Patrick Thursfield: the last Tangerine

He was perceptive enough to see that, as far as local Moroccans were concerned, the brief and brilliant decades of festivities had contributed little of permanent value to Tangier itself. It did however bring hordes of curious visitors in its train with money to spend and an almost insatiable appetite for old scandals. But by the standards of the past it had been a deplorable period in local eyes. The private lives of Bowles, Ginsberg, Burroughs & Co, as they eventually became public, were regarded mostly with contempt, a point neatly made by the Gerofi sisters, proprietors of Tangier's best known bookshop, in Daniel Rondeau's book Tanger et autres Marocs: 'Burroughs etait sale a un point inoui ... Son imper se serait debout de crasse ... Genet portait une veste de cuir toute rapee ....' (Genet lived at Laraiche, further down the coast, and is buried there). Only Beckett seems to have escaped censure, because of his elegance and self-restraint.

Indeed the real Tangier, the Tangier of the International Zone and Free Port guaranteed by international treaty, the Tangier which could have provided the setting for the film Casablanca, vanished when the enclave once more became part of Morocco when that country regained its independence in 1952. But something of the atmosphere still lingered, a conflation of all the personalities that had left their mark on the place since its Edwardian dawn in 1904 until its final metamorphosis back into what it had been when Catharine of Braganza brought it with her as part of her dowry on her marriage to Charles II, an ancient, if rather seedy and dilapidated town rich in historical deposit, on the North African coast, with which the Portuguese appeared to have had no difficulty in parting. We abandoned it to the Moroccans, demolishing the protective mole that we had begun to build before leaving. By the time of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 which gave us Gibraltar we could have done with it, especially during the Napoleonic Wars when revictualling the Mediterranean fleet was a perennial headache--we had to make do with neighbouring Tetouan instead--but had to wait until the Algeciras Treaty of 1904 before once again gaining control of it under a disguised neutrality. Despite the participation, on an equal basis, of other Great Powers, it was the British who effectively controlled Tangier throughout this period. It remained untouched by the Rif rebellion of the 1920s and neither the French nor Spanish Protectorates over Morocco affected it.