Tito Mesod Benady was born in Gibraltar in 1930, educated at the Hebrew School, the British School in Funchal, Madeira during the Evacuation, and the Gibraltar Grammar School. Was given a bursarship to study Semitic Languages in 1948 but dropped out when he decided he was not a linguist. He then joined the Prudential Assurance Company as a third class clerk in 1952 and moved to the City as a reinsurance underwriter in 1955. In 1964 he started his own underwriting Agency in the City of London which he was forced to sell because of ill health in 1974. He retired to Gibraltar for a few years and founded the Gibraltar Bookshop and for some time was editor of the weekly paper Calpe News. He returned to his old profession for three years in 1980, but has since his first retirement in 1974 spent his time on his first love, the History of Gibraltar. His interest was awakened when his grandfather bought him a 1904 copy of Drinkwater’s Siege of Gibraltar from Beanland Malin when he was 15. In time he came to realise that all histories that had been written in English were in fact perpetuating myths and events which had not really happened. He has written over 100 monographs on the history of Gibraltar to set the record straight, most of them in the local press, Gibraltar Chronicle, Panorama, Calpe News and of course, the Gibraltar Heritage Journal

Tito received an MA on Naval History from the Greenwich Maritime Institute, University of Greenwich, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He was awarded an MBE for his work on the history of Gibraltar. He is an honorary Director of the Instituto de Estudios Campogibraltareños and was for many years a member of the Council of the Jewish Historical Society of England, and a member of the Board of the Friends of Gibraltar.

His books include The Royal Navy at Gibraltar, Essays on the History of Gibraltar, The Streets of Gibraltar, and the correspondence and memoir of Aaron Cardozo, with a couple more in the pipeline