Skegness Magazine

‘Miss Gibraltar 1974′ visits Gibraltar Point

In BRITAIN for the Miss World Contest on 22 November, 19-year-old Patricia Anne Orfila, who will be representing Gibraltar, visited the Gibraltar Point nature reserve at Skegness to present a commemorative shield on Monday.

A small plaque above the colony’s coat-of-arms stated that she had made the visit to bear the greetings of the people of Gibraltar.
Patricia — Miss Gibraltar, 1974 — presented the shield to the field station warden, Mr George Evans, outside the visitors’ centre in which it will be given a place of honour. He, in return, gave her a beribboned sprig of buckthorn as a good luck charm in the Miss World Contest.
Wearing a brown polo-necked sweater and trousers and yellow tip, a necklace of nutshells and another, which she made herself, of water melon pips, Miss Gibraltar was afterwards taken to see the buckthorn growing on the reserve and entertained to lunch.

SMALLEST COUNTRY
She represents the smallest country to send a delegate to the contest. Gibraltar-born, she has been to Britain only once before — on a brief school trip to London in 1971.
She has blond hair and hazel eyes, is 5ft 2in tall, measures 35-22-35 and weighs only 7st 11b.
She speaks English, Spanish and French fluently and left school this summer with five `0` levels and three ‘A’ levels to become a student teacher.
Her hobbies include playing the piano, painting, gymnastics and yoga. She claims to have seen a flying saucer earlier this year.
The idea of the visit to Skegness came from the Gibraltar Tourist Office public relations officer, Rosamunde Bern, who accompanied Miss Gibraltar.
She said: “I was looking through an AA book and I saw two Gibraltars mentioned in Lincolnshire, one of which came to nothing and the other was here.”
What no one seemed to know, however, was why the point, so flat and marshy, had been named after a huge rock like Gibraltar.

Is the plaque still at Gibraltar Point nature reserve, thirty-four years later? You’ve guessed it! It’s on our list of ‘things to investigate’! Check back soon!