Evacuation Exhibition Opens Tomorrow

An exhibition of evacuation photos and memorabilia which aims to encourage the public to put names to faces will open tomorrow. 

The exhibition will be held at the John Mackintosh Hall as from Thursday 24th September to Friday 2 October.

Organised by Joe Gingell, the exhibition is also intended to foster greater awareness of the evacuation in the community and encourage further research in the subject. There will be about 400 photos on display which have been selected from the nearly 1,000 photos donated during the last 25 years of research.

All the photos—and the majority of the names that appear in the captions—have been provided by local families whilst Mr Gingell has been researching the evacuation. Mr Gingell says that, without the cooperation of all these families, who very kindly offered to help in sharing their evacuation memorabilia, it would have been impossible to acquire so many photos and publish his books to raise funds for cancer and mental health charities.

Evacuation names and information have also been gathered from a campaign launched in conjunction with the Gibraltar Chronicle and from different social media groups.

Mr Gingell says the evacuation of the Gibraltar civilian population was a “central event in the history of Gibraltar and which affected every family in different ways.” He adds that the photos serve as a reference for understanding the experience lived by the evacuation generation and “to depict their expressions of hopes, disappointments and their impressions of their life-changing experiences.”