On the morning of 18 May 1940, Randolph Churchill found his father shaving with his old-fashioned Valet razor in his bedroom at Admiralty House in London.

‘I think I see my way through,’ said the new wartime prime minister.

‘Do you mean that we can avoid defeat?’ said his son. ‘Or beat the bastards?’

‘Of course I mean we can beat them.’

‘Well, I’m all for it, but I don’t see how you can do it.’

‘I shall drag the United States in.’

Wooing the isolationist United States of America became a prime objective. Britain had to persuade American diplomats, emissaries, celebrities, politicians and journalists, leaders and leader writers, that it was fighting the good fight for democracy against totalitarianism, and was not going to give in (‘We shall never surrender’). The encouraging voice of Ed Murrow of CBS, for example, broadcasting resilience from London, the city where he had lived since 1937, became a vital antidote to the defeatist messages the US government was getting from its own diplomats, like William C. Bullitt in Paris and especially the US ambassador to the Court of St James, that ex-bootlegger from Boston, Joseph P. Kennedy.

Thus the wind was in her favour when, in September 1940, another enterprising American broadcaster, resourceful young Helen Hiett, told the British Embassy in Madrid that she wanted to visit the heavily restricted Fortress of Gibraltar. Hiett managed to scoop a trip to the Rock, where no American journalist had yet gone. Tom Burns at the embassy passed the word to the Ministry of Information in London, who checked Hiett out with Fred Bate of NBC and gave the thumbs up. Then Mason-MacFarlane, down in Gibraltar, said yes because he remembered her name from his time as Director of Military Intelligence in France: one of his officers had talked to Hiett at a party about her Xmas 1939 visit to Nazi Germany, and reported what she said about morale and conditions. Finally, the Spanish director of propaganda extruded his official permission.

She had only been in Spain for two months but, as we have seen, Helen Hiett was intelligent, curious and capable. A week short of her twenty-seventh birthday, she had seen a lot more of life than most women from Pekin, Illinois expected to see in a lifetime. Resident in Europe since 1934, she’d worked at the League of Nations in Geneva, visited Fascist Italy, and spent three weeks in a Nazi Girls’ Labour Camp at Königshorst in the summer of 1937 as part of her PhD thesis on indoctrination at the London School of Economics. Hiett was in Paris when the war broke out, spent Christmas 1939 inside Nazi Germany again with a girl-friend from the Labour Camp, and started the ‘Paris Letter’ to tell neutral Americans what the French were fighting for. In April 1940 she revisited New York City and Abe Schechter of NBC Radio hired her to go back to Paris as a correspondent, right in the middle of the crucial month of May 1940.

On 3 June, the Luftwaffe started bombing Paris: one explosion destroyed NBC’s Paris office and Hiett followed the retreating French government south, travelling chaotic roads by day and sleeping nights unwashed in fields. She was bombed in Tours and again in Bordeaux. On 27 June she and three other young women left the city in a Chrysler Plymouth with Hiett driving, and got caught up in a huge column of German vehicles heading south through Les Landes to the Spanish border: motorcycles, armoured trucks, staff cars, supply lorries, gun carriages bristling with machine guns. She eventually made it to Switzerland, where she told that story to NBC before getting a visa for Spain. In ten days in Madrid she wangled permission to broadcast to the USA, and slowly adapted to Spanish habits: rationing, siestas, the procrastinations of mañana. This deadline-conscious modern American woman was rather relieved when her importunate Swiss watch was stolen while she was busy swimming in the Manzanares, allowing her to embrace a more relaxed attitude to time.

 

Helen Hiett flew from Madrid to Málaga on Monday 16 September 1940, and the next day the British consul and his wife drove her the eighty miles to Gibraltar. ‘The scenery is perfectly grand, following the sea all the way,’ she wrote to her parents, ‘and then suddenly the gigantic Rock looms up, dominating all the land and sea around.’ On arrival, she lunched with the American consul, Mr Hawley, and declined his invitation to stay. At the Rock Hotel she was astonished to get a phone call from the reception desk saying that ‘the general’ was downstairs. Major General Noel Mason-MacFarlane himself, handsome, tanned, fit, turned up for tea, invited her to dinner and, like the consul, also asked her to stay at his house. She turned him down too, staying on at the Rock Hotel.

The next morning, however, the general appeared again with a typewriter to lend the reporter. She would write her own copy, but on his machine. This is part of the trade-off between the military and the media: in return for access, the media get the military’s ‘angle’. Mason-MacFarlane came out of military intelligence and understood the impact of propaganda. He had selected Helen Hiett to be one of the very few journalists to visit the Rock because he calculated that a human interest piece by a woman reporter from the neutral USA on the indomitable resilience of Gibraltar could be invaluable in the war of morale.

Hiett spent a couple of hours at the American consul’s, reading up on Gibraltar, and then, at one o’clock sharp, was at Government House for lunch with His Excellency the Governor, Sir Clive Liddell. Despite feeling that she wasn’t looking her best – the salty sea air made her pageboy cut ‘stringy’ – the young American wowed everybody. The men liked the girl and the girl liked the men:

The suntanned officers in khaki shorts, so hungry for female company, were unlike the limp and long-haired intellectual Englishmen she had met before, but more like the chaps in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘In Partibus’:

It’s Oh to meet an army man

    Set up, and trimmed and taut …

[Who] walks as though he owned himself

    And hogs his bristles short.

At lunch they discussed English public schools and the foppish ‘Eton-and-Oxford’ breed. Hiett said she preferred Scotsmen to Englishmen and Paris to London. The soldiers happily agreed the Englishmen she had known were insufferable professorial types whom the army scorned.

As I sat looking at them – H.E. with his tattooing on his forearms, his legs crossed negligently so that his bare knees stuck up over the table top, his fine head and sunbrowned face that a thick shock of grey hair only made seem all the younger, I liked them instinctively, liked their naturalness. They are real people, so different from the affected kind of Englishmen I have known, always seeming to be so self-conscious about what is done and ‘not done’.

His Excellency Sir Clive Liddell had only just met Helen Hiett when he, too, invited her to stay at Government House. This offer she accepted, bringing her things down from the Rock Hotel and then going out for the afternoon with Noel Mason-MacFarlane to inspect the defences. The month before, Sir Samuel Hoare had visited Gibraltar from Madrid and pronounced himself ‘horrified’ by their unreadiness and the general peacetime sense of security. Now things were getting gingered up: ‘First we inspected some of the tunnelling in the North face where they are putting in new gun positions, blasting about six feet a day in the limestone. He showed me, too, some spacious new living quarters that are just being completed in that part of the Rock.’

Today the Rock of Gibraltar conceals within itself some thirty-four miles of tunnels, which is almost twice the length of the roads visible on the outside of the peninsula. Much of that expansion happened during the Second World War, when the existing seven miles of tunnels were more than tripled to twenty-five miles. It is a huge amount of tunnelling in a Rock that is barely three miles long. From June 1940, just as the infantry were reinforced from two to four battalions, so the Royal Engineer Fortress Companies were brought up to ‘war establishment’ status under the Chief Engineer, Colonel H. M. Fordham OBE, MC, and the first Tunnelling Company, consisting of former coal miners, was brought out by sea from Britain. Eventually teams of men like these would work around the clock, in eight-hour shifts, all through 1941, 1942 and 1943, joined by hard-rock miners from the Canadian army with their diamond-tipped drills.

The immediate need in 1940 was to create accommodation for men and stores of food and ammunition inside the humid limestone rock. Existing stalactite caves like St Michael’s already had brick and concrete magazines built inside them, with corrugated-iron roofs to keep out the wet. The embrasures in Willis’s and Queen’s and the Upper Union Galleries were now fitted with bunks; their new denizens pinned up pictures of sweethearts and Hollywood movie stars on their whitewashed walls. Old eighteenth-century tunnels sprouted new extensions and connections that grew more spacious as the troglodytic network spread through the Rock. The tunnellers doggedly worked away, widening and deepening the tunnels from seven feet to eight feet and beyond to twelve feet. In the end, lorries would be able to pass each other as they drove along ‘the Great North Road’, a new King’s Highway fifteen feet wide and fourteen feet high, built deep inside the Rock.

Helen Hiett found the North Face of Devil’s Tower a formidable sight:

I stood there feeling small, looking up at a quarter mile rise of sheer limestone, trying to imagine how an invading army would feel approaching that forbidding wall. But it is not only the rock wall that fills you with awe, what is inside is more awful still, as I soon found out. For the rest of that afternoon we climbed and slipped and clambered and crawled and slid in and out, along, around and on top of the maze of tunnels and caves and galleries that honeycomb the Rock, sheltering a myth-like underground city of warriors. There seems to be more tunnels in the North Face than anywhere else – because it guards the single land approach.

Hiett had only brought one evening dress with her, so that became her uniform in Government House whenever the men appeared in their tartans and scarlet-and-blue mess dress. But Lieutenant Colonel Inglis had lent her his Spanish maid (senior officers did not stint on servants) and the pair tried out different hairstyles to ring the changes. This unnamed maidservant was not a bad match for Hiett, having swum the five miles from Algeciras to Gibraltar to escape the Spanish Civil War – she had been a fixture in the household ever since.

On Thursday 19 September, the assiduous reporter saw inside the dramatic Cathedral Cavern of St Michael’s Cave, the Rock’s largest, which had cases of bully beef and baked beans piled high among the stalagmites. She sat through forty-six explosions as more tunnels and caves were blasted out, and shivered in a giant refrigeration room full of beef, butter and eggs. Helen Hiett loved Europe’s mountains, and down at Catalan Bay she stood on the beach inside the barbed wire looking up – ‘my Alpinist eye picked out several routes a good climber could probably deal with. But the Rock is treacherous. The limestone holds aren’t as sure as granite …’ Then she clambered over the water catchment area’s wide flat structure of wood and corrugated iron above Sandy Bay and saw the huge freshwater reservoirs inside the Rock, all spare space round them packed tight and high with more stores. She got a great surprise at Reservoir No. 10, where she expected to see one more lake like the others:

No water in this one – instead a fantastic, well-lighted cavern that rang with the sound of hammers. Swarming workmen were just completing a modern, three-storey barracks as living quarters for hundreds of soldiers, down there deep below the Rock’s surface. It seemed so much like the control room of Gulliver’s Island of Laputa, that I half expected to feel the whole Rock rise up and gently float away.

As Mason-MacFarlane showed Helen Hiett around the camouflaged cliff-face defences of the North Front, she saw crates of beer by the embrasures and thought the Scottish soldiers were well provided for. Then she saw this was not India pale ale. Each bottle was topped with a cloth wick: they were actually Molotov cocktails made from soap and petroleum. A red-handed Scot explained that they had been throwing some bottles of red paint to mark where the missiles would hit down below. She also noticed they kept their boxes of ‘pineapple’ hand grenades close.

On Thursday night, Helen Hiett went to the theatre in Gibraltar with the governor, the admiral, the general and all their staffs, the only woman in the box for the opening night of an amateur show that the staff of the British Embassy in Madrid had brought down to Gibraltar. Hiett had actually tried to get into the show in Madrid as a way of wangling a visit to Gibraltar (doing an ‘Apache’ dance with a press officer at the tryouts) but was very glad she had not succeeded.

[T]heir show is so rotten it is absolutely painful. We just sat in our boxes and groaned, almost ashamed to look up, and scared to death that the troops would give them a raspberry and walk out at any moment … It was rather funny, too, to see the surprise of one or two of [the embassy staff] who had snubbed me, at finding me here installed and very much in favour.

She was meant to go back and broadcast from Madrid on Saturday, but after agonising, she sent a cable to New York saying ‘IMPOSSIBLE’. Instead, on Friday she took a boat over to Morocco for a weekend at Tangier’s El Minzah Hotel, eager to experience the new continent’s sight and sounds. On the boat back on Monday 23 September she held the captain’s sleeping pet monkey in her arms and made the spectacle of the leaping, darting dolphin accompanying them across the strait an excuse to get five silent Frenchmen to talk.

The five turned out to be escaping pilots. After the fall of France, they had volunteered to take the exams to become primary school teachers in Morocco, but this was all a ploy. Once in receipt of their first month’s pay, they shed the deception, skipped to Tangier and were now heading to Gibraltar, seeking the chance to fly for de Gaulle. The general had claimed in August that Vichy was transferring hundreds of planes from North Africa to Marseilles, so other Free Frenchmen thought it was a good idea to pinch the aeroplanes before they ever fell into German hands. Hiett had already seen a brand new Douglas aircraft parked at the emergency airstrip at the North Front in Gibraltar – a quick-witted Free Frenchman at a Moroccan airstrip had hijacked it from a Vichy-led party of Italian Armistice Commission officers when they left the plane to go for lunch.

As they approached Gibraltar, anti-aircraft shells were bursting in the sky. Hiett thought the British were shooting at ‘Persistent Percy’, the regular Italian spotter plane, but her five new friends made a definite identification of Vichy French war planes on hostile reconnaissance. She did not know it, but Dakar had been attacked that day and Vichy was looking for revenge. There was a late party at Government House that evening because it was her twenty-seventh birthday, and Raven, the governor’s imperturbable butler, served sandwiches in his red silk pyjamas and dressing gown.

*

Late on Tuesday morning, 24 September, Helen Hiett was tapping out her NBC radio piece on the typewriter borrowed from Mason-MacFarlane when the air-raid siren sounded outside. The familiar ‘crump’ of a bomb told her this was no practice. She went downstairs to find shelter in the governor’s ground-floor office with its partially sandbagged window. An ADC brought in three girls from the British Embassy theatrical revue party who were due to go back to Madrid that afternoon. Dragged protesting from bed, they hated appearing in public wearing curlers and no make-up, so they slumped into corners, clutching their war-paint.

By that time the bombs were falling pretty fast. We heard windows breaking in the room above us, another bomb hit on the ramparts just behind, a paint store was flaming up at the end of the garden, an ammunition store next it seemed doomed to blow up, and us with it; the Bofors guns started going off overhead, more planes zoomed in and down, the Rock guns barked and the fleet guns boomed and the whole Rock fairly shook. But the three girls, quite oblivious to it all, sat calmly looking into their mirrors, taking their hair-curlers out, streaking on lipstick, stretching their mouths to wipe away the smears and patting their curls into place. I was amazed at their sang-froid, particularly since it was the first raid for all of them. Yet they showed no fear, and their concentration on the faces in their mirrors was complete.

Only when their make-up session was over did her female companions begin to turn green and tremble. Had the air raid gone on much longer, Hiett was sure they would have panicked. But the job of making themselves presentable had kept fear at bay. There was the moral, she thought: if you are caught in an air raid, keep your mind occupied with something else, even if it is just taking off hair-curlers. ‘Fear comes first to the idle, who have nothing else to think about but fear.’

Hiett later looked at research into British reactions to air raids. Women stood up to them better than men (who lost control of their nerves when they couldn’t do anything) because women thought of their children’s welfare and their loved ones first, and so forgot about their own fear. The working classes, more used to suffering and physical danger, were not in fact any more resilient than the liberal and intellectual professions who distracted themselves by turning their minds to the aesthetics of searchlights and explosions, the technical identification of aircraft and ordnance, the mathematics of range and trajectory, plus relevant historical perspectives and future prognostications.

As to fear itself, it doesn’t upset your nervous system so much, as soon as you learn not to be afraid of fear. But this may take a long time to learn. I still didn’t know that fear can be a good thing when I learned from a Spaniard that a man who is afraid is also courageous, just as long as he doesn’t run or let the fear take mastery. I thought that at best fear was an undesirable thing to be accepted. But the more you see of this war the more you think about fear.

The ‘all-clear’ sounded at 4 p.m. and they all dashed to the dining room for a lobster lunch. Nobody talked about the air raid till the crustacean was demolished and Raven came in with coffee and a cigar-lighter fashioned to look like an anti-aircraft gun, which he had been saving for just such an occasion. That broke the voluntary silence. Governor Liddell explained what they had been through: it was a Vichy revenge air raid by several score Potez and Glenn Martin aircraft. The Anglo-French attack on Dakar had brought the war to Gibraltar. Liddell said he thought a couple of the Vichy planes had been shot down over La Línea for violating Spain’s neutral airspace. ‘It did seem like a queer kind of war when American-built planes, piloted by Frenchmen, should bomb the British at Gibraltar on German orders and be brought down by Spaniards. We laughed over that for a while, and then H.E. let me come with him on his official tour to inspect the damage.’

Cormorant Wharf, the Dutch Shell stores, the south generating station, the married quarters in Naval Hospital Road, King George V Memorial Hospital and Scud Hill were all damaged by Vichy bombs. One projectile had exploded in the middle of South Barracks parade ground and a coal shed on the South Mole caught fire. There were six dead and seventeen injured. The AA batteries had fired 750 rounds.

The chorus girls left for Madrid on the morning of Wednesday 25 September, but something kept Helen Hiett from going with them, so she had the journalist’s luck of being in a bad place at the right time. The sirens went off again just after noon, announcing the fifth air raid on Gibraltar, the longest and heaviest so far. Wave after wave of Glenn Martin bombers from Casablanca dropped ordnance south to north along the Rock, then flew back to reload and refuel and attack again. Government House had lunched early and now Hiett sat in the shelter with her typewriter, the only woman among a group of men:

It does you no harm to sit for three hours listening to the terrible crump overhead, knowing every minute that death may pick you for a partner. It helps you settle down generally thereafter, for your body refuses to stay in a perpetual state of panic. You sense a new serenity in seeing how much you can take … As to being alone with a group of soldiers, facing danger and doing it as well as they, it’s like the thrill of learning a new language, or of practicing a new profession with success. Then, too, in such a case, men are always grateful to a woman who doesn’t panic, and their gratitude is pleasant to receive, the more so if disproportionate to your own merits.

She kept asking for more whiskey and handed the glasses under the tablecloth to a young man called Paddy who, although an ADC to Mason-MacFarlane, was not yet inured to bombardment. She was glad to have the typewriter so she could write her script. It proved the truth of what she had learned the day before about keeping busy, and the sound effects outside inspired some descriptive copy for NBC’s listeners in North America, people who had never been bombed, and whose country had not been invaded in living memory. But Hiett was sensitive enough, too, to know when to stop typing during the bombing, and she saw that the others in the room were glad of that: ‘For the moment before a near one strikes and you think, “Well, this is it” – that moment must be spent in silence.’

The air raid killed seven British people. The two three-inch ackack guns on Signal Hill, firing four rounds a minute, exhausted all their ammunition, and several French bombers were shot down. The Gibraltar Defence Force gunners had tin hats but no ear-protectors; the gun-layer on John Porral’s gun was deaf for several weeks. A litter of unexploded ordnance blocked some of Gibraltar’s streets. One bomb hit the British anti-submarine trawler Stella Sirius, moored on the South Mole, killing two seamen named Thomas and Griffin and setting the ship ablaze. Four Gibraltarian men – Peter Buttigieg, Antonio De La Paz, Joseph Stagno and Second Officer W. H. Jones – went aboard and bravely hacked their way into the fo’c’sle to rescue the trapped and injured. They managed to scuttle the ship before the flames reached the magazine and the depth charges. The number of bombs dropped harmlessly in the sea made some wonder if every French pilot had his heart in the Vichy cause. Their explosions killed a lot of fish. A dockie speared a big one with a pitchfork and many a Spanish workman walked home to La Línea dangling a fish dinner.

That day, Fortress HQ put out an upbeat press communiqué: ‘After an afternoon of intense air bombardment Gibraltar’s high morale remains entirely unaffected and the traditional Ceremony of the Keys was carried out in the presence of His Excellency the Governor with full ceremonial.’

*

The Key is part of the Rock’s symbology. The coat of arms of Gibraltar, first granted in Toledo in 1502, is an escutcheon (shield) with a three-towered red castle under which hangs a golden key (‘pendent therefrom a key Or’). This signified in heraldic terms that Gibraltar was the key to the strait, as for the Moors it had been the key to Spain. The Ceremony of the Keys at Fortress Gibraltar dates from the Great Siege, when Governor Eliott held the keys to the three gates in the North Wall, and only handed them to the Port Sergeant to lock the gates at sunset, and then to open them again in the morning. (Eliott carried the keys at his belt by day, it was said, and slept with them under his pillow.)

After peace was restored in 1783, drums and fifes accompanied the Port Sergeant, warning aliens to leave Gibraltar before the gates were locked. This happened every night until the end of the First World War, like the nightly ceremony at the Tower of London. Governor Harington revived the tradition in 1933, with a ceremonial parade in Casemates Square where the senior NCO requested and was given the keys by the governor. The ritual is still performed annually by the Gibraltar Regiment, and every Saturday at midday the Gibraltar Re-Enactment Association Society dress up to do a tourist version.

Helen Hiett wrote in September 1940:

I had seen the ceremony before and I’ve seen it since – the marching, the stirring music, the drummers in full dress of crimson and white, the age-old query, ‘Whose keys?’ and the answer ‘King George’s keys’, before the gate in the ramparts is locked for the night, but never has it been so impressive as it was that day, a few moments after the last bomb fell, when searchers were still hunting unknown dead.