When I was doing my PhD at the University of Leeds in the late 1990s, I spent a lot of my time at the Brotherton Library. Most evenings, once the day’s research was done, I’d spend half an hour – sometimes more – searching through nineteenth-century travelogues and memoirs for references to Gibraltar. It began as a light-hearted distraction – a way of switching off from the often laborious business of working with Elizabethan pamphlets and manuscripts – but soon became a focused interest in its own right. Very quickly, I learned two things: Gibraltarians were either ignored in these Victorian writings  or – if by any chance they got a mention – they were described in the most derogatory terms. ‘The civilian in Gib seems a mere tolerated accident,’ accordingly wrote Walter Thornbury in 1859, ‘and the young military blood delights to tell you that, in case of war or revolt, the government, to whom nearly all the houses and shops belong, would sweep them away at one swoop, and plant fresh batteries upon their sites.’[1] This quote in many ways exemplifies how the natives were conceptualised by the British military establishment in the nineteenth century. Marginalised and belittled, they were seen as a dispensable presence, one of those troublesome burdens that necessarily come with Empire. As the British scholar David Lambert eloquently put it in 2005:

A consequence of Empire in Gibraltar has been that the non-military population has been marginalized consistently, hidden by the looming shadow of the Rock…. The effacement of the indigenous populations is a common feature of imperial discourse … and it has happened in Gibraltar too, where the reduction of Gibraltar to ‘the Rock’ effaces its human geographies and histories, aside from the endeavours of transient soldiers.[2]

By the time I read Ulysses at the age of twenty-eight, I was already familiar with the stereotypes that kept cropping up in writing on Gibraltar. What struck me about Joyce’s novel was how it steered clear of these stereotypes and never looked down on Gibraltarians ‘as members of a mongrel race’ (as Henry M. Field infamously described them in his popular 1887 travelogue). Molly Bloom, born of the union between an Irish military officer and Lunita Laredo, a Gibraltarian of both Spanish and Sephardic descent, has her own third-space identity – an identity which is neither Spanish nor Irish, but something in-between. For me this was very important because it tallied with the hybrid reality that existed in Gibraltar back in the late twentieth century and which – despite the gradual loss of Llanito among young people – continues to exist to this day. In my own book Past: A Memoir, for instance, I talk about my great-grandfather Joseph Brown, a Mancunian who spent a few years posted in Gibraltar with the British military in the mid-1880s before marrying Sebastiana Villanera, a locally employed seamstress from Cortes de la Frontera in Spain. Throughout Gibraltar’s long colonial history there have been countless Anglo-Gibraltarian nuptials of this type. Time and again, an English soldier would get posted to Gibraltar, meet a Spanish or Gibraltarian woman, leave the army, marry, and raise a family. And it is precisely this sort of domestic background that Joyce gives the part-Irish, part-Gibraltarian Molly.

The second thing that struck me about Ulysses was its sustained attention to the rhythms and minutiae of everyday life. Joyce may have never visited Gibraltar and only taken his material from the Gibraltar Directory and Guidebook of 1913 and from travelogues like Field’s, but what he did with the information he gathered is nothing short of astounding. Take the way he uses language. Throughout the Penelope section of the novel, Molly peppers her monologue with Spanish words, much in the same way as modern Gibraltarians incorporate Spanish in their everyday speech. For instance, Molly remembers spurning the advances of one of her lovers for fear that she might be “left with a child embarazada” – employing a Spanish word that to this day is used in Gibraltar to describe the state of being pregnant. In addition, she is highly attuned to the region’s climatic conditions – referring at one point to “those awful thunderbolts in Gibraltar” crashing violently over the Rock, and later complaining about the sweltering humidity during periods of Levanter – two meteorological phenomena known to anyone who has resided in the overseas British territory. Her monologue, moreover, draws on local surnames like De la Paz, De la Gracia, and Rosales – names that would never have appeared in Henry Field’s guidebook. As her mind drifts back to her old Gibraltarian routines, she recalls a certain Mrs. Opisso – this being Catherine Opisso, a dressmaker who actually resided on Governor’s Street (and whose son Ernest, incidentally, was the last person to be hanged on the Rock in 1931). She also remembers buying biscuits from the Benady brothers – whom we can identify as the well-known bakers Mordecai and Samuel Benady – and remarks on not liking the look of some olives in Abrines, a local purveyor of foodstuffs for which I myself worked for at the beginning of the 1990s.

But for me what’s most significant about Joyce’s depiction of Gibraltar is the way that civilian – rather than military – experience is prioritised throughout the novel. Guns, bastions, wars and sieges are mainly absent from Molly’s memories, appearing only from time to time as background props. Even when Molly is reminiscing about her military lovers, they remain largely nameless and faceless – as nameless and faceless, I would argue, as the native Gibraltarians were in nineteenth-century British travelogues and memoirs. This tendency to prioritise civilian over military experience can also be seen in what could be termed the spatial geography of Molly’s memories. In the writings of W. M. Thackeray, George Borrow and other English writers who visited Gibraltar in the 1800s, the most described and commented locale is Main Street– the street on which the British Governor’s palatial residence was built and through which troops of British soldiers marched up and down on a daily basis. But nearly all of Molly’s Gibraltar reminiscences take place away from this symbolic artery of Britishness, either in the Upper Rock or, even more significantly, in the Alameda Gardens. Inaugurated in 1816 by General Sir George Don, the gardens were Gibraltar’s first public recreational space and from the very beginning were decorated with towering marble tributes to British military heroes like General Elliot and the Duke of Wellington. But history often comes intertwined with all sorts of piquant ironies … and the irony in this case is that the gardens’ maze-like interior soon became a refuge for the local demimonde, one of the few places in the garrison where you could, in effect, act without fear of police or military surveillance. When the red-light district shut down in the early 1920s, for example, prostitutes began bringing their clients to the gardens in defiance of the authorities. And several decades later, when the civilian evacuation of 1941 had emptied the Rock of Gibraltarian women, British soldiers and sailors used the park as an illicit gay cruising zone.

Nowadays the gardens are a leafy haven of tranquillity. Among its attractions you will find a goldfish pond, a children’s playground and even a statue of Molly Bloom. But all is not as it seems. As I write in my book Border Control:

The advent of lockable gates and CCTV cameras may have curtailed the opportunities for sexual transgression, but it is evident that the Alameda still retains something of its old anarchic spirit, hosting weddings and civil ceremonies during the day while offering out-of-hours sanctuary to pot-smoking teenagers and other small-town rebels, its continuing popularity with the local demimonde attested by the scorched spliff ends, broken beer bottles and condom boxes that accumulate on its unswept tarmacked paths.

I’m not sure if Joyce was aware of the sort of reputation that the Alameda Gardens had in 1922, but I think it is very fitting that Molly’s reminiscences, as well as the novel itself, conclude with a reference to this emblematic corner of Gibraltar’s landscape.