The Cardinal, the Russian Prince, the Cartoonist, and the Football Managers

 

A visitor who strolls around the centre of Ipswich, and takes a brief diversion to the football stadium, comes across statues that commemorate five notable men (sorry no women) in the history of my home town. To a teenage boy Ipswich in the 1960s and 1970s seemed a dull, un-cosmopolitan place. When my university studies took me to exciting places such as Peru and Mexico, this young man dreamed of the world beyond Ipswich. I used to joke to people who asked me where I came from that Ipswich had only two important people in its history: Cardinal Wolsey and Alf Ramsey, a football manager. Looking back, clearly, I was wrong.

 

Wolsey is indeed commemorated with a statue that depicts him in his cardinal’s robes, seated in a grand chair, from beneath which peeks a cat. The statue is located at the junction of Silent Street and St Peter’s Street, close to Wolsey’s presumed birthplace. Around the base of the statue runs the following inscription: “Cardinal, archbishop, Lord Chancellor and teacher who believed that pleasure should mingle with study so that the child may think learning an amusement rather than a toil.” My first response to this statement was that it should be read to the ambitious politicians turned Secretaries of State for Education who have turned our national education system into an arena of cramming knowledge deemed useful (i.e. of direct economic value) rather than helping students to develop an enquiring, intelligent and discriminating mind. The emphasis on education is, presumably, a reference to Wolsey’s never-to-be-realized plan to endow a school (The King’s School) in Ipswich from which students could progress to university studies. All that remains is Wolsey’s Gate close to the waterfront: a rather sad remnant of Tudor brick, a wooden gate, and a coat of arms in stone much eroded by the emissions of traffic that passes within a few feet. For some reason, Ipswich fails to commemorate another great Medieval figure, Geoffrey Chaucer, who was born in London, but whose parents owned a wine store in Tavern Street (the booze center of the Medieval town). Several generations of Chaucers were vintners and merchants in Ipswich.

The statue of Cardinal Wolsey.

 

Wolsey's Gate.

 

The next monument is in Cromwell Square (Thomas Cromwell assisted Wolsey in the dissolution of monasteries to raise fund for his Ipswich school and another in Oxford). The sculpture commemorates an exiled Russian, Prince Alexander Obolensky, who played rugby for Oxford University, Leicester and England. The prince died when his Hurricane fighter plane crashed on Martlesham Heath near Ipswich during a training flight. In short, the prince's connection to Ipswich is sketchy at best. Nevertheless, the memorial was unveiled in 2009 by Obolensky’s niece, Princess Alexandra Obolensky. Unfortunately, one of the main sponsors of the work was Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch then owner of Chelsea football club, now the subject of sanctions as a facilitator of President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The memorial to Prince Obolensky.

 

 

Close to the town hall stands an altogether different monument, which features some of the famous characters created by the cartoonist Carl Giles: Grandma, twins Lawrence and Ralph and Rush the dog. Grandma looks up to the studio window of a nearby building where Giles worked. Giles lived about four miles from his memorial in Tuddenham, where he owned a farm and converted a barn into a light-filled studio (now a bed and breakfast), and frequented the Fountain pub.

 

The Giles memorial (photo by John Peacock).

Alf Ramsey's statue at Portman Road football ground

The statues of two mangers of Ipswich Town Football Club stand, naturally enough by the club’s stadium. Alf Ramsey was manager from 1955-1963, and took the team into the First Division, of which they became champions in their first season. He was also the manager of the England team that won the World Cup in London in 1966. The other manager, Bobby Robson (1969-1982), whose team won the FA Cup and the UEFA Cup, and was for several years one of the best in England. I once met Robson when he was signing copies of a memoir (not the best book of its sort) in the boardroom of Macmillan Publishers. After I had introduced myself as an Ipswich boy from the glory days, he spoke with boyish enthusiasm about those times and gave me a signed copy of the book.

 

The Bobby Robson statue

Ipswich’s glory days in terms of its economy lay further in the past than its sporting glories. It claims to be the oldest continuously occupied English town (since about 600AD), and received its borough charter from King John in 1200. Medieval Ipswich was one of the most important ports in England, a rival even to London. The town had two strategic advantages. It lay on a navigable river, the Orwell, which opens into a wide estuary where its waters join the Stour and the North Sea, providing access to the markets of the Low Countries and northern Germany. That trade was fuelled by woollen cloth, since Suffolk was an important sheep-rearing region. Ipswich merchants even sought wealth in the far-off Americas, including Mexico (this blog is after called Mexico and Other Matters). From 1586-1588 the merchant Thomas Eldred, and another Ipswich man Thomas Fuller (an apt name for a native of a town famous for its cloth), was on board the small fleet of Thomas Cavendish, of Trimley St Martin, some 12 miles from Ipswich, which circumnavigated the globe, halting off Baja California to raid the Spanish galleon the Santa Ana, which was en route from Manila to Acapulco.

 

A 19th-century drawing of Thomas Eldred's house in Fore Street. A pub once elsewhere in Ipswich bore Eldred's name, until the name was changed in 2012.

The layout of the town centre of contemporary Ipswich, generally reflects the Medieval town plan. It takes no more than 15-20 minutes to walk across the former Medieval centre from north to south or east to west, yet such was the borough’s wealth that in this narrow space there were 15 churches (12 survive, but many now deconsecrated and used for something other than worship), a chapel and four priories (Augustinian, Franciscan, Carmelite and Dominican). There were also four leper hospitals: Medieval England’s public health was generally poor, and ports helped to transmit disease.

 

John Speed's map of Ipswich, 1610

Nothing remains of the priories or the hospitals, but a walking tour of the remaining churches gives an impression of what power the church must once have exercised. For example, a stroll up St Stephen’s Lane takes you past St Stephen’s church (previously a tourist information centre, now closed). One hundred metres away stands St Lawrence on Dial Lane, and about the same distance on Tower Street is St Mary-le-Tower, Ipswich’s civic church. About 500 metres from St Lawrence is St Mary at the Elms, a not particularly notable little church, were it not for its role as the shrine of Our Lady of Grace, once visited by Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon, Sir Thomas More and. of course, Wolsey. On 20 September 1538 the shrine was destroyed and the statue of Our Lady taken to Chelsea to be burned. However, the good people of Nettuno, south of Rome, add an unexpected twist to the story. Their church displays an ancient wooden statue known locally as Our Lady of the Graces, or less formally as The English Lady. It seems that Our Lady escaped the flames of Chelsea and ended up in Italy, or at least that’s how they see it in Nettuno. A replacement statue, set in a modest niche in the wall, is now venerated in the Ipswich church.

 

The modest shrine of Our Lady of Grace at St Mary at the Elms

.

St Margaret's, Ipswich (© Simon Knott, http://www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/ipsmarg.html).

The most glorious of Ipswich’s ancient churches is St Margaret's, built in the late 14^th and early 15^thcenturies, and dedicated to St Margaret of Antioch. While she was being tortured on the orders of a Roman governor, whom she refused to marry because she had dedicated her virginity to God, Margaret survived numerous dangerous episodes such as being swallowed by a dragon (Satan in disguise), and only gave up her mortal coil when she was beheaded. Ipswich’s Medieval churches underwent changes over the years, especially in the Victorian era when the town was a flourishing manufacturing centre, and St Margaret’s is no exception. The exterior was restored and the height of the tower increased. However, the Victorians fortunately left alone the church’s great glory, its double hammerbeam wooden roof, installed in the 1480s and 1490s. In 1644, a visiting iconoclast had the saints set in niches below the roof decapitated, but otherwise did no damage. The roof was sumptuously painted in the 1690s as a tribute to William and Mary’s triumph in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Ipswich was resolutely Protestant , non-conformist of various flavours, and even Puritan (a local historian opines that we Ipswichians still are a puritanical lot).

 

The double hammer-beam roof of St Margaret's.

Works of two of Ipswich’s adopted sons are displayed in Christchurch Mansion a minute or two’s walk from St Margaret's. Thomas Gainsborough (baptised 1727-1788), born in Sudbury, 10 miles west of Ipswich, moved to the town in 1752 where he painted portraits of many of the worthies of the town, until he moved to Bath in 1759. John Constable (1776-1837) also painted portraits, but he excelled as a painter of the Suffolk landscape. Some fine examples are in the mansion, which houses the largest collection of his work outside London.

 

Christchurch Mansion (built by the wealthy merchant Edmund Withypoll, 1548-1550, given to Ipswich corporation by Felix Cobbold in 1894). Withypoll is buried in the churchyard of Saint Margaret's.

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), Mrs Mary Cobbold and Miss Cobbold with a lamb, c.1752.

Cover of the commemorative book published by Cobbold to mark two centuries of brewing at Cliff Quay, Ipswich.

The back cover of the commemorative book featured Cardinal Wolsey and his gate.

One of Gainsborough’s patrons was the wealthy Cobbold family, who moved their brewery from Harwich to Ipswich where the water in Holywells Park made better beer, and where the Cobbolds owned a large house. Gainsborough painted Mrs Mary Cobbold and Miss Cobbold with a lamb about 1752. In 1923 Cobbold & Co. marked the bicentenary of the Cliff Brewery with a fete at Hollywell Park and the publication of a book to celebrate the firm’s illustrious history. The book records the importance of the Cobbold family in Ipswich’s civic life. John C Cobbold was member of parliament five times between 1847 and 1865, and John P, Thomas C and Felix T Cobbold all represented Ipswich in Parliament. Five Cobbolds were mayors of the town between 1841 and 1914 and John Chevalier Cobbold was High Steward from 1875-1882. A selection of Cobbold’s ancient and historical Inns includes the Bull Inn, Ipswich, which “dates from the sixteenth century and in this early period was one of the most important maritime Inns of the town”; Ye Olde Neptune Inn was another 16^th-century inn originally the home of a wealthy merchant who had it decorated (probably by Flemish workmen) with rich oak panelling and carving; the Swan Inn pays £2 per annum to St Mary-le-Tower, a perpetual fine for a murder committed there; The Angel in Woodbridge pays 20 shillings a year for the needy poor of Hasketon, an obligation imposed by Alice Osborn in 1678; The King’s Head in Needham Market had a Tudor staircase; The Greyhound in Pettistree (much favoured by the current Jacobs family and reputed to be the oldest pub in Suffolk) had been occupied as tenants by the Smith family since 1821; the Ostrich Inn at Wherstead probably does not record the presence of large birds on the Orwell, but is more likely a corruption of Oyster Reach. When Bobby Robson was manager of the football club a Cobbold was the chairman, and one of the stands at the football stadium is named after the family. Robson said that if the team won Mr Cobbold would share with Bobby a bottle of champagne to celebrate; if the team lost two bottles were consumed.

 

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), Holywells Park, 1748-1750. The waters were used to brew Cobbold's beer.

Tenants and employees of  Cobbold's brewery celebrating the marriage of John Murray Cobbold and Lady Blanche Cavendish, daughter of the 9th Duke of Devonshire, at Holywells in 1919. From the commemorative book of 1923.

The Greyhound in Pettistree, restored 1922, as depicted in the commemorative book of 1923.

While wool made Medieval Ipswich’s fortune, iron was the material that dominated the 19^th century, and the men (no women once again) behind it were Quakers. The story begins in Ipswich’s rival town, Norfolk in 1785, when Robert Ransome, son of a Quaker schoolmaster, took out a patent for a new cast-iron plough share. Ipswich had a big advantage over Norwich. It was an important port, so in 1789 Ransome moved to Ipswich and set up a foundry opposite St Mary-at-the-Key church, close to the harbour. He soon moved to a former maltings in a street now aptly known as Old Foundry Road. By 1807 Ransome had installed a steam engine to work the machinery. Innovation did not stop with plough shares and steam power. In the early 19^th century, the firm expanded into bridgebuilding and millwrighting. While this was going on, in 1802 a rival, Jacob Garrett, who already had a foundry in Leiston (where my great uncle George Lucas went to work in 1901), set up shop in Ipswich. Ransome’s responded by setting up a foundry in Leiston. Competition did not cramp Ransome’s style. In 1832 (two years after Robert’s death) the firm bought a licence to manufacture Budding’s Patent Grass Cutting Machine, in other words a lawnmower – Ransomes were still important lawn mower manufacturers when I was growing up in Ipswich in the 1960s and 1970s (my uncle Dennis Hussey was a director of the firm, then named Ransome, Sims and Jeffries).

By 1841 the firm was making steam engines to power farm machinery. Expansion was made possible by financing from Ipswich’s Quaker bankers, and the arrival of fresh (Quaker) engineering talent. Ipswich capitalists (including John Chevalier Cobbold of the brewing dynasty), had meanwhile been investing in railways, so naturally Ransomes turned to making railway lines, and signalling and switching gear. The firm (by then known as Ransomes and Rapier) made the large iron buffers at Waterloo station, as well as at several other London rail and underground stations. This was an international business: Ransomes made the first railway engine for the Shanghai and Woosung Railway, and also manufactured the sluice gates for the Aswan dam and other water control schemes. While engineering boomed, other Ipswich industrialists invested in other enterprises. Around 1849 Edward Packard established the first fertiliser factory, close to the all-important docks (as the aptly-named Coprolite Street reminds modern visitors). Packard soon found a rival in Joseph Fison, whose last name survived as a PlC until 1995. The Pretty family (one of whom, Edith Pretty would sponsor the excavations of the Viking ship burial at Sutton Hoo, not far from Ipswich) became one of the largest corset manufacturers in the country, with works at Tower Ramparts, in 1882. The Pretty family were also partners in a department store, Footman, Pretty & Co. And by 1880 George Whight & Co. was producing the New Excelsior sewing machine in the Buttermarket in central Ipswich.

 

Ipswich waterfront, 30 November 2023. The building to the extreme right is the 18th-century Customs House.

The Ipswich manufacturing boom touched my mother’s family (last name Lucas) by offering employment opportunities in new industries. My aunts, Florrie and May Lucas were both employed in an Ipswich clothing factory, perhaps for the Pretty family. The ancient port also provided opportunities. My grandfather Harry Lucas was the captain of the Raybel sailing barge, recently restored and once again carrying cargo under sail. Harry’s son Arthur sailed on the Thalatta for R & W Paul Ltd of Ipswich, carrying malt and barley. The Thalatta too has been restored and is now an educational vessel.

 

The Raybel unloading barley at Woodbridge in the 1920s.

So, the monuments chosen by Ipswich to commemorate famous figures from its past do not give a very representative account of the town's history. But the young student, dazzled by the exotic wonders of the Andes and the Sierra Madre, was equally wrong about his home town, as I realised when I researched a visit with my friend John Peacock in late November 2023. Our goal was to visit some Medieval churches and other surviving ancient buildings, and to see the Gainsboroughs and Constables. Also, to take in a football match: Ipswich 3-Millwall 1, I am glad to say. Unfortunately, the only bar we could find open afterwards could not serve us a bottle of champagne, so we could not celebrate in Cobbold style.

Ipswich (right) vs. Millwall, Portman Road, Ipswich, 29 November 2023.

 A special thank you: my Indianapolis friend Jack Cooney found the book that commemorates 200 years of Cobbold brewing in a used bookstore in Alamogordo, New Mexico (population 31,384 in 2020). Quite how the history of Ipswich brewing travelled all the way to the Chiuhuan we will never know, but it conjures up the Suffolk of my grandparents.

The Roses of Alahuiztlán

 

In December 1603 the Marquis of Montesclaros, viceroy of New Spain agreed to a request from the Indigenous people of Alahuiztlán (now Alahuixtlán in the west of the modern state of Guerrero). The Marquis had ordered that the entire population be moved from their existing homes to a location more convenient for officials to collect taxes and for priests to preach. Moreover, the houses that the people of Alahuiztlán had built for themselves were to be demolished to ensure that nobody lingered behind. Such forced locations were common in late 16^th-century and early 17^th-century Mexico. The native population, devastated by epidemics, had been reduced to such a level that the administrative convenience of Spanish officialdom trumped the attachment to ancestral villages.

 

The people of Alahuiztlán promptly petitioned the viceroy. In the midst of epidemics and death they had carefully tended a rose bush whose flowers were used to decorate their church. If the bush was not cared for it would die. Montesclaros ruled that one house should be spared from demolition so that two or three villagers could remain behind to tend to the rose.

 

The church of Alahuixtlán

In about 1521 three elders of the village of Noxtepec in northern Guerrero, travelled to Tenochtitlan, the defeated capital of the Aztec empire, to introduce themselves to their new overlord. The village leaders met Hernán Cortés himself, who told them that one of his lieutenants, Juan de Cabra would be their new lord. The Spaniards offered the elders Spanish food, but so disgusting was the European cooking that they could not eat it. They took it home and offered it to the men of Noxtepec, but none of them fancied it either. They also returned home with an instruction from Cabra to build a church to replace their prehispanic temple. The elders asked for time to do so and eventually finished the work in 1533. The church of St James the Apostle of Noxtepec stands there to this day.

 

The 16th-century church of Noxtepec

 

These two anecdotes are just two of many tales from the history of Guerrero recounted in my forthcoming book. The following is the University of New Mexico Press catalogue entry:

 

Indigenous Culture and Change in Guerrero,

Mexico, 7000 BCE to 1600 CE

Ian Jacobs

Until recently, Guerrero’s past has suffered from relative neglect by archaeologists and

historians. While a number of excellent studies have expanded our knowledge of certain

aspects of the region’s history or of particular areas or topics, the absence of a thorough

scholarly overview has left Guerrero’s significant contributions to the history of Mesoamericaand colonial Mexico greatly underestimated.

 

With Indigenous Culture and Change in Guerrero, Mexico, 7000 BCE to 1600 CE Ian Jacobs

at last puts Guerrero’s history firmly on the map of Mexican archaeology and history. The

book brings together a vast amount of cross-disciplinary information to understand the

deep roots of the Indigenous cultures of a complex region of Mexico and the forces that

shaped the foundations of colonial Mexico in the sixteenth century and beyond. This book

is particularly significant for its exploration of archaeological, Indigenous, and historical

sources.

April 1

384 pp.; 6 x 9; 33 halftones,

2 maps, 35 tables

$85.00 cloth

ISBN 978-0-8263-6586-6

$106.00 CAD

$85.00 webPDF

E-ISBN 978-0-8263-6587-3

 

 

And as immodest self-promotion, these comments will be on the back cover:

 

"A remarkable book, combining unusual ambition, meticulous research, and lucid analysis; in its pages, Guerrero morphs from a marginal hinterland of 'wild Mexico' into a dynamic entity, whose territory, peoples, trade, production and culture are vividly recreated."

--Alan Knight, author of Mexico: from the Beginning to the Spanish Conquest

 

“This is an ambitious, superbly researched, and significant reassessment of the history of Guerrero. Based on meticulous research, Ian Jacobs has written a deep history that foregrounds the formation of indigenous cultures and economies in Mesoamerican Guerrero over millennia, and their transformation during the first century after the Spanish invasion. This is an absorbing narrative that exposes searing destruction and displacement of indigenous peoples of the region under Spanish colonial rule, but also adaptation and resilience. It is a remarkable work and a major contribution to the field.”--Susan Deans-Smith, author of Bureaucrats, Planters, and Workers - the Making of the Tobacco Monopoly in Bourbon Mexico.

Acapulco and Gaza

 

When my son Chris drives to Puerto Vallarta from San Vicente, Nayarit, where he lives and works, he crosses to the Ameca river that flows down a wide valley to the Bahía de Banderas (Bay of Flags). As you approach the river from the Nayarit side you can’t miss a huge sign “Vidanta World” and the pods of a cable car crossing high over the highway. Vidanta’s corporate website describes its business as “luxury hotels, golf courses, real estate investments, tourism infrastructure, and entertainment experiences.” Look to your right and you see a vast, grey castellated set of buildings that, to my eyes at least, resemble a pastiche of a megalomaniac’s Stalinist monument. On the other side of the highway where the cable car deposits guests, the company has channelled water from the river to create an artificial lake. In short, Vidanta has occupied a vast area of land along the river and on the beach, and has reengineered the ecosystems to provide the experiences it sells to its clients. So huge is Vidanta world that when Chris went there to collect two visitors to his charity, Pasitos de Luz, he drove for two kilometres on Vidanta property.

 

Developments like Vidanta World that are proliferating around the bay monopolize the land, once the home of crocodiles, crabs, iguanas, tlacuaches (a large rodent), many kinds of birds, and other animals, and where turtles laid their eggs. Fortunately, “ACs” (Asociaciones Cívicas – registered charities) do their best to protect the turtles and other species, and to preserve access to the beach for local residents, from the corporate landgrabbers.

 

Chris was a speaker recently at the finishing line of a mega-marathon from Mascota, set in a valley inland high above the bay, to Puerto Vallarta. The runners cover various distances, starting at 20km to a maximum of 100km. Various charities had been given display space near the finish and were granted speaking slots to address the audience. However, the previous day the charities had been allocated the hottest time of the day and spoke to a crowd of only three hardy people. The following day, the time slot was changed at short notice to the evening. Since the charity workers had been waiting since early morning, only Chris stayed on to speak.

 

Earlier in the day, Chris had watched as important figures from the city administration were presented to the crowd. One plump young man was talking on his mobile as he was announced and during his time on the stage busily sent messages and paid no attention to the event in which he was participating. When the Spanish interviewer asked Chris why ACs matter, the image of this man, quite possibly the nephew or some other relative of a senior elected official, came to his mind. He felt moved to say that the ecology of the bay and its fauna could not be entrusted to the likes of Vidanta nor to local officials. Those who were making a real difference to local residents were the ACs that protect turtles, or charities like Pasitos that provides free nutrition, therapy and education to disabled children.

 

Chris told us this story during our weekly Zoom call in response to our asking how people in his part of Mexico had reacted to the war in Gaza. He responded that there was much more concern about the appalling devastation wrought by Hurricane Otis in Acapulco, a much larger city than Puerto Vallarta. Judging by the photos I have seen, the damage caused overnight by winds and rain resembles uncannily the devastation in Gaza that we witness daily on our TV screens. In Acapulco too, people whose homes were destroyed are without water, food and electricity. The low-income working-class residents have lost their homes, their jobs and their incomes and are completely without resources to survive. As in Gaza, desperate people have looted sources of vital supplies.

 

The government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) promptly evacuated foreign tourists on free buses to Mexico City. While the wealthier Mexicans who lived in Acapulco could afford to pay for private transport inland, the government’s offer to the poor is a free bus ride to Chilpancingo, the state capital. Now, the population of Acapulco exceeds 900,000, while 283,000 people live in Chilpancingo. The capital could not possibly accommodate large numbers of displaced people, who in any case lack the money to sustain away from their destroyed homes.

 

AMLO has declared that the armed forces will deliver all humanitarian aid so that ACs and local government “wouldn’t try to profit from people’s necessity.” This choice reflects AMLO’s preference for involving the army (which he holds to be incorruptible against evidence to the contrary) in projects such as delivering medicines, managing Mexico City’s two airports, building a new railway and numerous other enterprises. An initial delivery of 20,000 food rations and 200,000 litres of water for a population the size of Acapulco’s seems a rather meagre first response. Furthermore, one suspects that local charities and government officials would understand where the needs are and how best to reach communities in complicated terrain. This was certainly the case of Pasitos de Luz during the pandemic: Chris and his colleagues delivered food parcels to the families of the children they care for when the charity had to shut its operations. One hopes that local charities have ignored AMLO’s discouragement and are doing what they can to help fellow citizens.

 

Chris told us that in his area local people have donated supplies to be sent to the people of Acapulco. One friend who comes from a coastal community near Acapulco loaded her car with donations and drove nearly 1,000km. to deliver them to those in need. She reported much damage and many streets in the city still blocked and impassable. This brought home to me that, awful as the deaths (at least 100 people) and the damage to people’s homes and livelihoods are in Acapulco, they pale in comparison to Gaza. The night of the hurricane must have been terrifying, but it was one night not a month or more of continuous bombardment, and the scale of killing vastly greater. And no kind souls can load their car to take supplies and comfort to homeless terrified and grieving people.

 

Note: I was moved to write this simply because the photographs of buildings damaged by the terrifying power of nature somehow parallels the still more awful power of human-made tragedies. A few weeks before Hurricane Otis we had experienced Hurricane Lidia which landed just 20km south of Puerto Vallarta. Even a less powerful hurricane brought huge rocks, tress and land crashing down onto the coastal highway, and swollen rivers washed away anything in their path. Our area experienced nothing worse than a few days without electricity or water, but the damage we saw further south showed us something of the power of Lidia. Nothing I have written here is intended to ignore nor minimize the suffering of innocents murdered in Israel or those held hostage by Hamas. I am disheartened by the one side or the other rhetoric. We should perhaps remember that those killed, those held hostage, and indeed the rescuer of some young Israeli Jews from the music festival, include Bedouin Muslims who have long suffered unjust treatment under Israeli rule. We have a collective responsibility for the deaths, oppression and injustice in Israel and Palestine. We have been content for our political leaders to ignore the moral imperative to work honestly and unceasingly for a settlement that enables the Palestinian people to live free of occupation and oppression that creates a rergion in which all, Muslim, Christian, secular, Jew can coexist in at least a tolerable degree of security and justice. Whatever the most recent wrongs there is no answer but freedom and justice.

Testing times in Mexico

 

Unfortunately, shortly after we arrived in Bucerías, Nayarit, my wife Jan became ill with symptoms that seemed to be Covid. In urban Mexico you are never far from a pharmacy, and on Lázaro Cárdenas street in Bucerías there are six or seven within a 15-minute walk. The first had no pruebas Covid, but the chemist’s next to the fancy liquor store, did. The charming young woman in the standard white pharmacy uniform told me she had two types: one used a drop of blood from a finger, the other a swab inserted into one’s nostrils. The tests that required blood did not include anything to prick the finger, so I opted for the more familiar up-the-nostrils model and asked for two in case of mishaps. She fetched a box, made sure it contained at least two of everything, and carefully counted out two of all the components into a black plastic bag. The instructions were not included, so I asked her to explain to me how to conduct the test. Then she told me the price: rather more than 1,000 pesos (a little over £50 or US$70). The daily minimum wage in Mexico is 207 pesos, a few pennies over £10, so for a working-class Mexican this price is a staggering amount. I asked the young woman how on earth most Mexicans could afford tests at such prices, at which point she suggested that she could call the main branch to authorize a bulk discount. I left the shop £45 poorer and Jan tested positive. A family living on a typical Mexican income would not have had the luxury of testing to confirm whether or not they were infected. Life in Mexico can be very hard but most Mexicans meet life’s difficulties with quiet determination.

 

This rather trivial insight into the challenges of life in Mexico was emphasized by our last social engagement in Puerto Vallarta, a dinner with the family of one of Chris’ colleagues, Eliseo Molina, a physiotherapist at Pasitos de Luz. Eliseo was born without eyes in a rural community in Chiapas in southern Mexico. His mother considered a blind child a source of shame, so she forbade her son to leave the house so that neighbours could not see him. However, Eliseo was determined not to be limited by his lack of sight and, in his words, he managed to escape. State schools did not admit blind children, so Eliseo received no education until he was an adult, when he moved to Mexico to attend the Escuela Nacional para Ciegos (National School for the Blind), a residential school in the historic centre of Mexico City. The school was founded in 1870 by a former governor of the Distrito Federal, as Mexico City was formally known, Ignacio Trigueros Olea, who taught himself braille to become its first teacher in Mexico. The school now has 34 classrooms, sports facilities, and a computer room. Students are taught to use the white stick, to cook, are given a primary and secondary education, and the beginnings of a professional qualification.

 

Eliseo explained that one of his first classes taught students how to navigate the Mexico City metro and bus routes: a considerable challenge in a huge city. He also learned how to deal with pavements (there were none in his rural birthplace) and other obstacles of city life. And the trained to become a physiotherapist. Most importantly, Eliseo met his wife Lupita there. The couple have three children and live in a small neat house on calle Coliflor (Cauliflower Street) in Colonia Campestre San Nicolás, a suburb of Puerto Vallarta, which lives up to its name (campestre means rural). To reach their home Chris navigated deeply rutted unpaved streets, avoiding fallen tree trunks and other obstacles, as well as a small herd of cows. After introductions and a formal invitation to come into Eliseo and Lupita’s home we bounced along to dinner in Chris’ car and a taxi, joined by Carlitos (their son) and Sofía.

 

Over dinner I learned more about Eliseo and Lupita’s lives. Lupita teaches braille in a local branch of the DIF (Sistema Nacional Para el Desarrollo Integral de la Familia: National System for the Integral Development of the Family) ). Eliseo explained that the DIF provides a range of support services, including food parcels, refuges for abused women and children. Eliseo told me that he is a keen supporter of the current President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), because, when he was governor of Mexico City, he provided free metro and bus transport for blind people, and as President has introduced programmes to help the needy. This is not an opinion shared by many of my more well-to-do friends in Mexico, who are (rightly concerned by AMLO’s involvement of the army in many sectors of the economy, such as managing airports, building new train lines, distribution of medicines, and by his authoritarian instincts. However, Mexicans of more modest means are unsurprisingly less concerned by such matters as they are by the challenges of daily life.

 

Eliseo and Lupita explained that they share the cooking, Lupita sweeps and mops the house (a daily chore in most Mexican households). Eliseo gets to work at Pasitos de Luz by taking a local bus to the charity’s original building, where he meets the bus that transports children and staff to Pasitos. I asked him how he knows when to get off his local bus, since Lupita explained that the bus drivers provide no assistance. Eliseo explained that he counts the topes (speed bumps) and turns. When I asked if he ever gets off too early or too late, he replied that this happens only if he is distracted. Unsurprisingly, Eliseo is assigned the blind children at Pasitos. One little boy, Alexis, has no eyes and is autistic. He has been a particular challenge, especially since he forgot all he had been taught about the use of his white stick during the pandemic. His therapy had to start again from scratch.

 

I also asked Eliseo and Lupita if life is very difficult for a blind couple in Mexico, for example when dealing with officialdom, which can be very bureaucratic. They replied that most of the time they coped well with life, but recently Carlitos, who is 15 years old, has had serious treatments for cancer every two weeks in Guadalajara, some 320km away. Dealing with long bus journeys and hospital administration has been very hard for them. Carlitos has had both his legs amputated and recently had tumours removed from his lungs. When we met him, he was walking on a new prosthetic leg and crutches. Over dinner he quizzed Chris about life in London and other aspects of the UK. He listened with wrapt attention and a broad smile. He tells us that he plans to become a doctor. His enthusiasm was contagious, and, to use a much over-used term, inspirational. 

 

Jovita, the cleaning lady in our apartment, told me that she would charge 500 pesos (the price of one Covid test) to sweep and mop the floors with Pinol, the universal floor cleaner in Mexico with a pleasant pine smell; to clean the kitchen and four bathrooms; sweep the terrace; wash and change the sheets; and to empty the rubbish. Two and a half hours later our apartment was scrupulously clean, our son Chris’ disorderly room all neatly arranged, and our assorted bathroom products sorted into neat rows. Public places in Mexico may often be disorderly and scruffy, but homes are always neat and clean. For a morning of hard work Jovita explained to me that she takes two bus rides to Bucerías and two back home, at a cost of 80 pesos, so she would have netted, 420 pesos, not enough to buy a Covid test, for 2.5 hours of unstinting work and her travel time. Jan insisted that this was not enough and insisted that I pay Jovita 600.

 

As we sit having breakfast on our terrace, every morning about 10am a father and two small children not more than. 6- and 8-years old trudge along the beach in front of our building carrying trinkets for sale. The trinkets are of little value, so their daily earnings must be very thin stuff, especially in this low season when the beach is pretty much empty. The children cannot attend school, so may well grow up illiterate, or at best with a minimal education. Another person who passes our building regularly is a man who sells shrimps on a stick, seasoned with a red sauce and a squeeze of lime. He holds an array of the snacks in his right hand. If sales are slow, those shrimps will be heated by the sun perhaps for an hour or more: no doubt a food safety hazard.

 

Many Mexicans scrape a living as that family or the shrimp seller do, but some have it even harder. To reach our building, as you enter Bucerías you pull into a right-hand lane to make a left turn (one of the curiosities of traffic management in the state of Nayarit is that to turn left you turn right first), and wait for the traffic lights by the enormous Chedrahui supermarket. Traffic lights are an opportunity to earn a very few pesos, if you are desperate enough, while passengers wait for the lights to change. You may be a mother working the cars with a small child selling chewing gum or some other small item. Another mother, steps out when the lights turn red, squats down and her small son sits across her shoulders, then she stands up and the boy juggles two rubber balls for a minute or two. He climbs down and he and his mother walk along the line of cars asking for a few pesos as their reward for a brief entertainment. Again, these children miss school.

 

Lack of education, or an inadequate education, consigns many Mexicans to making their lives this way. Literacy is technically high in Mexico: 99.5% of the population is literate, but the level of literacy is poor. The OECD reports that 50.6% of adults in Mexico attain only level 1 literacy, defined thus: “At Level 1 in literacy, adults can read brief texts on familiar topics and locate a single piece of specific information identical in form to information in the question or directive.” Mexico educates a substantial number professionals to a high standard. A waiter at one of our favourite Puerto Vallarta restaurants, The River Café, has a daughter who is completing a PhD in Barcelona, and another studying for a Masters in Puerto Vallarta. But many Mexicans do not complete their primary education.

 

The night-time security guard in our building exemplifies another kind of hardship. He speaks English well and quite grammatically, and understands most of what we say to him even with our British accents. He tells me that he learned some of his English in school, but more by listening to English pop music: Phil Collins, Sting, Rod Stewart etc. And he lived for two years in Greensboro, NC, where he has a 15-year-old son who he hopes to have enough money to visit some time. On an anecdotal level, family separations across the US border are a common theme of conversations with Mexicans who work in low-paid jobs (restaurant and hotel work, driving taxis, cleaning and so on).

 

A friend of our son Chris works in one of the more luxurious hotels selling tours to the (mostly American and Canadian guests). For this work he needs good English and interpersonal and sales skills. He cannot, of course, afford to live close to the hotel where he works, so he wakes at 4am and takes buses to work. He leaves home very early because the buses are so crowded that he often needs to wait for several to pass before one arrives with room for some additional passengers. The buses are thus crowded and almost intolerably hot (they are not air conditioned like the tourist buses). So he arrives sweaty and already tired, but has to put on his smile and get to work. The buses are a municipal service, so one might think that a politician who promised more comfortable transport would be guaranteed to win an election. However, Chris’ friend explained that, while formally municipal, the buses are in fact controlled by the mafia who have no interest in funding increased comfort. I asked Chris about the reference to the mafia, and he responded that friends often point out business activities that they describe as mafia. One example in San Vicente, Chris’ town, is a new and very luxurious bar, which will be beyond the means of most residents of the town. A friend assured him that this was a mafia enterprise to be used for money laundering. Whether this is true or not I can’t say, but the general assumption is that services are not run for the benefit of ordinary Mexicans.

 

One feature of Mexican life is the importance of the municipality and its residents’ attachment to their neighbourhood, which often expresses itself in neighbourhood solidarity and self-help, sometimes in vigorous ptrotest. For example, one evening, as Chris drove us to a restaurant in one of the non-tourist neighbourhoods of Puerto Vallarta along rutted unpaved streets, a young man held a paper cup out at an intersection. Chris gave him five pesos and explained that a collection was being made for materials so that local residents could make some basic repairs to their street. He commented that he frequently encounters such collections to repair streets or to paint topes.

 

We came across (or rather narrowly missed) another form of collective action as we planned to return to the UK from Mexico City. Jorge, the reliable driver who transports us from and to the airport, told us that the terminal from which British Airways flights depart had been subject to blockades by disabled people protesting their inability to obtain a medicine they need. The lack (desabasto) of medicines has been a subject of controversy in recent years. There have been similar protests by the parents of children unable to obtain medicine critically needed to treat their children’s cancer. In our case, the blockade had been lifted by the time we reached the airport.

 

The moral of all these rather miscellaneous anecdotes is that life for most Mexicans is hard, but that most face difficulties that would defeat many comfortably placed people in Europe or North America with resolution and resourcefulness.

And the President said “Let there be light”

 

My long-time friend Jim Murray and I were putting on our formal attire (in my case white tie, in Jim’s the Murray tartan, sporran etc.) in the home of Jim and his wife Leila in Herne Hill, while our spouses were arranging their long evening dresses. Our friend Dudley Ankerson had wangled for us tickets to a Mansion House state dinner for Miguel de la Madrid, president of Mexico (1982-1988). On our arrival we discovered that we had tickets that entitled us to dinner, but not to be presented to the president and to share a cocktail with him: those tickets were reserved for the politically important and those of the right pedigree.

Miguel de la Madrid wearing his presidential sash.

 

I was reminded of that long-ago evening by a conversation in San Sebastián del Oeste, Jalisco, with doña Laura Villanueva, who had invited us to visit her family home. Doña Laura is the 6^th generation of the Villanueva family, whose home is more than 320 years old. She explained to us that she now lives most of the year in Puerto Vallarta near her two daughters, but moves to her mountain home to escape the extreme heat. Unlike other prominent families in San Sebastián, the Villanuevas had made their money not in mining silver and gold but raising cattle. The house has a long walled terrace facing onto the street, protected from the frequent rains of the mountains by the projecting tiled roof. We stepped into a large and elegant living room, with its original pine timber ceiling and restored fireplace. To the left was the main bedroom and to the right two more bedrooms. There had once been a fourth bedroom to the rear of the living room, which is now the kitchen (which was formerly outside on the garden terrace). A heavy wooden door opens, not on hinges but on stout round wooden posts (which as doña Laura pointed out to not squeak) on to a large garden, somewhat neglected now but once full of fruit trees, and no doubt animals.

 

Doña Laura and Jan in the living room of the Villanueva house.

Doña Laura’s father was born in 1913; he died in 2009. He married an 18-year-old girl from Mexico City and brought her to San Sebastián. To judge by their wedding photo, the bride, in a white dress with a long train carefully arranged for the photograph was a petty petite young girl. Doña Laura remarked that her father was always armed with a pistol, although he had never fired it – law and order did not reach such a remote small town so personal protection was necessary. But to return to Miguel de la Madrid. In those days the candidate of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI: Institutional Revolutionary Party) was guaranteed to win the election, but nevertheless toured the country showing himself (only one male pronoun was needed in those days for senior politicians) to the people, and for some reason de la Madrid expressed a particular wish to visit San Sebastián. There was not yet a road connecting the town to La Estancia 9km away on the Guadalajara road, only a dirt track (a brecha) which most travelled on foot or on horseback, but señor Villanueva had a pick-up truck, the only vehicle in San Sebastián, so de la Madrid’s organizers asked him if they could borrow his truck to transport the candidate. He agreed on the condition that only he be allowed to drive his precious vehicle.

 

After taking his tour of San Sebastián and its region, the future president asked señor Villanueva whether he could thank him by giving the town something it needed. Doña Laura explained that her father and two friends had bought a generator to provide street lighting, but it was sufficient for only a few lights and only from 7-10pm, so her father’s request was for street lighting. However, as Doña Laura tells the tale, her father had no great faith in a politician’s promises and told de la Madrid so frankly. Doña Laura shares her father’s low opinion: she told us that the presidents of Mexico had all been “unas robaderas” (outrageous thieves). Imagine her father’s surprise when some time later representatives of the now president turned up to ask him what San Sebastián needed. Señor Villanueva decided to ask for street lighting and a proper road, both of which the government delivered – it was common for governmental decisions to be taken this way in the Mexico I knew as a young man, and it may well still be the case.

 

The plaza of San Sebastián de Oeste in the rain.

Doña Laura went on to explain that her home was once larger, but after the early death of her mother the family moved to Puerto Vallarta, leaving some relatives to live in and care for the family home. Unfortunately, the relatives were none too scrupulous. They sold the property in two parts, and when her father discovered what had happened, he was able only to recover part of his home. The family still did not occupy the home year-round, and subsequently the furniture was stolen from the empty house. Nevertheless, the Villanueva home is now restored and cared for.

 

The Villanueva house. Note how the roof sits above the body of the house.

The Hotel los Arcos del Sol on the plaza.

We stayed in the Hotel Los Arcos del Sol hotel on the plaza. One of the hotel staff explained that the building is about 400 years old and had belonged to the Dueñas family for four centuries. Appropriately enough (dueñas means female owners), inheritance of the property traditionally passes through the female line, but the current owner has no daughters, so her two sons (last name Aguirre) are the future owners. The Dueñas family was involved in the principal business of San Sebastián – mining silver and gold. Metal ore was apparently smelted approximately where the hotel reception now stands. The processed metal was then transported on the backs of mules and burros to Guadalajara, over roads which, in the 18^th century, would have been little better than dirt tracks. The roads ran through mountainous territory which is still sparsely populated, so robbery must have been a risk for the mule drivers transporting the bullion. Mining began in the mid-16^th century and continued until 1888 when the American owners closed the mines rather than negotiate with striking miners. The contemporary visitor to San Sebastián can visit disused mine shafts along the camino de las minas, which slopes uphill to the ancient silver and gold deposits. The last mine on the route is the Mina Santa Gertrudis, a low, dark, damp and uninviting space, which nevertheless, we are told, can be visited by tourists.

 

The interior of the Hotel los Arcos del Sol.

The Mina Santa Gertrudis. The shaft bends sharply to the left after a few metres.

As we returned from our walk to the mines, we stopped at a silversmith’s workshop. The genial smith shows us how he buys his silver as small beads of metal, his equipment for lost wax casting and his small electric smelter to melt the silver. We talked about the pollution caused by processing metal ores in San Sebastián’s heyday, particularly the use of mercury to increase the yield of silver ore. He commented that in the stream that runs through the Hacienda Jalisco (once a mining facility, now a hotel) malformed fish have been found. He also remarked that intermarriage was the norm among the small circle of elite families in San Sebastian (if necessary, marriage with a Spanish outsider might be sought, but never with another Mexican family), and claimed that cancer is now prevalent in those families. This reminded me of a visit two years ago to the home/museum of Doña Conchita Encarnación. The family tree in the museum room traced the marriages between the Encarnación, Sánchez and Aguirre families. No doubt, the Aguirre brothers who will inherit the Hotel de los Arcos del Sol come from the same intermarried families. Incidentally, the silversmith told me that one company (that owns the Palacio de Hierro, Mexico’s Harrods, in Mexico City) has a monopoly on processing and selling silver in Mexico. A nice little earner in one of the largest silver producing countries in the world.

 

Roof structure of the Hotel los Arcos del Sol showing how the roof sits above the rooms below.

You may have noticed from the photo of the Villanueva home that the sloping tiled roof sits above the main part of the house with a substantial open gap between roof and ceiling. This applies to other old structures in San Sebastián. It rains a lot in the mountains, and water runs off the roof into the street or garden, protecting the ceiling below. In Puerto Vallarta, where heavy tropical rainstorms and hurricanes are frequent in the rainy season, almost all buildings, in contrast, have flat roofs which need regular impermiabilización to ensure the structure is water tight – the profusion of buckets catching water leaks on a visit to a large supermarket after a storm suggests that water-proofing is not a precise science. We asked our son Chris why homes like his have flat roofs, seemingly much more ill-suited to the climate than they are in the less rainy UK. He pointed out that if his roof were gabled, water would pour rapidly into the walled concrete patio at the rear, which would quickly flood his home. Rain flows more slowly off the flat roof enabling the drains to cope. However, in San Sebastián water flows off the roof into gardens and on to streets which drain quickly down the hill, so sloping roofs are the norm.

 The population of San Sebastián at its peak was some 20,000 inhabitants, but after the closure of the mines it declined. In 2005 the town had 5,626 residents permanent residents. The people of the town no longer live from mining, but from tourism: hotels, restaurants, the sale of craft items, renting quad bikes and appalling all-terrain vehicles called rzzrs (pronounced “raders”) with which they fill the streets periodically in groups of several at a time or charge up hiking paths. Pedestrians beware.

 

The plaza of San Sebastián on a Sunday morning. Note the public transport to the left. The taco stand outside a butcher's shop served from breakfast to dinner without a break.

On the way out of town a sign directs visitors to the Antiguo Panteón (old cemetery), we took a stroll along a verdant path, covered in places by an avocado tree or two, to a secluded spot away among fields and orchards on the edge of town. There stand the decaying monuments to anonymous residents of San Sebastián, their inscriptions now eroded. Perhaps these once held the bones of the Villanueva, Dueñas, Encarnación, Sánchez and Aguirre clans who lived for centuries in remote San Sebastián.

The Antiguo Panteón.

 

A morning in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle

 

A short drive northwest around the bay takes you to a small town with a large marina called La Cruz de Huanacaxtle. The town derives its name from the huanacaxtle trees that dominate the plaza. The tree’s name comes from the Nahuatl nacaztli, meaning ear. The fruits are shaped somewhat like an elephant’s ear (in English one name for the tree is ear-pod tree). A cross made of huanacaxtle wood stands in a circular plaza between the highway and the main plaza.

 

A huanacaxtle tree in the plaza of La Cruz

La Cruz has a salón ejidal, meaning that the town was granted communal agricultural land under the agrarian reform programmes that began after the Mexican Revolution ended in 1920. While this gave land to landless peasant farmers, the land was not always of good quality. Ejidos were not a guarantee of prosperity, but they did lift some rural families out of the worst poverty. However, the business of La Cruz is no longer agriculture, but tourism which shapes the economy and layout of the town.

 

The cross of la Cruz

The main road that takes traffic to the exclusive and expensive resorts of Punta de Mita is lined by businesses: inexpensive restaurants catering to the tastes and budgets of locals, grocery (abarrotes) shops, hardware and spare parts suppliers and the like. On the hills above the town are condominiums, villas and hotels positioned to have a prime view of the bay. Turn left, as usual from the right-hand lateral lane, off the main road and one of the few paved streets in La Cruz takes you past the wooden cross to the plaza. Trees cast a pleasant shade on the gardens, with the inevitable kiosko in the centre. On the morning we visited, an iguana was the only other creature enjoying the gardens. A small, simple concrete church occupies one corner just past the public toilets, there are four or five restaurants/cafés and the inevitable pharmacy. At a small café an attentive and courteous young Mexican woman served us delicious coffee and French toast with plenty of fruit for 300 pesos (£15/$20).

 

An iguana goes for a stroll

Iguanas are not the only animals in La Cruz. The marina saw no reason to post a sign in Spanish and English, presumably because very few Mexicans enter.

La Cruz, in short, is a very ordinary Mexican small working-class town. However, cross the plaza and one enters another world. The waterfront is occupied entirely by a huge marina, protected by a barrier operated by a languid guard. The yachts and other boats are too many to count, but they alone must exceed many times the combined wealth of all the Mexican residents of la Cruz. As we reached the yacht club building, three buses arrived with foreign tourists all booked in for one of the many excursions on the bay. The buses parked on grass beyond which was a roped off area prominently signposted propriedad privada. Through the trees we glimpsed the sun loungers of a hotel.

 

The marina of La Cruz. In the distance are the condominiums and hotels on the other side of the highway.

A short walk from the marina entrance is the boatyard in which sat a huge yacht worthy of a middle ranking billionaire, the international sailing school and the fish market, where we bought some red snapper and prawns for dinner. A young woman was preparing a delivery of dorado and other fish plunged into ice on the back of her motorbike and then covered in black bin bags.

 

Dorado ready for delivery.

I have rather mixed feelings about La Cruz, sandwiched between luxury accommodation built for foreigners and a waterfront occupied entirely for the pleasure of more foreigners. The ejido was never the rural idyll of justice and equality portrayed in the rhetoric of governments that descended from the Revolution. The ejido provided a perfect springboard with a ready-made following for an ambitious leader (comisario) to launch a political career, which was often accomplished with violence and corruption. Ejidos were often the place where land disputes or personal animosities were resolved with violence. But nevertheless, they did give a lot of rural people land. And four or five decades ago La Cruz would have been a tiny fishing/agricultural village, remote from the attentions of national and regional politicians. I don’t know what land or other property the ejido of contemporary La Cruz controls, but since tourism arrived the town has been shaped not so much by its people as by foreigners whose money has commandeered the most desirable parts and left the Mexicans in the middle. The same applies to Bucerías where we rent our apartment, and thus contribute in small way to the reshaping of the town by moneyed interests, but here at least, the beach remains open to Mexican and non-Mexican alike.