It was while in Ireland that an order was passed through our HQ fixing the time and place for me to meet the GOC.-in-C. Gibraltar, in London. Within forty-eight hours a small party left for an unknown destination on a mission. They were commanded by Paul Baker, recently promoted to major, with three subalterns, Lieutenants Roy Meyler, Don Terry, and ‘Shorty’ Wells and five good NCOs who were drawn from across the Field Companies under protest from their OCs ! The nature of the mission that could not be revealed to the men until they left England, was to advise and train the garrison of Gibraltar in the techniques of destroying bulk fuel installations.
The party travelled to Gourock and was embarked on HMS Maidstone, a submarine depot ship due to take up station on the Rock. Baker’s description of the departure was as follows:
Before we left Gourock a team of officers was sent out to scour the town to buy ginger ale for the Wardroom bar to mix with brandy in ‘horses’ necks’, which were very popular. The odd thing was that the ginger ale cost more in the Wardroom than the duty free brandy! When we sailed we joined a convoy and for a time as we passed through the North Atlantic one of our escorts was the mighty battleship King George V, known as KG five. I remember thinking as she followed us that her beam looked like a destroyer crossing our course at right angles.
Soon after embarking the party was impressed into the ship’s crew. All had previously experienced more than one passage with the Royal Navy and could avoid the more obvious pitfalls set for the unsuspecting soldier aboard ship but this was different. They not only had to avoid any reference to the sharp or blunt end, they had to be sailors; it was not sufficient merely to be careful to refer to ladders or companionways as such, and not as stairs.
Baker played around with division lists, quarter bills, action stations for military personnel and generally became entered as apprentice to ‘Jimmy-the-One’. Furthermore, they helped man the ack-ack guns and kept anti-submarine lookouts throughout the voyage so this time they felt part of the ship and not on the ship as landlubbers as they were usually described.
‘Jimmy-the-One’ was also the gunnery officer and would frequently exercise gun teams. Now sappers are sappers and gunners are gunners, that is in the army, but this did not mean a thing to the naval officers. At first our party meekly suggested that it ‘warn’t their trade’ but this was brushed aside. Then they threw themselves heart and soul into the job because they couldn’t let the army down. Before the end of the voyage they achieved the impossible and those sappers were gunners, hopping round at their stations and obeying orders for change of targets like any matelot wearing a gun on his sleeve. As one NCO put it ‘Aint it all right, chum, you have to do everything in the navy, gunner and all’.
Many alarms relieved these watches of any tendency to boredom. Every distant gull seemed like a plane in sight and the humble porpoise invariably appeared like a submarine to the unaccustomed eye.
Every morning at dawn the Tannoys would summon the watch to action stations, where they were compensated by witnessing the splendour of the rising sun over the Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes calm and comparatively cloudless, but at others it would appear angry and tempestuous as the light spread across the watery expanse. In either case it gave one a sense of proportion, and man’s efforts dwarfed into insignificance against this background of sea and sky with the rising of the sun. But the reverie was soon ended for there was much to be done each day.
The spells off duty were spent either on a hand of cards or swapping yarns, whilst the NCOs tried out the possibility of investing the ‘old mud hook’ at Crown and Anchor, only to find that if it provided excitement, it was not too good a pastime from the financial point of view. The Royal Navy are great hosts and the time passed pleasantly enough. At one period they ran into heavy weather, when the troops were rather shaken, particularly at breakfast time when heavy rolling landed them either in the scuppers or under the mess tables with their breakfast wrapped round their necks. The routine during the voyage was a change for the party who quickly fell in with the traditions of life afloat; after all, they had worked under Naval Command in many of their ‘jobs’ and the White Ensign figured in most of their recollections. They came up smiling for meals, in spite of the weather and learned to sleep in a hammock. An amusing indication of our close association with the sea for some months is that many in the unit had got into the habit of ‘making signals’ in preference to sending messages; this produced an inquiry while on an exercise in Ireland from a brigadier who asked whether we were ‘blankety, blank’ Marines!
The days at sea passed quickly and one morning the Spanish and African coasts came into view. These blue hills, misty and distant, merging at places with the sea and sky, told of the end of the journey. It was not long before that huge bluff, the rock itself, was discernible, dominating and impressive, standing sentinel over the entrance to what the chief dago was wont to refer to as mare nostrum. I know of no spectacle more impressive or more typical of our solidarity as an Empire than the first glimpse of Gibraltar as one approaches from the sea. The key position of the Rock at the western end of the Mediterranean is at once evident when approaching from the Atlantic. The massive block of grey rock rising steeply to 1,400 feet in grim and imposing outline gives a vivid idea of the military importance of the place. The north and east faces are particularly steep, but elsewhere the sides descend in terraces to sea level.
Baker continued:
We had a comfortable trip and duly took up quarters on arrival. I then reported to the Garrison HQ and explained our mission. Practically all the sappers on the Rock were tunnellers, mostly former miners, and a tough lot. The rest of my party were introduced to them and got on with a programme of training in demolitions under Don Terry, boatmanship under Roy Meyler with Wells and the NCOs helping out as needed. As a change from tunnelling they found this most acceptable and we heard that there had eventually been some keen competition to get into one of our raiding parties.
The amazing collection of barracks, casemates of bygone ages, modern fortifications, a Moorish castle, and countless other works of the military engineer, tended to give the place an intriguing outline. It may be said that the Corps of Royal Engineers had its origin at Gibraltar in the late eighteenth century as soldier artificers.
The outstanding impression of those first contacts with the garrison was that everyone tried to convince them that there was no escape from the Rock for the duration. Once you set a foot ashore, you were there for keeps, seemed to be the local outlook and any suggestion that one might return to England was the subject of merriment and derision.
The naval base and dockyards bring the two services close together at this outpost of the Empire. It will be recalled that Gibraltar was taken by the British in 1704 and has been a colony of the Crown ever since; small wonder then with its dominating position and historical importance if the Nazis should cast covetous eyes on it. The indigenous population are descendants of Italian, Spanish or early Genoese settlers, but of course are British now and highly patriotic subjects of His Majesty. Local legend says that British rule will last as long as the monkeys flourish. This refers to the small colony of Barbary apes found on the Rock who are officially on the ‘ration strength’ of the garrison and a bombardier has a full time job as their minder.
The party was accommodated in Nissen huts up near the frontier on the isthmus. Little or no blackout was in force – that was a minor thrill. It was quite exciting to see the lights again at night, their only previous similar experience since war was at Nantes just before the fall of France, and those more recent weekends in Dublin.
The work of the mission was hard, at first often taking up long hours, but once accomplished it became a matter of waiting for the passage home, not too easy a matter in those days. During this period of waiting several of the officers and NCOs did spells at sea with the anti-submarine patrol. Imagine leaving the trawler base, ‘pens’ as they are known, and pushing out to sea early on a wet and cold morning, as likely as not into the teeth of a Levanter. Life aboard these hard little ships is tough going at the best and hell at other times. With a small crew commanded by a lieutenant, they go out to hunt, fight and destroy the King’s enemies above and below the sea. On these spells at sea our men would muster and carry on as part of the crew. They learned the secrets of the Asdic by which they listened to the grating of the surf miles away inshore, or the thump, thump of some distant coaster’s screw plugging along on her lawful business. They would keep watch either above or below deck in the engine room and generally share the rough and the smooth with those cheery young men in these ships. One of our NCOs went to the lengths of replumbing the hot and cold water pipes to the galley with such crowning success that both the hot and the cold water came out of their appropriately labelled taps when the job was done! Action stations and alarms came frequently enough to convince the most bloodthirsty that there was plenty of excitement to be had in these small but active vessels of the Royal Navy.
The Rock, because of its size, only had a limited garrison, a fair proportion of which were RE tunnelling companies including one RCE from Canada. These were engaged in hollowing out even more of the interior of the Rock to provide shelter for the garrison in the event of air attack. In the end total living space was provided including a hospital and all the necessary facilities for a long stay. New gun emplacements were constructed covering the isthmus joining the Rock to Spain. The spoil from all the recent work was tipped into the sea adjoining the narrow neck of land connecting the Rock to Spain and this was used to form a landing and take-off strip for fighter aircraft; as the tunnelling progressed so the airstrip runway was extended.
The weekly ceremony of the Keys was a never failing source of interest. The battalions of the garrison took it in turn to provide the band and escort to the Keys; the Independent Company provided a frontier guard. After inspection by the governor or another officer appointed by him, the frontier guard marched through the casemates to their posts, and the gates were then closed and ‘locked’ by the Keys sergeant. The arrival of the sergeant at the gate is always challenged by the sentry, and the traditional dialogue is then,
‘Who goes there’?
‘Keys.’
‘Whose Keys’?
‘King George’s Keys.’
Rumour has it that on one occasion before the sergeant could reply to the latter question, a wit in the crowd convulsed his fellow onlookers by interjecting loudly ‘Maconochies’! It should be remembered that in wartime the garrison menu comes very largely out of tins bearing that trade name and so is well known to all ordinary soldiers of two major wars.
Sergeant Blake, who was awarded a Military Medal at Rotterdam, was walking down a street one day when the Commander-in-Chief, Field Marshal Lord Gort VC, was approaching. Blake chucked him up a smart salute, as the soldiers would say, and the Field Marshal spotted his MM. He stopped and had quite a long conversation with him. Later, during an inspection on one parade in which the sapper officers and NCOs were fallen in as supernumeraries at the back, the Governor, Lord Gort, spotted Sergeant Blake again and going up to him said, ‘I know you’. He then carried on with their previous conversation. It took Sergeant Blake a long time to live down his acquaintance with a Field Marshal in the Sergeants’ Mess.
Baker signalled the War Office to report the completion of their work and request permission to rejoin their unit in Northern Ireland. After a week or two of waiting and considerable negotiations, prompted no doubt by a homing instinct acquired during previous adventures on the Dutch and French seaboard, the party received the order for embarkation. This was a great day, for in spite of the many friends and enjoyable experiences, a man without a definite job is a poor creature. So it was that at last they said goodbye having disproved the wartime adage ‘once at Gib – always at Gib’, and sailed in a small steamer in company with other details. As fellow passengers there were British officers who had escaped from the Hun in France and made their way back through Spain. They told tales of Spanish prisons, vermin, starvation, Gestapo, misery and suffering; also of many months of hard living after the escape before their delivery was accomplished.
Finally our men arrived back in their unit lines four months after leaving, with a tan the colour of mahogany and no funds in credit, only to face a barrage of chaff about their ‘tough’ mission away from wartime Britain.