In the early hours of the morning of 3 July 1940, British and Canadian sailors seized French warships and submarines in thirteen ports in Britain and Canada, and interned their crews. In the western Mediterranean at 4 a.m., the destroyer HMS Foxhound sped on ahead of Force H, taking Captain Cedric Holland of Ark Royal to meet the French Admiral Gensoul for a final parley. At 6.20 a.m., Foxhound’s motorboat was given permission to enter the Algerian harbour, and Holland radioed a personal message to Gensoul on the battle cruiser Dunkerque hoping that his proposals – if acceptable – would put the two navies on the same side.

If the Bay of Oran is seen as a great bowl with the city of Oran at the bottom to the south, then the naval base of Mers-el-Kébir is a few miles away from the city, tucked under the western lip of the bowl, with a fort and a lighthouse on the headland. From this headland, a long mole runs southeast across the bay, and there the French battleships were moored stern first. Nearest the fort, and most northerly, was Dunkerque, then Provence, then Strasbourg, then Bretagne and the Commandant Teste.

Admiral Gensoul refused to see Captain Holland, although the British officer insisted his proposals were ‘Eyes Only Admiral’. Perhaps Holland’s inferior rank posed a problem for Gensoul’s amour propre. The French flag lieutenant Bernard Dufay took the message and there was a slow to-and-fro of written replies from Gensoul stating that his assurances to Admiral North remained exactly the same: French ships would never fall intact into German or Italian hands. Admiral Gensoul added a warning, however, that force would be met by force, and that the first British shot would turn the entire French navy against them.

What Holland did not know was that Gensoul had hurriedly signalled to the French Admiralty only a point-blank British ultimatum – scuttle your ships in six hours, or else – and had relayed none of the more reasonable alternatives. On the British side, nobody took into account that the French Admiralty was in the chaos of relocating itself, with its staff in two different places. Admiral Darlan was at his birthplace, Nérac, 150 miles away from his team, and reliant on the provincial Post Office for communications.

Meanwhile, Force H was hovering ten miles to the northwest of the French ships at Mers-el-Kébir. This gunnery position was calculated so that any British overshoots would not land on Oran, while the French ships would have to fire back over the fort on Mers-el-Kébir’s hundred-foot-high headland. On the crown of HMS Hood, the thirty-foot range-finder for the guns was already turning. The British crews were ready in anti-flash gear – white leather gauntlets, stockinette balaclavas and asbestos hoods. When British spotter planes reported that the French ships were making steam and preparing for sea, Somerville ordered magnetic mines to be dropped by aeroplane at the harbour mouth to stop them escaping.

News arrived that French Admiral René-Émile Godfroy had been persuaded to disarm the French warships at Alexandria, but Admiral Gensoul did not respond. Somerville kept postponing H-Hour in the hope of a French change of heart. The 3 p.m. deadline he had given passed. Finally, at 4.15 p.m., Gensoul received Holland in his hot cabin on Dunkerque. Piped aboard, the British captain wearing his Légion d’honneur ribbon saw with foreboding that the decks were cleared and the tompions removed from the mouths of the battle cruiser’s big guns.

Gensoul was indignant at the British demands. He reiterated that he would scuttle his ships before the Axis ever got them. Holland, sweating in the heat, explained that the British government feared that mere verbal assurances could be undermined by German or Italian treachery; Somerville was deadly serious about opening fire, and very soon. Gensoul stolidly refused to change his position in the absence of a new direct message from Admiral Darlan. He did not consult his officers and men, nor offer them possibility of sailing to somewhere like Martinique and disarming without loss of honour.

Meanwhile, the British Admiralty put more pressure on Somerville by telling him that signals intercepts indicated more French warships and perhaps submarines were coming from Algiers, and he must act before nightfall. Somerville signalled Gensoul visually and by wireless that he would open fire at 5.30 p.m. Gensoul got this message at 5.15 while still conferring with Holland. A brief signal was sent back saying the ships would sail to the West Indies ‘if threatened by the enemy’. But this option was not among the terms offered, and Gensoul did not raise a large square flag to signal assent to the British proposals. Time ran out. As Captain Cedric Holland and Lieutenant Bernard Dufay said their hurried farewells on the French ship, both men were crying.

The tragedy commenced at 5.54 p.m. Having given Holland’s motorboat time to get clear, Hood, Valiant and Resolution opened fire from the northwest with their fifteen-inch guns, thirty-six four-gun salvoes in something over ten minutes, at a range of 17,500 yards. A fifteen-inch gun fires a one-ton explosive shell from its twenty-yard-long barrel; their multiple effect on the French ships struggling to slip cables and hawsers and unmoor from the jetty was devastating, frightful. Bretagne was hit in the first few minutes and was soon completely ablaze. When her ammunition store blew up, she rolled over and sank, killing 977 French sailors by blasting, burning or drowning. Many had been ashore at Gibraltar recently, perhaps carousing at the Right Shoulder Forward or in the bars of Irish Town with the very British matelots who killed them.

Dunkerque was hit by four projectiles, which crippled her steering, electrics and hydraulics. Stokers were boiled alive as scalding high-pressure steam escaped shrieking from ruptured pipes. Before she ran aground off St André, in the lee of Fort Santon, Dunkerque banged off over 150 anti-aircraft rounds at the British spotter planes up above and forty big shells at Hood. The French used different coloured dyes in their rounds to help each turret distinguish where its own shots fell and Hood’s crew were astonished to see great spouts of red, blue, yellow and green erupting from the sea as French shell fire straddled them. There was little damage: splinters wounded a couple of hands.

Hidden by the huge thick column of black smoke from Bretagne, the French battle cruiser Strasbourg and five destroyers slipped their berths, avoided the mines and escaped eastwards, unscathed. Somerville sent Swordfish bombers from Ark Royal after them but they made no hits and the ships escaped to Toulon in Vichy France.

*

Force H returned to Gibraltar in sombre mood on 4 July. ‘How I loathe it all,’ Somerville wrote in his pocket diary. He poured out his feelings in a letter to his wife on the same day. ‘We all feel thoroughly dirty and ashamed that the first time we should have been in action was an affair like this.’ He thought he might be relieved of command ‘forthwith’ for letting the battle cruiser Strasbourg escape. ‘I don’t mind because it was an absolutely bloody business to shoot up these Frenchmen who showed the greatest gallantry. The truth is my heart wasn’t in it and you’re not allowed a heart in war …’ Somerville, who was ‘damned angry at being called on to do such a lousy job’, thought that Mers-el-Kébir was ‘the biggest political blunder of modern times and I imagine will rouse the world against us’.

It was indeed a propaganda gift to Goebbels. Immediately he broadcast the line that Britain had cynically dragged France into the war, let it be fought on French soil with the sacrifice of French soldiers, then set up a pseudo-French government on British soil before attacking French ships and pretending that it was ‘in the French interest’. A Berlin newspaper called Churchill ‘the greatest criminal in the world’. Vichy France broke off diplomatic relations, but did not actually declare war.

Some neutrals, however, were awed by this demonstration of British ruthlessness. The news reached the USA on the Fourth of July 1940 and impressed the Americans on their Independence Day. Never mind the defeatist poison the US ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, was whispering, the British were clearly still bloody, bold and resolute. Roosevelt’s chief adviser Harry Hopkins later told Churchill that Oran was the action that convinced a doubtful president that Britain would fight on. From India, the viceroy said that Indian public opinion approved ‘vigour and decision on our part’.

In the House of Commons, Churchill gave a masterly exposition of the tragic necessity of the deed and the inflexible resolve now required as the home country faced invasion. He read out the exhortation he was sending to every servant of the Crown, urging steadiness and resolution: ‘We shall not fail in our duty, however painful … No negotiation with the German and Italian governments … We shall prosecute the war with the utmost vigour by all the means that are open to us until the righteous purposes for which we entered upon it have been fulfilled.’ Even the Tories in the House cheered Churchill to the rafters, and once again he burst into tears.

The Algerian bloodshed was not yet over. On 6 July, a dozen torpedo bombers flew from Ark Royal to finish off the lightly damaged Dunkerque. One torpedo hit a trawler laden with depth charges moored near the battle cruiser; the blast killed scores more Frenchmen and crippled the ship for a year.

James Somerville was in Gibraltar when he received a parcel with a message:

The Captain and Officers of the Dunkerque inform you of the deaths, for the honour of their flag, on 3 and 6 July, of nine officers and 200 men of their ship.

They return to you herewith the mementoes which they had from their comrades in arms of the British Royal Navy in whom they had put all their trust.

And they express to you on this occasion all their bitter sadness and disgust that these comrades did not hesitate to soil the glorious flag of St George with an indelible stain, that of murder.

Robert Murphy, a US diplomat in France for the past ten years, reckoned the sinking of the French fleet ‘the most serious British mistake of the war’ because it undermined the Free French and wiped out any moderate, pro-British sentiments in Vichy. In Le Figaro, François Mauriac wrote: ‘Monsieur Winston Churchill has arrayed against England – for how many years? – a unanimous France.’ The consummately crooked politician Pierre Laval rode that wave of anger into absolute power in Vichy: within a week of Mers-el-Kébir, he had got the French parliament to commit political suicide by dissolving itself and voting in a totalitarian dictatorship headed by the venerable Marshal Pétain, a state ‘with only one road to follow … a loyal collaboration with Germany and Italy’.*

*

The naval bombardment at Mers-el-Kébir also caused blowback on the Rock. The raging grief of French citizens at the death of their sailors was turned on the hapless Gibraltarian refugees now living in French North Africa, AFN, l’Afrique Française du Nord.

Lourdes Pitaluga was nearly thirteen years old, an evacuee in Casablanca with her mother and two teenage sisters, Carmen and Angeles. Her two elder sisters had stayed behind in Gibraltar as nurses at St Bernard’s Hospital, as had their father, an accountant and Special Constable. The first sign of animosity was that no one in AFN would serve the Gibraltarians in the local shops: no food for the hated anglais. Then came a knock at the door and the message that they all had twenty-four hours to leave Morocco. They had just rented a flat, bought four beds, a table and chairs, pots and pans, and now they had to leave everything behind.

On Wednesday 10 July, they had to make their own way to the port with only what they could carry. No taxis would take them; no horse gharries were available; no French citizen would give them a lift: people pushed them aside on the street and spat at them. The hot sun was rising in a blue sky. Angeles Pitaluga found a Moroccan boy with a decrepit cart and a broken-down old donkey and persuaded him to take some old people and a few pieces of luggage. The others set off on foot, dragging their suitcases past hostile, angry faces. Thousands of Gibraltarians slowly converged on the port, women and children, young and old, the frail and the sick. Senegalese tirailleurs, French colonial black soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets, pushed them up against the fence and gates in the hot sun, where there was no shade and no water. All day they waited, and wilted.

Meanwhile, a kind of rescue was on its way, from an unexpected quarter. As we have seen, the collapse of France had led to a split in its armed forces and among its people. Many French soldiers had been evacuated to Britain in Operations Dynamo and Ariel. A few joined de Gaulle’s Free French to carry on the fight, but a rather larger number just gave up and wanted to go home. Nearly fifteen thousand of these disillusioned and unruly Frenchmen were gathered in camps near Liverpool, and gained an unfortunate reputation for thieving and for molesting women. They had to be got out of the country, but as all of France’s coast from Belgium to the Bay of Biscay was now enemy occupied territory, their nearest possible destination was Casablanca in French North Africa.

Fifteen British freighters were readied to transport 8100 French soldiers and 5100 French sailors. The Royal Army Service Corps provided rations and fitted field kitchens in the empty holds where around nine hundred men in each ship could live and cook their meals. Their convoy commodore, Rear Admiral Sir Kenelm Creighton, was not impressed with his new charges: ‘They made a sorry sight; unshaven, dirty and, though a good many still had rifles, ammunition and equipment, they had made no attempt during their weeks of idleness in England to clean them. This was no doubt due to the poor leadership of their officers …’

Convoy OG 36 formed at sea on 3 July. OG stood for Outward-bound Gibraltar, but some ships were heading for Bilbao, Oporto, Lisbon, Seville and Cádiz. It was the same day as the seizing or sinking of the French fleet and as soon as Creighton heard about the actions being taken he signalled all the masters of his fifteen Casablanca-bound ships to keep Frenchmen away from the radio room and ensure there were no private wireless sets on board, fearing that news of the Oran events would enrage them, and that with the arms and ammunition they held, they could overwhelm the two dozen merchant navy crew on each ship. Thus the French officers who wandered up to see Creighton on the bridge of SS Balfe remained in the dark, and demoralised. When Creighton urged them to carry on the fight and never surrender, they only shook their heads, pityingly: ‘La France est vaincue; la guerre est finie’, ‘France is beaten; the war is over.’

The British convoy of freighters, Bactria, Balfe, Beckenham, Belgravian, Brittany, Calumet, City of Evansville, City of Windsor, Clan Macbean, David Livingstone, Dromore Castle, Euryades, Fidra, Strategist and Swinburne, got a harsh welcome off Casablanca on 8 July. Two French submarines surfaced, a squadron of light bombers passed low overhead, almost at mast height, and the destroyer which had signalled them to stop sent over a motorboat with three submachine-gun-toting sailors and a blue-chinned officer, who scrambled up the jumping-ladder and made for the bridge of the Balfe. The capitaine de frégate leading the boarding party was brusque and rude. He ordered the ship’s wireless room to be closed, elbowing Captain Woods, Balfe’s master, out of the way.

Admiral Creighton’s fierce temper flared; he was not the sort of Irishman to treat lightly. (Once, when the Egyptian Minister of Communications for the third time did not deign to arrive for the arranged appointment, Creighton picked up the chair he had been made to wait in and smashed it, shatteringly, straight through the glass door of the secretary’s office. They paid attention promptly thereafter, and King Farouk made him a pasha.) On the bridge of the Balfe, Admiral Creighton grabbed the French commander by the lapels and snarled that he objected to his insult to the ship’s master; British ships were risking their lives to bring Frenchmen to Casablanca. But when the French officer started to talk about the criminal murder of French sailors, Creighton let the man get it all off his chest before telling the capitaine he needed to disembark the troops and get on his way. The French destroyer lamp-signalled permission to enter and at the breakwater a pilot came aboard who was equally disagreeable and handled the Balfe with deliberate carelessness, bumping her against the jetty and damaging the hull.

On the quayside, lines of black African French colonial soldiers were standing to attention with their rifles butt-down at order arms. The French soldiers and sailors from Liverpool disembarked, were fallen in and marched off. There were jeers and catcalls, not cheers; the atmosphere was tense. Creighton wrote:

No sooner had the repatriated [French] troops disappeared from view than a mass of civilians poured through the dock gates and spilled across the road leading to the jetty. Black troops forced them forwards with rifle butts. I saw as they came closer that they were Europeans; men, women and children of all ages, they stumbled along the baking dusty quayside. Old men and women were collapsing in the heat, young mothers were trying to shield their babies from the sun. Clutching battered suitcases and parcels roughly tied with string these people – there were thousands of them – were a pathetic sight.

Then another French officer handed Creighton a note from the Vichy admiral in charge of Casablanca. It said his ships were under arrest until each one embarked a thousand of the people squatting miserably on the quayside. Creighton realised: ‘They were the women and children, the old and infirm, of the population of Gibraltar.’

The ships in Creighton’s convoy were in no condition to take these pathetic civilians. They were not passenger ships with cabins and stairs, but cargo ships. Fit young men might be able to climb up and down iron ladders in order to get in and out of the holds, but frail old people, children and pregnant women could not be expected to. And besides, the holds were in a disgusting state because the lazier Frenchmen had preferred to foul their living quarters than find the heads. The smell was appalling.

Creighton was between a rock and a hard place. The French wanted to be rid of the Gibraltarians; the Fortress authorities didn’t want them back in. ‘For Heaven’s sake don’t,’ cabled Admiral Dudley North, ‘we had enough trouble getting them out.’ Creighton decided that he must ignore this message and get the hungry, thirsty and sunburned Gibraltarians on board, crammed into all the space available on his cargo ships. The French troops started enthusiastically pushing the women and children up the gangways with their rifle butts. Lourdes Pitaluga was bruised on the buttocks, Mariola Benavente fell and hurt her left knee. British merchant navy officers and sailors went down among the Gibraltarians and started pushing back, yelling and shouting, making such a scene that the French captain was forced to restrain his soldiers from overcrowding the ships. As twelve-year-old Lourdes reached the top of the gangplank of the Swinburne, clutching her mother’s hand, a sailor motioned her towards a stairway but, recoiling from the faecal stench, she pulled her mother around onto the deck where they crouched by a stack of sandbags.

The strung-out convoy of re-evacuated refugees set sail on Wednesday 10 July. It was a six-hour trip from Casablanca to Gibraltar. As night fell, it grew horribly cold for the girls in their flimsy summer dresses, but the merchant navy sailors moved among them with sweaters, scarves, blankets and greatcoats, handing out mugs of hot bitter cocoa that warmed their icy hands. ‘I pray for them every night,’ Lourdes told me, seventy-five years later. As the children slept, the elders watched and prayed. At 3 a.m., on board the Clan Macbean, Mrs Pizzarello gave birth. They named the boy Alex after the naval officer who wrapped and rocked him.

*

Things were moving in Gibraltar. Governor Sir Clive Liddell issued a press communiqué on Wednesday 10 July which appeared in the Gibraltar Chronicle on the Thursday. But the Rock is a small place where word of mouth travels fast. Everybody knew the facts by Wednesday night: the Gibraltar families were leaving Morocco, and were being transferred ‘to another destination, calling at Gibraltar only for replenishment of the ships’. The governor further stated: ‘It will not be possible to allow any landing, but lists of passengers will be published for information as early as possible.’ He unimaginatively requested the public ‘not to make personal enquiries which can only hamper and delay the organisation’.

It was a bad mistake to think that Gibraltarian workers would allow their exiled families to pass through the Rock without seeing them. The Gibraltarians were seen as colonial subjects completely at the disposal of the fortress, garrison and naval base; treated with cheerful racist contempt by generations of swaddies and matelots, they were expected to do what they were told. But this latest order touched family, the heart of Mediterranean civilisation. The day when the first cargo ships of refugees started arriving, Thursday 11 July 1940, is the day when the Gibraltarian people stood up for themselves, the day that the people dismissively termed ‘Rock Scorpions’ or ‘Scorps’ struck back.

Early in the morning, shops stayed closed, and workmen did not go to their places of employment in the shipyard, in the docks, and even in the police station, for the policemen had wives and children too. The Gibraltarians began gathering in the old Jewish marketplace, El Martillo, Commercial Square, which is the Rock’s political equivalent of Trafalgar Square. (It had recently been renamed John Mackintosh Square after a wealthy local philanthropist’s death. Today it is often called Piazza.) Emotions ran high; there was angry talk of la huelga, strikes; the mood was ugly. The young lawyer Joshua Hassan, then manning a gun in the Gibraltar Defence Force, vividly remembered the Gibraltarian men standing right up against the lines of British troops with fixed bayonets, soldiers sent out to control the civilian crowds. He wondered what would happen if push came to shove – bloody noses and broken heads? Anthony Baldorino, one of the two Gibraltarian elected members of the City Council, woke the other, his colleague Samuel Benady, and told him he thought there was going to be a riot and serious fighting with the soldiers, if they did not do something quickly.

The two councillors spoke to the crowd from the balcony of City Hall. Benady said it was monstrous that their families were being shipped like cattle, and not being allowed to see them was adding insult to injury. He said he and Baldorino were going immediately to confront Governor Liddell at Government House, but he asked the crowd not to follow them down Main Street as it might cause trouble with the soldiers. Abraham Serfaty, head of the Exchange and Commercial Library, was still talking to the crowd when the two men hurried off to their impromptu meeting.

General Sir Clive Liddell was reluctant to change his mind because of British fears that if the civilians were allowed off the ships they would refuse to be re-evacuated. But Benady and Baldorino said they were more in touch with the Gibraltarian people than his British advisers, and warned Liddell he would have an ugly riot on his hands if he did not let the families come ashore. At one point the governor left the room, probably to communicate with London. When he came back, Liddell conceded. He said he would allow the evacuees ashore, but only for a few days, until the ships could be put in a proper state for their transport elsewhere, and asked the councillors for an undertaking that they would co-operate. They agreed and requested, ‘May we tell the people in John Mackintosh Square?’ Liddell nodded.

Back on the balcony of City Hall, the two councillors announced what had transpired. The crowd was jubilant. Victory! They could meet their families later! In the meantime the councillors asked everyone to go back to work. After three cheers for His Majesty the King and His Excellency the Governor, they all dispersed.

There had been some trouble on the ships too when people were told they could not go ashore to their homes and their menfolk. On the ships tied up at the South Mole, some of the evacuees, including Mariola Benavente’s mother, started throwing their luggage over the side onto the wharf. But food and water were sent out to the ships and, in the afternoon, the first tenders started bringing families ashore to anxious relatives waiting at the Waterport Wharf entrance and in Casemates Square. Buses, taxis, army lorries, private cars and horse-drawn gharries carried folk home. The Pitalugas got into an army lorry with a sign saying Governor’s Parade, nearest to Gavino’s Court. By Thursday night, half the refugees were back on the Rock.

While negotiations began to bribe neutral countries like Spain and Portugal to accept some civilian evacuees, Creighton reckoned it would take ten days to clean and fit out the cargo ships properly to carry the rest of the Gibraltarian women and children to Britain. He took a room at the Rock Hotel, where officers of the three services and senior WAAFs and WRNS were billeted, and found it very pleasant.

In the early hours of 18 July he was woken by the wailing of air-raid sirens and the loud sounds of a bombing raid, the Vichy revenge attack on Gibraltar for the sinking of the French fleet. While Gibraltarian civilians, like the Pitaluga family under Governor’s Parade, huddled on benches in the City Council’s ‘Ironside’ ARP shelters, Creighton merely buried his head under the pillow and went back to sleep. In the morning he found a metal splinter embedded in the plaster a few inches above the bed-head, and the carpet salted and peppered with broken glass and grits of stone.

*

On Friday 19 July, the richer evacuees were once again the first to go. Four hundred and fifty people from families who could pay their own passage were evacuated to Portuguese Madeira aboard the RNR ex-passenger liner HMS Royal Ulsterman. Also on board was the governor’s wife, Lady Liddell, with their son. Another fifteen hundred would follow them to Madeira in the days to come.

Over the weekend, the first ships destined for the UK with civilian evacuees left in Convoy HG (Homeward Gibraltar) 39. The Bactria was carrying a hundred mental hospital patients and the paupers from the City Poor House (the only people who had not been allowed to disembark after their return from Casablanca), with their nurses and family carers. The Clan Macbean was transporting 213 evacuees to Cardiff, and the Avoceta took 146 Gibraltarians together with the hundred-odd Polish, Czech and French refugees who had arrived from Lisbon.

Even A. M. Dryburgh, Controller of the Evacuation Scheme, found his sixteen-day voyage to Swansea on the Avoceta dismal. He had to bunk in a cubby-hole with a sapper lance corporal, the food was deplorable because there was no fruit or vegetables, the only drink was stewed tea, and everyone ended up crawling with lice.

The pressure to get the civilians out of Gibraltar increased as bombing raids began. Following the air raid of 18 July which killed four people, in the early hours of Friday 26 July another fleet of Vichy bombers attacked from the north, dropping a chain of bombs between Four Corners and Europa Point. Two civilians were killed, one a thirty-year-old woman, the other a little boy of two, and forty people were wounded. That evening, the Union-Castle line troopship Athlone Castle (which had brought out the 4th Battalion of the Black Watch to defend the Rock) carried some sixteen hundred Gibraltarians away to the UK, mainly elderly and disabled, families with toddlers and expectant mothers. Mrs Lopes’s baby girl, born en voyage, was christened Athlone Angeles Lopes. The next day, three more troopships evacuated another nineteen hundred people.

By the time Admiral Creighton’s original cargo ships were ready, the five thousand-plus Gibraltarian evacuees had all been listed and labelled. Everyone had to bring soap and towel, knife, fork, spoon, plate, and cup or mug in their hand luggage, and each family brought simple cooking utensils, as well as enough food for the first meal. Mattresses and blankets had to be rolled and kept separate from the other baggage, which was collected by lorry. No private cars, only official buses or medical ambulances ferried everyone down to Waterport, and only naval and military personnel were allowed to help people aboard the ships – the Fortress did not want families’ emotional farewells cluttering up an orderly departure.

After two days in the bay, Convoy HG 40 finally left on Tuesday 30 July 1940. There were twenty-four ships, including a dozen of the vessels that Creighton had come out with, and a bunch of Swedish ships carrying iron ore. Their escort for the first four days out into the Atlantic was the destroyer HMS Wishart, together with the anti-submarine trawler HMS Leyland. A lone corvette, HMS Wellington, stayed with them the whole long route west of Ireland, and round into the Irish Sea via the North Channel, arriving at Liverpool on 14 August.

One of the ships of convoy HG 40, SS Calumet out of Avonmouth, held a special group of eleven prisoners among its 259 evacuees. Formerly kept in prison at Moorish Castle, these were the Gibraltarian Fascists arrested under Regulation 18B – Bertuchi, Bonifacio, Bonitch, Byrne, Canilla, Facio, Figueras, Frendo, Garcia, Gonzalez and Scicluna. They were being escorted to the UK by three police officers led by Chief Inspector Santos. One of the police escorts, fifty-year-old Constable Joseph Baglietto, had just retired injured with an annual pension awarded for his ‘diligence and fidelity’. Baglietto was the police officer badly wounded by shrapnel while helping civilians at Catalan Bay during the José Luis Diez firefight in the Spanish Civil War. Taking retirement now meant he could accompany his wife Mary and children Francis and Concepcion to England. Young Frank noticed that one of the Fascists was bawling like a baby as he boarded the ship in handcuffs.

As the Gibraltarians watched their dear Rock slide away, changing its shape over the water, there was sorrow and dread among the more cautious, but hope and excitement among the more adventurous. They were leaving homes that were being bombed by the French and going to another country that was under attack by the Germans, but who on earth could know what would happen to them?

Lourdes Pitaluga was on the City of Evansville with both her parents and her four sisters, and nearly five hundred others. Although the Gibraltar dockyard carpenters had tried to make the ship’s holds habitable, she found them airless and appalling. In the centre of each hold was a long trestle table with a dozen holes for metal washbasins. Families picked a spot in the remaining floor space and unrolled their mattresses. Large cockroaches came scuttling across the floor, making the girls scream, and sometimes there were rats. Up the wooden stairway from the hot hold were the lavatories, rough sheds with a coarse sacking curtain for a door, fitted on the side of the lower deck. Inside, up a wooden step, was a long shelf overhanging the ship’s rail, with bottom-shaped holes cut in it through which you could see the sea below. For those too weak to climb the stairway or too inhibited to use these long-drops, there were night-soil buckets which a friend or family member would have to empty. Luggage was buried too deep in the hold for anyone to get a change of clothes for a fortnight and water was so strictly rationed that it was hard to wash properly. Lourdes was grateful that her darkening suntan hid the dirt on her skin.

The shipyard carpenters had also rigged up a stove or two by the smokestacks for volunteers and families to cook hot meals. After a few days of summer heat, the Gibraltarians on the City of Evansville found all the fresh foodstuffs they had brought with them had gone mouldy and had to go overboard to feed the seagulls. Instead they subsisted on boiled rice. On the first day, Lourdes refused to eat it, and then she did, squeamishly pushing the weevils to the side of her plate. By the end of the trip they had boils and mouth ulcers and felt faint with hunger. Lourdes’s two elder sisters, Carlota and Victoria, were volunteer nurses with very little experience, and one of their charges was a three-year-old girl called Elena Bagna who had a terrible wound on the left side of her forehead from the last bombing attack – her father was also wounded and her mother heavily pregnant. Every day the girls had to change the dressing on the big hole in Elena’s skull. An officer gripped her between his knees and held her arms as she wriggled. The wound stank of sepsis; the little girl screamed with so much pain and distress that everyone ended up in tears. Carlota and Victoria were excused duty when Mrs Bagna had her baby: a woman from the next hold acted as midwife to the newborn, later christened Marina. James Balfe Gomez was another baby born during the voyage – the Balfe was another of the convoy ships – but four people also died and were buried at sea.

The trip was a worry for the convoy commodore and the ship’s masters, concerned for their merchant navy crews as well as the wretched flock they were shepherding. Approaching Ireland, submarine scares sent the ships into their pre-arranged zig-zags: ten degrees to starboard for ten minutes, then twenty degrees to starboard for another ten minutes, then thirty degrees back to port for fifteen minutes, another thirty to port for ten minutes before a thirty-degree turn to starboard brought the convoy onto its original mean track. Then repeat, until the order ‘Cease Zig-zag’.

Six convoys earlier, HG 34F (Homeward-bound from Gibraltar, Number 34, Fast) had lost four of its twenty-one ships to U-boat torpedoes, and sixty-six men had died. On Creighton’s twelve cargo ships, each carrying anywhere between 250 and seven hundred passengers, there were nowhere near enough lifeboats for everyone on board. Though they had scrounged every extra raft and lifebelt they could lay their hands on in Gibraltar, if any ship had sunk, most people on board would have certainly drowned or frozen to death in the Atlantic. If HG 40 had been attacked and any of its ships abandoned, the officers and men would have been forced to do their duty and give up their places in the lifeboats to save the women and children. The merchant seamen were knowingly facing the prospect of almost certain extinction if there were enemy action, but still they were kind to the children, giving them treats like bread and butter from their own ration, Lourdes Pitaluga recalled, and once, magically, a plate of egg and chips to share. Seven of them in turn, each solemnly dipping a chip in the yolk. The matelots enjoyed seeing so many women and girls on board. One sailor surprised his mother by returning home with a kitbag full of clothes beautifully folded and ironed by Gibraltarian women’s hands.

Some of Convoy HG 40 went to Liverpool and others to Cardiff. The City of Evansville docked at Swansea. A tender came out and asked them if there was anything they wanted. ‘Bread! Bread! We are hungry!’ the girls chanted. ‘We want bread! We want bread!’ More boats came out and Lourdes got her own loaf, which she crammed into her mouth in fistfuls of crust and crumb, with a single sweet and delicious tomato. She was also given a hen’s egg, which her mother pierced with a pin from her brooch so she could swallow it raw from the shell.

*

The Gibraltarians disembarked on 14 August and, after a high tea of bread and butter, buns and cakes, were put on a night train to London. There were no lights because of the blackout so they sat back and watched mysterious dark shapes and silhouettes rushing past the window. Distant searchlights, like long probing fingers, caught a tiny plane in the sky and puffs of smoke appeared around it. Then it burst into flames and fell out of the sky. When they reached Paddington Station it was two thirty in the morning. The dazed foreigners got out of the train to see lines of red buses waiting. Suddenly, scores of people poured out of the buses and filled up the empty train. These were British women and children being evacuated from London. Though they did not know it, the Gibraltarians were replacing them just in time for the Blitz, which would begin in three weeks.

But first they were processed. Like all foreign refugees, they had not properly ‘landed’ in England until they had been through Empress Hall. This was a huge building at Earl’s Court, originally constructed for spectacular entertainments, where Queen Victoria had seen real Sioux Indians re-enacting the battle of the Little Big Horn for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. In 1915, Empress Hall had housed thousands of Belgian refugees; then it had become an ice-skating rink. Now it was a principal London County Council holding centre where refugees were registered, housed, fed, bathed and given a medical while papers and credentials were checked. They were not allowed out until they had been ‘cleared’, although they could receive visitors. The control was strict but the supervisors were friendly and courteous, reported a Basque priest who was there from 28 June to 4 July 1940. The canteen workers, the ‘Pentecost Brigade’ of interpreters, the carers and caretakers and distributors of clean second-hand clothes were all from the Women’s Voluntary Services, WVS, the remarkable organisation founded by Sir Samuel Hoare and Lady Reading, initially to assist ARP, Air Raid Precautions, in 1938.

However nice the British personnel may have been, Lourdes Pitaluga was not impressed with the physical conditions for 750 Gibraltarians. There were long queues for the ablutions and the communal soap was seething with lice. As she lay in her camp bed, jammed between tiers of bucket seats, she looked up at the Victorian cast-iron dome with its hundreds of panes of glass and thought it no protection against German bombs. When the air-raid siren wailed they went down into a deep shelter, and at the ‘all clear’ came back to find their folding camp beds crazed with glinting shards. Soon the Gibraltarians were moved into big hotels in Kensington.

London was full of foreign refugees in 1940 – displaced people of scores of nationalities including Belgians, Czechs, Danes, Dutch, Finns, French, Norwegians, Poles, Romanians, Slovaks, Yugoslavs. Amongst them was the Basque priest mentioned above, Canon Alberto Onaindia, who had witnessed the bombing of Gernika in 1937, gone into exile in France and eventually arrived in Plymouth on a Canadian destroyer. In August 1940, Onaindia, by then living in a community of refugees at Redhill in Surrey, was summoned by an English friend to Empress Hall to meet two elderly, frail and sick Gibraltarians who spoke no English and wanted to give their confession in Spanish. It is not that easy to administer the sacrament of penance. Under Catholic canon law, an ordained priest must also be granted the faculty of exercising absolution by the competent authority. In other words, Onaindia needed the permission of a bishop or higher. So the Basque wrote to His Eminence the Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, offering to serve the exiled Gibraltarians as their priest.

The secretary of seventy-five-year-old Cardinal Arthur Hinsley wrote back to say he regretted very much that His Eminence could find no place for the Basque priest in his diocese. This was because Cardinal Hinsley remembered Canon Onaindia from their political disagreements at a Eucharistic Congress in Budapest in May 1938, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War.

Hinsley, a no-nonsense Yorkshireman who kept a picture of Generalísimo Franco on his desk and saw the Spanish Civil War as a battle between Christ and Antichrist, had been very keen to send back all the Basque children who had been evacuated to England a year earlier, ‘especially as I learn that many of them … are already imbued with Communist doctrines’. Onaindia, a Christian democrat and a Basque patriot, knew dozens of Basque Catholic priests were among Franco’s six hundred thousand prisoners and disbelieved Franco’s claims to the Christian moral high ground. Onaindia felt the Basque children were far better off in ‘a free country which is fighting for the liberty of the oppressed’.

Some see Cardinal Hinsley (who died in 1943) as a benign figure in English Roman Catholicism, whose ‘Sword of the Spirit’ campaign against totalitarianism was useful propaganda in the Second World War. But Canon Onaindia only saw his unquestioning support for Franco, and his denigration of decent Basque Christians as communists. He wrote an impassioned follow-up letter to Cardinal Hinsley on 22 August, which a Basque friend finally persuaded him not to send. The draft ended:

Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of King George VI, was not much older than Lourdes Pitaluga when she made her first broadcast on the wireless, on 13 October 1940. She spoke on the BBC’s Children’s Hour to all the Commonwealth children who had been evacuated. ‘My sister Margaret Rose and I feel so much for you as we know from experience what it means to be away from those we love most of all.’

Before I finish I can truthfully say to you all that we children at home are full of cheerfulness and courage. We are trying to do all we can to help our gallant sailors, soldiers and airmen, and we are trying, too, to bear our own share of the danger and sadness of war.

We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well; for God will care for us and give us victory and peace. And when peace comes, remember it will be for us, the children of today, to make the world of tomorrow a better and happier place.

My sister is by my side and we are both going to say goodnight to you.

Come on, Margaret.

Goodnight, children.

Goodnight, and good luck to you all.

* ‘The French grew tired of the Republic as if she were an old wife. For them, the dictatorship was a brief affair, adultery. But they intended to cheat on their wife, not to kill her. Now they realise she is dead, their Republic, their freedom. They’re mourning her.’ Irène Némirovsky’s notebook, 1942.