Abstract
Reviewed by: Rúben Serém, University of Nottingham, UK
Julio Ponce, a lecturer at the University of Seville and author of several pioneering and exhaustive works on twentieth-century Seville and its province, has successfully produced a succinct study on the byzantine quadrangular relationship between Gibraltar, Great Britain and both Republican and rebel Spain during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939.
The author’s prose is both clear and direct and the main narrative is condensed in 96 pages (39–135), in which Ponce’s command of archival material in Gibraltar, Spain and Great Britain is evident. The same cannot always be said of his use of secondary sources. In the five years between the publication of the Spanish- and English-language versions of his book, for example, Ponce makes no reference to the published works of the foremost expert on contemporary Gibraltar, Gareth Stockey, relying solely on an earlier, unpublished MA thesis. Ponce nevertheless laments the ‘surprising dearth of research regarding the history of the colony during the Civil War’ (4). A further absence, Ponce devotes a mere two paragraphs to the all-powerful Catholic Church (77–8), this despite recognizing that ‘religious factors played a key role in Gibraltarians’ views of the Republic’ (36). Likewise, socio-political tensions within the enclave, both pitting Gibraltarians against the British colonial authorities and between Gibraltarians of different political persuasions (that climaxed during the 1939 riots), clearly merits a separate chapter rather than being spread out (and inevitably ‘diluted’) throughout the book.
Nonetheless, these shortcomings are largely compensated for by an impressive contribution in the subjects of high politics and diplomatic history. In a series of carefully constructed arguments, Ponce successfully demonstrates that Gibraltar ‘exemplified the calculated non-intervention policy promoted by Great Britain. It remained formally neutral, though the authorities and businesses present on the Rock favoured a nationalist victory in more ways than one’ (7). The author concludes that the alliance between the British colonial administrators and the Gibraltarian elites against the Republic was fuelled by mutually-shared class prejudices, a determination to safeguard their economic interests in Spain, the morbid fear of a communist revolution, and the erroneous assumption that the victorious rebels would not gravitate towards the orbit of the Axis. Moreover, Ponce clearly shows the myriad ‘ways’ in which the aforementioned coalition supported the rebel war effort, namely: the sale of fuel, ammunition and other materials to the insurgents (all this while refusing to supply the Republic); the preferential treatment dispensed to pro-Francoist war correspondents; the disclosure of sensitive military information to the rebels; the toleration of insurgent espionage activities in the enclave; and the blocking of the right of belligerency to both sides (which effectively granted the same diplomatic status to the legitimate government of Spain and the rebels). In so doing, Ponce adequately supports his overarching argument that Gibraltar undermined Republican military efforts to blockade the Strait and ‘aided … the rapid control of the seas by the insurgents’ (3). The other overarching argument presented in the introduction, that ‘the intensity of the Spanish claim to the Rock increased once the nationalists began to emerge as victors’ (5), is satisfactorily supported by Ponce’s brief analysis of the critical years between the epilogue of the civil war (starting in 1938) and the end of the Second World War (124, 131–5). Oddly, Ponce reaches the bizarre conclusion that General Franco never seriously entertained the idea of entering the war on the side of the Axis (134–5, 138), an argument that has long been discredited by Paul Preston and several others.
Ponce’s skills as a biographer are perceptible in his investigation of the crucial role played by Charles Harington, the Military Governor of Gibraltar between 1933 and 1938, whom the author exposes as a hysterical anti-communist, a rebel sympathizer and personal friend of the infamous General Queipo de Llano. Harrington enthusiastically turned a blind eye to the violation of the non-intervention treaty by the insurgents and downplayed the military threat posed by the installation of heavy artillery in Ceuta and Algeciras. Moreover, Ponce provides an articulate examination of the convoluted tenure of Luciano López Ferrer as the rebel diplomatic representative in Gibraltar; in particular, his strained relationship with Governor Edmund Ironside. Finally, one of the most impressive sections of this book consists of a powerful exposé of the cataclysmic nature of the refugee crisis that plagued Gibraltar, where between 5000 and 9000 Spanish nationals crammed into an already claustrophobic enclave that possessed a pre-war population of 18,000 residents (53), and the profound political anxieties of a colonial administration that feared a potential ‘ideological contagion’ among Gibraltarians (58).
All things considered, Julio Ponce’s work represents an accessible yet authoritative overview of a still neglected topic in the vast bibliography of the foreign dimensions of the Spanish Civil War.