Monday, May 4, 2020 - 10:11 Carmen Gomez

An extract from the summer of 1964, tells of how Joshua Hassan was preparing for the United Nations debate. “He organised and led the drafting by a committee composed of all the elected members of the Legislature, of a short, well-argued and telling pamphlet called “The future of Gibraltar,” which was sent to all the members of the committee of 24, together with an album of photographs of Gibraltar.”

This extract speaks for itself, and also speaks volumes of commentary; not only for the lack of success achieved in all these years since; but for the manner in which things were then done.

A WORLD OF PEACE

Like others of my generation, I have seen two existences sink beyond the horizons of history. One through my parents eyes, i.e., that of the evacuation. The other being the closure of the frontier, which for me was the departing point from any type of endearing attachment to Spain; and so it is today. Now, more than ever, it is beyond argument that those years were something separate from the rest of ones life.

As for me, I regret the vanished benevolence of the world around us and its honest fight to bring about worthy changes to our social structure. A time that we felt we should preserve, whilst resuming something of the life which had been interrupted. Of course, conditions were not what they ought to have been. The working classes had even more to complain about then than they have now. All sorts of things were crying out to be improved, and most of the social reformers were regarded as difficult or worse. But the fact remains that it was a world of peace, and I found it a pleasant world to live in.

The origins of things were seldom explained to us; we just appropriated life as it came along supplying our own irrational interpretations. For example, it never struck me growing up that “Casemates” was named after the neighbouring casemate that defended Gibraltar from siege after siege; or that our Montagu bathing pavilion, which had taken its name from the nearby Montagu Bastion, on top of which were the Montagu gardens; were supposedly named after the first Duke of Montagu in 1705, a year after the capture of Gibraltar. Except to this day, nobody knows why. Small matters, and yet I find it easier to turn my thoughts to then, than to have to try and understand the present, with its worsening values; its lack of ethics and caring in general.