GREY GIBRALTAR.

Hokitika Guardian, 19 April 1924, Page 4

GREY GIBRALTAR.

CHANGING CUSTOMS ON THE ROCK.

(,G. Ward Price in Daily Ala.il)

GIBRALTAR. In the dimmest North-East distance Dawned Gibraltar, grand and grey,

and through the morning mist, in line ahead, majestically entering the, Straits from the Atlantic, came three grim giants: H..M.S. Revenge, H..M.S. Ramillies, H.M.S. Royal Sovereign, all the same drab leaden colour, except where . the polished tompions of their fifteen-inch guns shone in the sun like lamps left lighted. From the deck of the little Tangier packet mine wero the only British eyes to see this Imperial pageant, beside which the Wembley Exhibition, however, splendid, must seem makebelieve. For wo were on as historic a patch of water as there is in the whole world—within sight of the place where the last German submarine, II 34, was sunk, only GO hours before the armistice, where the H.M.S. Britannia was torpedoed the next day, and where Columbus set out to discover America.

Yet, even without a squadron of super-Dreadnoughts in the foreground, it is unmoved. As a fortress its value may be fast decaying—one of those great ships, lying away out of sight, could pound the Rock into limestone avalanches, and drive the townspeople into its deepest caves like rabbits in a warren. But as a symbol of British might, raised Reside the great highway of the sea which holds our Emipre together, Gibraltar is profoundly impres-

The very fact that it stands on a foreign shore, guarded night and day by a cordon of sentries; that one can enter it with only a pass; that the gates are locked at nightfall, and that it is governed despotically by a general, add to its national significance.

Just its Rhodes, under the Knights of .Malta, was for hundreds of years a world-wide problem of militant Christianity, so Gibraltar stands for the British Empire in arms, unprovoeativo, hut strong to hold its own. Unlike many picturesque places of the Mediterranean, its attraction only increases when you land. It has the tidiness of a ship’s quarter-deck, combined with the quaint charm of a college court. And, as it should bo, the atmosphere of the place is strictly military. The main promenade for the civilian inhabitants is the Land Wall; their park is a promenade ground, and a hill is not called a hill, hut a “ ramp.” ' Sometimes Gibraltarians have resented the tightness of their military leading strings. Application for permission to make the slightest structural alterations, for example, has to he made to the appropriate branch of the Army adminstration. and is liable to be refused with the curt, lormula, “Military objection.” Since October 1922, however, an Executive Council has been attached to the Governor, on which the civilian population is re-

presented. But the regime of benevolent despotism under which this Colony of the British Crown still lives was far severer in its early eighteenth-century days, when a sudden attack from Spain was almost a daily possibility.

The old Governor’s Regulations show that authority was then wielded with a very high hand.

“Ships coining into the Bay without showing colours arc to he fired on, ” says the order, adding, with a shrewd regard for the Rock’s finances that suggests a Governor from beyond the Tweed, “and the cost of the shot is to be recovered in the port dues.” The liberties of the civilian inhabitants were closely restricted. “ Xv> woman is to beat a soldier, ” it is laid down. “The first that does so shall he whipped and turned otlL ot town.”

Ono Margaret Doe soon 101 l the effects of this decree. “For milking a disturbance in her quarters and attacking Alexander Stewart” she was sentenced to receive 100 lashes in three places and afterwards to ho drummed out of the garrison with ft rope round her neck. Flogging and death sentences were lavishly distributed. For giving an opium-pi II to a sick soldier—“ playing the quack,” the order dogmatically calls it—a bombardier is recorded to have received HOO lashes. Even straying donkeys were to be shot. Yet, despite the sterness of the limes, it was necessary for a special regulation to lay down that “No officer or soldier for duty is to carry an umbrella,” and one day the Governor announced that “ to his great surprise the General met an officer coming in from Spain with a large straw hat, and, to add to the burlesque figure, an officer riding behind him. The General forbids any such indecency, and will not allow port liberty to any officer dressed in an unmilitary manner.”

The Empire has become n pleasanter place m some respects since then. Yet some of the old grievances remain. The lines carved over a century ago on a stone sentry box at Prince Edward’s Gate might be used by Earl Haig’s Fund:

God and the soldier all men adore Tn time of trouble and no more, For when the war is over And all tilings righted God is neglected And the old soldier slighted.

The long and glorious history. that such records recall makes it unthinkable that- the suggestion constantly urged from Spain of exchanging Gibraltar for Ceuta, at the loot of the opposite "Pillar of Hercules,” on the African shore, should ever lie carried out. This pyramid of barren rock, dependent even for its water on the rainfall, isolated on the southernmost sandy beach of Spain, our only Colony on the Continent of Europe, is as old and as integral a part of the British Empire as St. Paul’s Cathedral. It harms no one, and its sentimental value to all Britons is above price.