With the lifting of sanctions against Italy, Sir Samuel Hoare ordered the Home Fleet home again after ten months of Mediterranean patrols, and they steamed back from Alexandria via Gibraltar. By Saturday 18 July 1936, the Rock had already waved goodbye to battleships, cruisers and the aircraft carrier Furious, as well as flotillas of destroyers and submarines returning from Egypt.

That Saturday, the hot sun beat down on the isthmus at North Front. Across the way, the Spanish border town of La Línea de la Concepción was opening its annual feria de julio. Over the next seven days there would be stalls and sideshows, fireworks, food and football, a fancy dress competition for children, the Municipal Band oompahing every evening and a first-class novillada at the bullring on the final Sunday, with Torerito de Triana and Pascual Márquez matched against large, fierce Miura bulls from Seville.

But this year it went wrong from the start. There was ‘trouble at the Fair’, they said, but it wasn’t quite clear what was happening at first over there by the bullring. Shooting, explosions. Someone said sticks of dynamite were among the fireworks that traditionally opened the feria with a bang. Someone else said no, the gunfire began just as the string of firecrackers called la traca were going off, masking a shoot-out between Falangists and Anarchists. Another said the fighting was at the barracks and the whole fair had been called off. By the evening of Saturday 18th, rumours were flying thick and fast. The Spanish regular army had risen in Morocco, they said; someone had heard it on the radio. They said Moors and Legionnaires, the terrifying soldiers who took no prisoners in the Moroccan Rif and then were used to smash the Asturian miners in 1934, were crossing the strait from Ceuta in the ferries. ¡Moros en la costa! (‘Moors on the coast!’) is an old Spanish phrase from the days of the Barbary pirates, meaning watch out, danger is looming – best stay at home and lock the door.

*

Phil and Mary ‘Mabs’ Bower, on honeymoon from Cheshire, innocently went across the bay from Gibraltar to Spain by the Algeciras ferry that Saturday in order to have tea at the smart Reina Cristina Hotel. Afterwards they tried to get the ferry back to Gibraltar but there was a soldier reading a proclamation and troops on the quay. Then the new Mr and Mrs Bower bumped into the British vice consul, who told them they should get back to the Rock forthwith. A Spanish army officer in uniform offered to escort them to the frontier and they were bundled into a car full of weapons and ammunition. At La Línea, gala-festooned for the feria del pueblo, there was a barricade, men with rifles, shooting. The Spanish soldiers jumped from the car and returned fire. Mabs clutched her shoulder, shocked, shot. Phil dragged her from the car and they ran over to a block of flats. A woman leaned out of a window. On hearing they were English she waved them up and sent down her daughter to lead the way. The señora dressed the wound and eventually the Bowers made their way to the frontier to British territory.

At the Four Corners gate Gibraltarian bobbies in absurd British police helmets were trying to filter the crowds of Britons and Spaniards fleeing from the fair. With them, ‘in support of the civil power’, were British soldiers, baggy-shorted, pith-helmeted picquets from the 1st Battalion, King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, with bayonets on their bundooks or rifles. When the gate opened for a motor car, the Bowers ran behind it to reach the safety of Gibraltar. They left for England the next day on the Anchor Line’s SS Elysia, and their story was squabbled over by the British press: the London Evening Standard offering £10, the Daily Express £15, for an exclusive.

A nine-year-old girl called Mariola, dressed in her best, waited for her Gibraltarian policeman father, Gustavo Benavente, to finish his Saturday shift and take her with her two younger brothers to the opening parade in La Línea as he usually did. This year, he came home very late and did not take them to the fair. She heard him say those were not fireworks, but gunshots, and the grown-ups talked sombrely of revolución and guerra.

*

What was going on? At 2.13 p.m. on Saturday 18 July 1936, the Senior Officer (Intelligence) at Gibraltar sent a signal marked ‘IMPORTANT’ to the Admiralty and the Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces in London, and the C-in-C, Mediterranean in Malta:

The Military Commander in Chief of Spanish Morocco announced by wireless from CEUTA at 12.00 today in essence that the Military forces both Spanish and Native, in Spanish Morocco and the Canary Islands have revolted against the government, and are in control of those areas.

Reports claim that Spanish Navy and Air Force are with them. This is supported by rumours reaching here from TANGIER. Fighting reported in vicinity of CEUTA and transport has been ordered to ALGECIRAS to embark troops for that port today. Unconfirmed report from CARTAGENA states that warships there have refused to proceed to Morocco.

All quiet at present in GIBRALTAR area.

It should not be forgotten – whatever justifications and lies were offered afterwards – that what we now call the Spanish Civil War began with an attempted coup d’état or military rebellion by General Franco’s forces against the democratically elected government of the Spanish Republic. Franco’s military insurgents justified their coup on the spurious grounds that the February 1936 elections which brought in the Popular Front government had been corrupt. The military uprising was led by three Spanish army generals – Franco, Mola and Sanjurjo – who had got to know each other in brutal campaigns suppressing the Berber tribespeople of Spanish Morocco. Colonial warfare there was atrocious, with no quarter given on either side. In 1921, in their stunning victory at Annual, the Rifian guerrillas led by Muhammad Abdel Krim and his brother M’hemmed had managed to kill up to twelve thousand Spanish soldiers, but the Berbers were crushed in 1926 by combined French and Spanish armies using air power and illegal poison gas manufactured with German help.

The formerly incompetent, underpaid Spanish army had reinvented itself in North Africa, creating two new and ferocious units: the Regulares, formed in 1911 from Moroccan volunteers and so always known as moros – the Moors – and el Tercio de Extranjeros, the foreigners’ regiment, founded in 1920. The Tercio or Legion was modelled on the French Foreign Legion, and their berserker war-cry was ‘¡Viva la Muerte!’ (‘Long live Death!’). When the 1936 military uprising began, these two units made up Spain’s most professional fighting force, the African Army, el ejército de África, with eighteen thousand Spaniards and sixteen thousand Moroccans.

Generals Franco, Mola and Sanjurjo began their violent insurrection against the Popular Front government in Madrid on the evening of Friday 17 July with garrison risings in Spanish Morocco, shooting dead 225 loyalist soldiers and citizens who resisted them. On Saturday morning in Andalusia, four thousand men led by the right-wing General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano seized Seville and its radio station, where he broadcast regularly for the next eighteen months. In Navarre, General Emilio Mola took Pamplona.

Other rebellious officers failed to take key cities like Madrid and Barcelona because the workers resisted or those in uniform stayed loyal to the elected government, so the uprising’s outcome hung in the balance. Barely a third of Spain’s territory was in insurgent hands at this stage: they controlled over half the army, 60 per cent of the artillery and almost half the Guardia Civil, but only a third of the air force, the Carabineros, the Republican Assault Guards and, most worryingly for them, the navy. For the coup d’état to succeed, the military rebellion needed to get their toughest fighting force, the Army of Africa, back to Europe by air or by sea. If they could stop them at the Strait of Gibraltar, the Spanish navy might nip this rebellion in the bud.

The Spanish Republican navy, which does not seem to have been significantly involved in planning the army-led coup, had twenty thousand men and around eighty vessels, including two battleships, seven cruisers, seventeen destroyers, five gunboats, nine coastguard vessels, eleven torpedo boats and a dozen submarines. It operated from three main bases: El Ferrol, looking to the north and the Bay of Biscay, Cádiz facing the Atlantic and Cartagena in the Mediterranean. But how reliable was the navy, how loyal to the Republic’s current government? On 14 July, a signal had gone out from the Ministry of Marine in Madrid to the heads of the three naval bases, admirals of squadrons and all flotilla leaders, warning them to take precautions ‘to prevent extremists of one side or other from spreading propaganda among personnel under your command’ and to signal back whether ‘personnel of all classes and categories can be trusted to obey your orders’. Naval officers thought to be of dubious loyalty were asked to resign.

Anyone with foresight could have seen that the Strait of Gibraltar was key to a military coup. José Giral, the Republic’s Minister of Marine, a mild-mannered chemistry professor, certainly understood its strategic importance and acted swiftly on 16 July by ordering four warships to Spain’s southern waters, but events overtook him. On 19 July, President Azaña asked Giral to become prime minister and, fatally, no one replaced him as Minister of Marine.

The Spanish navy may have had more conservative and reactionary officers than the army and air force, but there were also radicals with opposing views. In March 1936, the Republican Popular Front government had passed a law allowing people dismissed for their left-wing political views to rejoin the armed forces. The existence of La Unión Militar Republicana y Antifascista (UMRA), the Republican and Antifascist Military Union, within the navy, indicates that not every naval person was conservative.

One UMRA member was a strongly Republican warrant officer from Galicia called Benjamin Balboa López, a radio operator who worked at the Spanish Admiralty’s central telecommunications centre at Ciudad Lineal in the pine forest of Chamartín, north of Madrid. A command-centre radio operator is better informed than most people. Balboa worried that the crews of ships at sea, cut off from events on land, might be stopped from hearing what was going on by officers intending to join the right-wing revolt.

The first radio messages about uprisings against the Republican government in Morocco came through to Madrid on the afternoon of Friday 17 July. Early next morning, General Franco sent two messages for re-transmission to all garrisons. Radio operator Balboa acted swiftly. Instead of passing on Franco’s messages he alerted the Galician prime minister, Santiago Casares, and José Giral, then still Minister of Marine. When Balboa’s commanding officer, Captain Castor Ibáñez Aldecoa, learned of this act of disobedience he snatched Franco’s messages and telephoned their contents himself to Vice Admiral Javier de Salas, higher up the chain of command, who was in on the right-wing plot. Salas told Ibáñez to send Franco’s message to all garrisons. Back in the radio room, Ibáñez ordered Balboa to his quarters, under arrest.

But Balboa stood his ground. ‘I will not comply with that order … I am here to defend the Republic against those people who are, as you well know, betraying it. And from right now it’s you, not me, who’s barred from the radio room.’ With that, Balboa drew his nine-shot .22 Luger pistol and pointed it at his superior officer’s abdomen. Balboa locked his commanding officer up, and the police later drove him and Admiral Salas away to prison. (Ibáñez later got away to a friendly embassy, but Salas was taken out of jail and shot by leftists in August.)

Loyalists now occupied the Ministry of Marine building in Madrid. From the telecommunications centre at Ciudad Lineal, Balboa and his team started sending a stream of messages to the men of the fleet. Every ship was to report its position every two hours and listen for instructions; all communications were to be ‘in clear’ or using current language, since conspirators were hiding behind ciphers. Balboa wanted to reach every radio operator in the fleet, because he believed that every ship had at least one loyal Republican among the operators who could spread the message horizontally to the crew, bypassing the vertical chain of command.

On Saturday afternoon, 18 July, Minister of Marine José Giral signed official telegrams which Balboa sent out in Morse code to the commanding officers of the four Spanish destroyers and one gunboat at Ceuta and Melilla, ordering them to stop any ships bringing troops across the Strait of Gibraltar from Africa. In addition, they were to open fire on rebel camps, barracks or gatherings. ‘The Spanish Republic expects that the loyalty and discipline of the crew will honour the shining tradition of the Navy.’

At Melilla, some officers disregarded this command. Captain Fernando Bastarreche tried to persuade the crew that he was right to do so. He waved a copy of Franco’s message:

I’m not going to read it but to tell you that a military uprising has broken out across Spain, the whole army has risen … Heading the movement is a glorious Spaniard, General Franco, a man who is worthy of your trust, a good and patriotic Spaniard who has never meddled in politics … There is a government in Madrid that is no kind of a government. You will have read about the series of murders that are staining our land with blood, and for this reason General Franco is calling on all good Spaniards to help save our homeland. We have received an order to bombard Melilla … Tell me: which of you would open fire on our brothers?

A hoarse voice broke the tense silence. ‘So why did the army start shooting in Asturias in ’34? Is it because miners, being miners, aren’t our brothers?’

‘I wouldn’t have fired,’ said Bastarreche.

‘That may be true. But someone on your side did.’

Then Guevara from the engine room spoke up. He praised the Republic and said he would accept no orders except those from the legitimate government. Enraged, Bastarreche told him to leave the ship and telegraph Madrid. Guevara refused. ‘Sir, I am someone you kill from the front, not in the back, like a dog.’ The crews clamoured to return to Cartagena, and the two destroyers blundered out to sea, almost colliding. However, they carried no insurgent troops across from Melilla to mainland Spain.

It was a different story along the African coast at Ceuta. In the dark of Saturday night, the destroyer Churruca embarked four hundred Moorish soldiers loyal to Franco, and together with the passenger/ cargo ship Ciudad de Algeciras (owned by Juan March), also carrying insurgent military personnel, set off for Cádiz. The mail steam-packet Cabo Espartel, carrying a further battalion of Regulares, headed for Algeciras. As they crossed the strait, a radio operator on Churruca managed to tell Balboa what was happening and swore that Republican loyalists would later take over the rebel ship, and if necessary sink her in the strait.

Now the Spanish Republican navy was in turmoil, caught in a tragedy of loyalties. Officers rebelling against the state they were pledged to serve provoked mutiny among men whose duty was to follow orders. In one ship, an officer argued passionately to his crew that the military rebellion was not to import fascism but to stop communism taking over the country. A sailor replied that they wanted neither fascism nor communism, but in order to defend the Republic from both extremes they were prepared to shed their blood. And bloodshed there was, as loyalists and rebels fought for control of ships and bases. Rebels took El Ferrol, La Coruña, San Fernando near Cádiz and Palma de Mallorca. The northern Biscay coast from Gijon to San Sebastián stayed loyal to the government, as did the whole Mediterranean littoral from Málaga to Barcelona. Urged on by Balboa in Madrid and radio operators on other ships, loyal crew members seized the cruisers Libertad and Miguel de Cervantes from officers who wished to join the insurgency. Hugh Thomas says the pro-Franco officers on the Cervantes resisted to the last man and that other officers were imprisoned and then shot at Cartagena in August. The worst atrocities and murders happened on prison ships afterwards, not during the initial fighting. George Steer records how ‘drunk and dirty sailors’ from a left-wing Republican warship crept aboard the prison ship Cabo de Quilates in Bilbao waters and murdered forty-two Francoist prisoners in early October. Overall, more than a third of the Spanish navy’s officers perished.

These events had consequences in Gibraltar. On 19 July, somewhere at sea off the coast of Portugal, there was a brief gunfight for control of the España-class battleship Jaime I, a dreadnought with eight twelve-inch guns. Sailors loyal to the Republican government acquired pistols, stormed the defended bridge and killed two rebel officers, Captain Aguilar and Lieutenant Cañas. Both sides were guilty of opposing lawful authority; but which of them was in the right?

It being high summer, the loyalist sailors asked the Marine Ministry in Madrid for instructions about what to do with the dead bodies of the officers. The reply, to this specific question, was brief: ‘Con sobriedad respetuosa den fondo a los cadáveres, anotando situación’ (‘With respectful solemnity, commit their bodies to the deep, noting position’). Franco’s rebels later dishonestly portrayed this message as a general government mandate to murder officers by throwing them overboard.

General Franco broadcast by radio from Tenerife his first manifesto, claiming he was saving Spain from anarchy and foreign subversion. Then he flew from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco in a British-owned and British-piloted Dragon Rapide aeroplane, hired with £2000 of Juan March’s money. A right-wing ‘adventurer’ called Major Hugh Pollard, who did odd jobs for SIS, brought the aircraft out to him. When he landed at Tetuán early on Sunday 19 July, Franco learned that the colonels supporting him had managed to send some Moorish Regulares (commanded by Spanish officers) to Algeciras on the Spanish mainland aboard three small ships. Thus the city across the bay from Gibraltar became the beachhead for rebel troops from Morocco to disembark.

*

The Senior Naval Officer (Intelligence) in Gibraltar reported to the Admiralty on Sunday 19 July that ‘Martial law was declared in ALGECIRAS when Communist leader was shot last night.’ Algeciras had fallen to the rebels straight away on 18 July; its newly arrived military commandant, Colonel Emilio March, was swift to join the conspiracy. As the Gibraltar Chronicle and Official Gazette approvingly put it in its front-page lead on Monday 20 July: ‘The military assumed power at Algeciras on Saturday afternoon in the quietest possible manner.’ Among the leading civilian supporters of the rebellion were the conservative Larios family. Pablo Larios’s house, San Bernardo, became a barracks for young right-wingers, eager to shed Red blood.

What happened in La Línea over the same two days was very different. The carabineros, the armed corps that patrolled coasts and borders, remained largely loyal to the government. NCOs at the Ballesteros barracks disarmed those officers who wished to rebel and pushed some across the border into Gibraltar late on Saturday, before the gate at Four Corners closed at midnight. The next day the fighting continued.

*

After hearing the first radio reports of military turbulence, the American reporter Jay Allen left his house in Torremolinos to see what was happening further south down the coast. He arrived in La Línea on the morning of Sunday 19 July in a rich man’s limousine. Nervous Anarcho-Syndicalists opened fire on what they thought was a right-winger’s vehicle, wounding Allen’s Spanish driver. A mob of men seized the reporter but he talked his way out in fluent Spanish. He went home, said goodbye to his writer friends, Gerald Brenan and Gamel Woolsey, and got a fisherman to take him with his typewriter and suitcase from Estepona to Gibraltar to hunt out good stories for the News Chronicle.

At eleven o’clock that morning, the rebel torpedo boat T-19 shelled La Línea’s Ballesteros barracks. When 170 Moorish Regulares who had disembarked in Algeciras joined the attack, the defenders could not withstand the assault. ‘Loyal troops there have capitulated,’ signalled the Gibraltar Staff Officer (Intelligence), ‘and both LINEA and ALGECIRAS are in the hands of revolutionaries.’ Among those rebel attackers, one of Pablo Larios’s sons-in-law, Fernando Povar, took a bullet in the shoulder and nearly lost his arm to gangrene later.

After the Sunday lunchtime battle in La Línea, the Moorish Regulares, seeing signs of hostility in the crowds outside the barracks, started shooting into them too, killing and wounding scores of civilians. Estimates of the number of dead range from ninety to over 150.

*

On Tuesday 21 July, the Gibraltar government cabled the Colonial Office a situation report:

Situation in Spain where as you will be aware Army in conjunction with Fascist party has rebelled against Socialist government is very obscure. Algeciras in hands of rebels. Malaga reported still held by Government but burning in many places. Neighbouring town of La Linea occupied by rebel troops from Morocco and there have been clashes there with Communist mob. Reaction in Gibraltar has been that Colony has been inundated with over 2000 of the 4000 British subjects living there [in La Línea]. Also considerable influx of terror-stricken Spanish including many women and children. Entry of Spaniards however being strictly controlled. Some inconveniences through lack of Spanish labour but not yet serious. Similarly a shortage of fresh vegetables etc, but supplies expected from Tangier. British tourists and others have been collected from Algeciras by Port Department launch and from Torremolinos west of Malaga by War Department tug. Telephone communication with Spain suspended, train services not running, travel by road impossible or risky. No overland mails received since Saturday. Please repeat to General Harington, 94 Piccadilly.

The sporty Governor of Gibraltar, General Sir Charles Harington, was on leave in England, happily watching the cricket at Lord’s, having taken a little flat nearby so as not to miss a stroke of the batting, and picked up messages at his club, the Naval and Military, known as the ‘In and Out’, at 94 Piccadilly. The Acting Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Gibraltar was Brigadier W. T. Brooks.

The Rock was a very long way from Lord’s Cricket Ground. There had been an enormous stampede of people out of La Línea. Those who could not get through the gate rowed or even swam across to Gibraltar’s Eastern Beach, seeking shelter with friends and family or among kindly strangers. Fishing boats from La Atunera ferried refugees to Catalan Bay. The wounded were taken to the Colonial Hospital and the semi-naked, hungry children clothed and fed. No one knows exactly how many refugees there were, but Harington later estimated up to ten thousand. He wrote: ‘Gibraltar was at once dangerously overcrowded. These people lived in caves, on hulks, in hovels of every kind, many in the streets, in taxis, in gardens and in a camp we prepared for them.’

This was an army tent-camp rigged up for twelve hundred people on the racecourse at North Front, where the Gibraltar Soup Kitchen provided many thousands of hot meals and hundreds of tins of milk for babies. The CO of the Gordon Highlanders complained in mid-August that refugees were freely defecating by the hedge round the manège (riding school), but others set up a subscription fund to help the destitute. The Indian Merchants’ Association, while worried about ‘our people and property’ in Spanish territories, were ‘deeply touched’ by the influx of frightened civilians pouring into Gibraltar, and wrote to the Colonial Secretary generously offering ‘advice, help and co-operation, any time we are called upon’. Over a hundred new Special Constables were recruited to help with the refugees, many of whom were poor working-class Spaniards who feared going back because they might be shot for their left-wing views. (Although in British official eyes only ‘prominent persons e.g. of ministerial status’ counted as ‘political refugees’.)

Flies, dust and filth led Lieutenant Colonel Allnutt, the Medical Officer of Health, to call for improvements in sanitation and three-times-a-day emptying of the thirty-four bucket-latrines provided. Seven young children and two old people died in the camp, but when the governor closed the place in mid-September, the refugees resisted, scuffling with the police in Irish Town. The National Council of Civil Liberties in London sent a telegram to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Major Ormsby-Gore, on 19 September:

Gravely disturbed at reports that Spanish refugee camp in Gibraltar closed down and refugees camping in streets and refugees without money liable to be sent over border to rebel territory where they would be exposed to risk of torture or death … These reports causing widespread feeling in this country and regarded as violations of British tradition on right of asylum stop We earnestly beg you make immediate investigation and prevent grievous injustice being done ends.

Among those who signed the letter were the liberal Tory MP Vyvyan Adams, the lawyer and MP Dingle Foot, Professor Julian Huxley, the campaigning journalist Henry Nevinson, the progressive MP Eleanor Rathbone and the novelist H. G. Wells. The Gibraltar government replied that no one was being sent by force anywhere they did not want to go: fifteen hundred refugees had been shipped to Málaga, still under Republican government control, while another two hundred had drifted back to La Línea.

*

In late July 1936, General Franco’s whole strategy hinged on the Strait of Gibraltar. His rebel army was mostly cut off in Africa; he was desperate to get them across the water to Europe, and he had to stop the loyalist navy from blocking their way. In the Mediterranean and the Strait of Gibraltar, the Republic still ruled the waves, retaining a battleship and two cruisers, as well as nine destroyers, eight submarines, four torpedo boats and some smaller craft. Franco used every aeroplane he could muster at Tetuán in Spanish Morocco, mainly Breguet biplanes but also half a dozen small trainers from the Seville Aero Club, to bomb these ships and drive them away. Nearly all the Francoist attacks missed, but since several targets were British-flagged vessels, including the Gibel Dersa, the regular Bland Line ferry to Tangier, the British government sent warnings via the British consul in Tetuán that any more such incidents would be met by force.

A squadron of Spanish Republican ships – the cruisers Libertad and Cervantes, the destroyer Churruca and three gunboats – converged on the port of Tangier in Morocco, seeking water and fuel. Tangier was a law unto itself, run by a Control Commission of six European nations: Belgium, Britain, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Under Article 3 of the 1923 Convention establishing Tangier as a neutral ‘international zone’, all military activity was prohibited. On these grounds, Shell refused to sell the Spanish government ships any bunker oil, although refuelling was not strictly ‘military’. Forty kilometres away in Tetuán, General Franco was outraged that the Republican ships were in Tangier at all, breaching neutrality, he claimed, by using the international zone as a base for potential attacks on Ceuta and Melilla and Gibraltar. When Franco threatened to bomb the Republican vessels, an international incident began brewing.

Gibraltar cabled the Admiralty on 20 July: ‘Tangier reports that Spanish warships in harbour have placed their officers under arrest and have constituted a Soviet … They are awaiting oil fuel from Malaga and then propose to bombard Cadiz and Algeciras.’ The next day the Republican flotilla moved across the strait. Led by the battleship Jaime I, which arrived on 21 July, and the cruisers Libertad and Miguel de Cervantes, the fuel-starved ships started arriving in Gibraltar Bay on the evening of Tuesday 21 July. By Wednesday 22 July 1936, they had all dropped anchor among the commercial shipping outside the naval harbour.

This worried General Franco. From Tetuán he sent a telegram addressed to the Governor of Gibraltar, trying to persuade him that the Republican navy was no longer legitimate and should not be refuelled or resupplied. This is how his 21 July message was translated from the Spanish, with the original ink underlinings of key phrases:

In Gibraltar Bay, the British boarding officers and the naval visiting officer came to visit the Republican vessels but could not immediately see Commander Fernando Navarro Capdevila, who was said to be in charge of the cruiser Libertad. Then an unshaven person appeared. He was dressed in the correct officer’s uniform with the right insignia denoting Capitán de Fragata, but he was not wearing socks.

Did this shocking aberration indicate the collapse of decency and the rise of communism? Or was he perhaps a member of the lower orders impersonating an officer? In fact, the cruiser had run out of fresh water to wash with, and Commander Navarro had been racing pillar to post for four days without a change of clothes. This loyal officer had taken an emergency flight from the Ministry of Marine in Madrid; narrowly escaped execution by rebels in Cartagena and, once freed, had sailed via Tangier to Gibraltar, where he was finally able to take his socks off.

The Francoist rebel command were trying to recapture the narrative by making the legitimate Spanish government seem illegitimate. Colonel Emilio March, the Francoist Military Commandant of Algeciras, sent a mildly threatening message to the Acting Governor of Gibraltar, Brigadier Brooks:

Governments can treat with warships of other nations if they are legal and their officers genuine. But if they are prisoners on board or they have been shot, the ships should be considered as pirate ships and should not be helped in any way … [T]here may be consequences.

Brooks later telexed the Colonial Office in London about the Republican ships, telling them that he had received a visit from a rather junior officer, Lieutenant José Paz, claiming to be the acting chief of staff, accompanied by the Consul of the Spanish Republic. Paz, who was not in uniform, admitted there were very few officers on board his ship: ‘they had left when the trouble broke out.’ The Republican flotilla had then applied to the local commercial bunkering firms for coal and fuel oil, the Gibraltar firms had refused to supply them without reference to their principals in London. Meanwhile the Spanish government oiler Ophir was supplying the flotilla with five hundred tons, enough for them to get to Málaga. Brooks thought the Republican ships wanted ‘to use Gibraltar if possible as a fuelling and supply base and to bring the neighbouring towns under fire’. He pointed out that General Franco in Morocco had warned that ‘he will be forced to fight the Government Fleet with his aeroplanes and that British ships in the straits should carry distinctive signs in order to prevent mistakes’. In view of this, Brooks asked the Republicans ‘to move their anchorage to the north end of the bay near the Spanish shore … I consider it is most desirable that this Fleet should depart from British waters as soon as possible and be discouraged from returning.’

All the Gibraltar bunkering firms were situated in the central street called Irish Town and almost all refused to sell fuel to the Republican ships. (Were they ‘squared’ by the rebels? Or the Gibraltar government? Possibly; no evidence remains.) Their representative, Lionel Imossi, claimed that he told Lieutenant José Paz there would be no coal unless imprisoned officers were handed over to the judicial authorities; Paz denied that he held any prisoners. Official Gibraltar was suspicious and fearful of the Republican sailors, with the Royal Navy in particular seeing revolutionary fervour as a dangerous contagion. Acting Governor Brooks soon sent a cable that is further evidence of shallow analysis.

Official Gibraltar did not ask the right questions and made no mention of the salient fact that the Franco-favouring rebel officers were disobeying the orders of the legitimate Spanish government. The spectre of ‘Communism’ was enough to frighten the class-and caste-bound British, horrified by scruffy crews and breaches of decorum. They also believed that naval officers were imprisoned below decks, murdered and thrown overboard, perhaps even, as the anti-communist Francis Yeats-Brown later alleged, ‘crucified … on the quarter-deck’.

The Royal Navy – the Senior Service – had always feared insurrection from below and repressed it fiercely. ‘What are the traditions of the navy, pray?’ Churchill is said to have expostulated: ‘Rum, sodomy and the lash!’ The late King George V, most punctilious of naval monarchs, once rebuked Claude Elliott, the head master of Eton, for allowing Eisenstein’s 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin to be shown at the school. Told that it was good for the boys to see new cinematic techniques like montage even if they did come from Soviet Russia, the king said, ‘Nonsense! It is certainly not good for the boys to witness mutinies, especially naval mutinies.’

In the end, no Gibraltarian oil or coal was sold. The Republican ships got just enough fuel from their own oil tanker to make it to Málaga.

*

The Admiralty Tower at Gibraltar was alive with signals as the Royal Navy was galvanised for action all round the coast of Spain. From Vigo in northwest Spain, far off from the British Embassy and the Foreign Office, came a request for a fast warship to protect ‘British lives and property in case needed. All business closed since July 13th. General strike now in progress and disturbances at San Pedro hourly. Town and district virtually in hands of proletariat.’

The Royal Navy’s policy was to rescue all Britons and other respectable persons from the chaos caused by dangerously overexcited foreigners. Rear Admiral James Murray Pipon at Gibraltar committed the S-class destroyer HMS Shamrock to evacuations from Málaga, Marbella and then Sevilla; he sent HMS Whitehall to Tangier, the ageing sloop HMS Cormorant to patrol the Eastern Beach of Gibraltar, and the dockyard tug Energetic to pick up 130 British nationals and various foreigners and take them away from Algeciras.

All through the Mediterranean, screws were churning: six B-class destroyers arrived from Malta to help; the battle cruiser HMS Repulse brought the 2nd Battalion Gordon Highlanders at high speed back from Egypt, and after disembarking them in Gibraltar on the 25th, headed for Palma de Mallorca to evacuate over five hundred foreigners. Basilisk went to Almería, Boadicea to Alicante, Devonshire to Palma, Keith to Valencia, Keppel and Whitshed to Vigo, and five more British warships to Barcelona.

The reporter George Steer was sardonic about the evacuations, which he witnessed in the autonomous Basque country in northwest Spain even though it had remained orderly: ‘There was no social revolution at Bilbao … political murder and destruction of property (the very thought of which was horrible to the Basque farmer-bourgeoisie) were suppressed at once.’ Nevertheless, Steer said, foreign navies, including the British Royal Navy, were insisting that all their citizens be immediately evacuated, which in effect helped the Francoist rebels, because the loss of foreign technicians, businessmen, bankers, managers, etc., caused severe economic damage to the Republic. Steer wrote in his 1938 book The Tree of Gernika that ‘the official naval attitude to the Civil War was summed up colourfully in the Official Gazette of Gibraltar, which described the Spanish Government with which its own Government maintained normal diplomatic relations as – The Reds.’ Indeed, ‘Malaga in Hands of Reds’ and ‘Warships Turn Red’ were the front-page headlines of the Gibraltar Chronicle and Official Gazette on Tuesday 21 and Wednesday 22 July 1936.*

Gibraltar’s prejudices distorted London’s policy towards Spain because the British government had nowhere else to get its information. The best British correspondent in Spain, Henry Buckley of the Daily Telegraph, pointed out in his exemplary book The Life and Death of the Spanish Republic (1940) that British officials were absent from Madrid. The ambassador, Sir Henry Chilton, was away summering at San Sebastián with the corps diplomatique; the British consul, George Ogilvie-Forbes, was on holiday for a whole month until the middle of August. No one was en poste throughout to tell HMG what was really going on.

In Madrid and Barcelona, an ill-armed citizenry had managed to thwart the military uprising against a democratic state, and there was still a moderate, middle-class Spanish government, however precarious: Don Manuel Azaña was president and Don José Giral, the bespectacled pharmaceutical chemistry professor, was still prime minister. Henry Buckley’s view was that the British government did not want to know in precise detail what was happening, they were just waiting (and hoping?) for Franco to win. The reporter thought the complete lack of ‘fresh and accurate material’ from diplomats, analysts and ‘unofficial observers of insight and experience’ during the dramatic events of mid-July set the entire course of subsequent British policy, which began in ignorance. Carl von Clausewitz said that the first and ‘the most far-reaching act of judgement’ that commanders have to make is to establish what kind of war is being embarked on. Calling Franco’s rebellion ‘the Spanish Civil War’ was a category error. The file that the Gibraltar government started on the events did at least have a more accurate title: ‘Military Rising in Spain, July 1936’.

England’s rulers assumed their class interest was the same thing as the national interest. By standing back, refusing to help or arm another democracy, they yielded the ground to totalitarian powers to fight their proxy wars. Henry Buckley regretted that British Empire policy was shaped too much by prejudice. ‘Well, I suppose all empires grow old,’ Buckley concluded. ‘But it is not much fun to be a young man in an old empire.’

*

Andalusia in 1936 was as unequal as Ireland in 1836. Five per cent of the landowners in some provinces had three quarters of the total agricultural wealth, and the landless got a few pesetas a day for seasonal work. This bred anger and resentment, and when the serious shooting started in the summer of 1936, it allowed the different classes to start murdering each other in a furia española.

One of the first buildings set on fire in Málaga in July 1936 was the Casa Larios, the headquarters of Málaga’s principal industries. Its reduction to an ‘ugly, smoking shell’ was witnessed by Gamel Woolsey, the melancholy poet from South Carolina who had fallen in love with another writer, Gerald Brenan. In July 1936 she was happily living with him in their thick-walled old farmhouse in the village of Churriana, south of Málaga on the road to Torremolinos – a property Brenan had bought from Don Carlos Crooke Larios.

Gerald Brenan, a self-described rebel against middle-class English life, knew and loved Spain and the Spanish people. After winning the Military Cross as a captain in the Great War, he left England ‘to discover new and more breathable atmospheres’ in Spain, an experience memorably evoked in his book South from Granada. Brenan’s account of the social and political background of the civil war, The Spanish Labyrinth (1943), is a classic which the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper said ‘made everything else written on Spain seem pitifully shoddy’.

Gamel Woolsey’s own book, Death’s Other Kingdom: a Spanish village on the eve of the Civil War (1939), tracks the emotional and psychological effects of fanaticism and political murder on ordinary life. Looking at the torched Casa Larios, she wondered if arson wasn’t ‘a vice of the nature of an erotic crime’: rape on the grand scale. ‘The mad faces in the streets of Málaga seemed drugged with the lust of burning; and all the queer creatures of the gutter and the cellar, the twisted, the perverse and the maimed had crawled up into the light of the flames.’†

Ingenious methods were used to rescue people from ‘Red’ Málaga. The Ruggeroni brothers, Angel and Ernest, who acted as the Mexican consul and vice consul in Gibraltar, used blank Mexican passports to help give the persecuted new identities. They usually took the bogus passports off people when they got to the Rock, but when someone travelled further with one, Mexico closed the scheme down.

As humane, educated people, Woolsey and Brenan felt it was their duty to protect their neighbour, Carlos Crooke Larios, from roaming Anarchist death squads looking for any ‘Fascists’ to shoot. Brenan described Don Carlos as full of optimism and good cheer, but with a cruel and destructive streak. They hid him with his sons in their house for a month even though he was a most annoying and dangerous guest. During a Francoist air raid on Málaga he was seen jumping about on the roof and shouting ‘¡Viva España!’ which could have led to the whole household being shot by a renegade leftist camarilla. Eventually, with the help of a Spanish Liberal called Don Francisco, Brenan got Don Carlos the right papers to board an American warship evacuating people to Gibraltar.

Ten days later, Brenan and Woolsey followed him into exile. Among the rich Spanish refugees on the Rock they found Don Carlos Crooke Larios again, now working for General Franco’s intelligence service.

I asked him when he returned to Malaga to protect Don Francisco, to whom he owed his life and who was in any case not a Red but a harmless liberal, trapped in a situation which he hated.

‘He’ll be shot all right,’ Don Carlos answered breezily. ‘We are going to shoot everyone who worked for the Reds.’

On Wednesday 22 July, between 4.30 and 7.00 p.m., Franco’s insurgent aircraft flew over the strait from Ceuta in Africa to bomb the five Republican warships that were anchored at the north end of Gibraltar Bay. The Fortress told the War Office that the Republican ships ‘engaged aircraft actively with all available guns. Several unexploded shells and many fragments fell in Gibraltar but little damage, no casualties. Situation complicated by presence of Spanish Government aircraft flying low and dropping bomb on neutral ground and machine-gunning troops in La Linea. Strongest possible protest lodged with both sides.’ Some shrapnel fell on the roof of the Rock Hotel and other bits went right over the top of the Rock and landed on Catalan Bay village.

Gibraltar’s Colonial Secretary, Colonel Beattie, addressed ‘the strongest possible protest against this outrage and contravention of international law’ to the Republican Commander Fernando Navarro on the Libertad, reminding him that his ships were ‘admitted to port only for supplies and they must not jeopardize life by actions of this kind’. If any similar incidents occurred, the ships would have to leave. In a gesture towards even-handedness, he also informed Navarro that ‘a protest is being lodged with the [Francoist] authorities responsible for the despatch of the aircraft’.

Captain Navarro replied straight away:

General Franco also responded to the protest note, sending an insincere telegram via the Algeciras commandant Colonel March to the Colonial Secretary, to let ‘His Excellency the Governor of that Fortress’ know just how ‘extraordinarily’ annoyed he was by bombs falling in the wrong places. Franco would issue ‘the strictest orders’ against any repetition. Nevertheless, any shrapnel that fell was all the fault of ‘the state of anarchism of the Spanish fleet’. The message ended with a stiff reassurance: ‘It is the greatest interest and desire of General Franco to avoid by all means any inconvenience, danger and juridical infringement to the British nation and its inhabitants …’

Over the telephone from Algeciras, the rebel Colonel March continued to argue that Republican ships were effectively pirate ships. He thought ‘the proper thing’ for British naval forces to do was to disarm such warships and intern their crews in the fortress, citing the authority of General Franco as the ‘de facto chief of the Spanish government, since his forces have possession of ¾ of Spanish territory, and there is in fact no government in our capital’.

Around midnight on Wednesday 22 July, the Republican flotilla left Gibraltar and headed to Málaga for fuel. Franco’s planes repeatedly bombed all ships in the strait. At 10 a.m. on Thursday, a rebel plane dropped a bomb near the British destroyer HMS Beagle, and around noon the civilian Gibel Dersa ferry was bombed at the entrance to Tangier harbour. HMS Whitehall opened fire, and the aircraft went away. When the Gibel Dersa was bombed again on the way back to Gibraltar at 18.20, George Gaggero, the chairman of Bland Line, protested by telegram. Franco’s disingenuous, comicopera response was to award the Gibel Dersa’s captain, José Silva García, the Cross of Military Merit.

* When George Orwell visited Gibraltar en route to Morocco on 7 and 8 September 1938, he described the paper thus: ‘Local English daily, Gibraltar Chronicle & Official Gazette, 8 pages of which 2½ advertisements, 1d. Current number, 31,251. More or less pro-Fascist.’

† Just before his evacuation by British destroyer to Gibraltar in July 1936, the young Laurie Lee felt something similar after the villagers burned down the pseudo-Moorish casino in Almuñecar, ‘an air of orgiastic gloom … a sour and desolate sadness’.