The Second World War Evacuation
Was your relation among the more than 13,000 residents who left the territory in 1940?
In May 1940, the British government ordered the evacuation of Gibraltar. The territory was to be converted into a fortress, because it was believed that Hitler was planning its capture. As a result 13,495 women, children, the elderly and infirm crossed the Strait to French Morocco.
However, soon after their arrival in early June 1940 France fell to Nazi Germany. As a result, the evacuees were ordered to leave within 24 hours. Against the Gibraltan government’s wishes, they initially returned to the territory, from where, after a short delay, they sailed for Madeira, Jamaica, Northern Ireland and London, where they arrived in August 1940. Among them was actor Michelle Keegan’s great grandmother and children as discovered in her 2018 episode of Who Do You Think You Are?.
By the end of July 1944 half of the evacuees had been repatriated. The remaining half were to continue to live in their new temporary homes, to
await their gradual return to a very changed Gibraltar. Many of these evacuees had to remain for as long as 10 years from the beginning of the war before rejoining their families in Gibraltar. Some never returned.
The experiences that the evacuees had and the sense of helplessness on the part of the men left behind on the Rock accounted in large measure for the demands for greater self-government that followed the end of the Second World War.
Lists of the evacuees are held at Gibraltar National Archives, whose website has a section dedicated to them:
nationalarchives.gi/evaclist_surname.aspx.
A copy of the index is available on Ancestry at
ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/70853.
In 2015, the Friends of Gibraltar society undertook an oral history project, interviewing many surviving evacuees. The interviews can be heard at fogoh.org.uk.