At La Línea, just over the way from Gibraltar, on Sunday 27 February 1938, the Francoist General Queipo de Llano provoked controversy by arriving, according to the Daily Herald, with an escort of goosestepping German soldiers in Reichswehr uniforms, and made an inflammatory speech at a mass rally with loudspeakers pointing towards the Rock. According to the Daily Telegraph, the garrulous Spanish soldier declared: ‘We shall soon incorporate Gibraltar in our motherland. Then Gibraltar will be free from the grip of the smuggler bandits who now control it.’ A correspondent of The Times in Bayonne picked up a broadcast from Seville on 28 February which said that ‘General Queipo de Llano, in a speech, had referred to Gibraltar as having been stolen from Spain by treason’, adding that it would ‘soon be back in the hands of the Mother Country’.

Nationalist Spain hurried to whitewash over what seemed like a diplomatic gaffe. The Duke of Alba, General Franco’s agent in London, went to the Foreign Office to protest ‘in the strongest terms against what he called “the misrepresentation by irresponsible correspondents in Gibraltar” of a speech given by General Queipo de Llano on the future of Gibraltar’. The duke said such reports were entirely false; the general had only said that Spain should always be strong, and that her moments of weakness had always had fatal consequences for her ‘as happened in the War of Succession which deprived her of Gibraltar, and again now in the case of Bolshevist designs to acquire control of Spain’.

In reply to British government queries, Governor Harington also maintained that Queipo de Llano had not said what he was reported as saying, citing the British vice consul of La Línea as a witness, together with several prominent Gibraltarian citizens of the merchant class. He added that the speech was at the swearing-in ceremony of five hundred new NCOs at the infantry barracks in San Roque, but chose not to mention that the goosestepping German soldiers who escorted Queipo de Llano were the German military instructors at the barracks, who were training thousands of Spaniards for combat, using German weapons, ammunition and equipment.

The wife of Major General Sir Walter Maxwell Scott, attending the event as Queipo de Llano’s personal guest, sent indignant telegrams to the press baron Lord Beaverbrook and his Daily Express, complaining about ‘disgraceful Red propaganda continually coming from Gibraltar’ and Queipo de Llano himself dismissed the negative reports of his speech as ‘a typically foul Marxist trick’.

*

In early March 1938, the Royal Navy held their customary spring naval exercises off Gibraltar and General Harington had sixteen British admirals to dine at Government House, recording it with an official photo. In the black-and-white picture, the six senior admirals are seated with the governor and the other ten stand behind, all in black tie and medals, the elite flag ranks from the Home and Mediterranean Fleets gathered at the Rock. James Somerville, Rear Admiral (Destroyers), and Andrew Browne Cunningham, Vice Admiral (Battlecruisers), both from the Mediterranean Fleet, were leading the opposed sides in the war games; in the photograph they are sitting together on the left. Next to them is Admiral Sir Roger Backhouse, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, and next to him the head of the whole Royal Navy, the First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Ernle Chatfield. On the other side of Harington sits Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet (who would become First Sea Lord in June 1939), and Vice Admiral Charles Kennedy-Purvis of the 1st Cruiser Squadron.

At dinner they discussed the extent of the threat Fascist Italy posed to the Mediterranean. Cargo ships of all nationalities trading to Republican ports had been bombed by Italian aeroplanes and sunk by the Italian submarine fleet (then the largest in the world), although the Non-Intervention Committee always pretended the attackers were of ‘unknown’ origin. Following the Italian submarine Iride’s attack on the British destroyer HMS Havock, Anthony Eden had organised a conference at Nyon to end submarine warfare. As part of the elaborate diplomatic make-believe, Italy the aggressor was later formally invited to play a part in the peacekeeping force.

The Spanish Civil War was not a happy period for the Royal Navy. ‘How I loathe this damn Spain and all the doings here,’ Admiral Somerville wrote to his wife. ‘It is all indescribably filthy.’ Policing Non-Intervention and enforcing the Nyon Agreement’s interdiction of submarine warfare meant too many time-wasting tasks for the fleet. The Royal Navy was involved in protecting British merchant ships entering and leaving ports from the Bay of Biscay to the Costa Brava, in blockade work – stopping and searching for contraband and smuggled weaponry – evacuating civilians, minesweeping, and seeing off threats by Nationalist warships, hostile aircraft or submarines that were torpedoing ships, as well as simply flying the flag in trouble spots. Valencia and Barcelona were grateful when a British capital ship put in, because the Italians would not bomb them while the British ships were in port. Deployment on all these tedious tasks meant that the Admiralty could not refit and repair the ships, a real concern for those who wished to rearm while the politicians and diplomats bought time.

One unpleasant but necessary job for the Royal Navy was rescuing crews of sunken ships. On 6 March 1938, while the combined British fleet exercise was under way, there was a Spanish sea battle off Cape Palos near Cartagena. The Republican destroyer Lepanto, which had once limped damaged into Gibraltar, fired two torpedoes which hit the Nationalist heavy cruiser Baleares on the starboard side, detonating the forward magazine. (British rumour had it that a Republican who was once a torpedo rating in the Royal Navy fired the torpedoes.)

Two British destroyers on Non-Intervention patrol, HMS Kempenfelt and HMS Boreas, came to the rescue of the Baleares in the early hours of the morning. Captain Rhoderick McGrigor tried to get Kempenfelt close enough so men could jump across from the cruiser’s quarterdeck, but sharp girders and uplifted propellers made the manoeuvre impossible and Baleares went down at 5.08 a.m., taking Admiral Manuel Vierna and 765 officers and men with her. Kempenfelt and Boreas immediately moved into the mass of figures struggling in the black waters and British officers and men went overboard to help rescue Spanish survivors. It was dark and cold, and thick engine oil choked men’s lungs and made hands, ropes and boats slimy and slippery. Nevertheless, they saved over 440 Nationalist marineros.

*

Events in Europe were moving fast. On 11 March 1938, the British Embassy in Berlin learned that German troops and police were advancing through Munich eastwards towards Austria. Colonel Mason-MacFarlane went to see the Director of Military Intelligence at the German High Command to find out what was going on. A senior staff officer insisted the Britisher was misinformed. Mason-MacFarlane did not believe him and set off on a recce, soon finding himself among armed police and SS moving towards Austria in buses, vans, lorries and miscellaneous requisitioned vehicles. Adolf Hitler’s demand on the first page of Mein Kampf was finally being fulfilled: ‘German-Austria must return to the great German mother country … One blood demands one Reich.’

Meanwhile, Kenneth Strong was summoned to the German High Command where an embarrassed staff officer explained that Mason-MacFarlane had been wrongly briefed and there was indeed ‘a strong demonstration’ on the Austrian border to prevent disorders ‘of Marxist origin’ spreading into Germany. Mason-MacFarlane made his way to Vienna the next day. At Aspern airport, Ju 52s full of German troops were landing at the rate of one a minute; the attaché had to duck down to avoid being seen by the German Director of Military Intelligence. The Austrians, like the British, drove on the left side of the road, but the German SS were ignoring that, going helter-skelter on the right. Finally, the German military attaché in Vienna, General von Muff, gave Mason-MacFarlane, an old friend, a full account of what was going on. It was der Anschluss, the ‘connecting up’ of Austria with Nazi Germany.

In Vienna that evening, the American CBS reporter William Shirer, temporarily forbidden to broadcast on the day of the annexation, got caught up on the Kärntnerstrasse among crowds singing Nazi songs. He noticed Austrian policemen now wore swastika armbands. ‘Young toughs were heaving paving blocks into the windows of the Jewish shops. The crowd roared with delight.’ Soon elderly Jewish people, including rich women in their fur coats, would be forced to clean the streets on their hands and knees while ‘good Germans’ spat on them. Eleven hundred Viennese Jews killed themselves after the Anschluss.

Europe was shocked by the annexation. ‘Violence has triumphed,’ said Le Figaro; ‘Austria has lost her sovereignty,’ said Le Journal de Genève; ‘All the dreams of collective guarantees are illusory,’ said Gazeta Polska. In Britain, the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post deplored ‘the mailed fist’ and the Manchester Guardian said, ‘No propaganda can disguise and no ignorance fail to understand so unconcealed a threat of armed force.’

Mason-MacFarlane watched Austrian-born Adolf Hitler drive from his home-town of Linz towards Vienna: ‘There was something terribly sinister about that string of shining black Mercedes, rolling along inexorably … with the impassive figure with the black cowlick and toothbrush moustache gazing fixedly ahead and taking no account whatever of his surroundings.’ ‘Easy rifle-shot,’ Mason-MacFarlane remarked to Ewan Butler, The Times’s correspondent in Berlin, looking out from his drawing-room window to where they were building the reviewing stand for Hitler’s fiftieth birthday parade on 20 April 1939. ‘I could pick the bastard off from here easy as winking, and what’s more I’m thinking of doing it.’

Ewan Butler demurred politely on moral grounds. ‘Besides, think of the backlash when they discovered he’d been potted by a British officer!’

‘Oh I know … I’d be finished in every sense of the word. Still, I doubt if they’d declare war, and with that lunatic out of the way we might be able to get some sense into things.’

Many others felt the same way. George Orwell, reviewing Mein Kampf, said ‘I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him.’ Geoffrey Household wrote of Hitler: ‘The man had to be dealt with, and I began to think how much I would love to kill him.’ Household dramatised those thoughts – ‘my feeling for Nazi Germany had the savagery of a personal vendetta’ – in his classic 1939 pursuit thriller, Rogue Male, in which the failed assassin of an unnamed European tyrant escapes from his torturers and is hunted down, deep in the English countryside. In another 1939 novel, The Man Who Killed Hitler, by ‘Anonymous’, the maddened Austrian psychiatrist hero only succeeds in murdering – with a heavy bust of Hindenburg – one of the Führer’s four doubles.*

*

One fatality of the torpedoing of the Nationalist cruiser Baleares was Fernando, Marqués de Povar, Talia Larios’s husband. In mournful respect, the Royal Calpe Hunt cancelled the meet on 10 March. A congregation of eight hundred attended the memorial service for the Baleares crewmen, arranged by the Anti-Communist Association of Gibraltar, an offshoot of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, headed by Luis Bertuchi. A Mass was held in the Sacred Heart parish church, up behind the Garrison Library, on 26 March 1938, presided over by Luciano López Ferrer, the Nationalist sub-agent on the Rock, and his deputy Leopold Yome, with the Italian and German consuls sitting just behind. The right-wing Bishop Fitzgerald and his confederate, Father Paul Murphy of the Christian Brothers, were there among prominent Gibraltarian citizens and businessmen.

Afterwards, López Ferrer took the fascist salute from the crowd in Main Street outside the Catholic cathedral, and a small group of Gibraltarian fascists took a wreath across the frontier to La Línea to place it at la cruz de los caídos, the Nationalists’ Cross of the Fallen.

The left in Gibraltar were not going to take this sort of thing lying down, and held their own large rally five days later. Bishop Fitzgerald tried to get the Colonial Secretary to ban it on the grounds that the mob might attack his Catholic churches. The Transport and General Workers’ Union put out a manifesto declaring the support of Gibraltar’s workers for Spanish democracy, condemning both the moneyed classes and British colonial officers for their support of the Nationalists. Three thousand people gathered at Gibraltar’s Assembly Rooms (today the site of the Queen’s Cinema and Theatre) where Spanish Republican flags were pinned to the walls and the ‘Internationale’ was played. The councillor and union man Agustín Huart gave the final speech, throwing down the gauntlet to the right-wingers on the Rock: ‘If General Franco wins the war with the aid of Italy and Germany, where would we stand, and which steps would the fascists of Gibraltar take, they who call themselves British?’

The question went to the heart of Gibraltarian identity; the right had no monopoly on patriotism and loyalty to the Crown. The elaborate service for the drowned Baleares sailors was a deliberate provocation, Agustín Huart continued. Where was the church service for the ten Gibraltarian seamen who died in January on the Gibraltarregistered SS Endymion, torpedoed by the Nationalist submarine General Sanjurjo? How come the police arrested workers for using the clenched-fist salute when no one did anything about the fascist salute outside the church? And what about the rich, ‘who would not lower themselves to talk to the working man but would do so with pride to the Marquesa de Povar’? The meeting ended in a blaze of leftist patriotism. People sang both the ‘Marseillaise’ and ‘God Save the King’ with clenched fists aloft.

The widow Talia Larios, la Marquesa viuda de Povar, suffered a further blow when her father, Don Pablo Larios Sánchez de Piña, Marqués de Marzales, died just a few weeks after her husband, at home in Algeciras on Sunday 3 April 1938. A launch brought his coffin to Stone Jetty at Bayside in Gibraltar and the Joint Master of the Royal Calpe Hunt was buried in the family vault at Gibraltar’s North Front Cemetery on the same day. Governor Harington was there, with members of the hunt in full hunting uniform. The Pablo Larios Memorial Fund was set up to keep hunting going, and ex-King Alfonso XIII sent £5 from his £35 million fortune.

*

The Defence Security Officer in Gibraltar was Captain A. E. Airy, now assisted by Staff Sergeant Holden, confidential clerk in charge of the files and index. Airy had to liaise with MI6 about foreign espionage from Spain or Tangier, but he was keeping an eye on the Marquesa de Povar on behalf of MI5, who had first opened a personal file (PF. 458/8) on her in June 1937, interested in her links to German intelligence. Airy told them in a letter dated 19 June 1938 that ‘any general Intelligence about Gibraltar collected locally, including local defences, details of Warships, etc., is freely exchanged between Germany, Italy and Nationalist Spain’. A month later Airy reported to MI5: ‘I know for a fact that the German instructors at the Military School at San Roque, for instance, have been to her people’s house in Algeciras.’

Airy described the Marquesa de Povar as ‘a very jealous woman’ with a lot of information about British officers ‘at her finger-tips’ which she would readily share with Nationalist and foreign intelligence officers. She and her attractive young aunt, Isabel Fernández Villavicencio y Crooke, Marquesa de Nájera, had been making a ‘dead set’ at the junior officers of the Welsh Guards, recently arrived on the Rock. In July 1938, as British MPs were asking more questions about the German guns facing Gibraltar, Airy was following up a British officer (well known to the ‘exceedingly friendly’ pair of marquesas) who had gone to Casablanca to see a Dane called Karl or Charles Cabos, believed to be working for German intelligence in French Morocco.

The suspect British officer was revealed to be Second Lieutenant Richard C. Sharples of the 1st Battalion, Welsh Guards.† He was questioned at GHQ in Gibraltar and his innocent explanation was that Cabos knew his father – both had worked for the Shell Oil Company – and had invited him over to Casablanca on local leave. Sharples said he had been lavishly entertained but had told Cabos nothing of interest or importance.

Airy made further enquiries about the two women: he discovered the Marquesa de Povar held a Spanish (Nationalist) passport, no. 220, issued in Cádiz in June 1937 and renewed for one year by the Spanish (Nationalist) Consulate in Gibraltar in June 1938. She lived in a large flat in Gibraltar and had a house near Algeciras, but her resident’s permit had not been traced. She had contracted heavy debts in Gibraltar and was ‘thought to be financially embarrassed’. Airy also recorded that her aunt, the Marquesa de Nájera, was the guest of a British resident of Gibraltar and was believed to be sleeping with the Marquis Cittadini Cesi, former Italian consul in Tangier, now temporarily Italian consul in Gibraltar, and an associate of the Italian spy Dante Brancolini. The marquesas were giving their all for Franco. Todo por la patria, as the saying went.

*

In September 1938, the Czech crisis blew up. The Third Reich bullied its way into the so-called Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, ten thousand square miles of territory in Bohemia and Moravia where most of Czechoslovakia’s three and a half million German-speaking inhabitants lived. This 23 per cent of the population listened solely to the German radio station RRG, Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, run since 1933 by the Propaganda Minister, Dr Joseph Goebbels, a man who saw radio as the most modern and important way to influence the masses. ‘While others build up troops and organise armies, we want to mobilise the army of public opinion. The army of spiritual unification.’

The Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg in September 1938 was widely broadcast on radio. Goebbels denounced the communist menace in Czechoslovakia, saying that ‘Bolshevism is the rude child of democracy’. Field Marshal Göring boasted that Germany had never been stronger: tremendous fortifications in the west were overflown by the planet’s most powerful air force, yet ‘We love peace more than anyone in the world,’ he declared. ‘The only countries working for peace in Europe are Germany and Italy.’ Hitler also spoke, and his broadcast was listened to in dread by millions across the continent. In a truculent and paranoid speech, he attacked the Versailles Treaty that created Czechoslovakia, saying it had denied 3.5 million Germans living there their right to self-determination. These brothers were being oppressed and tortured, and Hitler would no longer tolerate it. He drew a parallel with Palestine. ‘The poor Arabs are deserted and perhaps defenceless. The Germans of Czechoslovakia, however, are neither defenceless nor deserted.’ Encouraged by these words, German-speakers in Bohemia attacked Czech and Jewish property. Martial law was declared. Refugees fled to Silesia.

Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador, said in his memoir that he spent his time at the Nuremberg rally warning senior Nazis that ‘If Germany makes an aggressive attack on Czechoslovakia, France is in honour bound to come to the aid of the Czechs, and if France is engaged in war, Great Britain will inevitably be drawn in also.’ But he took a hint from Göring that personal diplomacy might help to avoid a conflagration. On 15 September 1938, Neville Chamberlain flew (the first time he had ever been in an aeroplane) from London to Munich and then took a train south to Berchtesgaden.

The Führer, in Nazi uniform at the top of the steps, gave his Hitlergrüss arm-salute. Chamberlain, dressed like an undertaker, his black umbrella hooked over his left arm, raised his homburg with his right hand and gave it a little wave. The British prime minister was eager to help persuade the Czechs to cede a chunk of territory peacefully to the Germans. Hitler promised not to attack while Chamberlain put pressure on Edvard Beneš, the Czechoslovak head of state, to give Germans in southern Czechoslovakia the right to secede.

Things got worse. The Poles and Hungarians wanted gobbets of Czechoslovakia too. Chamberlain flew to Cologne for a meeting on 22 September. He was put up in the Petersberg Hotel, which belonged to the man who owned Eau de Cologne. (The rooms had lavish displays of different bottles, which members of the British team discreetly pocketed for their wives.) Hitler was staying at the Dreesen Hotel on the other side of the river, tense and twitchy, living on his nerves. The German economy was in trouble, the generals were conspiring against him and he feigned terrifying tantrums to get his way. ‘Teppichfresser’ (‘Carpet-chewer’), muttered a German editor to the reporter William Shirer, referring to an incident where Hitler had rolled raging on the floor. Chamberlain patiently explained to Hitler that the French and the British had persuaded the Czechs to cede the Sudetenland to Germany without a plebiscite. It was to no avail. Hitler said it was no longer enough – ‘das geht nicht mehr’. German troops must occupy the Sudetenland straight away. Chamberlain flushed in shock; Hitler had moved the goal-posts once more.

The next day, the 23rd, Hitler produced a map with a great crescent of all the territory he wanted from Czechoslovakia drawn on it in thick blue crayon. If he did not get it by 28 September, he would invade. After Chamberlain gained a tiny concession – the deadline was pushed on three days to 1 October – he agreed to convey Hitler’s ultimatum/‘memorandum’ plus the map to the Czech government. The man who volunteered to take the documents by hand to Prague was the Berlin military attaché and future Governor of Gibraltar, Colonel Noel Mason-MacFarlane.

This was no easy task. The Czech frontier was closed and policed on both sides by jumpy men with guns. On the 23rd, Mason-MacFarlane flew in an elderly Breguet east from Cologne to Templehof airfield at Berlin, where he was met by a car with a driver and the Czech assistant military attaché. The three men drove fast to Zinnwald on the Czech border, arriving at dusk, but German border guards said the road was impassable, a fact confirmed by Czech frontier guards. Mason-MacFarlane sent the car and driver back to Dresden, telling him to return next morning. Meanwhile, Mason-MacFarlane and the Czech officer sat in the guard post and worked out a plan.

They could hear gunfire from the ‘Sudeten Free Corps’, hoping to ambush Czech patrols, but there was still a phone line open to Teplitz-Schönau, a few miles further inside Czechoslovakia, and the attaché rang the commanding officer of the regiment there to say that he and a British military attaché would be making their way on foot through the woods, bringing a vital document for delivery to Prague. Could he arrange for a car to meet them and get them to the capital? After two hours of scrambling in the dark sodden forest, where pro-Nazi vigilantes were roaming with guns, the two men, their clothes soaked and hands and faces bloody from bramble scratches and barbed wire, met a Czech picquet. They eventually drove to Prague on a cratered road, through many roadblocks. When he got to the British Legation at one in the morning, Mason-MacFarlane found they had given him up for lost and gone to bed. He handed over Hitler’s map and memorandum to the dressing-gowned ambassador and then got some sleep. Back at the German border next day he found the faithful driver waiting and a parade of eager Nazis – Army, SS and Freikorps – drawn up to salute der Englander for having helped der Führer in a dangerous mission. Mason-MacFarlane felt humiliated at being thanked for doing Hitler’s dirty work and slipped away as soon as possible.

Back in Berlin, Mason-MacFarlane learned the Czechs had rejected the ultimatum he had carried, and Europe was cascading towards war. The French mobilised half a million men and reaffirmed their military commitment to the Czechs. President Roosevelt and a clutch of South American leaders appealed for calm; the Pope asked the faithful to pray for peace.

*

British ‘precautionary measures’ on 25, 26 and 27 September 1938 included mobilising the fleet, distributing forty million gas masks, digging air-raid trenches in park flowerbeds, evacuating schoolchildren, instituting rationing, fixing food prices and sandbagging key London buildings against possible bombing. The Territorial anti-aircraft and coastal defence forces were called up, as well as the entire Auxiliary Air Force. The War Office instituted a new non-combatant organisation for women, the ATS, Auxiliary Territorial Service, to help the armed forces with cooking, clerking and driving. The Czech crisis galvanised the nation. The forty-eight-page HMSO booklet National Service, distributed free to every British household in January 1939, lists what Anthony James calls ‘an amazing array of organisations clearly already in place for offensive, defensive and support activities’, plus two pull-out, official-paid Application for Enrolment forms. By the summer of 1939, this would raise three hundred thousand men for the armed forces and 1.5 million people for civil defence.

In Gibraltar, security was tightened, especially as regarded the eight thousand people who crossed the frontier from Spain every day. Dockyard Identity Cards were issued to all civilian employees, the Defence Security Officer issued new Military Permits and the Civil Police carefully controlled other Spaniards entering Gibraltar daily to work. All cards carried a photograph of the bearer, and a duplicate went into the card index. Foreign visitors and tourists had to leave their passports at Four Corners or Waterport on arrival, to collect on leaving; these too were discreetly copied and filed.

Mason-MacFarlane had flown back to London to brief General Lord Gort, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and the entire Cabinet (with Neville Chamberlain not paying attention, but riffling unconcernedly through a pile of papers). After Mason-MacFarlane painted his gloomy picture of Czech morale, Alec Cadogan of the Foreign Office wrote crossly in his diary, ‘What does he know about it?’ Mason-MacFarlane felt the primary aim of HM Government was still to avoid war, at all costs, because the ill-equipped armed forces were not ready to fight.

At eight o’clock that night, 27 September, Neville Chamberlain took to the airwaves, using the medium of radio like Hitler, but in a very different tone. He spoke on the BBC Home and Empire Services, to ‘you, men and women of Britain and the Empire, and perhaps to others as well’, describing the letters of gratitude for his efforts and the prayers for his success that he and his wife had received:

Most of these letters have come from women – mothers or sisters of our own countrymen. But there are countless others besides, from France, from Belgium, from Italy, even from Germany, and it has been heartbreaking to read of the growing anxiety they reveal …

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing …

The next morning, Chamberlain was just telling the House of Commons that he was willing to make one final effort, when his speech was interrupted by the delivery of a letter from Herr Hitler, inviting the prime minister to meet him at Munich the next day, together with Signor Mussolini and Monsieur Daladier. This news provoked a storm of cheering.

Chamberlain flew out once again, this time to the Four Power conference – Britain, France, Germany and Italy – at the Nazi Brown House in Munich. The Czechoslovaks were not invited to discuss their own fate. On the same day, 29 September, the rolled-up canvas of Picasso’s Guernica arrived in London, care of the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief, to display the agonies of the casualties of Nazi bombing first at the New Burlington Galleries off Regent Street, and then at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in the East End (where the price of admission was a pair of boots for Spanish Republican soldiers).

In the early hours of 30 September, the Four Powers agreed that the Sudetenland would be ceded to Germany, Teschen to Poland and Ruthenia to Hungary. Seven million Czechs saw their country, only created two decades earlier by Britain and France at the Treaty of Versailles, dismembered by the same two countries, because their leaders thought yielding was more politic than fighting. The Munich agreement also doomed the hopes of the Spanish Republic to join Britain and France in an international war against totalitarianism.

Neville Chamberlain had another early morning meeting with Adolf Hitler and flew back to London waving a meaningless piece of paper with a bland declaration ‘symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again’. There were hysterical scenes in the capital, weeping, shouting crowds of people giving thanks that bloodshed was averted. The gaunt, sixty-nine-year-old prime minister was thrilled at his tumultuous reception, addressing the crowd outside No. 10 Downing Street as ‘my very good friends’, and saying: ‘I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds.’

When the more realistic French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier arrived back in France from Munich he thought the great crowds assembled were there to lynch him; their cheers and tears amazed him. ‘Ah, les cons!’ he exclaimed (delicately translated by the BBC as ‘These people are mad!’). Another Frenchman said that Munich offered the democracies all the relief of an urgent defecation, followed by the realisation that they had not managed to drop their trousers in time.

‘Isn’t this splendid?’ said Ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson to blackly depressed Mason-MacFarlane on the latter’s return to Berlin. ‘If only you soldiers can produce a plan to get the Czechs out of the Sudetenland and the Germans into it without a fight we shall have peace in Europe for ten years!’

Winston Churchill, however, in a superb jeremiad on 5 October, described the disastrous Munich agreement as ‘a total and unmitigated defeat’. All sides of the House of Commons howled him down.

*

That autumn, Edmund Ironside replaced Charles Harington as Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Gibraltar. He arrived with his wife and daughter aboard the SS Orford, the ship that had taken Haile Selassie to the UK, on 9 November 1938. General Ironside was met on the Rock with a ceremonial seventeen-gun salute at Ragged Staff steps, two honour guards in review order with medals, and a motor route lined with sailors, gunners and engineers smartly at attention. In the ballroom of Government House, the Chief Justice administered the oaths of allegiance and office and Ironside received the keys to the city. Among the speeches of ‘hearty welcome’ was one (‘following an ancient and pleasant custom’) from the Managing Board of the Hebrew Community of Gibraltar, who pointed out that the Jews were:

… among the first in point of time to have become residents of this Colony under British Rule and are second to none in their unswerving loyalty to all you represent … Your Excellency will always find this community individually or as a body, ready and willing to cooperate, wholeheartedly and unstintingly, towards everything that might be needed for the welfare of the Empire, in general, and of Gibraltar, in particular.

How much better to be a Jew in Gibraltar than in Germany! That very date, 9 November 1938, marked the start of Kristallnacht, the violent two-day Nazi pogrom in which the windows of 7500 Jewish shops were smashed, some four hundred German Jews were killed, thousands more beaten and abused, thirty thousand locked up or sent to concentration camps, and over a thousand synagogues burned. Kenneth Strong, once the DSO in Gibraltar and now the assistant British military attaché in Berlin, worked near the British Passport Control Office. He recalled seeing ‘a long line of distressed Jews, weeping, waiting, hoping and begging to be given passports to leave Germany. They grabbed at me as I passed, old men and women, young children, all desperate to get out of Germany.’

Ironside’s initial brief from the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, John Gort, was to prepare to be commander-in-chief for the entire Mediterranean area, which forced him to take the big strategic view. He saw clearly from the world map that Britain could ‘not afford to give up this Mediterranean route. We need it as an Imperial artery.’ The Middle East had to be reinforced, with reserves of stores in case of trouble. He also saw that ‘None of our Imperial stations such as Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Alexandria and Haifa is safe – or shall I say immune? – from heavy air attack in the early stages of a war with Italy and Germany.’

One glaring fact was that Gibraltar itself had no airfield. The RAF detachment relied on Fairey seaplanes with buoyancy floats touching down on the waters of Gibraltar Bay. A system of ‘Emergency Landings Only’ on the grass racecourse was jealously policed by the old buffers of the Gibraltar Jockey Club and was hardly the ideal situation for a modern air force. The racecourse on the sandy isthmus north of Devil’s Tower was the only place on the peninsula where an aerodrome could go, but Foreign Office lawyers were worried about the legal ownership of this strip of terrain, as it was not actually specified in the Treaty of Utrecht, and the Spanish were (with justice) complaining about encroachment from the Gibraltar side. The working agreement with Spain had been that only temporary buildings, such as tents for sick people during epidemics, could ever go up there; by tradition the ground was reserved for parks, sports and recreational facilities only.

Ironside started cracking the whip. The Colonial Office had approved a budget of £500 a year to set up an anti-aircraft unit, but Ironside told the War Office in February 1939 that should war break out, he wanted a locally recruited Gibraltar Defence Force of nearly four hundred men, with anti-aircraft, artillery, signals, transport and medical sections. In 1939, however, there was not enough money for this as well as the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) that Ironside had determined were needed. To protect the civilian population against bombing he instituted the building of a series of ‘Ironside Air Raid Shelters’. Right in the middle of town, City Council of Gibraltar workers dug up the entire piazza of Commercial Square to make an underground reinforced-concrete shelter for many hundreds. The square was resurfaced afterwards, but the market did not return and the ugly concrete entrances remained as a reminder of the brutalism of modern war.

*

The Marquesa de Povar, clad in widow’s weeds, was helping Nationalist intelligence with even greater determination in revenge for her husband’s death. When the damaged Republican government destroyer José Luis Diez arrived in Gibraltar for repairs, there was a flurry of activity by other Nationalist agents too, like the Spanish naval intelligence officer Fausto Saavedra, Marqués de Viana, hoping either to sabotage the destroyer for good or to make sure she did not get away. The Yome brothers, the Burgos delegate López Ferrer, his plain-clothes policeman, Horacio Soler, and the clerk Chicluna kept a twenty-four-hour watch on the Republican destroyer. When the José Luis Diez did escape from Gibraltar at 1 a.m. on 30 December, the Marquesa de Povar was said to be one of those who fired rockets (from, reportedly, the Royal Gibraltar Yacht Club) to alert Nationalist naval patrols. After a sharp firefight with the Nationalist gunboat Calvo Sotelo and the minelayers Júpiter and Vulcano, the Republican destroyer was run aground off the eastern fishing village of Catalan Bay, where several misdirected shells landed and small-arms fire ricocheted. Gibraltar Police Constable Joseph Baglietto received a medal for saving citizens in this chaos, even though he himself was bleeding copiously from a jagged lump of shrapnel that struck him on the left breast, narrowly missing his heart.

A few days later, in January 1939, the editor of the Gibraltar Chronicle received a vigorous letter from a group of Spanish Nationalists:

On 27 January 1939, the Marquesa de Povar was among those who celebrated the fall of Republican Barcelona to Franco’s forces with a drunken party at the ‘Burgos Offices’, the Nationalist subagency at 2–4 College Lane, just where the narrow street curves west off Main Street, opposite the offices of El Calpense newspaper. With the windows open, the Spanish and Gibraltarian guests inside sang triumphant Nationalist songs while an angry pro-Republican crowd crammed the street outside. The Francoists taunted them with slogans shouted down from the windows. ‘Un, dos, tres … ¡Barcelona nuestra es!’ (‘One, two, three … Barcelona belongs to me!’) A man in a Guardia Civil uniform gave the fascist salute, and there were vivas for Franco, Hitler, Italia and Alemania, which agitated the crowd even more. Then the overexcited Marquesa de Povar shouted from the window, ‘¡Muera Inglaterra!’ (‘Death to England!’). The crowd boiled over and only the police with truncheons stopped them battering down the thick door and storming the place. There were some fights as the guests departed, but most of the crowd outside left to follow a Gibraltarian called Richard Balloqui, waving a Union Jack, just north along Main Street to El Martillo, the Commercial Square. Balloqui then asked the ‘brothers’ to go home, without shouting and making more noise, in a touching declaration of loyalty to the crown: ‘We are all British subjects and very proud to be, God Bless our King. We are all working-class people, and know how to behave ourselves, and defend our flag, that flag, that we are under, and has been insulted by the bad fascists.’

The Spanish Republic was dying. In freezing February 1939, the Republican political leaders – Aguirre, Azaña, Companys, Martínez Barrio, Negrín – and thousands of refugees were escaping across the snowy Pyrenees from Catalonia into France, while seventy Condor Legion aircraft bombed and strafed their columns and convoys on road and rail. On 27 February 1939, ‘a day of disgrace and folly’ as Ivan Maisky called it in his diary, London and Paris recognised the government of General Franco. The Soviet ambassador in London drily noted that it had taken Britain and France seven years to recognise the Soviet Union, but barely seven days to recognise General Franco. In London, Azcárate was forced to hand over the Spanish Embassy to the Francoist Duke of Alba. Nationalist troops entered Madrid. ‘The war is over,’ Count Ciano wrote in his diary on 28 March. ‘It is a new, formidable victory for Fascism, perhaps the greatest one so far.’ Spain joined Italy and Germany in the Anti-Comintern Pact. General Franco declared the civil war at an end on 1 April 1939.

Claude Bowers, the US ambassador to Spain for the previous six years, saw the democratic failure to arm and help the Spanish Republic as an act of fatal appeasement, and when he met President Roosevelt at the White House, Roosevelt admitted: ‘We have made a mistake; you have been right all along.’ Nevertheless, the pragmatic USA also recognised Franco’s regime on 3 April.

In May 1939 there were huge victory parades at Barajas airport, in Madrid and in León for the Italian and German armed forces who were now leaving Spain for home after their triumphant intervention on Franco’s side. On 15 June, Italian airmen returned to Genoa, accompanied by the Spanish air force general Alfredo Kindelán, who had used Gibraltar’s telephone system at the beginning of the uprising. In an interview, Kindelán claimed, ‘The union of the Spanish and Italian air forces has made the Mediterranean into a lake which cannot be traversed by the enemy.’

*

General Edmund Ironside left Gibraltar on Monday 26 June 1939, to be replaced as governor by a rugger-bugger from ‘the Tigers’, the Royal Leicestershire Regiment, General Sir Clive Gerald Liddell, a former adjutant general of the British army. As Ironside drove through the gate at Four Corners, heading north for Burgos and Paris, the band of the 1st Battalion Welsh Guards played ‘Auld Lang Syne’, the same tune the band of the King’s Regiment had played for Harington when he left by sea, lashed by wind and rain. Ironside had ridden (awkwardly) to hounds with the Royal Calpe Hunt and, like Harington and Godley before him, had learned to sail in Gibraltar. His worst crisis on the Rock was not, like Harington, seeing his dentures trapped in an egg while wrestling with a tiller, but the grief that overcame him when his beloved dog, a scarred and savage Staffordshire bull terrier called Caesar, chased a goat off Europa Point and was drowned in the battering surf.

Ironside arrived in London on 1 July and went straight to see Lord Gort, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Ironside’s new job and title was Inspector-General Overseas Forces, but his understanding was that he was to be the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force supporting the French on the European mainland when war came, under a French general but with the ‘right of appeal’ to London. When Ironside asked the Secretary of State for War to whom he should appeal – the Cabinet? the prime minister? the War Office? – Leslie Hore-Belisha said he did not know. Although Hore-Belisha had managed to double the Territorial Army since 1937, bring in conscription, get the cavalry into tanks, improve anti-aircraft defences and modernise the army in many ways, the British armed forces were still not really prepared for the gigantic onslaught approaching. The three services did not work together effectively – the navy was going to blockade Germany, the air force was going to bomb it and the army was going to commit its very few divisions to Flanders.

Ironside knew Neville Chamberlain was not a prime minister for wartime. ‘He is a pacifist at heart. He has a firm belief that God has chosen him as an instrument to prevent this threatened war.’ Winston Churchill should be the war-lord, he reckoned; Churchill in return admired Ironside’s energy and ability. Ironside went to Chartwell, Churchill’s home in Kent, for dinner in late July and they talked through the night until 5 a.m., with Churchill striding in front of the map and explaining his ideas – how the Germans would smash into Poland, how Italy would attack Egypt and how Hitler might well make a pact with Stalin. When this cynical volte-face did indeed, as Churchill predicted, happen in late August, any dreams of an Anglo-Franco-Soviet ‘Eastern Front’ against Nazi Germany disappeared. On 1 September, Churchill telephoned Ironside at 10 a.m. to tell him that Warsaw and Krakow had been bombed at dawn and German forces were invading Poland. Winston Churchill outside government clearly had better sources than the War Office.

The Royal Navy was first of the services off the mark on Sunday 3 September 1939. At 11.17, the Admiralty signalled all its ships and units ‘TOTAL GERMANY’. The Gibraltar government received a telephone message from General Forces Headquarters at 1 p.m.: ‘WE ARE NOW AT WAR WITH GERMANY’. An hour later came the first of many telegrams dated 3.9.39 from London: ‘See preface defence scheme. War has broken out with Germany’; then a series of single code-words – ‘BISTO’, ‘VIXEN’, ‘SNAIL’, ‘TITBIT’, etc. – indicating specific things to be done. All enemy merchant ships and enemy civil aircraft were to be seized ‘in prize’, their radio gear carefully dismantled. As the news spread in Gibraltar, melancholy hooters sounded from the dockyard. People were calm, however; the police incident book for all Gibraltar that day only records a man in City Mill Lane accusing a neighbour of damaging his spectacles.

War was declared in London by Neville Chamberlain announcing it on the wireless, but in Gibraltar it was royally proclaimed on a parchment with a large red seal:

I, SIR CLIVE GERALD LIDDELL, Governor and Vice-Admiral of Gibraltar, being satisfied thereof by information received by me, DO HEREBY PROCLAIM that War has broken out between His Majesty and Germany.

Given at Gibraltar this 3rd day of September, 1939.

By His Excellency’s Command.

Alexander Beattie

Colonial Secretary.

The final approval to form a Gibraltar Defence Force came through on the day war was declared. By year’s end Gibraltar’s Anti-Aircraft Section had one officer (the Gibraltarian Second Lieutenant Freddie Gache RA) and forty-seven other ranks, who manned two quick-firing three-inch 20 cwt guns of First World War vintage. Two dozen men made up the signal section, and another twelve were medics. Because they were Gibraltarian colonials the British army only paid them three quarters the rate of British soldiers.

When the war broke out, Governor Liddell later admitted, ‘Gibraltar was practically undefended.’ The coastal defence batteries could deal with some ship bombardment, but ‘the possibility of an attack from the mainland was ignored altogether.’ Anti-aircraft defences were almost ‘non-existent’ and the harbour and beaches were defenceless against landings. ‘The garrison was insufficient to man even the armament which had been installed, inadequate though it was.’

*

In London that Sunday, 3 September 1939, General Ironside was summoned from an evening drink at his club to the War Office. Expecting to be appointed commander-in-chief of the four divisions of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) being sent to France, Ironside was astonished to be asked instead by Leslie Hore-Belisha to become the Chief of the Imperial General Staff – in effect the army’s brainbox; Winston Churchill, newly returned to the Admiralty, had backed Hore-Belisha’s choice. Ironside was bitterly disappointed not to command an army in the field but, as ever, said he would do his duty. (He said he never asked for nor refused a job; his whole life was based on doing what he was told.)

‘And here is the Commander-in-Chief of the BEF,’ said Hore-Belisha, ushering in fifty-three-year-old Lord Gort from another office. The top job in the field had gone to another fighting soldier, the Irish Viscount Gort, who had been mentioned in dispatches eight times in the Great War, when he also won the Military Cross, three Distinguished Service Orders and the Victoria Cross for conspicuous bravery. John Gort, delighted with his field command after being shut up in the War Office as Chief of the Imperial General Staff under Hore-Belisha (whom he had come to loathe), set off for France with the 152,000 men of the BEF, leaving Edmund Ironside in charge, and in the lurch.

Ironside was ‘flabbergasted’ to discover how unprepared Britain was for war – no men, no munitions, no armour, no stocks – and appalled by how red tape strangled every initiative. Hore-Belisha told him it would be like ordering a car: you asked the Ministry of Supply for the equipment for a division and they delivered it. Ironside said it was somewhat like ordering a car, except the vehicle arrived all in bits and you had to assemble it yourself. The war would last three years, Ironside thought, and Britain would need to raise fifty divisions, each of around twenty thousand men, to add to the existing two complete infantry divisions and one partially armoured division.

On the Home Front, the nation was not yet sure it was at war. Fascists and communists were vying with each other to become the British people’s ‘peace party’; there were panics and alarums, hysteria and spy fever. MI5, the Security Service, were unhappy with Ironside’s appointment as Chief of the Imperial General Staff because rumour led them to believe he was a secret sympathiser with the British Union of Fascists. These suspicions seemed to be confirmed when Ironside asked for Major General J. F. C. Fuller to be his deputy. (MI5 was tapping Fuller’s telephone because he was an extreme right-winger.) In fact, Ironside wanted Fuller not because he was pro-fascist but because he was an expert on the tanks which Britain so badly needed for armoured warfare.

Fuller never got the position, but his anti-Semitic lobbying probably helped bring down Leslie Hore-Belisha, the Jewish Secretary of State for War, on 5 January 1940. Chamberlain offered Hore-Belisha the Board of Trade; Hore-Belisha resigned instead, and Oliver Stanley, a lesser man, took his place as Secretary of State for War.

Meanwhile, across the North Sea, in the seven months from January to July 1940, Nazi Germany’s armaments production doubled.

* The saga continues. James MacManus’s novel Midnight in Berlin (Duckworth Overlook, 2016) is dedicated to the memory of Colonel Noel Mason-MacFarlane ‘whose courage and vision inspired a story woven round the plan to assassinate Hitler in Berlin in 1939 and the Gestapo’s efforts to compromise the British diplomat who intended to be the assassin’.

† Sir Richard Sharples (1916–73) later became a Conservative politician and Cabinet minister. When Governor of Bermuda, he was assassinated on 10 March 1973 by a Black Power militant who also shot dead his Great Dane dog, Horsa, and his aide-de-camp, Captain Hugh Sayers. The murderer, Erskine Burrows, was hanged on 2 December 1977, one of the last judicial executions conducted under British rule.