Finger's crossed for November 2nd

 A friend in New Jersey bought a Biden/Harris sign to display in her yard. It was stolen two days ago (by a Trump supporter?) so she made her own replacement.

The man with the red flag and other tales of AMLO’s Mexico

 

A few weeks ago our son, Chris, was driving from his home in San Vicente, Nayarit, to Tepic, the state capital. On a remote stretch of road that wound its curvy way through forests the traffic slowed to walking pace. A man with a red flag appeared, approached Chris’ car and said “Take this man to hospital”. A man with a bloodied face promptly appeared and sat in the back seat. He was the driver of a lorry involved in an accident. He had not been wearing his seat belt – hence the injuries to his face. The nearest ambulance station was a considerable distance away, so Chris found himself in the role of volunteer ambulance driver. The injured man was from the next town along the road, Compostela (population 16,000), which was conveniently en route to Chris’ destination. They arrived without further incident at the public hospital in Compostela. Unfortunately, a notice on the door informed them, with impeccable logic, that it was shut on account of the health emergency. The injured lorry driver asked to be taken to a taxi rank. That was where Chris last saw him trying to persuade a reluctant taxi driver to take a bloody passenger home. This rather improvised health care is indicative of an under-funded public system. Mexico has a large number of doctors trained to the highest standards, and the best (always private) hospitals are a match for any in North America or Europe. However, the provision of medical services for the less fortunate, especially in remote areas, is patchy, and subject to arbitrary administrative measures, such as closing a hopsital when a medical emergency occurs.

A few weeks before this incident Chris met another man with a red flag, this time on the Querétaro-Mexico City toll road (a rough equivalent of the M6 toll road in the UK or the New Jersey Turnpike in the USA). As he pulled into a toll plaza, Chris noticed that the booths were empty. A man with a red flag stopped him and explained that the “booths have been taken over” (las casetas están tomadas), by whom and for what purpose he did not say. He demanded 50 pesos (about £1.60), less than the official toll. Chris had no cash and the man with the flag did not take cards, so after some debate he relented and Chris drove off. Chris has no idea who the man with the flag was, but in Mexico a small red flag lends an air of authority. The man with the flag may have been part of a local group engaged in some form of protest, or a member of a criminal gang.  In any case, he and his associates had illegally taken possession of a federal government facility on a major highway. Law and order in Mexico is unpredictable and arbitrary, rather like health care provision.

Rather like Mr Trump, Mexico’s president, AMLO, is fond of blaming his predecessors for his country’s ills and of accusing them of corruption. On the latter charge, AMLO is undoubtedly on firmer ground that Mr Trump. His immediate predecessor Enrique Peña Nieto (EPN – presidents are identified by acronyms nowadays) is generally considered to have presided over an unprecedentedly corrupt administration. AMLO recently announced a plebiscite (he is fond of calling referenda to endorse his initiatives). The proposal was to consult the people as to whether the public prosecutor should investigate evidence of corruption against Mexico’s four previous presidents. One might think that a prosecutor hardly needs instructions from the public to investigate evidence of corruption. That is the prosecutor’s job after all. The proposed plebiscite no doubt had political objectives, rather than judicial ones. Law and order can indeed be unpredictable.

Meanwhile, the fight against corruption at the highest levels took a dramatic turn at Los Angeles airport. The Secretary of Defence under EPN (2012-2018), General Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, was arrested by the US Drug Enforcement Agency on suspicion of corruptly assisting drug cartels. News reports suggest that the drug kingpin El Chapo Guzmán, now in a US jail for life, has begun to denounce high-level officials, alleging that they took bribes from his organization. If that is true, life may get a little tougher for a number of important people. EPN may no longer be quite so free to dine at his favourite New York restaurants. However, Cienfuegos has not yet been charged, so much remains to be seen. 

AMLO argues that corruption is the root of just about all of Mexico’s problems, from drug and criminal violence, to poverty and poor public services. This is not without a kernel of truth, although corruption has long been so deeply embedded in all levels of society that attacking corruption alone is not likely to solve other problems. However worthy his anti-corruption rhetoric, AMLO uses allegations of corruption as a convenient justification for any initiative he chooses to promote. A few months ago I heard AMLO speaking critically of institutions that I had not heard of before: los fideicomisos, or trust funds. While most national governments have borrowed money to provide economic stimulus and fund social provision during the pandemic, AMLO has declared that he will not increase government borrowing to attenuate the economic and social impacts of Coronavirus. Rather, he explained, the government would find money elsewhere, one source being los fideicomisos. These are endowment funds established to provide long-term funding for higher education institutions, scientific research institutes and the like. AMLO has alleged, citing only one rather inconclusive case, that the funds are poorly managed and used for corrupt purposes. The institutions that have fideicomisos have defended them, arguing that they are properly audited, that there is no evidence of corruption, and that the funds include grants from international agencies and other funding bodies which will be lost if the fideicomisos are abolished. Thus, a long- established method of providing predictable funding for higher education and research indpendent of fluctuations in the government’s budget, have been rather blithely abolished. Government also can be arbitrary and unpredictable.

Higher education had already suffered budget cuts within weeks of AMLO’s election in 2018. At the Colegio de Michoacán (Colmich) , where I spent three happy months researching in Spring 2018, the staff first felt the cuts at Christmas when the customary aguinaldo (Christmas bonus) and ham were eliminated. I recently heard from a friend at Colmich that the loss of the fideicomisos would further weaken finances. The pandemic has already strained Colmich’s finances severely. All teaching has been online since March and is likely to be so until next summer at the earliest. The students have returned to their homes in various parts of the Republic and the faculty are in lockdown at homes in Zamora, in Mexico City, or in USA. Apparently, only one member of staff has contracted Covid-19, but several others have contracted dengue fever, a seasonal mosquito-borne viral disease. The main business in Zamora is enormous acreages of berries (strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and blueberries), which require plenty of water and provide a mosquito-friendly habitat which causes occasional outbreaks of dengue.

The Coronavirus pandemic has been particularly damaging for the large number of Mexicans who make their living in the “informal sector” (selling food and drinks on the street, busking, carrying out casual work, selling door-to-door, performing juggling and other tricks at traffic lights for a few coins and so on), or who work in tourism and related activities. The Bahía de Banderas area, where Chris lives is a major tourist resort. From November to April the region is usually crowded with visitors from Canada and the USA escaping winter cold. Those tourists have been almost entirely absent since early this year. Many workers have been laid off by the hotels, restaurants and entertainment venues. They now seek what income they can in the informal economy. While we were talking to Chris recently, he was distracted by a man at his front door offering to mow his “lawn”, a small patch of grass no more than 2m². Chris already has somebody who mows this tiny patch of grass for a small fee, but it was a hot day (40^oC), so he offered the man a fruit juice and a banana, which he consumed in the shade of a small tree. He returned his glass with profuse thanks and moved on to find work elsewhere.

The Coronavirus has had a profoundly negative impact on Chris’ charity, Pasitos de Luz. Events attended by tourists account for about 40% of income. The government ordered Pasitos to close in March to restrict the spread of infection. The staff switched from providing meals, therapy and education for the children in their building, to delivering food parcels, advice and support to the children’s families at home. Plans to reopen were further delayed by an unanticipated problem. For several years Pasitos had transported children to its facility in an old yellow American school bus, but it had broken down and could not be repaired. Two antiquated mini-buses were pressed into service, but these are not considered to be Covid-secure. So, one of Chris’ projects this year has been to buy a bus. In the USA yellow buses are manufactured to a demanding specification required by law. The law also requires that they are retired from service long before the end of their useful life. There is, therefore, a market for used buses in countries like Mexico that cannot afford such exacting standards. Even so, Chris discovered that a used yellow bus can cost a good $150,000. Fortunately, he found a Mexican company that offered to build a new bus customized for Pasitos’ needs. The next problem was to raise the still substantial funds needed to buy the bus. This campaign was successful, and Pasitos proudly took delivery of its new bus in September. Preparations are now underway to welcome the children to the building once again.

While the beaches and other tourist areas were locked down, work continued at Pasitos on a therapy pool generously funded by donors in Calgary, Alberta. The Pasitos pool is modelled on a therapy pool in Calgary. However, the designers failed to understand a significant difference between Canada and Mexico. At the Calgary pool each child is assisted by a therapist. Pasitos cannot afford a 1:1 ratio of therapists to children. Therefore, the Mexican pool requires a barrier to prevent unattended children falling into the pool, a requirement not anticipated by the donors. Securing funding for the barrier has been another of Chris’ projects. Government support for people with disabilities is far from adequate. However, the Directorate of Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities of the state of Jalisco called for proposals for grants ranging from 50,000 pesos (c.£1,700) to 250,000 pesos (c.£8,500). Of 46 proposals received, funding was allocated for 16, of which Pasitos de Luz was one. The other charities won grants for adults and children with various needs and medical conditions: the social and labour market inclusion of disabled adults; education; treatment for cleft palate/lip; treatment of cataracts and other visual impairments; teaching sign language; treatment of speech and language disorders. However, even if all the grants had been for the maximum amount, the total funding for a state with a population of 8.3 million, including Mexico’s second city, Guadalajara, with a population of 5.2 million, would have been 4 million pesos. Since 7.5% of the Mexican population is disabled, this equates to inclusion funding per capita in Jalisco of 6.5 pesos (UK£0.22/US$0.33). The proportion of the population that is disabled in the UK is 22% and in the USA is 26%, so I suspect that the figure for Mexico is a gross underestimate and the real need for support much greater.

Life in Mexico, as you will have gathered, can be very tough. However, Mexicans are hard-working, resourceful, courteous, hospitable people, with strong and vibrant cultural and social traditions and family ties that help them cope with the hardships. One tradition that will be affected by the pandemic this year is El Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead). The James Bond film, Spectre,  opens with an entirely fictional Day of the Dead. In other words, this was an “indigenous tradition” made in Hollywood. However, the Bond brand offered an opportunity to attract international tourists to Mexico City, so the parade has now become an annual “tradition”.  Far less glamorous commemorations fill cemeteries in in towns throughout Mexico with families who share a meal by the graves of deceased relatives. This year gatherings in cemeteries are prohibited, so, in Mexico at least, Covid-19 can find you even as you rest in your grave for eternity.

 

 

Sunninghill Scarecrows

There will be no groups of children roaming the streets of Sunninghill this Halloween. Instead, the Parent Teachers Association of our primary school has organized a trail of 47 scarecrows. Nobody seems quite sure why scarecrows were chosen rather than the more traditional British Guy for Guy Fawkes Day on 5 November. Perhaps the PTA wished to avoid any hint of the anti-Catholic sentiment that lies at the historical roots of Guy Fawkes Day.

I have not managed to track down all 47 scarecrows, but here is a good sample.

Our young neighbour Thomas is a Star Wars fan

Another neighbour Finn likes dinosaurs

This is a recyclable, environmentally-conscious scarecrow

This installation is a reference to Julia Donaldson's characters Betty O'Barley and Harry O'Hay

Not really a scarecrow, but inventive

A working scarecrow

The apparently drunken bride and NHS doctor were, in fact, blown askew by the wind

Now, this is a traditional Guy Fawkes, to the detail of the carrot nose

This Rotary Club scarecrow is a reference to the annual New Year's Day wheelbarrow race, now postponed to May 2021

A radically untraditional nautical scarecrow

This presumably is a scared crow

The window display of the party supplies shop

Bury My Heart at Pettistree

 

After seven months, we escaped the strictures of lockdown to visit my family in Suffolk, the county of my birth. I have not lived there for almost 50 years, but have fond memories of its quaint charms and sometimes severe beauty.

 

Saints Peter and Paul, Pettistree.

We rented a cottage in Pettistree, population c.190. Despite its size, the village has a 14th century pub, the Greyhound, reputed to be the oldest in Suffolk, and a 13^th century church.  One of the glories of Suffolk is its many Medieval churches, often known as wool churches since Medieval Suffolk grew rich (or rather its landowners and merchants did) on wool. Pettistree’s church of St Peter and St Paul was locked, but we wandered the churchyard and found a curious inscription on a granite monument, the finial of which has broken off. Among those buried in Pettistree is Charles Peirson, born 20 or so miles to the north in Uggleshall in 1814, “Formerly President in this parish and for many years a citizen of New York”, buried in 1880, and his wife Julia Frances, who died in Houlgate in the Calvados region of France. Also buried here is Anthony Van Bergen, born in Coxsackie, NY, on the Hudson River, in  1827, died in Paris in 1912. The monument records his address in life as 118 Champs Elysées, Paris. Anthony’s wife Julia Augusta, daughter of Charles and Julia Peirson, lies here too since her death in 1897.

 

The Greyhound, Pettistree.

I was curious as to why an American who lived at such a fancy address, and his Suffolk father-in-law who had lived in New York, should be buried in a small Suffolk churchyard. Anthony and Charles it seems were both involved in the first American department store, Arnold Constable & Company, founded in 1825 at 91 Front Street, Manhattan. The Van Bergen’s had been prominent political and business figures in New York for generations stretching back to the Revolutionary War. Anthony became Arnold Constable & Company’s representative in Paris, where he also represented the Equitable Life Assurance Society. He was awarded the Légion d’Honneur. His children married well: one son to a prominent family of Buffalo, NY; another son to a descendant of a Scottish-American banker, Richard Irvin; and his daughter, rather grandly, to Count  Otto von Grote.

 

A thatched cottage painted Suffolk pink, Pettistree. This house is Vicarage Cottage, perhaps the former rectory.

I assume that Anthony had his body transported from Paris to Pettistree so that he could be buried with Julia Augusta, but exactly how the Peirsons came to Pettistree I have not discovered.

 

The Street, Pettistree. The owner of this house is evidently a dahlia specialist.

I remember another Suffolk grave from my childhood which was notable for another reason. It stood atop the fragile cliffs of Dunwich, about 20 miles from Pettistree, looking out over the cold North Sea. My memory is too vague to be certain, but the stone I remember is possibly the one that marked the last resting place of John Brinkley Easey, who died at Dunwich in 1826, aged 23. John’s grave was the last remaining trace of All Saints church, long lost to the sea by the 1960s. Modern Dunwich, no larger in size and population than little Pettistree, is what remains of an important Anglo Saxon town and one of the major ports of Medieval England.

 

St. James's Street, Dunwich. The first building on the left is the Ship pub. Dunwich museum is further along the street.

Dunwich makes its first appearance in history about 630 AD when King Sigebehrt installed Bishop Felix, a Burgundian cleric, there as the first bishop of East Anglia. Dunwich remained a bishop’s seat until 870. According to the Domesday Book (1086), around 1060 Dunwich was a manor of Edric de Laxfield, with a population of 120 burgess families (so, 500-600 people or more). The Domesday Book presages the causes of Dunwich’s eventual doom, since it records that the town had lost about half its cultivable land to coastal erosion in about 1070. The book also records a substantial increase in Dunwich’s population, to 306 burgess families. About 1200 the population has been estimated at 3,000.

 

Dunwich beach and cliffs, looking north to Dunwich, Walberswick and Southwold. The Medieval coastline was some distance out to sea.

History records a great storm on this coast in 1091, though how it affected Dunwich we do not know, but the need to protect the town from storms was much discussed in the 12^th century. Remnants of a ditch and rampart dated to the 12^th and 13^th century can still be seen. Meanwhile, another threat appeared in 1173. While Henry II was absent in Anjou, his wife Eleanor, supported by King Louis of France, rebelled to place her son Henry on the throne in his father’s stead. A rebel force landed on the banks of the river Orwell to the south and marched across country to Dunwich, led by Robert Earl of Leicester. According to a poem written by the Bishop of Winchester:

  

Thus did the people of Dunwich defend themselves,

             As these verses tell which are written here.

And so stout-hearted were both great and small

             That Earl Robert withdrew completely discomfited

 

Dunwich beach and cliffs. We met two National Trust volunteers who had been photographing the cliffs to monitor continuing erosion.

Dunwich was on its way to becoming a major player in Medieval England, home to one of the most important ports, many ships and wealthy merchants. Their business was wool, wine, herrings, shipped to France, from where Dunwich ships returned laden with a variety of goods. They also indulged in a number of not very legal enterprises and fought hard with their neighbours, Blythburgh, Walberswick and Southwold to the north, to control trade. The shipping business was subject to the whims of international politics. In 1624 23 Dunwich ships were seized and held for a year in Bordeaux. Dunwich’s ship-owners and merchants were regularly called upon by the King for ships to pursue his war games. In 1229 he demanded 40 ships (he received only 30, but that was one eighth of the royal fleet) to wage war at Poitou.

 

Putative plan of Dunwich c.1280, from Rowland Parker, Men of Dunwich, Collins, 1978.

The other business of the Middle Ages was religion, and Dunwich had plenty of it. In 1200 the following churches were recorded:

            St Leonard's, built c. 1086

            St Martin’s, built probably after 1086

            St Nicholas’s, swallowed by the sea c.1355

            St John’s, demolished in 1540 before the sea could do the demolition work

            St Peter’s, close to the harbour, stripped of lead, timber and bells in 1702

            All Saints, which may or may not have yet existed in 1200

            There were also three chapels

 

This part of Suffolk was notable for some major friaries established by the religious orders. There was a small Benedictine monastery in 1200. By the mid-13^th century the Black Friars and Grey Friars had arrived. There were other religious buildings as well, such as the Leper Hospital of St James, whose remains still stand. By the 13^th century there was also a more general purpose hospital, Maison Dieu.

 

But Dunwich had a problem as the storm of 1070 presaged. The coast here was very prone to erosion  and consequent large-scale changes in the coastline. Some changes happened over quite a long time. For example, a shingle spit protected Dunwich harbour (but not the town) from the worst of the storms. This spit had moved southwards from Walberswick to Dunwich over a long period as tides and storms shifted huge quantities of stones. As well as protecting Dunwich’s harbour, it had also closed direct access to the sea from the River Blyth. Therefore, ships could reach rival ports to the north (Blythburgh, Walberswick and Southwold) only by passing through Dunwich’s waters and along the channel created by the spit. Dunwich thus controlled access to the ports of its principal rivals.

 

Disaster finally struck the night after New Year’s day 1286. There was an unusually high tide, although Dunwich was accustomed to flooding. But that night, and the next day and night, a ferocious wind from the east drove the high tides straight at Dunwich, overwhelmed the ramparts and destroyed large parts of the town. Greyfriars priory was completely destroyed. Two parishes disappeared entirely under the sea, two more were reduced  in size. Churches collapsed, homes and business premises were swept away. To cap it all, the storm opened direct access for Blythburgh, Walberswick and Southwold to the North Sea. This was not yet the end of Dunwich port, but it never recovered and over the centuries the sea took more land and buildings away.

 

Grey Friars, Dunwich, general view with gateway in the distance. This was the second site of the friary, occupied until the dissolution of the monasteries.

Plan of Grey Friars Friary. The church bottom right is All Saints, lost to the sea in 1920.

Perhaps John Easey went to his early grave assuming that his headstone would be a lasting memorial to remind later generations that this man of Dunwich once lived and worked there among others buried in the churchyard. In the unlikely event that it still stands (I could not find it when we walked the cliff) John’s grave is one of the few remaining traces of a Dunwich lost to the sea.

 

St Mary, Dennington. The church houses one of the finest alabaster monuments in England. Here lies William Bardolph (d.1441) and his wife. William was chamberlain to Henry VI. He fought at Agincourt.

About 14 miles west of Dunwich is the village of Dennington, which has one of the finest of Suffolk churches, St Mary, a 14^th century flint church. In 2006 we roamed the churchyard with my mother in search of a little Jacobs family history. A shout from one of our sons led us to the gravestones of Laurence Jacobs, his wife Mary and son James. Like many of my ancestors, Laurence and Mary were poor rural folk, which is about all we know of them. Their son Laurence, however, earned his living as a poulterer, and his son Charles, a blacksmith and Primitive Methodist preacher is my great grandfather. But that’s a story for another time.

The graves (left to right) of Mary, Laurence and James Jacobs, Dennington churchyard.

 

On the Trail of the Station Master of Wadi es Sarar

 

Since I wrote on 11 August about my father’s friendship with a station master in Palestine during World War II, I have been fortunate to meet digitally Dr Walter Rothschild. Walter, in addition to being a rabbi in Berlin, is the author of a PhD dissertation about the Palestinian Railways 1945-1948, and editor of Harakevet, a magazine about the history of Israel railways. Walter, in turn, put me in touch with Chen Melling, director of the Israel Railway Museum at Haifa, and the museum’s archivist Moshe Haviv. Chen deciphered a mysterious Arabic word in the dedication on the back of a photo of Anis Eliyas Abou Zayd and his family as “al-Estaff”, a reference to Doug’s rank: Staff Sergeant.

 

The family of Anis Eliyas Abou Zayd, March 1942

With their help I have managed to piece together a little more about the place where my father worked and his friend Anis Eliyas, the Station Master of Wadi es Sarar, also known as Nahal Soreq in Hebrew, and as Junction Station to the British military during the World War I. I have also stumbled across two more photos of my father, Douglas (“Doug”) Jacobs. This is, therefore, an update about what I have pieced together about a young Suffolk lad born in the village of Grundisburgh in 1912, who, aged 29, was whisked away to a very complicated Palestine and a landscape so very different from the gentle green fields of Suffolk.

 

The church of St Mary, Grundisburgh, 14th-18th centuries. Doug's parents are buried in the graveyard

Doug Jacobs, left, Friede (?) and an unknown soldier in Tel Aviv September 1941

Firstly, a photo taken on 5 September 1941 proves that Doug was in Palestine before that date, after surviving the disastrous rout of the British expeditionary force in France in June 1940. The photo shows Doug and a colleague at a restaurant in Tel Aviv, with a waitress who has served them a drink. On the reverse is this text: “All the very best for the two nice Englishmen from Friede [?], Tel Aviv Sept. 5^th 1941.” If the waitress in the photo is indeed named Friede (this is Walter’s suggestion; the signature is not easy to decipher), short for Elfriede, she may have been from Austria or Germany and was fortunate to have reached Palestine before the war. The dedication infers that my father and his colleague were regular customers, about to leave Tel Aviv. Perhaps they had been on leave and were about to return to Wadi es Sarar.

 

Text on the reverse of the photo

Another photo on the front of a postcard, taken by Approved Military Photographer No.46, shows Doug in uniform with the three stripes of a Warrant Officer.

 

Official photo of Doug Jacobs 1941-1945

Doug’s station master friend is recorded in a list of junior staff of the Palestine Railway in 1930 as A. A. Zeid. He was born in 1898, so his childhood and early teenage years were spent under Ottoman rule. After World War I, British rule replaced the Ottomans. Anis joined the railway in 1924. In 1930 he was a Grade III employee with an annual salary of Palestine £132. He was ranked 51 in seniority of 71 Station Masters in his grade. The names of Anis’ colleagues in the 1930 list remind us that Palestine was a multi-ethnic, multi-faith territory, a reflection of a long history of trade, migration and wars waged by foreign powers. Among his colleagues were M. Cohen, a Ticket Examiner, N. Gurovitch (A Yiddish form of a Russian name), a Traffic Inspector, N. Dedeyan (Armenian), a clerk, E. Katz, M. M. Hussein, S. Filbert, N. Barkovitch (Slavonic), S. Kerry, F. Iskander (Iranian), all Station Masters.

 

Wadi es Sarar station, with possibly Anis Eliyas Abou Zayd centre

Chen and Moshe sent me a photo of five men and two women outside Wadi es Sarar. The portly man in the centre is the station master, quite possibly Anis Eliyas himself, although the photo is not clear enough to compare with our 1942 photo. Perhaps the woman to his left (our right) is ‘Wife’ of the family portrait.

 

With the help of Walter’s dissertation, I have been able to piece together a picture of the railway that brought my father and his friend Anis together. Palestine was a small country with a remarkably complex railway system, designed and constructed by, and in the interests of, a medley of foreign powers and organizations, with scant regard for the needs of the people of Palestine. The first line, Jaffa-Jerusalem, on which Wadi es Sarar was a stop, was financed by a French Catholic organization to take pilgrims to Jerusalem. It was cheaply built and narrow gauge, so it had to be rebuilt later to meet the military needs of the Ottomans. Other lines were constructed by French and Belgian interests or the Ottoman military. During WWI the Ottomans added a spur line from Wadi es Sarar to connect with a line that ran from Jerusalem to Beersheba and Sinai. The Ottomans also began a line west from Wadi es Sarar to take pilgrims to Mecca. The line also served Ottoman administrative and military needs. It reached Jordan, but there construction stopped. WWI bought more lines. The British built a line from Egypt into Sinai. The Ottomans built another from Tulkarm via Lydda (modern Lod) to Wadi es Surar. 

 

Wadi es Surar had thus become an important junction for strategic military purposes. In November 1917 the British attacked the Turks at Wadi es Sarar and seized control of the station and its junction. With the end of the war, the Palestine Railway came under British control. Most of the senior management, and some more junior posts, were British men employed by the Crown Agents in London. By the time Anis met Doug in 1941 the British had been managing the railway for 23 years. Our Station Master would have been long-accustomed to getting along with British superiors and colleagues. 

 

In WWII the main British base in the Middle East was in Egypt, but Palestine was a significant secondary base for operations in Syria, Iraq and Persia. Wadi es Sarar was one of five depots for ammunition and ordnance in Palestine. There was also an ammunition factory there. Between 1940/41 and 1941/42 military goods traffic in Palestine more than doubled. Between 1941/42 and 1943/44 it nearly doubled again. Doug and Anis must have been busy.

The rail system struggled to cope with the volume of traffic, so road transport was also essential. My sister recalls our father telling her that while he was in Palestine a new, inexperienced, officer was appointed. The officer was not happy with the way Doug organized the ammunition trucks, ensuring a substantial distance between each truck. He ordered his Warrant Officer to use a closer formation. Unfortunately, something set off an explosion in one truck, which in turn caused explosions in several others. 

 

Doug was suited by temperament to organizing people. His work was officially recognized twice by being “mentioned in despatches” and awarded the oak leaf decoration as a result, the first time in December 1941, the second in April 1942. On the second occasion a letter from the Director of Ordnance Services, GHQ, Middle East Forces, congratulated him “most heartily on being mentioned in General Wavell’s Despatches in recognition of the service you have rendered in the Middle East.”

I do not yet know exactly when Doug arrived in Palestine, nor when he left. We know that he was evacuated from St. Nazaire in June 1940 and remained in Britain for training, on the estate of the Marquess of Aylesbury in Wiltshire, for operations in the Middle East.  The Wadi es Sarar depot was completed by the Royal Engineers on 10 March 1941. An invasion of Syria was launched from Palestine in July 1941, and of Persia in August. Assuming that training lasted a few months, and allowing for transport to the Middle East, it seems likely that he arrived in early 1941 or Spring  that year. As for when he left, he was awarded the Africa Star, which recognized service in North Africa from 10 June 1940 to 12 May 1943. We know that he landed in France shortly after D Day in June 1944, so he probably left Palestine in the summer of 1943.

 

Doug returned home for good from Belgium in November 1945 to his young wife Alice and a baby son, Antony, born while he was in France and Belgium. He was a regular visitor to his mother in Grundisburgh where his name and those of his brother George and Leslie are recorded in the church.

The Roll of Honour in Grundisburgh church. George is G. E. Jacobs. Leslie is L. T. Jacobs (Royal Air Force). Doug's regiment is incorrectly listed as RA rather than RAOC

St Mary's Grundisburgh, interior

 

Angels on the roof timbers of St Mary, Grundisburgh, typical of Medieval Suffolk churches. These angels must have seemed a world away from Wadi es Sarar

During his time at Wadi es Sarar, Palestine was already a contested space. Doug was clearly aware of increasing tensions between different groups. He was once asked by representatives of one organization to sack his Arab workers. He refused. As an employer of local workers he was aware of the tensions that before the end of the decade would result in one of the most tragic and intransigent conflicts of the century.

 

What happened to his friend Anis and his family after Doug’s departure, or to his friend Friede, we do not know. However, the Palestine Railway ceased to exist at the end of the Palestine war of 1948. Trains were attacked near Wadi es Sarar by armed groups in January and February 1942. The 1948 left the station building in ruins. Its remains still stand, but Wadi es Sarar is now simply a passing point on the line.  Perhaps Anis survived these turbulent times. He may have remained in the new Jewish state or he and his family may have joined the great masses of Palestinians who fled into exile. In either case, as far as I know, my father never saw or heard from his friends again. 

 

A map of the Hulda area in 1942. The Jaffa-Jerusalem line runs down the centre of the map. Wadi es Sarar is to the south, not visible in this map (see map below)

I think we can suppose that 1945-1948 was a perilous time for Anis and his family. The photo of Wadi es Sarar station is in the archives of Kibbutz Hulda. Hulda takes its name from a Palestinian village named Khulda which existed nearby until the 1948 war. The land for the settlement was bought in 1905. The first settlers moved there in 1909. The farm was attacked and evacuated on orders from British forces in 1929, but resettled in 1931. It suffered further attacks 1936-1939. During the 1948 fighting Hulda was a base for  the Jewish military. Ani’s station was therefore in a hotly contested location. Google maps tells me that Wadi es Sara station is a 7.4km. walk from contemporary Hulda, so when intercommunal strife broke out the station will not have been far from any fighting.

 

Map of the Hulda area 1945. Wadi es Sarar is marked bottom right as Sara. Google maps suggests that the station was located slightly south of the point where the rail line crosses the main road to Masmiya and Deir Muheisin. According to this map there was no town or village associated with the station.

 

Civil War Trivia

 

I am reading Herman Hattaway’s rather dull Shades of Blue and Gray. However, today an intriguing fact caught my eye which, I assume, explains the derivation of a term used in American English, but not by we Brits.

 

Fighting Joe Hooker

On 25 January 1863 Abraham Lincoln appointed Major General Joseph (“Fighting Joe”) Hooker (1814-1879) to command the Army of the Potomac. One of Hooker’s critics accused him of turning army headquarters into “a combination of barroom and brothel”. It seems that Joe liked his booze, but was not in act one for the brothel. Rather, he sought to reduce venereal infections among the Union troops by  confining prostitution in the Nation’s Capital to an area bounded by Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenues and 12^th and 15^th streets. Thus, the red light district was the area that now includes the White House Visitor Center, the US Department of Commerce, Federal Triangle subway station, the office of the Mayor of Washington D. C., and the US Environmental Protection Agency. The Boy Scout Memorial fortunately stands just outside the former red light district.

 

I never enquired why Americans refer to prostitutes as “hookers”. I assume that the term derives from Fighting Joe’s last name, a rather unfortunate legacy.