Day in the Life of Pete Jackson and his Lord Airey’s Battery restoration

Over the course of the past four years, Pete Jackson, from the Gibraltar Heritage Trust, has taken it upon himself to restore and renovate Lord Airey’s Battery at the top of the Rock.

He invited the Chronicle to join him one day not just to see what he does but to roll up their sleeves and help him. Eyleen Gomez joined him together with Charlotte Ward, a friend of both Mr Jackson and Ms Gomez.

Lord Airey’s Battery at the top of the Rock has had an extensive restoration and renovation thanks to Pete Jackson from the Gibraltar Hertiage Trust who has been working on it since during the Covid lockdowns in 2020.

The Battery was built by British troops in 1891 and seen service throughout both World Wars.

Back in 2020, during lockdown, Mr Jackson was doing the Med Steps for his daily exercise.

“In the early days of lockdown, I was on the Med steps and I saw some kids who hid behind the wall when they saw me.”

“So I came towards them to see what was going on and they ran down to O’Hara’s.”

“But, when I came down and found the outer door had been forced open, I came inside and I could hear this gulping noise,” he said.

“Shone my light in there from my mobile to see oil over the floor. That's when I rang the police and said we've got a bit of an issue.”

“The police told me that ‘there's nothing we could do, we are in lockdown’ and I should ring the Environment and basically, I should ring the Heritage Trust. I said ‘Look, I'm on the Board of Trustees.

There's nothing we can do, there's environmental damage going on here’.”

“What do we do? They were unable to help, so I started doing it myself.”

Together with a member from the Fortress of Gibraltar Group, he threw sawdust all over it and left it for two weeks.

“Then I thought ‘hang on, I have left this oil coated sawdust. Nobody knows it is there in the dark and if somebody else comes in and steps on that, next time I come up it could be a body laid there’. So I thought I'm going to do something about it and I started cleaning it,” he said.

The clean-up didn’t stop there, Mr Jackson embarked on an epic challenge to restore the Battery to its former glory while also dealing and getting rid of hundreds and hundreds of rats.

“Everything I looked at was in such a state I thought we are going to lose elements of the gun,” he said.

“So I walked into the back room there, which is where the dunk tank is and saw the ammunition shaft was rotten. And I thought I need to stop the rot.”

“Well, I had been given some rust inhibitor from the previous gun I was working on in the north. So I took a quarter of a ton of rust off that shaft from bottom to top and applied the rust inhibitor where I could and then undercoated it.”

“So I thought ‘I’ve started this, so I have got to finish it’ and then it just snowballed from there,” he explained further.

Carl Alecio started coming up to help him, as well as a string of volunteers who have come up but “not as not as frequently as I'd like, but I have a good spate of help occasionally from volunteers.”

“Which, if I'm honest, that's what gives me the push to stay. Because people come up and see it and I see other people’s faces when they see it. And it helps,” he added.

The gun site had been abandoned since the 1980s, and Mr Jackson has been working on various rooms, prioritising based on potential losses.

But one aspect he had to deal with was the rats in every one of the drawers and other locations.

To deal with them he pulled the drawers out, turned them upside down and walked out leaving it overnight in the hope they would clear out. But the place was filthy leaving Mr Jackson feeling filthy regardless of how long he spent in the room.

He stripped the room out and cleaned it, painted and tried to make it workable, leaving him with an area he could operate from.

That room needs another clean out again as he is presently using it as a base to work from. One of the main things he did in this primary room was reinstating the shadow board, which is a place where the tools are hung up where it is easy to spot which is missing.

From there he moved onto the next, selecting each room by personal priority.

“What I thought was the most likely to be lost I would work on first and just take it as far as I could,” he said.

“I was hoping to finish by the end of last year but it's nowhere near. It needs more work.”

The Battery has two rooms downstairs, three on the main level and one just below the gun, which he is not doing, and the gun pit above, as well as the gun.

He is using rust inhibitors, cleaning techniques, and paint to restore different components of the gun and the restoration work involves cleaning, painting, blocking the rats’ access points, and also addressing water leakage issues.

He also needs to block access to the tank room where the rats are coming down from and, once he has done that, the Battery will be rat-free.

“That's been my overarching wish, to make sure that it's rat-free. Because then you can come down and you're not going to have something gnawing through your cables,” he said.

“It used to be a massive adventure playground for them.”

He has designed different methods to ensure the rats cannot set up a nest again.

Within the rat-free lower room of the Battery, Mr Jackson put Ms Ward and Ms Gomez to work. Dressed in overalls and gloves, he gave them thick paint, brushes and rollers. The task was to paint the walls and ceiling white and the floor in a special red paint. The task took numerous hours, but more was achieved than Mr Jackson had expected.

Regardless of their efforts Mr Jackson easily has a further two months of work to be undertaken in that area.

With this in mind, he is hoping the return of the UK-based charity Alabaré, which supports vulnerable, homeless and marginalised people, many of them veterans of military service, will put a dent into the work that needs doing. Their return will be the third consecutive year that Alabaré has brought veterans to work on the Battery.

At present, he is doing all the prep work for them.

“I want them to go away having achieved."

"The best way I can do that is prep all the metal work, have it ready for them so that, when they come in, it's a question of identifying who's painting what and who's fixing what,” he said.

He also hopes that 87-year-old Dennis Abbott will return with them and bring his “excellent carpenter and joiner” skills for Mr Jackson to utilise once again.

Without any volunteers, Mr Jackson has to carry out the work himself.

“It’s not easy,” he jokes, “I was born with a disability. Only eight fingers and two thumbs.”

“You need somebody really. Just putting in that light there without somebody on the other end is just one of the simple things that you can do as an individual.”

With this in mind he is always actively looking for volunteers.

“It's not everybody's bag. It's not easy to get to. It’s the top of the Rock, one of the most inaccessible places to get to. There's no facilities on site.”

“So once you’re here, you're really here,” he said.

“But the Heritage Trust is always searching for volunteers. It's not just this project. There's other projects going on around the Rock that people that are interested can get involved in.”

“And I'd encourage anybody that's interested to initially go the Heritage Trust and sign up.”

“By doing that, you’re then contactable. So if you're interested, you can say ‘I'm interested in helping out, who do I speak to?’”

“And you can get yourself on a project.”

“But the guns, for me is, is it. I'm hopeful there is another project after this one,” he added.

While Mr Jackson has a personal passion and affiliation with the guns, he explains that the guns on the Rock, not just Lord Airey’s, are massively important due to being crucial during World War II and are what kept Gibraltar British.

“They were key to stopping anything coming through the Strait and in the Med. We had control. And we had that because of these things and I can’t let them rot,” he said.

“I will do my level best, while I can, to save them.”

Mr Jackson aims to finish the restoration by June, but acknowledges the need for a plan to guarantee the site's continued maintenance as he is concerned about what will happen to the place once he walks away from it.

“Because, if it's just a case of it gets locked up and left, then the rats gnaw back in, insects takeover, and the paint flakes and it all becomes what it was before I started,” he said.

“I'd like to think that there is a plan being worked on or going to be decided on where it gets used.”

“It needs footfall in there, you need people.”

“But unlike most sites, you can't expect people to be allowed to walk through here unguided. You get the last guy of the day falling down those steps into the cellar, and he's locked in overnight. You can't do that.”

“And you get somebody who knows what they're looking at, and knows something is of value, and they can come down here with a screwdriver and take away old artifacts for scrap or for the mancave.”

“So it needs control and it needs thought into that control,” he added.

For those who cannot offer their support physically, there is an ability to support financially.

Mr Jackson directs interested donors to the Gibraltar Heritage Trust website, where they can donate directly to his work via Pete’s Projects at https://shorturl.at/oGLNO