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. 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 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. 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. 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