Churchill's Order That Saved Gibraltar's Apes

25 June 2026

In 1942 Gibraltar's macaques fell to about seven. Two years later Churchill set an exact headcount to save them. The true story behind the legend.

In the autumn of 1944, with Allied armies fighting their way across France and the largest war in human history at its height, Winston Churchill found a moment to dictate an order about monkeys. He wanted to know the headcount of the apes on the Rock of Gibraltar, and he wanted that number raised. The establishment, he instructed, should be twenty-four animals, and it should be reached as soon as possible and held there thereafter.

Two years earlier the troop had nearly vanished. By 1942 the wartime population had collapsed to about seven animals, and a folk prophecy two centuries old suddenly looked as though it might be put to the test. The saying went that while the apes remained on the Rock, the British would remain too. Churchill did not have to believe it. He only had to know that other people did.

A legend that outran the facts

Every visitor to Gibraltar hears the line within an hour of arriving. While the apes stay on the Rock, the saying goes, so do the British. It is repeated by taxi drivers, printed on postcards, and woven into the patter of every Upper Rock tour. What almost nobody hears is that the legend once came perilously close to being tested, and that a head of state intervened in a wildlife population in the middle of a world war to keep the prophecy intact.

The animals are not apes at all, despite the nickname that has stuck for centuries. They are Barbary macaques, a tailless monkey native to the forests of Morocco and Algeria, and the Gibraltar troop is the only wild monkey population anywhere in Europe. The confusion over their name is the smallest of the puzzles that surround them. The bigger questions are where they came from, why a folk superstition fastened itself to them, and how that superstition ended up on a Prime Minister's desk.

Where the saying came from

The origin of the legend is genuinely uncertain, and honest storytelling means saying so. Two accounts compete, and neither can be proved beyond doubt. The most repeated version places it during the Great Siege of 1779 to 1783, when combined French and Spanish forces tried for years to wrest the Rock from Britain. A second account reaches further back, to 1704, shortly after an Anglo-Dutch force took Gibraltar from Spain, when a shepherd is said to have guided Spanish soldiers up a hidden goat path on the sheer eastern face.

In both tellings the detail is the same: the monkeys, disturbed in the dark, raised such a commotion that the garrison was alerted and the surprise attack failed. Whether either episode happened as described, or whether the tale was stitched together afterwards to explain a superstition that already existed, is impossible to settle now. What is clear is that by the time the saying was famous, the macaques had become a symbol of the Rock itself, and symbols are dangerous things to lose in wartime.

While the apes remain, so too will the British. A line repeated for two centuries, and in 1942 it came within a handful of animals of being disproved.

The wartime dip to seven

By the early years of the Second World War the troop was in trouble. Disease, the disruption of the war, and the general strain on a fortress under siege conditions had pushed numbers down sharply. By 1942 the population had fallen to roughly seven animals. Gibraltar at that moment was no ordinary garrison. It guarded the entrance to the Mediterranean, it sheltered the convoys, and its airfield had launched the invasion of North Africa. The near disappearance of its famous monkeys carried a weight far beyond zoology.

The concern was never really about the survival of a species in the abstract. It was about morale, and about the meaning people had poured into these animals. Churchill understood symbols better than almost any leader of his age, and he understood what the garrison and the British public might read into the apes vanishing from the Rock at the exact moment the war hung in the balance. Whether or not he privately credited the prophecy is beside the point. He grasped its grip on everyone else.

Churchill sends for monkeys

The rescue came in stages, and it is worth separating the two dates that often get blurred together. The collapse to about seven animals was the crisis of 1942. The formal order came later. When word reached London that the troop had crashed, instructions went out to bring fresh animals across from North Africa. Among the new arrivals, several accounts record five females imported from Morocco, remembered by name to this day: Daisy, Beatrice, Jane, Kathleen and Madeline. A naval vessel was used to ferry additional macaques over, and the population was slowly rebuilt.

Then, on 2 September 1944, Churchill put the matter in writing in a directive that survives in the historical record. The establishment of the apes on Gibraltar, he instructed, should be twenty-four, and every effort should be made to reach that number quickly and to maintain it thereafter. It remains one of the more extraordinary documents of the war: a Prime Minister, in the year of D-Day, setting an exact target headcount for a colony of monkeys on a rock at the mouth of the Mediterranean.

What the DNA later revealed

For decades the precise origins of the modern troop were a matter of guesswork. Then genetics settled part of the question. Analysis of the Gibraltar macaques found that the present population descends from animals of both Moroccan and Algerian stock. That mixed ancestry is itself a fingerprint of the wartime rescue, because the replenishment drew on more than one North African source rather than a single founding group.

In other words, the legend left a trace in the blood of the living animals. The troop you photograph at Queen's Gate today is, in a real and measurable sense, the troop Churchill ordered rebuilt. The folk prophecy and the genome point back to the same wartime decision.

Who has looked after them

The macaques have long enjoyed a kind of official protection unusual for any wild animal. From 1915 the British Army took formal responsibility for the troop, with a budget line for fruit, vegetables and nuts and an officer appointed to oversee their welfare. Births were recorded in army registers and each new arrival was named, so that the colony was managed less like wildlife and more like a small, hairy regiment of its own.

That military stewardship lasted until 1991, when, with the run-down of the garrison, responsibility passed to the Government of Gibraltar and in time to the Gibraltar Ornithological and Natural History Society. Local vets provide medical care, an annual census tracks the troops, and the animals are provisioned with food and fresh water to keep them within the nature reserve and away from the town. The aim is the same one Churchill set out in writing: a healthy, stable, visible troop on the Rock.

The troop today

The numbers have recovered far beyond the seven of 1942. The population now stands at about 230 animals, living in six distinct troops across the Upper Rock Nature Reserve, with group sizes ranging from around twenty-five to seventy. Survey figures shift a little year to year, which is normal for free-living wildlife, but the trend is unmistakably healthy. While Barbary macaque numbers across Morocco and Algeria have declined under pressure from hunting and the loss of forest, the Gibraltar troop has held its ground and grown.

This is the only place on the continent where you can meet a free-living primate troop without leaving Europe, and it is worth pausing on that fact. To stand a few feet from a wild monkey going calmly about its morning, you would otherwise need to cross the Strait into Africa. For the deeper natural history, our Barbary macaques guide goes further into their behaviour, their hierarchy and their biology.

Where to meet them

The classic spot is the Apes Den, near the middle cable car station at Queen's Gate, where a troop is reliably present and where most visitors get their first close encounter. The cable car carries you up from the town in minutes, and from the upper station the views across the Strait to the Moroccan coast are worth the trip even before a single monkey appears. You can also reach the macaques on foot or by tour vehicle along the winding Upper Rock roads, which thread past the gun batteries and the old siege tunnels on the way.

A word of respect for animals that are, after all, genuinely wild. Do not feed them, keep food and bags out of sight and securely closed, and do not touch them. They are confident, clever and quick, and an open packet of crisps is read instantly as an offer. Treated with a little distance, they are calm and astonishingly easy to watch. For the wider context of the Rock itself, the tunnels, the siege history and the reserve, see our Rock of Gibraltar guide.

Visit early, visit quietly

The single best piece of advice is to go early. The macaques are at their most relaxed and the cable car queues at their shortest in the first hour or two of the day, before the cruise crowds and the tour buses arrive. Soft morning light on the Upper Rock, the Strait laid out below, and a troop going about its business undisturbed: this is the version of the experience the postcards never quite capture. If you are building a trip around it, our 48 hours in Gibraltar itinerary shows how the Rock fits alongside the town, the food and the border crossing.

Strip away the superstition and the real story is, if anything, more remarkable: a folk prophecy reached high enough to move a head of state in the middle of a world war.

A true story stranger than the myth

The legend says the monkeys keep Gibraltar British. The history says a Prime Minister, with a war to win, took the trouble to keep the monkeys. The two versions are not really in competition. The prophecy survives because the animals survive, and the animals survive because someone in 1944 decided the symbol was worth a written order and a naval crossing. Stand at Queen's Gate at eight in the morning, watch a young macaque pick its way along a wall above the Strait, and you are looking at the living end of a wartime decision that should never have been necessary and somehow was.

Base yourself on the Rock and you can be at Queen's Gate for that quiet first hour, coffee in hand, while the cruise passengers are still at sea. Victory Suites on Devils Tower Road sits about a ten minute walk from Grand Casemates Square and only minutes from Gibraltar International Airport, so an early run up to the cable car and the Apes Den is an easy thing to slip into a morning. With more than 100 serviced apartments, each with a full kitchen for a fast breakfast before you go, an indoor pool and a gym for the end of a day on the Upper Rock, and a team who can help you time your visit around the troops, it is a comfortable place to meet Europe's only wild monkeys before the crowds catch up with them.