Jamie Wilson

For centuries it was said that the British Empire would fall if the Barbary apes were to leave the Rock of Gibraltar.

Winston Churchill took the threat so seriously that even as the battle of Arnhem raged, and the Allied offensive in Europe hung in the balance, he issued a stern memo about their declining numbers.

But documents released yesterday at the National Archives in Kew reveal that during the 1960s the civil service did not always treat the fate of the apes as seriously as the wartime prime minister.

In a set of extraordinary telegrams a senior official at the Commonwealth Office and the then governor of the Rock conversed in what would nowadays be politically incorrect verse about the imbalance between the sexes of the apes.

A memo from RC Cox of the Gibraltar and South Atlantic Department detailed the background to the poetic exchanges. "Among the matters which we keep under regular review with the Governor of Gibraltar is the well being of the ape population on the rock," he wrote to another civil servant.

"The origin of this return stems, of course, from the old tradition that our tenure on the Rock would lapse if the apes should disappear and Mr Churchill in September 1944 (at the height of the battle of Arnhem) minuted: 'Colonial Secretary, the establishment of the apes should be 24. Action should be taken to bring them up to this number at once and maintain it thereafter. WSC.'

The memo states that one cause of anxiety in 1967 was the sex imbalance between the two packs �?known as Middle Hill and Queen's Gate �?into which the apes had organised themselves. The matter became the subject of a telegram from Saville Garner, permanent under- secretary at the Commonwealth Relations Office, to Sir Gerald Lathbury, the governor of Gibraltar. Marked "confidential", the telegram read:

We're a little bit perturbed

About the Apes

After studying their sizes

And their shapes.

As we see it, at first glance

There seems at least a chance

Of some lesbianism or sodomy,

Or rapes.



For nine girls of Middle Hill

May well decide

That they can't by five mere

males

Be satisfied.

While the Queen's gate lads

one fears

May become a bunch of queers

If by sex imbalance nature

Is denied.

So can you plan migration,

Or get up

A party for the apes who feel

Het up,

When the bachelors from

Queen's

Meet the Middle Hill colleens

And a new pack (with a

Gerald)

Is set up?

For the Welfare State for Apes

Has been decreed,

Where each of them is mated

(and de-fleed).

Then let Franco rage in vain,

Your immunity from Spain

Is by simian eugenics

Guaranteed.

The governor's reply, dated February 9 1967, continued in the same vein:

Much as we admire

Your Churchillian desire

To alter

While preoccupied with Malta

The simian balance at

Gibraltar

So long as we have Joe

(born at Queen's gate

in Fifty Eight)

No female ape need pine

Or lesbianate.

And of course there's Harold

too,

And Hercules of Middle Hill,

Though comparatively new

He knows a thing or two.

The verses tickled the fancy of NJ Barrington, assistant private secretary at the overseas development administration, who in September 1971 dug out the "splendid" papers for the then foreign secretary, Sir Alec Douglas Home, to read.

"I have also attached the latest up to date summary of the ape situation in which you will see that we are up to a healthy 37," he wrote.