The Sunday Times Magazine • 21to 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 theFalklands has sponsored a boarding house),
and to study for vocational qualifications or
undergraduate degrees at British colleges
and universities — all of it fully funded.
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 zonewas 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.
“None of these changes would be
possible without the war and the exclusion
limit,” says James Wallace, 41, chief
executive of Fortuna, the largest fishingIN PROGRESSARGENTINAARGENTINABrazilFALKLAND
ISLANDSPort HowardGoose
GreenGoose
Greenmount
pleasantStanleyStanleySOUTH
GEORGIA
25 milessussex
mountainsmount
tumbledownpebble
islandPort HowardPort Howard
FALKLAND
ISLANDSsussex
mountainsARGENTINAThe village hall at Goose Green, where more than 100 locals including Andrea
Clausen, aged ten in 1982, were held captive and sheltered under floorboardsVestiges of Empire — 8,000 miles from the UK
previous pages: getty images, these pages: imperial war museum, georgina strange for the sunday times magazine ➤