On 3 March 1848, a fossil skull pulled from a quarry on the north face of the Rock was laid before a meeting of the Gibraltar Scientific Society. Someone wrote a label for it. The label said, in effect, that this was an ancient human who had died before the great flood of scripture. Then the skull was put away in a cupboard, and there it stayed, ignored, for the better part of two decades. That cupboard was inside the Gibraltar Garrison Library. The skull was one of the first adult Neanderthals ever found, older than the discovery that gave the species its name, and for years the most important fossil in this story sat in a quiet reading room while the world had not yet worked out what it was looking at. This is the building that kept it, and the story of how a soldier who had lived through a four year siege came to found it. The Great Siege of Gibraltar ran from 1779 to 1783, a relentless attempt by Spain and France to starve and bombard the British garrison into surrender. It failed, but it was a grim education in isolation. Newspapers arrived late if they arrived at all, fresh books were a luxury, and an officer with nothing to occupy his mind had a great deal of time to fill between alarms. Among those officers was a young captain named John Drinkwater, who watched the siege closely and, crucially, kept careful notes. Out of those notes came a remarkable book. Drinkwater's history of the late siege, first published in 1785, became the standard account of the episode and remains a primary source two and a half centuries later. It proved so popular that it ran through four editions in as many years. Having chronicled the privations of the garrison, Drinkwater had also lived the intellectual privation, and he never forgot the want of a public library on the Rock. When he set about fixing it, he was not theorising. He was solving a problem he had felt in his own long, boring, frightening nights. > A library founded by the man who wrote the siege is a rare thing: the chronicler of the hardship became the architect of its remedy. The institution came into being on 31 July 1793, a decade after the guns fell silent. A note on the name is worth making, because it trips up even careful sources. The founder was plain John Drinkwater in 1793. He added the surname Bethune much later in life, after his wife came into an inheritance, which is why histories written long after the fact often call the founder John Drinkwater Bethune as though describing a different man. He is one man, and in 1793 he was simply Drinkwater. The library began modestly, as such things do, with reading rooms opened for the officers of the garrison and a catalogue of only a few hundred volumes. The ambition, though, was already larger than the shelves. Within a few years the collection had outgrown its first home, and a purpose-built library was begun. Construction started in 1800 and took four years, and the building was officially opened in 1804 by the Duke of Kent, Queen Victoria's father. It was raised on the site of an earlier governors' residence dating from the period of Spanish rule, and it was conceived as a place of both study and recreation for the officers of the garrison. Step inside today and the eighteenth-century intent is still legible. Tall windows, generous reading rooms and ranks of bound spines create the atmosphere of a gentleman's club as much as a public library, which is essentially what it was. Membership came by subscription and proprietorship rather than by public right, and for most of its life the library was run privately by a Trust. That arrangement endured for more than two centuries, until September 2011, when the library was transferred to the Government of Gibraltar. If you want the wider context of how the Rock came to be governed this way, our explainer on [Gibraltar's status](/blog/is-gibraltar-a-country-status-explained) sets the scene. The club-like character was not an accident of decor. The library was built for and by the officers of the garrison, and it ran on a clear social logic. A proprietor bought his way in and then enjoyed the run of the reading rooms, the borrowing rights and, above all, the company. For a man posted to a remote fortress at the mouth of the Mediterranean, that mattered. The library was where a long tour of duty could feel, for an hour or two, connected to London and the currents of the age. That dual function, half scholarly institution and half social club, is the key to understanding the place. It was never simply a room full of books. It was the drawing room of a society that had no other. Here is the detail that lifts the Garrison Library from local landmark to scientific curiosity. The skull presented in March 1848 had been recovered from Forbes Quarry, on the north face of the Rock. It was handed over by Lieutenant Edmund Flint, the secretary of the Gibraltar Scientific Society, and we now know it to be one of the first adult Neanderthal skulls ever found. It predated t