history file prairies was mightily impressed. “…you could see into Spain and away out on the Mediterranean also to the coast of Morocco — it was the most beautiful sight I have ever seen. There were a lot of six inch guns on the Rock manned by English soldiers some of them hadn’t had leave for several years. One gun was on the highest point, away from the Med. If they let an empty shell out in that position it would have dropped into the ocean 1800 feet below. There were 300 three-foot search lights on the Rock but you couldn’t see even one when walking around.” Not only could Zarn not see the camouflaged search lights he also claimed to “…never catch sight of one of the Rock apes.” Zarn kept a diary (illegally) and in it he recorded many of his experiences in Gibraltar including: Fights in the Universal Bar — “I looked back when we got to the door and there were four Red-Caps [Military Police] lying on the floor… a little English sailor came running out after us hollering, ‘That was nice work boys, and I got his burberry.’” Girls or lack of — “There were no girls on the Rock as all women and children had been evacuated to England but there were a few nurses as there was a small hospital there. One night the officers brought a few of them aboard for a party, I was trying to sleep on the deck which was hard to do with their noise, finally I heard the patter of bare feet and looking up I could make out a bare-assed girl running by, followed close behind by our Captain.” An execution — “There is an old castle halfway up the Rock that did not seem to be kept in repair but it was used once when we were there to hang a Spaniard caught trying to fasten a time bomb on a ship in the harbour.” Casemates — “There were gates in a great cement wall between Spain and Gib which were opened at 9am and closed at 5pm to allow Spanish workers to come back and forth to work on the docks etc… the Robert once supplied the
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‘Key Guard’.” *[See author’s note]. Skiving off — “…one day I noticed my name on a list of jokers that were to go on a route march to the top of the Rock in whites. I dashed to the sick bay.” Local bargains — “Frequently a local resident would come into the Universal with a basket over one arm full of shrimps. His basket had big ones in one half that sold for, I think, a few pennies a dozen. The small ones in the other half were terribly cheap.” But after a year of convoy duty Zarn grew tired of the Navy and of Gibraltar: “We seemed to go through the same routine month after month — Plymouth to Gib — I counted up when we finally left for home that we had made 56 trips across the Bay of Biscay.” From Gibraltar the Robert sailed to the Eastern Mediterranean, back to England and then home to Victoria, Canada. Zarn wrote: “Two French cruisers joined us and the following day we could see the Sierra Nevada
“ Author George Zarn
A local resident would come into the Universal with a basket over one arm full of shrimps
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mountains in Spain with snow on their peaks. I had been glad to leave Gib before but now as we sailed through the Strait I wished that we could stop for a visit before we got to Plymouth.” By the time the Robert returned to Canada’s West Coast in December, 1944 she had been away for the better part of two years and had logged nearly 150,000 miles. Zarn and most of his shipmates were given 56-days’ paid leave and train tickets to anywhere in Canada. Zarn returned to Alberta and ‘pitched hay’ for much of his leave. When it was over he was sent to Halifax, the premier naval base on Canada’s Atlantic coast, for training on torpedoes. Jenny joined him there and soon after he was given his discharge. Finished with the navy Zarn returned to country life and wrote books and launched a newspaper column under the tag The Hired Hand at Idlewood Farm. In Prairie Boys Afloat he summed up his naval career in the plain straight-forward language you would expect. “I joined as a bare-assed ordinary seaman, got discharged as a bare-assed able seaman.” In July1945 the Robert sailed east to take part in the anticipated invasion of Japan. Fortunately for the crew (my father AB Earl Reynolds was one of them) the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan surrendered. After the War the Robert was sold to the Charlton Steam Shipping Company and sailed under the name Charlton Sovereign between the UK and Australia. In April 1952 she was sold to the Fratelli Grimaldi Line of Genoa and restructured and refitted to be a luxury liner. As SS Lucania she sailed from Genoa to Venezuela via Barcelona, the Canary Islands and Curacao, returning by way of Havana, Miami, Bermuda and the Azores. Launched in 1930 she was finally scrapped at Spezia, Italy in 1962. n • Author’s note: The crew of the Robert was the first from a non-British ship to be given the honour of carrying out the Ceremony of the Keys.
Diary of a Victorian Colonial A new hardback book on Gibraltar, Diary of a Victorian Colonial and other Tales, is now available for sale in local bookshops. Written by Gibraltarian author M. G. Sanchez and published by Rock Scorpion Books, the main story is set in Gibraltar in the year 1888 and follows the fortunes of Charles Bestman, an Anglo-Gibraltarian returning home after years of enforced exile... only to encounter madness, murder and worse. The tale is populated with various local characters, including hot-tempered coalmen, drunken soldiers, fractious boatmen, petty smugglers and Spanish ‘cigarrerras’ from the Irish Town tobacco factories. The author says he got the idea for the story from the time he was researching his book of essays The Prostitutes of Serryua’s Lane and Other Hidden Gibraltarian Histories, adding that
GIBRALTAR MAGAZINE • AUGUST 2010
practically everything in the tale (the shops, the cigar factories, the smuggling methods, the drinking establishments, even the adverts in shop windows) is based on historical reality. The other tales in the collection are set in contemporary Spain and Italy and once again revolve around the interlinked subjects of exile and geographical displacement. M. G. Sanchez was educated at Bayside Comprehensive and the University of Leeds (where he obtained BA, MA and PhD degrees in English). This is his fifth published book. Diary of a Victorian Colonial and other Tales costs £ 12.50 and is available from all good Gibraltar bookshops. n
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