If you fancy reading an article about Gibraltar that doesn’t focus on Spanish sabre-rattling, here’s one I wrote for Kensington and Chelsea Today (http://www.kensingtonandchelseatoday.co.uk/lifestyle/travel/ccqvivigcb.html) this month —
Rock of Pages
Think of Gibraltar and literature is not necessarily the first thing that comes to mind. A military stronghold, maybe – three centuries ago this year, the Rock was officially signed over to Britain by Spain ‘in perpetuity’ in the Treaty of Utrecht, and has stubbornly resisted all attempts to prise it from British hands. A home to the only wild monkeys in Europe, perhaps – 300 Barbary Macaques still roam the Upper Rock, originally brought from North Africa as pets for the British garrison, now fattened by tourist snacks as they revel in their celebrity status, bolstered by Churchill’s assertion that Gibraltar would stay British as long as the apes remained. The gateway to the Mediterranean, certainly – the Rock’s strategic location in the Strait of Gibraltar allows it to monitor all shipping traffic coming in from the Atlantic. But literature? Surely the place is too functional for anything so insubstantial.
Yet Gibraltar’s eccentricity as an outpost of Empire at the southernmost tip of the Iberian peninsula (imagine if Land’s End were Spanish, its opponents say) has always caught the attention of writers. Daniel Defoe composed a pamphlet about the Spanish siege of 1728. Coleridge passed through in 1804 and wrote of ‘a town of all nations and languages… a multitude and discordant complexity of associations’ that made him ‘fall into musing’. Thackeray was there in 1844, wryly observing that a person should wait until evening to see Gibraltar at its best – ‘then the place becomes quite romantic: it is too dark to see the dust on the dried leaves’. Mark Twain visited via cruiseship in 1867 and describes ‘a lonely and enormous mass of rock, standing seemingly in the center of the wide strait… There could not be two rocks like that in one kingdom’. In Ulysses, James Joyce has Molly Bloom reminisce about her childhood in Gibraltar, ‘and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens… I was the flower of the mountain, walking down the Alameda on an officer’s arm’. In fact, a bronze sculpture of Molly can be seen today in the Alameda Gardens, Gibraltar’s small but beautiful public park, her face raised defiantly at the Rock as it soars above her. Anthony Burgess was stationed in Gibraltar in World War II and fictionalised his experience in ‘A Vision of Battlements’; John Le Carré’s latest novel ‘A Delicate Truth’ is partly set there. Perhaps it is this unrecognised bounty which has led to the inauguration of the Gibraltar Literary Festival, which takes place this year between October 25 and 27.
What first drew me to the Rock as a setting for a series of crime novels was a snippet of information overheard whilst studying Law in London – apparently there are more lawyers per capita in Gibraltar than in any other city on earth. I’d visited before, and decided to return, and found the place much changed – the military were scaling down, and high finance was ramping up. Online gaming firms were moving their headquarters there; the competitive tax rates were attracting private banks, hedge funds. What would it be like to practise as a lawyer on the Rock, I wondered, in the nexus between Europe and Africa, the Atlantic and Mediterranean, Spain and Britain? Spike Sanguinetti – Gibraltarian lawyer – was born, and unbeknown to me, was aspiring to become a small addition to an already sizable literary heritage.
‘Shadow of the Rock’ and ‘Sign of the Cross’ by Thomas Mogford are available now and published by Bloomsbury www.thomasmogford.com
Tickets for the inaugural Gibraltar International Literary Festival go on sale soon www.gibraltarliteraryfestival.com
© Thomas Mogford, 2013
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