When Gibraltar Was Emptied Of Its People

25 June 2026

In 1940 nearly the whole civilian population of Gibraltar was shipped away. For some families the journey home took until 1951. This is their story.

In the summer of 1940 a Gibraltarian mother was told to pack a single suitcase for a family that had lived on the Rock for generations. She did not know she would not see her own front door again for years, or that her children would learn to read the London sky for incoming bombs before they learned the streets of their own town again. Across just a few frantic weeks, almost everyone she knew vanished from Gibraltar with her.

By the time the order was complete, the town was a fortress with almost no townspeople left in it. Some 13,500 civilians were funnelled first to Casablanca, then thrown out when France collapsed, then scattered across three continents, from the London Blitz to the hills of Jamaica. The last of them did not come home until 1951. It is one of the most extraordinary civilian stories of the entire war, and ordinary travel guides barely mention it.

Walk through Grand Casemates Square on a busy evening today and you will find a town that feels permanent, lived in, certain of itself. It is hard to picture that within living memory this same town stood almost empty of its own people, its streets given over to soldiers, its families dispersed across an ocean and half a continent. For the people of Gibraltar, the Llanitos, this was no footnote. It was the experience that defined a generation and arguably forged the modern sense of being Gibraltarian. To understand the friendly, fiercely proud town you stay in now, it helps to understand the years when there was almost no town at all.

Why a whole town was sent away

When Italy entered the war in June 1940 and France collapsed soon after, Gibraltar's position changed overnight. The Rock sat at the mouth of the Mediterranean, a strategic prize that now faced a hostile or occupied coastline on almost every side. London decided the fortress had to be cleared of civilians so that it could be defended and reinforced without the burden of protecting a large non-combatant population.

The order fell hardest on women, children, the elderly and the infirm. Men of working age who held essential jobs largely stayed, but their families were told to pack one suitcase and leave homes many had never expected to lose. For a community whose whole identity was bound to this one small peninsula, being asked to leave it was almost unthinkable. They went anyway, because they were given little real choice.

The first stop, Casablanca, and then expulsion

The first major movement sent around 13,500 evacuees across to Casablanca in French Morocco. It was meant to be a place of safety close to home. Within weeks it became the opposite. After France capitulated in June 1940, the new Vichy administration, now aligned with Germany, found a crowd of British subjects on its soil deeply awkward and wanted them gone.

The moment of rescue came almost by accident. British cargo ships under Commodore Crichton had arrived to repatriate French servicemen evacuated from Dunkirk. As tension rose in the port, Crichton opened his gangways to the Gibraltarians, even though Admiralty orders forbade taking civilians aboard. Families crowded onto vessels never built to carry them, in conditions that were cramped, frightening and improvised.

They had been promised refuge and instead found themselves cast out twice over, first from their homes, then from the very place that was meant to shelter them.

Into the heart of the Blitz

Many of those ships carried the evacuees not to safety but to London, and they arrived at the worst possible moment. To dodge U-boats in the Atlantic, convoys took long and anxious routes north before reaching Britain. The city they finally entered was bracing for sustained aerial assault, with the Battle of Britain raging overhead and the Blitz about to begin in earnest.

By the end of 1940 the bulk of the evacuees, roughly 10,000 of them, were housed in the London area, part of a wider Britain-based population of around 13,000. Many were placed in Kensington and other districts, lodged in institutions, colleges and homes vacated by Londoners who were themselves fleeing the bombing. They endured the same nights in shelters, the same sirens, the same destruction, and later the terror of the V1 flying bombs. People who had left a sunlit Mediterranean town now learned to read the sky for danger.

Scattered across the world

Not everyone went to London. The evacuation became a global dispersal, splitting families and sending neighbours to opposite ends of the earth. About 2,000 people were sent to the Portuguese island of Madeira in the July and August of 1940, where many were lodged in hotels and where conditions were generally far gentler than in wartime Britain.

Around 1,500 were shipped much further, all the way to Jamaica, where they lived at Gibraltar Camp on the former Mona Estate, on land that is now part of the University of the West Indies. The camp was purpose-built, with barracks, stores, a hospital and a police station, and run under fairly strict rules. Residents could leave on the local trams only between set hours, and Jamaicans who entered the camp risked a fine. A single community had been scattered to the Caribbean, the Atlantic islands, the British mainland and the north of Ireland, often with little reliable news of one another.

A long timeline of waiting

The numbers and dates tell their own quiet story of displacement and delay.

Why the journey home took so long

Victory in 1945 did not mean a swift homecoming. Two problems stood in the way. The first was shipping, because every available vessel was needed to bring soldiers home before civilians. The second, and the more stubborn, was housing. Gibraltar simply did not have the homes to receive everyone at once, and rebuilding was slow while building materials remained scarce.

The result was painfully drawn out. The first repatriates, 1,367 of them, arrived on 6 April 1944, yet as accommodation in Gibraltar filled, others were shuffled onward instead of home, some to Scotland, many to camps in Northern Ireland. Year after year people waited for a town that had no room for them. The Governor of the day, Lieutenant General Sir Noel Mason-Macfarlane, pressed hard on their behalf and refused to accept the housing shortage as a sufficient excuse, but the final evacuees did not see the Rock again until 1951, six years after the war had ended.

How exile created the modern Gibraltarian

Something profound happened during those years apart. A people used to being governed found their own voice. The struggle to win better conditions abroad, and above all the fight to be allowed home, gave enormous momentum to the demand for a greater say in their own affairs.

It was in this period, in September 1942, that a group of Gibraltarian clerks and workers came together, led by the trade unionist Albert Risso, to campaign for the return of the evacuees and for civil rights. They had first thought of themselves simply as the Gibraltarian Association. On the advice of a young gunner in the Gibraltar Defence Force, Joshua Hassan, they took a far more ambitious name: the Association for the Advancement of Civil Rights. Risso served as its president until 1948, when Hassan, his vice-president, succeeded him and went on to become the towering figure of modern Gibraltarian politics. The homecoming campaign was, in a very real sense, the cradle of self-government on the Rock.

The fight to come home returned far more than a population to its streets. It handed a scattered people a shared purpose, and from that purpose grew the politics that still shapes Gibraltar today.

Walking the same streets today

For heritage travellers, Gibraltar offers the rare chance to stand in the exact place a story happened. The town that was emptied is once again full of life, and the contrast is part of what makes a visit here so moving. You can climb to the gun positions and tunnels that the fortress was cleared to defend, then descend into the very square the evacuees longed to see again. For wider context on the landscape they fought to return to, our Rock of Gibraltar guide is a good starting point, while Is Gibraltar a country helps explain the identity that this generation did so much to shape.

If you are tracing family roots, allow time to simply wander. The names above shop doors, the blend of languages in the street, the food on the table, all of it carries the memory of those years away. To plan a respectful, unhurried visit, our month by month guide to the best time to visit Gibraltar will help you choose the right season for quieter remembrance or fuller celebration.

A homecoming you can be part of

There is a particular kind of traveller who comes to Gibraltar not for the duty free shopping but to stand where their grandparents once stood, to find a surname in the embarkation records, or simply to honour a story that deserves to be remembered. If that is you, Victory Suites is a fitting base from which to trace it. We sit on Devils Tower Road, about a ten minute walk from Grand Casemates Square, the very square the evacuees longed to see again, and only minutes from Gibraltar International Airport, so you can land and be standing in their footsteps the same afternoon. Spend your days on the heritage trail, then come back to one of our more than 100 serviced apartments, each with a full kitchen for a proper home-cooked Llanito supper, and unwind in the indoor pool or the gym. Our team knows the tunnels, the square and the quiet corners that carry this history, and can point you straight to the ones that matter most. Come and stay in the living, thriving town that an entire generation refused to give up on.