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Fordham's Accommodation

Tunnels in GibraltarUse British English from July 2017
WW2 tunnel diagram hays level Northern defences
WW2 tunnel diagram hays level Northern defences

Fordham's Accommodation are underground parallel chambers within the Rock of Gibraltar built during the Second World War. These are part of the extensive tunnels of Gibraltar. The chambers were named after Colonel H M Fordham OBE, MC, who was Chief Engineer in Gibraltar. The chambers were based on Liddell's Union Tunnel.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Fordham's Accommodation (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Fordham's Accommodation
Queens Road, Gibraltar

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Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 36.1427 ° E -5.3481 °
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Tovey Battery

Queens Road
GX11 1AA Gibraltar
Gibraltar
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WW2 tunnel diagram hays level Northern defences
WW2 tunnel diagram hays level Northern defences
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Sixth siege of Gibraltar

The sixth siege of Gibraltar in 1411 was the only occasion on which control of Gibraltar was contested between two Islamic powers. After the failed fifth siege of Gibraltar in 1349–50, which ended with the death of King Alfonso XI of Castile from bubonic plague, the Kingdom of Castile was preoccupied with the Castilian Civil War and its aftermath. In 1369, Sultan Muhammed V of Granada took advantage of the Castilians' distractions and in the siege of Algeciras (1369) he seized the city of Algeciras, on the west side of the Bay of Gibraltar, which Alfonso XI had captured in 1344. After razing it to the ground he made peace with Henry II, the winner of the civil war. The truce was renewed by Henry's successors John I and Henry III. At some point during the truces, control of Gibraltar was transferred from the Marinid dynasty of Morocco, which had held it since 1333, to the Granadans. It is not clear why this happened; it may have been as a condition of the Granadans assisting the Marinids against rebels in Morocco.In February 1407, the truce between the Christian and Islamic kingdoms collapsed during the reign of the infant John II as the result of a minor skirmish. A Castilian fleet put to sea and inflicted a major defeat on the Moors in the Strait of Gibraltar. The rulers of Granada and Morocco met at Gibraltar and agreed to sue for a fresh truce, but relations between the two Islamic states soon broke down amid disagreements between their rulers.The garrison of Gibraltar rebelled in 1410 against the Granadan ruler, Yusuf III, and declared allegiance to Abu Said Uthman III of Morocco. Abu Said Uthman III sent his brother, Abu Said, to take charge with an army numbering some 1,000 cavalry and 2,000 infantry. They occupied a number of castles in the area as well as the ports of Estepona and Marbella. A Granadan counter-offensive in 1411 drove Abu Said back to Gibraltar, where he took refuge. Yusuf III's son Ahmad laid siege to Gibraltar and defeated several Moroccan attempts to break out. Eventually a Granadan sympathiser in the garrison helped the besiegers to gain entrance. They stormed the Moorish Castle, forcing Abu Said to surrender, and restored Granadan control over Gibraltar. Back in Morocco, Abu Said Uthman III reacted by writing to Yusuf III to ask him to execute Abu Said for disloyalty. Instead, the Granadan sultan gave Abu Said an army and sent him back to Morocco to launch an ultimately unsuccessful rebellion against Abu Said Uthman III.

King's Lines
King's Lines

The King's Lines are a walled rock-cut trench on the lower slopes of the north-west face of the Rock of Gibraltar. Forming part of the Northern Defences of the fortifications of Gibraltar, they were originally created some time during the periods when Gibraltar was under the control of the Moors or Spanish. They are depicted in a 1627 map by Don Luis Bravo de Acuña, which shows their parapet following a tenaille trace. The lines seem to have been altered subsequently, as maps from the start of the 18th century show a more erratic course leading from the Landport, Gibraltar's main land entrance, to the Round Tower, a fortification at their western end. A 1704 map by Johannes Kip calls the Lines the "Communication Line of the Round Tower".In 1704, an Anglo-Dutch force captured Gibraltar in the name of Charles, Archduke of Austria who claimed the crown of Spain during the War of the Spanish Succession. The Lines were named after him. They saw use during the Twelfth Siege of Gibraltar (1704–5), when the Spanish and their French allies succeeded in breaching the defences but were repelled; during the Thirteenth Siege (1727), when they were bombarded by the Spanish; and during the Great Siege (1779–83), when they were again under Spanish bombardment. During the tenure of William Green as Gibraltar's Senior Engineer from 1761 to 1783, the Lines were repaired, improved and fortified, and the cliffs below were scarped to make them impossible to climb. Facing west towards the Bay of Gibraltar, they were intended to make it possible to enfilade any attacking force trying to reach the gates of Gibraltar; they are connected to the Queen's Lines via a communication gallery completed on 13 September 1782. Following the Great Siege, the British bored a tunnel called the Hanover Gallery to connect the King's Lines to the Landport near No. 3 Castle Battery. A communication trench was also dug to the nearby Prince's Lines. Behind the King's Lines, the British dug a tunnel, called the King's Gallery, which ran parallel with the Lines to link them to the Queen's Lines and could be used as a bombproof shelter.Together with the Landport Front defences, the three sets of Lines constituted such a formidable obstacle that the Spanish called the landward approach to Gibraltar el boca de fuego, the "mouth of fire". A British clergyman, William Robertson, recorded his impressions of the Lines from his visit there in 1841: The lower lines consist of two lines of excavations, one above the other, communicating by subterranean passages and stairs. They are much shorter than the upper lines, and as excavations less remarkable, but as batteries they are far more formidable, and are considered exquisite specimens of fortification. The batteries here are not subterranean, like this in the upper lines, but stand out from the face of the rock; but the communications are chiefly excavated through the rock, in which there is also hollowed out a spacious hall for a mess-room, and, in fact, a complete barrack for the soldiers. The King's Lines were used as an artillery platform for over 200 years. During the Anglo-Spanish War of 1762–3, five 9-pdrs and one 6-pdr were recorded as being mounted on the Lines. Two 14-gun positions were established on the Lines for the Great Siege, at a point which was called either King's Battery or Black Battery. During World War II the Lines were redeveloped with a second wall built behind the parapet and the resulting space roofed over, to provide positions for machine guns and Hotchkiss anti-tank guns. The Lines are now abandoned, overgrown and not officially open to the public, although they have been described as "not merely one of the most, [but] perhaps the most, hauntingly vivid experiences of a visit to Gibraltar . . . [standing] comparison with some of the most famous military sites in the world." As John Harris of the Royal Institute of British Architects has put it, they are "capable of providing one of the great architectural experiences in the western world . . . the atmosphere of the Great Siege is vivid and evocative in the extreme." The Gibraltar Conservation Society proposed a £500,000 scheme in the early 1980s to preserve and reopen the Lines and the surrounding batteries, galleries and bombproof magazines, but the scheme did not go ahead and the Lines have continued to be neglected and vandalised despite being scheduled as an Ancient Monument. It is possible to visit the King's Lines with guided tours, the area has been cleaned up and prepared for this.