Gibraltarians regularly appear in the British media as arch Royalists festooned with the Union Jack and declaring themselves to be “more British than the British.” There is no doubt that Gibraltarians can be relied upon to come out in great numbers to celebrate their British identity and loyalty – especially when there are problems on the border with Spain. But what does it mean to be Gibraltarian and how did an overwhelmingly Spanish-speaking population with intimate connections with Spanish people and culture come, over the span of a single lifetime, to identify so resolutely against any identification with Spain? What does it mean to be more British than the British?
There have been numerous studies on this question but the approach has largely been historical — based on colonial archives and predominantly English sources with some small social science surveys, almost always conducted exclusively in English and with a limited set of questions. All of these studies confirm that the Gibraltarian identity developed over time from Genoese, Maltese, Spanish and other populations, but especially during the twentieth century, through the trauma of the enforced WWII evacuation of women, children and elderly, which ultimately led to the creation of a modern British Gibraltarian. But is that all there is to it?
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