Palatial Past

City planners don't often become known to the general public. As a Canadian I was vaguely aware that Humphrey Carver was one of my country's best known and respected architects and city planners. But until I happened upon his autobiography in a second-hand bookstore in Vancouver I had no idea that he had a Gibraltar connection.

Humphrey Carver wasbom in Bir mingham,England at the turn of the century. He attended Rugby,of Tom Brown School Days fame, was ac cepted at Oxford and later went to the Architectural Association's School of Architecture in London.

In the early 'twenties, with a de gree in hand, Carver and a friend travelled to Canada 'just for the ad venture'. They went job searching and almostimmediately Carver went to work, with Carl Borgstrom as a landscape architect. This was a new term at the time. Carver wrote:

"I had never heard of the term 'landscape architect' but it expressed exactly what I had been looking for.

To design a landscape would be far more exciting than to design a build ing."

Carver and Canada went well to gether. He was an innovator and con cerned with the construction of good, workable social housing that blended with the environment. He was very successful, eventually becoming Chairman of the Advisory Croup for Central Mortgage and Housing Cor poration. He wrote several books in cluding, Housesfor Canadians and Cit ies in the Suburbs.

Both Carver's mother and father had been born in Gibraltar but it was only in later life when he came across some letters written by his grand mother that he began to appreciate hisfamily's close bond with the Rock. In his autobiography. Compassionate Landscaping Carver wrote;

"When my father (Frank) and mother (Annie) were born in the early 1860s,Benjamin Carver and his six children lived in a beautiful but not very large Spanish house called the Palace fArengo's Palace, Gibral tar],and the Cresswells, with a dozen lively children lived over the post office.It was a high Victorian period, the British Navy sailed the oceans of the world, and most of them called at Gib on the way back and forth. There was a military band in the Alameda Gardens, there were balls on the illuminated decks of the fleet, and there were large picnic parties up into the cork woods beyond San Roque."

Carver did visit his aunt Maggie [*see below] at Campamento in the 1920s:

"Her gardener was known as

Alejandro the HonestSmuggler,and it was a common occurrence for my aunt to go to San Roque to bail him out. Altogether it must have been a glorious place to live, in Victorian days. And that, in spirit is where my mother lived for the rest of her life."

The Carver family initially bought port and sherry to supply for the Calpe hunt but expanded into the business of exporting cotton goods. Carver Brothers Limited bought raw cotton in Egypt and sold it to the Lan cashire Mills. The firm did so well that it became necessary for Humphrey's grandfather Benjamin, the senior partner, to move the fam ily "out of the Mediterranean sun, out of the 'Spanish' garden of the Palace... to a rather solemn and dreary mansion in the suburbs of Manchester".

Humphrey's grandmother Emily never adjusted to the change of en vironment and her yearnings for the warmth and friend ship of Gibraltar are recorded in letters she wrote to her friend Marianne Paterson.

"There never was such a backward Spring. It makes me long for the Rock. I have been so very unwell and weak

Areago's Palace

Above: and 1 sit and think about the dear home there and long for ail of you.I have no near neighbours and do not make friends easily and all my old friends are too far away."

Poor Emily faded away in the gloomy shadow of the Manchester mills and died aged just 38.

Humphrey's father Frank also had difficulty adjusting to life in England and when he was 21 Benjamin sent him on a trip to Gibraltar and the Mediterranean. In Gibraltar he stayed with Marianne Paterson and was welcomed by the Cresswells above the post office. He visited the Palace where his mother was born and felt her presence in the garden.

Frank was then off to America where a three-year ranching venture ended in failure. His experiences on the Rock were never far from his mind,however,and on his return he sailed to Gibraltar and married Annie Cresswell and took her to England.

Humphrey wrote:

"My mother was already thirty years old when she left Gibraltar and mar ried Frank, the shy, good-looking, sol emn young man who had rather mysteriously reap peared from America; and she in 1902, Carver was a strong advocate of a publichousing policy and was active in the Leaguefor Social Reconstruction,out lining in the 1930sthe social policy ba sis for a national housing programme. In his book Cities in the Suburbs (1962), Carver advocated that the plan ning of suburbs be integrated with the wider social community. Both of Carv er's parents were Gibraltar-born. was thirty-five by the time they set tled in the suburbs of Birmingham.

After the sunny, gregarious fam ily life of Gibraltar and Campamento, where everyone knew everyone else and there was a traditional convivi ality, Harborne (in Birmingham) must have seemed a pretty stuffy and impenetrable place."

Marooned in the grey climate of England, Annie maintained her en thusiasm for life by writing enor mous amounts of letters to family around the world.

"Day after day, hour upon hour, wrapped in rugs and jerseys and shawls she sat in her little gardenhouse - which revolved to catch whatever sun might penetrate - and wrote long letters to her sisters and brothers and their wives and children and friends and to anyone who would join in this worldwide net work ofcommunication that was,for her, the web of life. Her interest in all these people in India, in Africa, in Australia, and in other remote parts of the world, was intense and real. She would have loved to visit them all in person. And from time to time, throughout her whole life,she would return to spend a few weeks in Campamento to refresh herself at the heartland of the family".

Humphrey Carver's parents both died in England in 1938. He retired from CMHC in 1967, and died in Canada in 1995.

'Author's note: Edmund Carver vm, the postmaster for Gibraltar until Wsj death in 1877, aged sixty-four. Thejobl was passed to his eldest daughter Mag^l and she was postmistress for Gibraltar\ and Moroccofor the next thirty yearsan was awarded the Imperial Service OrderJ