-century fortifications (the galleries) and run son et lumiere productions there. Others thought that the money should be put into more and better hotel accommodation, esplanades, boat marinas—anything to mitigate Gibraltar's overpowering claustrophobia, which had strengthened as the civil population grew to near 25,000.
And there was smuggling, the export or re-export of goods knowing or suspecting that they will evade payment of legal duty in their country of final destination: one can call a spade a spade or a bloody shovel. There was always a small amount of smuggling into Gibraltar, mainly brandy, wines, and spirits, which were always much cheaper in Spain; but the principal direction, of course, was into Spain, and by far the most important item was tobacco. This had been going on for a long time, and so had Spanish complaints against it to the governor or to London. The British were in general unhelpful. Anthony Eden minuted on one of these protests that it was not the responsibility of Her Majesty's Government to protect the revenues of foreign states; but there is no doubt that if the French or the Dutch had asked for British help in preventing a huge traffic, contraband according to their laws, into their countries, they would have got it. The Spanish did not get it, and they must take part of the blame. As far as Gibraltar is concerned, their attitude had always been noncooperative or worse, from the punitive quarantines of the 1700’s to the affair of the Olterra, and they had no right to expect any friendly help from the Gibraltar British.
Further, the root of the problem was in Spain, not in Gibraltar, and this was particularly true after Hitler’s war, when a number of fast war surplus navy patrol launches were put on the market in the Mediterranean. The organizers and principal beneficiaries of the syndicates which bought and operated these launches for smuggling were Spanish. Their bribes and payoffs—indeed, smuggling as a fact of life—penetrated every level of Spanish society and government. The commissioner of police of La Linea was a frequent visitor to Gibraltar; his chauffeur was soon able to buy two blocks of flats and a bar. The military and municipal authorities of the Campo had a daily shopping list, and a man with a horse-drawn cart went into Gibraltar every day to fill it. An intelligence officer of the military government also went to Gibraltar every day, possibly in the line of duty—but he took with him a shopping list for high-ups in Madrid. One senior official publicly stated that the smuggling was necessary because it enabled Spain to provide American cigarettes to tourists without having to buy them with hard currency. The same could be said of streptomycin and penicillin, which were also heavily smuggled in the early postwar years.
In the face of this situation, British measures against the trade would have hurt Gibraltarian revenues and made no difference to Spain, for the stuff would have come from Tangier or Italy, as much of it did in any case. Nevertheless, the blatant operations of the smuggling launches based on Gibraltar (to claim British protection and status they had a British subject as nominal owner) began to embarrass the Gibraltar government, and in the mid-1950's it set about harassing the trade in various ways. This caused much of it to leave Gibraltar to work out of other bases under other flags. Gibraltar also offered the Spanish authorities means of identifying the crewmen of the smuggling boats, all of whom lived in or near Algeciras; but the Spanish never took action.
Most telling of all is the fact that Spain and Gibraltar are both members of Interpol. When the Italian government earlier mounted a great investigation of the smuggling into its country, it asked for and received information from all other Interpol countries, including Gibraltar. The Gibraltar government later prepared a list of the names, functions, and addresses of everyone it had traced in the organization of smuggling in the western Mediterranean. This list named 4 Latvians, 3 Dutchmen, 1 Swede, 4 Austrians, 5 Canadians, 4 Cubans, 41 Italians, 195 Portuguese, 4 Albanians, 3 Swiss, 20 West Germans, 12 Danes, 61 French, 9 Belgians, 134 Moroccans, 3 Americans, 158 British (including Gibraltarians), and 1,013 Spaniards. The Spanish government never asked Gibraltar for this list of names, because every country in Interpol would then have known that the smuggling was connived in and actively supported by some of the most highly placed men in the nation.
By 1963 Gibraltar's measures had reduced the number of potential Gibraltar-owned smuggling boats to 13, as against 42 of other flags in the area, mostly at Tangier. In this year General Franco decided that negotiations would not bring Gibraltar back to Spain and chose contraband as the point of his attack against the status quo. Because of the smuggling, he said, Gibraltar was a cancer in the Spanish economy. In using this line he obviously had to ensure that no investigation could implicate the Spanish government or its senior officials in the continuance of the disease. So thousands of police, guards, agents, and Tabacalera employees who had routinely been receiving payoffs for years were told—fingers out of the pie, finis! The Spanish state security is extremely tough and efficient when it wants to be, especially if the Generalissimo himself has given the word. The crackdown began. A few old hands like Juanito el Canario, who hadn't got the message or didn't believe it could apply to them because of their previous special connections, found themselves in jail. In a very short time
the smuggling was stopped cold.
To give an idea of what it had been worth, note that in the previous year the Tabacalera had legally imported 12,000,000 packs of U.S. cigarettes for sale in Spain. The year after, they imported 97,000,000. The difference —85,000,000 packs, at a sale price in Spain of about $40,000,000—was what the smugglers used to supply. With the great flow of tobacco, the crackdown also dammed the lesser streams of whisky, luxury cars, refrigerators, carpets, and British wool cloth which used to pass through Gibraltar. Small amounts of hallucinatory drugs are still occasionally seized and publicized as being from Gibraltar, but the evidence seems to be that they are not.
So today the contraband business is dead; and with it, one might add, the "Gibraltar as a cancer in the Spanish economy" argument. General Franco had shown that a strong, tough government which meant business could reduce smuggling to negligible proportions. But of course the use of the argument as political ammunition continues, because as long as Gibraltar is not Spanish the smuggling could start again ... if this or a subsequent Spanish government were to permit it.
From the "cancer" policy, Spain progressed by gradual stages to the imposition of a blockade against Gibraltar, which can be called the Fifteenth Siege. Her justification has been a series of motions in the United Nations accepting Spain's position and calling upon Britain to hand the tiny peninsula back to the great peninsula of which it is physically a part. The effects of the blockade are various. Gibraltar imports food from Morocco and wine from France and Italy, whereas both would naturally come from Spain. Prices are high, and much that ought to be readily available cannot be had at any price. No Spaniard is now allowed to enter Gibraltar to work, so Moroccans have to be imported—again underscoring Gibraltar's historic dependence on a friendly Morocco—but this has also forced Gibraltarians to learn trades and professions which they used to consider beneath them. The worst effect on the blockade has been to increase the claustrophobia, for each one of the 25,000 inhabitants seems to own a car, with which he used to stretch his spirit in the vastness of Andalusia; but now he drives it endlessly round and round, up and down, the narrow streets and roads ... and there is no escape.
Since Spain has cut off all land and sea communication between herself and Gibraltar, the Rock's only links are by sea and air with other countries, notably Morocco and England. From Gibraltar's point of view, therefore, Spain's most dangerous threats are concerned with air rights and territorial waters. Briefly, she claims that Gibraltar has neither, since they were not mentioned in the Treaty of Utrecht or any other agreement; but Gibraltar obviously must have territorial waters and air rights if its ships and civil aircraft are to operate. Spain keeps pushing—today anchoring tall-masted ships practically at the end of the airport runway, tomorrow complaining that British aircraft fly over prohibited areas. And day in and day out, the gray hull of a Spanish man-of-war slices through the waters of the bay, observing and menacing all maritime activity. This vessel is about 40 feet long, has a maximum speed of 5 knots, and apparently last had its flues cleaned about 1933. For obvious reasons it is universally known as Smoky Joe.
Stick in one hand, carrot in the other ... Spain set out to persuade the Gibraltarians that happiness and prosperity awaited them in the arms of the fatherland. This needed major engineering, because for centuries the Campo de Gibraltar—the semicircle of about 20 miles' radius centering on the Rock—had been as poor as any area in Europe. There were, and are, men who work on the estates of great lords for el cubierto—four pennies and a bowl of pottage—per day. In all the Campo few but went to bed hungry, and some, starving. Few, that is, except those who worked for the English on the Rock: they had a good wage, regularly paid, and the customary right to bring out a little something each day without paying duty on it.
To remedy this Spain announced, in 1965, a Plan of Development for the Campo. The plan involves spending $60,000,000 a year until 1990 to convert the Campo into a highly industrialized zone of great technical efficiency. A huge petrochemical complex has already been built, factories for plastics, cellulose, and the like are going up, modem roads and a sports stadium are under construction. All this the Gibraltarians can see over the closed fence on the isthmus. "Come out," Spain wheedles, "you'll never have it so good."
To put a final dressing on the carrot, it has also been announced that a new Spanish province called Gibraltar is to be formed. It will consist of the Campo, somewhat enlarged; and the eventual capital, when it returns "home," will be Gibraltar. There are a lot of jobs and money in a capital. People have to go there for all kinds of ceremonies, licenses, passes, permits....
So far, the Gibraltarians have refused to be cajoled. At a referendum held in 1967 after Spain took her case to the United Nations, the people were asked whether they wanted the British connection or an association with Spain. The pro-British response to this referendum (which Spain denounced as illegal and invalid) was over 99 percent. Pro-British or perhaps, according to the old residents before quoted, anti-Spanish. If Spain were as rich as the United States, these say, the Gibraltarians would have clamored to become Spanish. The sneer has some truth in it, but not much. Spain has never known liberty or responsible government. After two and a half centuries of military dictators of their own the Gibraltarians are enjoying the pains and pleasures of democracy far too much to consider risking them. Gibraltar Jews particularly fear any surrender to Spain's rigid and anti-Semitic Roman Catholicism.
Only one country promises any hope of protection against Spain. So the visiting Briton finds himself warmed, perhaps slightly embarrassed, and as surprised as would be an American in Paris if confronted with placards proclaiming Yankee, stay, we love you! On the poorer back streets, if he looks British enough, he is liable to be greeted with a murmured "God bless you!" Whole streets are painted red, white, and blue, including the sidewalks and gutters. The Union Jack is the favorite decorative pattern for window frames, doors, house ends, and old jalopies. Everywhere the hand-printed signs about British 265 years, British forever ... God Save Our Queen! ... Born British, we'll die British ... To hell with Franco! When Manchester United, which has become the personification of Britain abroad, played and beat Real Madrid, the personification of Spain, the score was chalked all over the streets and walls, with triumphantly disparaging remarks added for the benefit of the Spanish workmen who, in those days, were still going in and out of the dockyard. (This chauvinistic crowing was misdirected. All Spaniards are patriotic, but different classes place their emphases differently. It is not the peasant or laborer but the aristocrat and professional man who cares most deeply about British Gibraltar.)
But there are at least two sorts of Gibraltarian who would like to see an accommodation with Spain. First are the people called palomas (doves, passenger pigeons), born Gibraltarian, the typical paloma married a local Spanish girl, bought a cottage and a little land in the Campo, and lived there but worked in Gibraltar. Then the Spanish made him apply for Spanish papers, thus forcing him to admit that he was not a Gibraltarian but a Spaniard from the Spanish city of Gibraltar. Next they closed the frontier altogether, compelling the paloma to make a final choice. Thus families have been split, wives and children abandoned—or pride swallowed and the Rock deserted.
Many of the Indians and Pakistanis whose shops are so prominent a part of Main Street also want accommodation with Spain, to the considerable disgust of the true Gibraltarian. Because they came from countries of the British Commonwealth they were admitted without limitation; but none of them lives in Gibraltar. A family buys a store and sends some member from India to run it. It never hires shop assistants but just sends over some more young members to work for nothing. All the money they make gets sent back home. (And they make plenty, for they ally industry and shrewdness: one merchant always travels through Russia on his journeys back and forth so that he can see what consumer goods the Russians lack most: it is these goods he stocks, from Japan or Hong Kong, for the benefit of the Russian seamen.)
These factors, plus their aloofness, had already cut the Indian-Pakistani community off from the other Gibraltarians before General Franco's recent moves. But many Indian families and firms also have branches on the Spanish mainland or in the Canaries. In order to improve their status there some of the Gibraltar firms cabled the United Nations in support of the Spanish case. This did not increase their popularity with their neighbors.
So we come out of history into the continuing "now"; yet "now" is always, too, a continuation of history and cannot be separated or considered apart from it.
The Gibraltarians want to be independent but protected by Britain, or they want to be welded onto the British state. They declare that they cannot be handed like a chattel to anyone, least of all to a Spanish dictatorship.
Britain defies the United Nations mandate to hand Gibraltar back to Spain on the ground that a people's right to self-determination is paramount, taking precedence over treaty commitments made in the distant past. Whether Britain needs or wants Gibraltar is doubtful; whether she would or could hold it in the face of a Spanish attack, even more so.
Spain declares that Gibraltar was taken, and has been kept, by naked force; that the Gibraltarians do not have the right of self-determination because they are not a true "people" but a British importation, a puppet; that Gibraltar cannot be handed over to the Gibraltarians because the Treaty of Utrecht rules that if Britain ever gives up, it must be offered to Spain before all others', that Gibraltar cannot be politically united with Britain because, under the same treaty, Spain retains sovereignty.
