In 2009 I discovered the North Norfolk coast. It was thrilling. The landscape was wild and beautiful and, in early March, my dog and I had the beaches to ourselves. I told all my friends about my new find because, well, I was a pioneer. None of them had ever travelled that far east. I took a cottage for a week and when I wasn’t proselytizing to my friends, I was congratulating the locals on their great good fortune to be living in an area of such extraordinary beauty.

I grew up in Folkestone in the 1970s. I moved away in the 1980s and even further away in the 1990s. When people asked me where I was from, I would say Kent rather than Folkestone. I was embarrassed by Folkestone because it was ugly and seedy and I often wished that my parents had founded their English language school in a prettier town, like Brighton or Eastbourne. I have lived in land-locked Hertfordshire since 2003 and for years I would drive down to Folkestone, just for the day, just to smell and see the sea, just to walk along the Leas and hear the seagulls. In spite of myself, I loved my hometown and I missed it.

In 2015, I was researching for a book and began to return to Folkestone more regularly. During casual conversations with strangers, I would tell them that I lived in Hertfordshire. This frequently led to rapturous descriptions of Folkestone –  the Harbour, the Creative Quarter, the Leas, the wonderful high-ceilinged apartments which they had bought for a song. They had moved down from London. On a whim, they told me. They’d come for the day and loved it. No regrets. Best decision ever.

These stories began to irritate me:

So you live in Hertfordshire, they’d say. Is this your first visit to Folkestone?’

No, I grew up here (ie. when it was gritty and edgy… long before you arrived).

Before long my hometown was being mentioned in The Times and The New York Times. Tom Dyckhoff in the Guardian described Folkestone as a bit like Detroit, without the Motown. I felt strangely uncomfortable about all this favourable attention. I thought too about my experience in Norfolk and realised that I must have appeared equally annoying to the residents of Cromer.

It was with these complicated and conflicting thoughts in my head that I sat down to a conversation with Diane Dever. In 2015, thanks to the generous investment of local businessman, Roger de Haan, the old Folkestone ferry and railway terminal was undergoing extensive renovation and Dever was given the responsibility of curating the Harbour Arm as a social space.  She has a degree in Art in the Public Space but her first degree was in Geography: Physical Geography is about the world and what it’s made of and Human Geography is about people and the patterns they create, she explained. I am interested primarily in how people work and fit into the natural environment. When you put that together with art, you’re trying to connect people emotionally or change them physiologically (through improved health and well-being).

When the Harbour Arm project came up, she was curious to see whether art-led regeneration could be done well; whether the maxim A rising tide lifts all boats could successfully be implemented in Folkestone or whether there would inevitably be winners and losers. The town has gone through many changes so Dever knew that change was possible:  The question I had was how would it change and how would people change with it?

Folkestone has a diverse history. At the turn of the last century it was considered to be the most aristocratic seaside resort in England. During WWI soldiers from across the Empire and Commonwealth gathered in Folkestone as they waited to cross the Channel to fight on Flanders fields. In 1914 one hundred thousand Belgian refugees arrived, fifteen thousand of whom subsequently settled here. The refugee crisis of one hundred years ago is currently being  replicated in Folkestone with, as yet, no satisfactory solution in sight. The Leas was described as one of the finest marine promenades in the world and the King of Belgium declared the town to be the prettiest place in existence. World War II was less kind to Folkestone. During the Battle of Britain fighter planes from nearby Hawkinge Aerodrome were shot down, either into the sea or onto the town itself. The military mined and wired the beaches and placed gun batteries along the Leas. Thirty-five thousand residents moved away. There followed more than two decades of demolition and re-planning and from the rubble of bombed Victorian villas grew brutalist blocks, so favoured by urban planners in the 1960s. In the 1970s Folkestone lost its edge as a seaside resort when affordable package holidays in Europe re-routed the masses to Malta and the Costa del Sol. In the 1990s came the Channel Tunnel.

We are experiencing our fourth or fifth wave of ‘in-migration’, reflected Dever. How do we welcome those who arrive here? How do we protect those who live here from feeling threatened?

This made me think about my own parents who moved to Folkestone from London. My Irish grandfather had lung damage from fighting in WWI and my Swiss mother had spent a year as a tuberculosis patient at a sanatorium in Davos. There must have been plenty of ‘people like us’ who wanted to escape the polluted air of London in search of a better life for themselves and their families. As my father wrote, in a letter to his uncle soon after we arrived in 1959: The air down here in Folkestone is worth a guinea a box. We promptly invited hundreds of foreign students into the town. Many people welcomed them and for sixty years students from the School of English Studies lived with Folkestone host families. Life-long friendships were made. Some people, however, weren’t enthusiastic about all these foreigners living in their community. It made them feel uncomfortable. It made them feel as though they didn’t belong.

I asked Diane about her origins. She was born in rural Ireland and her family moved to the Middle East when she was 18 months old. Her father was a civil engineer who worked on large scale infrastructure projects, such the construction of the Jebel Ali port. Friday was a holy day and we didn’t go to school. Instead we accompanied my dad on site visits. Other kids played in parks but we climbed through concrete tunnel segments that were used for drainage and roads. As an artist I have an obsession with construction sites and I’m fascinated by how economies grow. I remember Dubai as dirt roads. Now there are six-lane highways. Dever spent every summer in Ireland. Things were changing there too. When she was eleven, the family left Dubai and settled in south east London. She remembers coming down to Folkestone for day trips and, even as a teenager, she recognised the socio-economic challenges of seaside towns. She moved here in 2003. People are moving to Folkestone from London and elsewhere because it’s a great place to live. It’s not their fault and we shouldn’t blame them. After all, we did the same.

How can we study these migration patterns and learn from them? How do we resist the desire to criticize and exclude? Dever is answering the challenge through art. Some artists make paintings which they hang on walls and you can go and look at them. It’s a particular kind of relationship and it requires the crossing of a physical threshold. This can act as a barrier. If you’re making art outside, there’s no threshold, simply an encounter which can feel more democratic, more inviting. This is for you.

In 2015 Folkestone Fringe worked in partnership to create four festivals – Profound Sound, SALT, Festival of the Sea and Environment, Women of the World and Normal? Festival of the Brain. This created an opportunity for different kinds of people to come together. Renovations on the old harbour station were already underway and residents were expressing regret that plants were being uprooted and destroyed. For Salt Festival, a community decision was made to capture every species along the railway tracks before all the vegetation was removed. A gardening club was formed, seed heads were collected and catalogued and four oak trees were re-planted at Martello Primary School. When the project was complete, a BBC expert on shingle gardens came down to give a talk. It was a way of processing change that was already happening, said Dever. It offered people the opportunity to make a positive impact. It was also a way of grieving and letting go. We don’t know how this will roll out. All we can do is be open to it because it’s happening. Each wave of new migration looks with uncertainty and a critical eye at the wave that follows.

So how can we address the fear? How do we engage with the very real concerns that people have such as: ‘This is too big/it’s happening too fast/who are you?/where do I belong?. Folkestone is by no means unique. Similar changes are taking place in other waterfront towns as quayside marinas are developed. Community organisations such as Go Folkestone and the New Folkestone Society play a vital role in co-ordinating and discussing issues of public concern and working for the best future of our town.

In the early 1900s the Leas was a restricted area, privately policed in order to keep the working class out of the west end. Urban legend has it that some, who lived in the east end of Folkestone, would pawn what few valuables they had in order to dress up in fine clothes and parade freely along the Leas on a Sunday. One hundred years later and the development of the Harbour Arm established the old fishing community at the centre of this new space. Today there is no separation or exclusion. Everyone is welcome, says Diane. No one has to pay to go there. The music is free. You can enjoy a beer. The children can run around. Those who live along the Leas come down too. We created a social space there. The Arm is not in the town, it’s an out-at-sea place, a place that people go to at the same time, in the same way, for the same thing. And those who live here can look back at their town and see how beautiful it is.

Folkestone is on the map, not just because it’s pretty but because there is a vibrant culture in the town. Young people are no longer turning their back on Folkestone but are returning to live and work here, as artists and owners of small shops and cafes. People are moving to Folkestone because the town is an exciting place to be. We should be proud of that, says Dever.

Published in Go Folkestone, July 2022

‘Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house,
stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot’.

                                   Rainer Maria Rilke translated from the German by Robert Bly

Once upon a time there was a boy who was born into a large family, a boy with a special destiny. Because he was special he didn’t go to the village school, like his brothers and sisters, but to a boarding school far away. Because he was an intelligent boy as well as a special boy, his parents didn’t have to give the school any money.

But as the boy got older, he thought he might like to be special in a different way. He wanted to help people heal their bodies rather than help them heal their souls. He wanted to be a doctor, not a priest. This made his father angry. He was ashamed that the boy wanted to be special in the wrong way. He told him that he was no longer his son and that he should leave his house and never come back. And so the boy did. He left his family and his village and his church and he never went back.

The boy became a soldier. He became a man. He fought on the battlefields of a country far away. He killed men and he watched men die. Their wounds were in their bodies and their wounds were in their souls. This made the man sad. He realised that he couldn’t heal the body wounds. He couldn’t heal the soul wounds. Only God could do that and God was far away, in the house of his father.

And so the man got married and had a son. The wife loved God but in a different way to the way her husband had loved God; back in the days when he was still special, back in his own land. This made her angry and it made her sad. The son was confused by the presence and the absence of God in his family. The God who was missing and the God who spoke in a loud voice about punishment, about a place called Heaven and a place called Hell. He decided that when he grew up, he would live in a house without God.

Many years later, the son got married and he too had a child. A daughter. God wasn’t welcome in his home, but other gods were, gods with different names. The daughter missed her father when he went away to visit these gods in faraway places. But, she wasn’t bothered by the one God, the God her grandfather had abandoned all those years ago. Because….well….. they had never been properly introduced.

The daughter grew up and married a man with no God in his life either. It was uncomplicated. For them and for their two children. There was no God language, no talk of punishment. No Heaven. No Hell. No ceremony either of course, no church, no community, no faith in the invisible, no support beyond the material. But that was OK.

But it wasn’t. Not really. So, the daughter started going to church. She started speaking to God, hoping that He would speak back to her. She loved the prayers, the poetry, the incense and the candles. She loved saying the Hail Mary, pretending she was a proper Catholic, like her grandfather, in the special days, before he became ordinary. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. She wished, with all her heart that she too could dip her fingertips in the holy water and make the sign of the cross on her body. But she couldn’t, because God was not her companion. Not really. The daughter felt sad but she recognised the truth of it – that Faith is a gift not a given.

One hundred and ten years after the once-special boy stood up and walked out of the home where he was born and raised, his great-great granddaughter was baptized in that same church, which he forgot. She is the first Catholic in our family for five generations. She may make her own choices in the future, but blessings have been offered, on behalf of both the living and the dead. A sense of gentle remembering and a quiet peace has fallen on the family.

And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.    Joni Mitchell

Minturn Till is a fourth generation fruit and hop farmer. His great-grandfather, Walter Till moved to Worcestershire in 1896, renting land and buildings in order to fatten chickens for the White Star Shipping Line. Walter also raised livestock and planted hops. He was passionate about farming and, over the years, was able to buy a few small plots of land.

Jim, Walter’s son, fought in WWI and, like many men of his generation, he struggled with his physical and mental health. After Walter died, Jim took on a foreman to manage the farm on his behalf. Jim’s own son, George, inherited both the farm and a lack of enthusiasm for a career he would never have chosen for himself. As soon as his son, Minturn left agricultural college, George sold a few parcels of land and invested his money on the stock market. At 53 years old, he retired from farming and spent the rest of his long years chairing committees, including the board of governors of a large local state school, fishing and playing golf.

Fortunately for the farm, as well as for the ensuing generations of the Till family, Minturn inherited his great-grandfather’s passion for farming. I have known ‘Minn’ for more than 40 years and, once or twice a year, I drop by for coffee, a chat and a walk round the farm. Minn’s apples are the best I have ever tasted.

As a result of the pandemic, I hadn’t seen Minn for a while and so, when I visited him late last year, I asked him about a project he had first mentioned to me 10 years ago – a walled kitchen garden. It’s finished! he told me triumphantly.

When Minn was a small boy his mother used to send him into the garden to pick herbs or pull carrots. He was mesmerized by the variety of colours and shapes and would invariably return to the kitchen with a cornucopia of fruit and vegetables, arranged in his basket like a Cezanne still life. At the age of five, I decided that when I grew up I would have a walled kitchen garden of my own, he told me.

Minn has lived at Nevergood Farm all his life and his sense of place and memory resides in the land. His garden is the result of accumulated wisdom combined with objects, thoughtfully collected, over six decades. An apothecary-style cabinet in the potting shed is a perfect example of this. Worn smooth, water-stained and the size and width of a single bed, its many drawers reveal seed packets, twine and small gardening tools. I know this because my granddaughter opened every one. When Minn was in his late teens, he spotted the cabinet standing on the street outside the village hardware store. A builder confirmed that it was destined for the bonfire. Minn returned with a flat bed truck and took it back to the farm: In my imagination, I already had a purpose for it, he said.

This sense of vision combined with attention to detail defines Minn Till’s legacy as a farmer. His passion is contagious and although I am entirely without knowledge or understanding of how to grow food, I asked Minn whether I could return and hear more about the story of his kitchen garden.

Two months later, I was back at Nevergood. Carrying a pot of strong coffee and two mugs, Minn and I retired to the greenhouse.

In the beginning I made a lot of mistakes, he explained. As a commercial farmer and grower, I had spent a lifetime cultivating fruit, hops and cereals but I had never planted vegetables before. I learnt, for example, that carrot root flies can’t jump and that you can stop them with a physical barrier. I installed mesh which kept the caterpillars from the brassicas (that’s cabbage, cauliflower and sprouts) but allowed sun and water to reach the plants and soil. Melons hate draughts and need a lot of sunlight and so I cover them with glass cloches, which also keep the pests out. Minn doesn’t use synthetic fertilizer, pesticides or fungicides in the garden. He kills aphids by tipping dirty bath water over the beans and cherries. Predatory insects do the rest.

As I sat on an old wicker chair, feeling the warmth of the spring sun through the glass and the first kick of caffeine as it entered my bloodstream, I asked Minn about the many varieties of fruit and vegetables in his garden. He grows apricots, nectarines, peaches, rhubarb, cherries and a full range of berries. He grows parsnips, beetroot, celeriac, artichokes, fennel, shallots, runner beans, broad beans, aubergines, chillies and, against a sunny wall, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Everything is grown specifically to use in the kitchen because Minn is not only a very good farmer, he is also an outstanding cook, known for his ability to whip up a delicious meal out of so-called ‘nothing’. The day I was there, he was expecting a friend for dinner. I’ll pick a few radishes and carrots and make crudités with fresh tartare sauce, using shallots and parsley. For the main course, I might grill a couple of salmon fillets and serve with asparagus, the last of the spinach and some new potatoes. For dessert … maybe  stewed rhubarb with cream…. What’s good in the garden today is my guiding principle.

Minn’s walled garden is not only beautiful, a rival to any of its National Trust equivalents, it was created pretty much instinctively. As his father, whilst an excellent nurseryman, was neither a hands-on farmer nor a dedicated gardener, Minn learnt much of what he knows from Ernie, the retired farm worker who planted and tended his parents’ kitchen garden almost 60 years ago. My motto was always listen, listen all the time to what others are saying because one day it’ll come in useful. The glass on the greenhouse roof, for example, has been cut using ‘beavertails’. This directs the rain water to run down the middle of the glass panes, thereby protecting the cedar frame from damp and rot. I remembered that detail and wanted to include it in my own garden. I have, of course, had a long time to think about things. I designed and sourced everything myself and I managed the project from start to finish; I have absolutely no building skills but the wonderful 70 year old carpenter and his team who built the garden allowed me to work alongside them as an apprentice labourer.  

Minn finds many of his treasures on eBay. By the entrance to the greenhouse stands a water tank; empty, it weighs 600kgs and was used in the Welsh mountain railways of the early 20^th century. In the potting shed is a Victorian pot-bellied stove. The mine lamps in the greenhouse are from the 1940s and the light switches come from an old factory. The rain buckets, forged in a Glasgow foundry, were made for a Scottish country house. They’re cast iron and when I bought them at auction they were coated in thick gloss paint. You could hardly see the beautiful Regency pattern underneath. I power blasted them and then powder coated them with zinc to prevent them rusting.

In the centre of the garden is an enormous 19^th century French copper cheese vat which has been repurposed as a fountain. This creates an attractive centrepiece but more importantly it maintains a steady water level in the dipping pool. Rain water from the gutters is channelled underground where it collects in a 3000 litre onion-shaped tank. A small electric pump circulates the water and irrigates the trenches during planting time. It maintains water levels on the same principle as a loo, Minn explained.

The garden was originally an old meadow that had never had pesticides used on it. The next process, as Minn described it, reminded me of baking a multi-layered birthday cake. He stripped away the top soil so it was not damaged during building works, laid out the raised beds and then brought back the soil. He subsequently spread 4 inches of horse manure over the soil, then covered everything with 4 inches of leaf mould. I am using a ‘no-dig’ approach to all my growing; as long as I keep topping up the beds with the leaf mould every year, I don’t need to disturb the soil and this preserves all the flora and fauna – especially earthworms and mycorrhizal fungi. Every year, in kitchen gardens and allotments across the land, Minn explained, people double dig the soil going in to winter. This, he told me, was like demolishing your house once a year. You spend the spring and summer building it and then, just as you’ve moved in and the winter winds start to howl, you knock it down again. Deep cultivation destroys the soil structure, causes soil erosion and the bare, overwintered soil it leaves allows valuable nutrients to escape into the atmosphere. Leaf mould is akin to soil armour: it provides food and habitat for organisms and also prevents moisture evaporation and the germination of weed seeds.

Minn uses a small Dutch hoe to create a little crumb on the surface, which, as a result of the leaf mould above and the water tank below, is consistently moist but never wet. His weeding system is equally gentle. I watched as he tenderly ran the hoe through the soil to dislodge the few weeds that were there, leaving them to dry and die in the sun.

A local carpenter built the greenhouse and Minn bought the 25,000 bricks for the wall and the paving stones as a job lot from a local reclamation yard. The footings for the entire garden structure were cast as a single ring beam, so that it moves, floating imperceptibly like a platform over the clay subsoil. By moving as one, it prevents the walls cracking. Minn sources his flowerpots from a company in Yorkshire that also makes terracotta drains. Drains need to be frost and road traffic proof, so not only are Minn’s pots tall and beautifully proportioned, they don’t flake or crumble. I thought of the Watch with Mother characters ‘Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot Men’ (but without ‘Little Weed’).

It was five hours before we returned to the house. I learnt a lot, not just about kitchen gardens, but about holding a vision for a lifetime; holding it, like a tiny seed in the palm of your hand; being patient with it; feeding it with just the right nourishment; showing it to just the right people; listening carefully, with your ears and your heart and above all waiting, ever so patiently for the day when your dream can fly free. Although George didn’t physically cultivate his own garden, Minn was able to see what was created on his father’s behalf. Today, George’s grandchildren and his great-grandchildren are learning about food and where it comes from. They plant and grow their own seed pots and every autumn Minn judges the Till family pumpkin growing competition.

I went home, not I will admit, sufficiently inspired to plant a kitchen garden of my own, but certainly with the intention of introducing my granddaughter to Beatrix Potter because, well …  Thea loves her bunnies as much as Minn loves his brassicas.

Recommended Reading:

Dirt to Soil: One Family’s Journey into Regenerative Agriculture Gabe Brown

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape our Future  Merlin Sheldrake

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I was a free man in Paris. I felt unfettered and alive. Nobody was calling me up for favors. No one’s future to decide.                                                                                                                                                      Joni Mitchell ‘Court and Spark’

Many years ago – 42 in fact – I lived in Paris. I was a student at the Sorbonne, although I rarely went to lectures, preferring to spend my weekdays in the Library at the Pompidou Centre. I was trying to write a dissertation on Cezanne, but I often got distracted, particularly by the fire-eater in the square. He was there every day and would bark huskily at the crowd, refusing to take a first slug of petrol until his hat was full of francs.

I have only been back to Paris a few times and for short periods. Last week I was looking forward to spending four days in the city with my friend, Valentine. A few days before we were due to leave, she tested positive for Covid; thus I arrived, by myself, at the Gare du Nord carrying my old diary from 1980 with some vague notion of retrieving my long-ago life in Paris.

In September 1980, I moved into an apartment in the 15^th arrondissement. It was tiny but had huge French windows that overlooked a courtyard. My landlady, Dominique, was a dancer at the Folies Bergeres. Cite Falguiere is a former artists’ colony, built as studios and apartments: Gauguin, Modigliani and Brancusi all lived there. My favourite restaurant Aux Artistes on Rue Falguiere is still there, exactly as I remembered it and probably unchanged since the family first opened the doors in 1959.

When I lived at 3 Cite Falguiere in 1980, I had no telephone, so if my parents or my friends wanted to visit, they had to send me a letter. Sometimes I’d come home and find a note stuck to the front door. Passing through, but you weren’t home. I rather liked this arrangement. I was free and unfettered. I wasn’t accountable to anyone. Sometimes, if I didn’t feel like entertaining visitors, I’d pretend I wasn’t home.

Today, accessing apartment buildings involves codes and keypads, but I managed to sneak in behind a delivery driver. I followed him, first into the courtyard and then into the stairwell of No. 3. Everything was exactly as I remembered it – just a little spruced-up.

Encouraged by my success, I walked to the Jardin de Luxembourg where children used to race sailboats across the pond and a one-man puppet theatre performed in the shade of the plane trees. On the Ile St. Louis, I joined the queue for Berthillon, a fifth generation glacier and a Paris institution since 1954. My roasted pineapple and basil ice cream was delicately flavoured and delicious.

The following day I decided to visit one of my favourite places in the city. In 1980, whenever I grew tired of reading French novels, I would make my way to Shakespeare and Company, a cosy, ramshackle building on the Left Bank and the only place I knew in Paris that sold second-hand books in English. George Whitman opened his bookshop in 1951. All through his life, Whitman, who died in 2011 at the age of 98, invited writers and artists to stay at his bookshop (benches doubled as small beds at night) and in exchange for his hospitality, visitors were asked to read a book a day, help at the shop for a few hours and write a one-page autobiography before they left. George referred to his shop as a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore. I didn’t know any of this at the time. I just liked the space and the books.

Shakespeare and Company has since been discovered. The queues are long and rope barriers determine the number of people permitted into the building at any one time. The rooms upstairs are now referred to as ‘Reading rooms’ and the books on display are for ambience. None are for sale. I asked a young woman stacking shelves about the change. This has always been a new bookshop she told me, in a tone of great confidence. You can’t buy second-hand books any longer, but you can buy tote bags and stickers; and you can drink lattes in the buzzing Shakespeare and Company coffee shop next door.

The city was full of people taking pictures of themselves and of each other. I was taking pictures too of course, although not of myself. I have almost no photographs of the 8 months I spent in Paris in the 1980s. I don’t recall having a camera.

I decided to make one last attempt at a Proustian experience and headed to my favourite cafe Les Deux Magots on Boulevard St Germain. It was popular, even 40 years ago. Writers including Sartre, de Beauvoir, Joyce and Hemingway would meet there and it became known as Le rendez-vous de l’elite intellectuelle. We were students and going to Les Deux Magots for ‘chocolat chaud’ was an expensive treat. We always asked for the same table outside so we could watch the street performers.

I had been told that it can take 30 minutes to get a table at Les Deux Magots and so I arrived with low expectations. It was lunchtime on a sunny Saturday and every table was taken. Then, as if by magic, a smartly-dressed waiter unclipped the rope and guided me straight to my old table. The chocolat chaud arrived on a silver tray in a china jug. It has the consistency of thick soup and I can say, without hesitation, even 40 years later, that it is the very best hot chocolate I have ever tasted. I wanted to hug the waiter. I resisted and left him a generous tip instead.

As Marcel Proust said: Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were. My old diary recalls the freedom I had as a student in Paris, but it also describes a time in my life where isolation was my response to feelings of vulnerability and separation. The four days I spent alone in the city helped  me reconcile the idealism and peculiar melancholy which I have always associated with the 8 months I lived in Paris.

In 1959, my parents founded an English language school on the southeast coast of England and in 1970, The School of English Studies welcomed ‘El Cordobes’, Spain’s most celebrated bullfighter.

I was eleven years old and had never heard of the man they called ‘The Beatle of the Bullring’, but I was fascinated by the secrecy that surrounded his arrival. He had chosen Folkestone because he wanted to keep a low profile. Within days, however, his cover was blown and there were photographers hiding in the bushes of Grimston Gardens and reporters calling the house day and night for a story.

Finally, it was agreed that the press could visit for a one-off interview and photo opportunity, and a team came down from the now defunct Daily Sketch to follow Manuel Benitez through a day in his life at SES. Pictures were taken of him playing table football with the other students and sitting in the Language Laboratory with headphones and a text book. The photographer even snapped him polishing his powder-blue Rolls Royce, a chore much more likely to have been done by his chauffeur. The double-page spread in the paper the following day infuriated my father. He was scornful of the impoverished, clichéd language used in the article, which described the matador as stabbing at everything that moved with his ballpoint pen and shouting ‘Gore Blimey’ and ‘Magnifico’ when tasting Mrs. Bannister’s fruit cake. In spite of all the excitement, Peter O’Connell remained determined that the SES teaching routine was not to be disrupted and, according to the article, the Press had to wait until the tough bullfighter had finished morning school before they could do their interviews.

El Cordobes was given special one-to-one tuition with Marion, the Director of Studies. She recalls driving Manuel around town in her Ford Popular in a bid to confuse the Press, who pursued him wherever he went.

Even though I had no interest in bullfighting, I decided to make the most of having a real live celebrity in the school, and I asked to be introduced to the great man. I had been told that even though he was in his mid-thirties, he had never been to school and this, in itself, I found astonishing. El Cordobes was very gracious and even though his English was non-existent, we smiled at each other and communicated through an interpreter. He subsequently handed me two pieces of what appeared to be air-dried beef. When I showed my mother what the great matador had given me, she explained that after he killed a bull, he would cut off its ears and throw them into the crowd. It was a great stroke of luck if you caught one and here I was with two, possibly even belonging to the same bull. I was revolted by this story and managed to get my mother to exchange the ears for an autographed picture, which I thought would give me greater kudos with my friends at school. First, of course, I would need to explain who El Cordobes was and why they should be impressed, after which I could always throw in the bit about having turned down a couple of dead bull’s ears.

El Cordobes is arguably Spain’s most famous bullfighter. Growing up in poverty in Cordoba, the young Manuel Benitez would steal into estates at night and practise fighting on untrained bulls. Later, in an attempt to gain recognition in the Ring, he vaulted fences at big fights and, using a makeshift cape, challenged the bull and delighted the crowds. He was flamboyant and provocative and had a reputation as a great lothario. Several biographies were written about El Cordobes and in 1991 the musical Matador, loosely based on his life, opened at the Queen’s Theatre in London. The great bullfighter had been due to spend seven months studying at SES, but the publicity became intolerable for everyone concerned, and a few weeks later he went back to Spain.

Richard, a summer teacher at SES, had lived in Spain for many years and was an avid fan of the ‘toreo’.  In 1980, we were visiting Barcelona and Richard invited us to a bullfight. I wasn’t keen on the idea, but decided that, in view of the school’s history with El Cordobes, I should go. I bought a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon in the hope of preparing myself a little, but the spectacle turned out to be worse than I could ever have imagined.

Bullfighting was banned in Barcelona in 2012 and Las Arenas is now a shopping mall. El Cordobes fully retired from the ring in 2000. At the time of writing, he is eighty-five years old and lives a quiet life in his hometown of Cordoba.

Taken from I Have Come to Say You Goodbye: A History of The School of English Studies, 1959 – 2017  by Una Suseli O’Connell (pub. June 2022).