It’s difficult to imagine a less hospitable place to spend five days and nights than dug into the side of Sussex Mountain on the Falkland Islands. Bleak doesn’t do it justice. The hillside is treeless and bald, ravaged by anabatic winds that feel as though they are whipping in straight off the Antarctic ice sheet, which indeed they may well be.
This is where the crack 2 Para — the 2nd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment — spent the first five days of the Falklands War, 40 years ago last month. These tough infantrymen cuddled together in the wind, lodged their frozen feet in each other’s armpits and wore ladies’ tights for warmth. “The longest five days of my life,” was how the paratrooper Tony Banks described it.
Eventually 2 Para were ordered off Sussex Mountain and conducted a night march over comically rough terrain to reach Goose Green, a heavily fortified hamlet. There they fought a vicious battle, losing 18 men, including their famed commander, Colonel “H” Jones, ultimately forcing almost 1,000 Argentinians to surrender. As Britain reflects on the 40th anniversary of this strange and final colonial war, one wonders whether it was all worth it. All that blood and treasure: 258 British and Gurkha lives lost, along with almost 700 Argentinians, six British ships sunk, 34 aircraft destroyed and £10 billion spent, all to recapture a dusty imperial relic in the middle of nowhere.
There were about 1,800 inhabitants of the Falklands then, a dwindling British farming community mostly descended from Scottish settlers, who found the unforgiving conditions somewhat familiar. The islands had changed hands repeatedly over the 18th and early 19th century, but immediately prior to the British occupation in 1833 they had been controlled by the Argentine Confederation, a predecessor to Argentina. The country of Argentina never gave up its claim and when the bellicose military junta came to power in 1976, growing tensions over the islands and a series of diplomatic fumbles eventually led to the Argentine invasion in April 1982.
Trudging from Sussex Mountain to Goose Green in 2 Para’s painful footsteps, the point of this remote but nasty squabble is not immediately obvious. This is the Falklands of the popular British imagination: “Miles and miles of bugger all,” as Denis Thatcher memorably described it. Two thousand alcoholics clinging to a frigid rock about the size of Yorkshire, said others; a barren anachronism with the highest sheep to person ratio on the planet. During the war British soldiers got in trouble for nicknaming the locals “Bennies”, after the simpleton character from the TV show Crossroads, which summed up our patronising sense of the Falklanders as Bovril and Bisto bumpkins frozen in colonial aspic. It’s a cliché that endures even now.
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The Falklands are an altogether different proposition today, though. War changed everything. It was a tragic and shocking affair, but in its wake came prosperity and growth. The conflict generated unprecedented economic support from Britain, but also gave the islanders a future to believe in and a point to prove. Thanks to fishing revenue and oil exploration, the Falklands are now considerably wealthier per capita than Britain, and just as cosmopolitan. The capital, Stanley, has about 60 nationalities represented according to the last census; higher education is free for all; land is almost entirely locally owned and not by British investors. The islands’ population has doubled since 1982 and is now about 3,600. Argentina’s claim hasn’t gone away — it still refuses to recognise or trade freely with the Falklanders, but despite this the Bennies are booming.
Today the hour-long drive from the British military airport at Mount Pleasant to Stanley is a smooth glide along a tarmacked highway, with the famous mountains that British soldiers trekked up and conquered — Longdon, Tumbledown, Two Sisters — rearing up alongside the road. In Stanley itself the rackety old Upland Goose hostelry that became famous during the war has gone. Instead I stay at the sleek Waterfront Boutique Hotel, which feels like a Soho House offshoot. Meetings are held over a glass of Chilean merlot and my first is with Andrea Clausen, 50, the Falklands’ director of natural resources.
Clausen moved to the islands from Middlesbrough as a small child and was ten years old when war broke out. Her family in Goose Green were among more than 100 unlucky Falklanders who were locked up in the village hall for almost a month, as the war closed in around them. “For the kids it was like a giant sleepover at first,” she recalls. “We all stayed up playing cards.” Over time the hall became more like a prison, with two lavatories and strictly limited exercise. When gunfire began the families dug holes beneath the floorboards to shelter their children. To this day Clausen can’t stand the sound of fireworks.
The war left her with a bundle of emotions: guilt, determination, pride, perhaps some PTSD too. “We do feel that it’s a lot of people to die for us,” she says. “But I have immense pride about what we’ve done on the back of such a sad event. We got ourselves educated, rebuilt the country — with a lot of help, but we did it. We built roads, connected the farms, explored for oil, built a tourism industry. We really did rise.”
Before the war educational opportunities on the islands were limited mostly to a few O-levels, with children in remote settlements often taught by travelling teachers who would pass through on horseback. Subsequently the community has built an impressive school for more than 200 pupils, and now uses fishing revenue to offer every child the chance to go to the UK for their A-levels (many attend Peter Symonds College in Winchester, where the Falklands has sponsored a boarding house), and to study for vocational qualifications or undergraduate degrees at British colleges and universities — all of it fully funded.
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The source of this flourishing is immediately apparent on a trip to the Tamar Pass, a narrow sea passage between West Falkland and Pebble Island, among the largest of the 776 Falkland islands and the site of a famous SAS raid at the beginning of the war. You can hear the pass before you see it. Flocks of albatross, cormorants, giant petrels and terns swirl exuberantly across the sky. Large groups of fur seals porpoise through the water in the wake of a colossal humpback whale. Sea lions gambol in the shallows. Punkish rockhopper penguins pootle about on the cliffs. It’s a carnival of the seas and a bad place to be a fish.
This abundance, which now accounts for about 65 per cent of the Falklands’ GDP, has always been present in waters around the islands, but it was only in the aftermath of the war that Britain acceded to Falklander pleas to set up a 180-mile fishing exclusion zone, which means any fishing in the area must be licensed by the Falklands. Prior to the war Britain had been fearful of offending Argentina, but from the moment the zone was established in 1986 the Falklands’ days as a giant indigent sheep farm were over. More than 200,000 tonnes of fish were caught in its waters in 2019, most in the form of illex or loligo squid, also known as “Falklands calamari”. Chilean toothfish and hake are also plentiful.
Falklanders don’t fish much themselves, but licences sold to fleets of Spanish, Korean and Taiwanese “jiggers” bring in big money: in 1974 the GDP of the islands was £2.7 million. Today it is about £200 million, making Falklanders around the fifth or sixth richest people in the world per capita, right up with Luxembourg and Qatar. This is nearly double the UK’s average wealth and nine times Argentina’s, which you can imagine doesn’t go down too well in Buenos Aires.
The results of this lucre are everywhere in Stanley: houses are going up every day in the west of the town, with new roads often named after old Falklands stalwarts, such as Rex Hunt, the red-taxi-driving governor in charge when Argentina invaded, and Sandy Woodward, the admiral who commanded the British task force to retake the islands. The Falklands hospital has proudly just received its first CT scanner (which doctors refer to as a “Boris scanner” as they were widely distributed during the pandemic). There are two smart hotels, six pubs, no homelessness, full employment and little in the way of poverty. “We’re the luckiest working-class people in the world,” says Robert Rowlands, a 69-year-old retired local.
Alongside the fish there are considerable oil reserves offshore that could deliver about 1 billion barrels of oil, pouring vast sums into the Falklands coffers and allowing for much-needed infrastructure upgrades. Oil extraction faces logistical and political obstacles, but an Israeli company, Navitas, has signed up to pursue the project. With Europe turning away from Russian energy, this new pot of gold may yet emerge.
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“None of these changes would be possible without the war and the exclusion limit,” says James Wallace, 41, chief executive of Fortuna, the largest fishing company on the island. Wallace and his father are among the “squidionnaire” fish barons who have reaped the rewards of the maritime boom. “This was not a wealthy place in the late 1970s,” he says. “People were moving away from the islands.”
Wallace is Argentine on his mother’s side — she had flown over to the Falklands in the 1970s, just after Argentina’s military coup of 1976. Flights had opened between the two countries in 1972 and the seeds of a relationship were planted, encouraged by a British government that was quietly hoping to offload this distant imperial holdover, which was viewed as being more trouble than it was worth. This all fell apart in 1976, when the military junta seized power in Argentina and immediately ratcheted up tensions over the Falklands, placing themselves on a path to war with Britain.
Amid economic turmoil at home the junta leader, General Galtieri, launched an amphibious assault that captured the islands on April 2, 1982. To the surprise of the Argentinians the British response was swift and decisive: within days a naval task force of 127 ships was powering its way towards the South Atlantic.
Despite his own ancestry, Wallace is appalled by Argentine behaviour towards the Falklands, then and now. One thing that’s immediately apparent in the Falklands is that there’s simply no pro-Argentina sentiment at all. None. One might hear the occasional rumbling about greater autonomy from Britain and “paying our own way”, but absolutely nobody in the Falklands, left, right or centre, old or young, of British, Chilean or even Argentine origin, has the slightest interest in being occupied by their closest neighbour. In a 2013 referendum on the subject all but three voters elected to remain a self-governing British overseas territory. (No one seems to know who exactly the three renegades were.)
The war and subsequent prosperity has also made the Falklands more independent from Britain and assertive about its own identity and self-government. They still have red phone boxes and Bourbon biscuits and EastEnders on the telly (piped in on delay via the British Forces Broadcasting Service), but laws are now made locally by an elected assembly of eight Falklanders. The British governor, who still lives in a leafy colonial mansion in Stanley, is restricted to making decisions on defence and foreign affairs, the two areas in which the UK retains control as part of its overall sovereignty (and at a cost to the taxpayer of more than £60 million a year). He also oversees the Queen’s birthday parade, a bicorn-hat-and-feathers affair that harks back to the Falklands’ colonial past.
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“The defence that the UK continues to provide is fundamental to our current success,” Wallace says. “It’s not a woke or fashionable thing to say the UK has some kind of parental role, but they really do. And I think it’s fine, we have a modern relationship.”
For all its progress, life on the Falklands isn’t exactly normal. The islands lie in chilly isolation, 300 miles off the coast of Argentina, 8,000 miles from the UK and just below the Roaring Forties, which make it among the windier places on earth.
Supply chain challenges and inhospitable soil make for somewhat exotic pricing. In West Store, Stanley’s supermarket, a melon can cost as much as nine Falkland pounds (the same as British pounds but with pictures of penguins). I found a single mushroom on sale for £1.50 and a pack of Bran Flakes for an alarming £6. Booze and fuel are hardly taxed, though, so a litre of diesel is less than half what it costs in the UK and a good bottle of red sets you back only £7. “There’s nowhere cheaper on the planet to drink and drive,” says one local, half-jokingly. As far as I can tell there are no hard drugs on the island at all, though one well-lubricated barfly informs me quietly that one can source an eighth of cannabis for a hefty £110, “if you really know who to ask”.
Despite the hundreds of cows you see chomping on tussock grass, there is currently no dairy on the island (they’re all beef cows) and Falklanders recently went three weeks without milk during a delivery snarl. Islanders like to chuckle resiliently at their unusual predicament and will joke about deliveries gone wrong — stale cornflakes and walnut whirls soaked in spilt creosote. Risible wi-fi speeds would make the place unliveable for your average London millennial: a strong connection costs upwards of £1,200 a year, and even then you’d struggle to sustain Netflix. One of the most heated recent debates on the (often heated) community Facebook group was about potentially moving away from the current Sure South Atlantic satellite connection to Elon Musk’s Starlink.
The Falklands accent is an unusual mixture of West Country warble and New Zealand twang that linguists assure me is the result of something called a diphthong shift. But the idiosyncrasies of life on the Falklands go far deeper than just outlandish accents and exorbitantly priced mushrooms. The unique environmental, geopolitical and economic forces at work here have forged a society full of apparent contradictions. The welfare state is Scandi socialist, with free education and healthcare for all, but foreign policy is firmly flag-waving Thatcherite (a bust of the Iron Lady stands down the road from the Cross of Sacrifice in central Stanley, just in front of Thatcher Drive).
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The Falklands is the epitome of Global Britain — a far-flung projection of postimperial force, yet it would have been ardently Remain had it voted in the referendum because so much of its produce is processed (and now faces tariffs) in Europe. It is a fish barony with almost no fishermen living in it. A village-sized country whose legislative assembly members act as both local councillors and global diplomats. Even the Benniest yokel has a firm and well-informed opinion on Argentine and British dispositions towards the Falklands. They have to pay attention.
And yet, despite all these quirks and challenges, somehow it all works fairly well. There are issues, of course. The Falklands prison is unusually full at the moment, after Operation Cinnamon led to multiple arrests on the islands for underage sex crimes. Locals will grumble about the overmighty governor and his “colonialist” ways. Some younger Falklanders sense racism and bigotry among the older generation, much as they do in Britain. Life in Stanley is stifling for those used to the city: as with any village population, secrets don’t last long and scandal spreads quickly. “People mostly drink a bit too much and shag each other,” is how one local puts it.
Yet most Falklanders look at Britain today — immigration woes, Brexit animosities, Covid horrors, cost-of-living crisis, huge national debt, rife inequality — and consider themselves rather fortunate. One particularly notable aspect of Falklands life is that after their five or six-year fully funded rumspringa in the UK, the majority of young Falklanders return home. (Thanks to an act passed after the war, Falklanders do have full rights to British citizenship, whereas migrants coming the other way from the UK or elsewhere need to apply for residency visas.)
Glyn Morrison, 21, spent three years at a technical college in the UK, but he never really considered staying. Why? “You have a freedom here that you just don’t get in the UK,” he says. “You’re used to a quiet place, but it’s also developing here at a rate that’s unreal, so you’re not just stuck in a rut. It’s the lifestyle. It’s being able to look up and see the stars. It’s the fresh air you breathe the moment you get off the plane. It draws you back.”
A plot of land in Stanley generally costs about £20,000 and building a house roughly £100,000. Morrison works as a construction site engineer and says there are 100 empty plots waiting for development: “We can’t keep up.” Like many Falklanders, Morrison’s prized possession is not his home but his Land Rover, three of them in fact, and he spends all his spare cash fixing up his fleet.
Prior to the pandemic weekly flights would arrive from Chile, sometimes via Argentina, as well as the “Airbridge” flight run twice weekly from the UK out of RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, which takes civilians and military personnel down to the islands. But when the pandemic arrived the Falklands went full zero Covid: commercial flights were shut down and UK arrivals were subjected to strict quarantine. Because of the Falklands’ size, isolation, well-oiled medical services and vaccination rates above 90 per cent, life here has been blissfully free of masks, mandates and Covid deaths.
The two years of almost total isolation gave the Falklanders a chance to get to know their own islands better. Despite the rural image the vast majority of Falklanders actually live in Stanley, also known as “town”, and only a hardy few live in the outlying farms and settlements known as “camp”, an anglicisation of the Spanish campo, or countryside.
The Falklands version of Eat Out to Help Out was the “Trip” (Tourism Recovery Incentive Programme), which gave each adult £500 and children £250 to travel around the islands, taking the tiny air taxis that ferry passengers from island to island, keeping tourism alive in the absence of the usual 60,000 annual visitors.
Out in “camp” is where you get a taste of the prewar Falklands. Many settlements are in their own time zone, “camp time”, an hour behind Stanley, to give people longer outdoors during the summer. Campers still gather annually for old traditions such as Sports Week, a boozy days-long sleepover featuring horse racing, shearing competitions and sheepdog trials. Word spreads in camp through the “diddle-dee telegraph”, a reference to the diddle-dee shrub coating much of the islands that produces a distinctive berry, useful for making jam (or gin).
In camp the arrival of roads, the internet, satellite television and smartphones has brought globalisation to this remotest of cultures. Stanley, on the other hand, is positively cosmopolitan: St Helenans or “Saints” came in the late 1980s, Chileans turned up in the 1990s, and now Filipinos have made their home here to work in the supermarkets and stores around town. A group of Zimbabweans arrived just over a decade ago to apply their expertise in clearing minefields. Several stayed and brought their families with them.
On a Saturday night in Stanley I attended a buzzing Zimbabwean Independence Day party, featuring a maize-meal, pork stew and yam feast. “At first it was so very cold and windy,” says Shupi Chipunza, 44. “But people here have welcomed me as family. In other countries there is a lot of violence. Here we don’t worry about the kids going next door.” After the demining, Chipunza became a firefighter at the military camp. “This is my home now,” he says.
War still haunts the Falklands and its residents, from the memorials and crosses dotted around the battlefields to the debris — ejector seats, twisted doors, gun casings — still scattered around the island from downed Argentine helicopters and Skyhawk jets. There were still active minefields on the island until November 2020, when the last mines were detonated. A ceremony was held to celebrate and hundreds of Falklanders ran on to the gorgeous white sands of Yorke Bay, just north of Stanley, for the first time since it was mined in 1982. The bay’s penguins, which were light enough to avoid blowing themselves up on the mines, finally had their neighbours back.
The 40th anniversary of the war is a significant undertaking, with a series of events and memorial services taking place over the course of May and June. But Argentina’s refusal to give up its claim on the islands still casts a shadow. The country harasses Falklanders at every turn, refusing to work with them on crucial regional fishing agreements and putting “Malvinas” stamps in Falklander passports when they pass through Argentina. Jingoistic Argentinians occasionally barrel up in the Falklands to unveil flags and remind the islanders that they have not renounced their claim. Companies who work in the Falklands face remonstrance from Argentina, which recently revealed China as a crucial backer of its claim to the Falklands.
On the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, James Wallace recalls that the Argentine navy were “out in force” pushing around trawlers and “circling” vessels bearing the Falklands flag. Older islanders still fear that Britain will tire of forking out tens of millions annually to defend these distant islands — and once more seek to appease Argentina. Nigel Phillips, the current governor, insists not. “UK ministers are not going to betray these islands, Argentina needs to understand that,” he says.
In truth, the moment you land in the Falklands the ancient Argentine claim on the islands, based on a fringe territorial squabble conducted some 200 years ago, seems absurd. Some Falklanders may still be more British than the British, but they are a distinct people with an increasingly distinct identity who have lived on these islands for longer than Argentina has been a country. There was never any indigenous population here, so the Falklanders are the locals, a leathery bunch of settlers who have built a flourishing community in highly unlikely circumstances. Britain is rightly used to cringing at its imperial sins, but when it comes to the Falklands at least, there’s no need.
Teslyn Barkman, 34, is the youngest woman to become a member of the Falklands legislative assembly. She raised a Ukrainian flag over the islands when war broke out in Europe, noting the parallels. “A lot of Falklanders can empathise with having an aggressive neighbour who wants to invade you,” she says. “Argentina plays that same information war: we’re an implanted population [they claim], we don’t have a history, we don’t have a culture.”
When she attended arts college in London, Barkman was surprised to find her left-wing friends asking whether she was actually Argentinian and questioning the Falklands’ status. “You’re talking about giving a place to another place as though it’s a commodity,” she says. “There’s nothing more imperialist or colonialist than that.”
The irony, of course, is that if Argentina relaxed its belligerence towards the Falklands the place would in time inevitably become a bit more Argentine, simply owing to proximity. But retaking “Las Malvinas” is written into the Argentine constitution, a point of principle that has become a national rallying cry, especially in times of stress.
On my last day in the Falklands, I join Patrick Watts for a trip up to Wireless Ridge, a hill above Stanley where the last battle of the campaign was fought on June 14, 1982. Now 77, Watts became famous on the first day of the war when he interrupted his radio broadcast to ask the Argentine soldiers in his studio to stop pointing their guns at his back.
Having won the first main battle of the war, 2 Para fought at Wireless Ridge as well, losing three men and ending the campaign they had begun at Goose Green. At the top of the ridge a metal cross sits on a cairn to mark their sacrifice, overlooking the town of Stanley that bustles and grows in its shadow.
“One thousand men shouldn’t have had to die to ensure democracy in the Falklands,” Watts says. “But we’ll never forget them. It’s always there. We hope you see that it wasn’t in vain.”