Abstract
This chapter considers language policy and practice in Gibraltar between 1940 and 1985. This period is important because it includes the wartime Evacuation and the Spanish border restrictions and closure, and it is also fundamental in the emergence of a Gibraltarian identity and democratic rights. These developments were facilitated by growing accessibility to the English language. From being largely the preserve of the colonial establishment and the elite, it emerged as pre-eminent in official use, the media and culture, and the higher oral registers.
Miles Clifford, Gibraltar’s Colonial Secretary 1942–1944, headed the committee entrusted by Governor Mason MacFarlane with the task of reorganising the whole educational system of Gibraltar for the post-war era. The Clifford Report of 1944 introduced a state system and gave a central role to English. Both MacFarlane and Clifford were enlightened rulers and indeed Clifford’s papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford show that in his concern for his colonial subjects he was a man ahead of his time. Although not everyone saw that the days of empire would be limited, colonialism in Gibraltar, in its closing stages, had unexpected nuances.
Education and a command of English became vital in the post-war years in the campaign for civil rights and political empowerment. With Franco’s government’s campaign against Gibraltar and the border closure the English language and the sense of attachment to Britain gained further consolidation. This co-existed with the move away from overt colonialism.
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Notes
- 1.
Gibraltar Chronicle, 31 January 1913, p. 2.
- 2.
Gibraltar Government Archives, YF 323/1933.
- 3.
See also Colonial Annual Report: Gibraltar, 1963 (HMSO 1964: 31).
- 4.
From May to August 1940, c. 17,000 women, children and old people in the civilian population, as well as men in non-essential occupations, were evacuated so as not to impede military preparations in the fortress. The evacuees were sent initially to French Morocco, and very shortly afterwards expelled from there following the collapse of France. Under pressure from the public and the authorities in Gibraltar, the British Government eventually agreed to admit them to Britain, initially on a temporary basis, with a view to transferring them to Jamaica or elsewhere. Some 1500 evacuees were in fact shipped to Jamaica; a further 2000 to Madeira. More than 12,000 went to Britain. Although the majority stayed in the London area for most of the war, there was dispersal, to Northern Ireland in particular, from 1944 onwards, when V-weapons were used against the UK.
- 5.
A contrary opinion is West’s assertion that ‘many evacuee children did not begin to learn English till they returned to Gibraltar.’ Michael West (1956: 156).
- 6.
Yo iba [de compras] con mi madre, y si mi madre quería algo, yo se lo pedía, ella no podía.
- 7.
For further information, consult: Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies, Rhodes House, Papers of Sir Miles Clifford, MSS. British Emp. S. 517.
- 8.
As late as at least the 1959 elections for the legislative council, candidates had to use English on Radio Gibraltar.
- 9.
Draft Report ‘A New Educational System for Gibraltar’, accessed in the National Archives, CO 91/517/6.
- 10.
Draft Report, Appendix A, p. 1.
- 11.
Letter of 15 June 1943.
- 12.
Paper in pp. 2–3 of Appendix B, 18 October 1943.
- 13.
Letter/memo correspondence at the Colonial Office, 14 December 1943, Draft Report, National Archives CO 91/517/6.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
Oliver Stanley’s letter, 2 September 1944, Gibraltar Government Archives, YF 368/1942.
- 16.
Reports of Advisory Committee of Education for the Colonies, National Archives, CO 91/522/12; Sub-committee’s proposals, CO 91/522/11.
- 17.
Par. 14, pp. 8–9 in the original draft.
- 18.
Amended Report in “Reports and Proposals on post-war education needs 1943–44” in box of A. A. Traverso’s research material for master’s dissertation on the history of education in Gibraltar, 1704–1950, Gibraltar Government Archives.
- 19.
See the booklet “A new Educational System for Gibraltar”, with Sir Miles Clifford’s papers, Rhodes House, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Manuscript MSS. Brit. Emp. S. 517, 2/1.
- 20.
Correspondence in Gibraltar Government Archives, YF 368/1942.
- 21.
See also National Archives, CO 91/522/12.
- 22.
Ibid. A sign of the high expectation held for the new system was the publicity given to it in Northern Ireland to raise evacuees’ morale.
- 23.
From “Gibraltar – Papers and Correspondence”, National Archives, CO 1045/171.
- 24.
Papers of Sir Miles Clifford, MSS. British Emp. s. 517 1, 2/1, 2/3.2/4 et al. (At Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies, Rhodes House, Oxford).
- 25.
Spanish restrictions (under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship: 1939–1975) started with the Queen’s visit to Gibraltar in 1954 but gained in severity when the issue of Gibraltar came up before the United Nations Decolonization Committee in 1963, culminating in the border closure of 1969. For two decades, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, Gibraltar was almost completely isolated from Spain.
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Acknowledgement
I acknowledge, and am thankful for, the valuable research on education in Gibraltar carried out by Albert Traverso and Edward Archer and the work and publications of the different members of the Lancaster project and also the contribution of local historians, such as Tommy Finlayson’s seminal account of the Evacuation. I am grateful to the writers of other works on language, to the Hispanic Studies Department of the University of Birmingham for its unfailing support in my PhD studies. Libraries and archives both in Gibraltar and in the UK have been extensively used in my research for both primary and secondary material.
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Picardo, E. (2019). Borders, Language Shift, and Colonialism in Gibraltar, 1940–1985. In: Canessa, A. (eds) Bordering on Britishness. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99310-2_6
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