Gibraltar Women’s Association

Review of the year : 2016

~ Making Stitches ~ 10 Comments

As the clock ticks inexorably towards midnight on 31st December and we close the door on 2016, I thought it was time to take a look back at the year we have just had. Most of the newspaper reviews I’ve read so far have focussed on the negative aspects, celebrity deaths, the seismic political changes afoot both in Europe, America and the rest of the world, and general doom and gloom.

I am very fortunate in that for us, in our little corner of the world, apart from the uncertainties of Brexit and what that could mean for us in the years to come, we’ve had a pretty good year. Looking back at all the interesting things we’ve done makes me think about how fortunate we are. If your 2016 has been a difficult one, I sincerely hope that 2017 will be better for you and your loved ones.

January 2016

The New Year saw us spending a few days up the coast from Gibraltar on the Costa del Sol, but we were back on the Rock in plenty of time to see the Three Kings Cavalcade. It was also back in January when I went for the first of my strolls around Gibraltar the first one was an homage to the many beautiful balconies, the second one paid tribute to the many steps we ‘enjoy’ here!

February 2016

February brought us some misty and stormy weather, but there was plenty of indoors activities to keep us busy here in Gibraltar. The second annual Gib Talks event saw speakers from all walks of life take to the stage for short talks on a huge range of subjects. Later in the month, the extraordinary Gibraltar Womens Association celebrated their 50th Anniversary, I found  their story fascinating.

March 2016

In March, we were blessed with some beautiful sunny days with bright blue skies. Along with completing a tin man outfit for World Book Day, I finally managed to finish my Attic 24 Cosy Stripe Blanket after a year of hooking! We made the most of the lovely spring weather and took a dolphin trip out into the Bay of Gibraltar. There was also a beautiful exhibition in Gib celebrating  women’s creativity.

April 2016

During April we made another short trip up the coast and headed inland to Ronda a beautiful Andalucian town. I was very productive at my dressmaking and home furnishing courses inserting my first invisible zip and producing curtain tie-backs for the public transport fan in my life. A tall ship called into port at Gibraltar and members of the public had the chance to go on board and have a snoop around.

May 2016

May meant Med Steps for me big time as I completed my final training sessions for, and then finished, the Med Steps 5 Challenge with my two stepping buddies. It was a rather intense day but we were so proud of ourselves for climbing to the top of the Rock five times in quick succession. We also managed to raise a fair amount of sponsorship money for the brilliant Cancer Relief Gibraltar. Some of my sponsors are readers of this blog and I am so touched that you took the time and effort to support our fundraising efforts – thank you.

As I spent so long prattling on about the Med Steps during my training, I figured I should tell you all about it:  The Med Steps: a few facts & figures . May also meant saying goodbye to a good friend to me and my blogging adventures. One of the sad things about living an expat life is that many of the friends you make are in the same boat as you and therefore may not be around for long Saying goodbye…

June 2016

June was a very eventful month not only for me but for Gibraltar and the rest of the UK as a whole as BREXIT loomed large (this post was my most read of all time and by a very long way). Six months on, we are still no further forward knowing what it all means.

Another unexpected thing to happen to me in June, was when I chose to go back up the Med Steps one foggy morning. I thought that the mist would make the climb cool as the summer heat had begun to build. I was wrong. As I climbed up the Rock, I climbed out of the mist and fog. I was nearly roasted alive, but I did manage to take a rather good photo of the Rock emerging out of the mist below (see second left image on the bottom row above). I got loads of likes and shares and retweets with that picture taken on  A mini stroll in the mist!

11th June 2016 marked International Yarnbombing Day 2016 and I had a little go myself with my first guerrilla crochet project as I attempted to Yarnbomb the Alameda Gardens to celebrate the park’s 200th anniversary.

July 2016

July equals the beginning of the very long school summer holiday in Gibraltar. As I stared down the barrel of 8 weeks of no school and the prospect of entertaining the three Little Postcards I felt a little overwhelmed. In an effort to find some way of surviving (with my marbles intact) I decided on day one that I would set myself the challenge of doing something crafty every single day of the holidays…. and the Summer Craft Challenge was born. One of our summer holiday outings took us up into the Upper Rock Nature Reserve to visit one of Gibraltar’s newest attractions, the  Windsor Suspension Bridge .

August 2016

August, for us, was mainly spent in England. I travelled back with the Little Postcards to spend two weeks based in the North West with my parents (with a lovely trip down to Berkshire to visit friends) and then two weeks with Mr Postcard visiting his family in East Anglia. We were blessed with the best of English summer weather. When the sun shines – there really is no better place to be. Our East Anglia holiday base was Southwold in Suffolk, it gave us the perfect opportunity for multiple visits to a special place for us Southwold Pier .

The end of the month brought the school summer holidays to an end. After eight weeks of full-time kiddiwinks and eight weeks of the summer craft challenge, I was very proud to still be in full possession of my marbles (I think) and I also managed to do something crafty on every day except for one (the day we travelled back to Gibraltar). The final instalment of my challenge is here.

September 2016

September is always a very busy month in Gibtraltar. Just after the children return to school, we all have a day off for Gibraltar National Day on 10th September. Around this time we now have the Gibraltar Music Festival to enjoy too. This year saw the Stereophonics headline and Europe played the air guitarist’s dream of The Final Countdown live on the Rock.

Towards the end of the month, I was able to fulfil an ambition of mine to visit the Yarn Festival of Yarndale. It was everything I had expected and more, with bells on. My absolute highlight was meeting my crochet hero Lucy from Attic 24 and being able to give her one of my Llanitas (Llanita, the Gibraltar Yarndale sheep that is). The sheep were made to raise funds to support a children’s hospice in North Yorkshire, I made two and they have both gone to live in Yorkshire!  My Yarndale 2016 (featuring Llanita’s Yorkshire adventures)

October 2016

In October I was still determined to keep up some of the crochet momentum I had achieved during the summertime and finished off my contribution to the Sixty Million Trebles project. I made a rainbow granny square blanket which will go towards the World Record breaking attempt to create a huge crochet blanket made up of sixty million treble stitches. Each treble stitch represents a displaced person or refugee. After the world record attempt the giant blanket will be made into smaller blankets and handed out to charities in the UK and those helping Syrian refugees. The organisers also hope to raise a considerable amount of funds too to help Syrian refugees.

A big event locally was the fourth annual Gibraltar Literary Festival 2016 I was lucky enough to be able to attend several events this year and really loved it.

November 2016

At the beginning of November we had just one Bunny in the Postcard household, then one Sunday afternoon during a walk through the Alameda Gardens, we found some abandoned rabbits. One of them, Blizzard, came home with us (Blizzard turned out to be a girl and she is now known as Snowflake). It was back in November when I had my first attempt at Podcasting I had such fun making it, and hope to be able to share another one with you soon.

December

In December we sadly said goodbye to Bunny Postcard. She had only been with us for 11 months but she’d quickly become a much loved member of the family.

This month I also headed out for my most recent stroll, to see some of the Christmas lights  we have on the Rock – amazingly it was the 16th stroll post I’ve written this year. I also took the plunge (literally) and joined with the annual Boxing Day Polar Bear Swim at Catalan Bay – I’m still feeling proud of myself for doing it!

 

Thank you so much for joining me this year, I have loved having your company and enjoy reading all the lovely comments. Here’s to next year, who knows what it will have in store for us all, here’s hoping it will be a good one.

Sisters are doing it for themselves: 50 years of girl power celebrated in Gibraltar

~ Making Stitches ~ 13 Comments

I’d like to tell you the tale of some amazing young women who decided enough was enough and took their concerns to the top. Until this week, I was unaware of this great story but following the news locally that the Gibraltar Women’s Association was marking its 50th Anniversary, I was intrigued and decided to dig a bit deeper. 

I came across this book: A woman’s place: Memoirs of a Gibraltarian Woman -A “Llanita” written by Mariola Summerfield, one of the founder members of the GWA (which at the time of its founding in 1966 was called the Housewives Association).

 

In it she tells her life story from her birth to the the time of publication in 2007. What an amazing life she has led, in the foreword, the book’s editor Germaine Britto Silva sums it up:

“Very few people can claim such a dramatic life – to have been exchanged at gun point as a prisoner of war, to have been excommunicated, to have co-founded and led Gibraltar’s oldest association, to have negotiated her way into Buckingham Palace and then been invited back to receive an MBE, to have been the first woman in Gibraltar to sit on a jury, and to achieve all this in such a glamorous and elegant way.”

As a child evacuee, Mariola was first sent to Morocco with her mother and brothers, then on to London (via Madeira and Jamaica) and finally up to Scotland. Her amazing life story would make a captivating film, however it was the time when she was a wife and mother and embarking on her public life which initially sparked my  interest. Little did I know what a rich vein of experiences her book would include.

Back to the GWA and it’s beginnings: life in Gibraltar in the mid-sixties was unrecognisable to how we live here today. Women on the whole didn’t work. Further education for girls was rare and soon after leaving school they tended to get married and start families. So-called women’s work like nursing and domestic service was done by Spanish ladies who came across the border for employment. They were living in a world of post war austerity and with the Rock facing an uncertain future regarding its relationship with our nearest neighbour, Spain.

A friend of Mariola’s, called Angela Smith, was concerned about the situation facing young families and invited a few friends round to her home to discuss whether they could do anything about it. Soon after, once word got around, between 200 and 300 women gathered for a meeting on 16th February 1966 and formed the Housewives Association. At the time, their main concerns were practical issues like safety outside schools but within weeks their lives were to take a very dramatic turn.

A news story broke which was about to set them down a very different course: the British Government announced it was preparing to speak to General Franco about the sovereignty of Gibraltar. Of course this worried the Gibraltarian people a great deal, they are British and they wanted to remain British. The ladies of the Housewives Association decided they should do something about it.  A petition was started and within a very short time around seven and a half thousand signatures were collected. They were all female signatories and all eligible to vote in Gibraltar – amazingly they made up more than 96% of the female electorate!

With the full petition collected, Angela Smith (the chair) and Mariola Summerfield (vice chair) flew to London with the sole intention of presenting the petition to the Queen. They wanted to tell the monarch, a mother herself, about what they were facing at home in Gibraltar and how anxious they were. After a few tense days and several attempts to get their petition into the right hands, they succeeded in getting it to Buckingham Palace and their message did indeed get to the Queen.

 

At the time it was very big news not just locally but much further afield. The ladies had succeeded in raising awareness about the plight of the Gibraltarian people.

Shortly after that triumph though, came the news that General Franco was preventing Spanish women from crossing the border in order to work. That meant the health service  and local businesses wouldn’t be able to function. The Housewives Association again sprung into action and within hours had rallied around 500 women who stepped in to fill the gaps left by the Spanish female workers. This in turn had a dramatic effect on the role of women on the Rock as things began to change forever and move towards the Gibraltar we see today.

To this day the Gibraltar Women’s Association still champions community causes and maintains pressure on the authorities to improve equality for the women of Gibraltar. At the age of 88, Mariola Summerfield is still involved in the organisation as a Life Honorary Chair. If you get the chance to read her book I would highly recommend it, as a woman and mother living in the 21st Century and having grown up during a time of relative peace, I find her memoirs utterly inspiring. 

 

Mariola Summerfield signing copies of her book at the 50th Anniversary celebrations of the Gibraltar Women’s Association earlier this week

What an inspiring tale of tenacity. Although Gibraltar is such a small place on the world stage, that’s also perhaps one of its strengths. If something needs doing, it just takes the will of a relatively small group of people who are strong enough to stand up for what they believe in and things can change dramatically.

The photograph & quote from the book A woman’s place: Memoirs of a Gibraltarian woman – “a Llanita” are included with the kind permission of Mariola Summerfield. Proceeds from the sale of the book are going to the Gibraltar Childline charity.