page_title: Hardy Town, Gibraltar
section_title: Living conditions
hierarchical_section_title: Hardy Town, Gibraltar / Living conditions
caption_attribution_description: View of Hardy Town from the sea
context_page_description: Hardy Town was a temporary civilian settlement established near the south end of the Gibraltar peninsula during the Great Siege of Gibraltar. The intensive Spanish and French bombardment reduced the town of Gibraltar to ruins and prompted many of its inhabitants, and eventually the off-duty members of the British garrison, to relocate to a spot out of range of the enemy's land-based guns. After it became known for its appalling conditions, a British quartermaster named Hardy was put in charge of the settlement and it acquired his name. Hardy Town was eventually abandoned and torn down after the siege ended and the population moved back to Gibraltar's main town within the city walls.
context_section_description: The huts soon became a shanty town, situated out of range of the Spanish land batteries at a spot near the southern end of the peninsula, between the Naval Hospital and the South Barracks on the road leading to Europa Point (now Europa Road). It was first jokingly dubbed New Jerusalem but the appallingly unhygienic conditions led to it being renamed Black Town. A British Army quartermaster named Major Hardy was put in charge of the encampment, and it was eventually called Hardy Town after him. The garrison were somewhat less complimentary and called it the Cowards' Retreat or the Female Camp.
  Although the camp was out of reach of the land batteries, it was still vulnerable to cannon-fire coming from Spanish gunboats in the Bay of Gibraltar. In May 1781, a shell from a gunboat was recorded as having hit a house in Hardy Town and "killed Mr. Israel, a very respectable Jew, with Mrs. Tourale, a female relation, and his clerk." One soldier recorded:
  The Spanish shells discovered many private and valuable stores [in the town] which were hoarded up by Jews and Genueses [Genoese] in order to mass their fortunes by extortion; but their little alls are now distroyed [sic] and themselves as lost sheep obliged to brooze upon the Rocks under the shelter of hutts [sic], caves, cliffs and tents at a place the Military call Cowards retreat, which lies out of the line of land-fire: But when the Gun-boats appear, it is shocking to behold them half-naked running to Cracks and Corners to save their lives, such is the disolation [sic] of these unhappy inhabitants.
  It was not just the Jews and Genoese who lived there, as eventually many of the British soldiers and officers did so too. The enemy bombardment made the town of Gibraltar uninhabitable. By the start of 1781, as Drinkwater recorded:
  scarce a house, north of the Grand parade, was tenantable; all of them were deserted. Some few, near South-port, continued to be inhabited by soldiers' families; but in general the floors and roofs were destroyed, and the bare shell only was left standing.
  Even the Governor left the town, living during the daytime in a large tent in the south of the peninsula but returning at night. Off-duty soldiers encamped in Hardy Town, and one writer records an incident in which part of a shell given extra range by a strong wind "fell into the house of a Mr. Maxwell... and made its way through the bed of Major Baugh, of the 39th regiment, who then resided in said house".
  By the end of the siege, the civilian population of Gibraltar had fallen to fewer than 1,000 people, the rest having either fled abroad, died of starvation or disease, or killed by shellfire. However, people soon returned to begin the work of rebuilding the ruined town and by 1787, four years later, the number of civilians had bounced back to 3,386.
caption: A 1782 Spanish view of Hardy Town and the nearby military encampment as seen from the Bay of Gibraltar
exif: {}