From Algeciras to the Dardanelles
Archibald Hopkins, Colonel in His Majesty’s Army, could hardly have suspected that a mission as special as serving as attaché to the British delegation at the International Conference on Morocco, to be held in Algeciras in 1906, would change the lives of both him and his family. The discovery of a warm and welcoming land, where serving five o’clock tea with churros was commonplace and bullfighting pasodobles coexisted with God Save the Queen, would transform the way the hardened soldier, seasoned in the Second Boer War, viewed life and the world. The protagonists of our story, mostly British, who arrived in the south of Spain by a twist of fate, settled in this part of the world with the hope and innocence typical of the Belle Époque. In this glorious era of the British Empire, their lives unfolded in a peaceful bubble shaped by a polite and bourgeois society, a haven of tranquillity abruptly shattered by the First World War.