Thurston Hamer I

Thurston Hamer

Thurston Hamer (the first) was born on March 2^nd, 1861, at 5 Grove Terrace in Gorton, Lancashire. His father was Job Hamer, and his mother Mary Hamer, nee Moseley.

Thurston was the first child among what were to be 10 children. His childhood cannot have been very easy with all those siblings, added to which his father was often away for significant periods of time.

In the census of 1871, when he was 10, we find him staying with his grandmother Elizabeth Sudlow (she was Mary Moseley’s mother, but she had been widowed and married someone called Sudlow) in Carden in Cheshire.

He seems to have followed in his father’s footsteps as an international traveller, presumably in the dry goods business. When he was still only 19 years old he was living in Lima, Peru and working for somebody called Mr Barron. We have a very interesting letter he wrote to his father from Lima in January 1881 in which he starts out

by acknowledging receipt of some letters from Job and he says: “I am very thankfull (sic) that you have agreed to my leaving here in August or thereabouts and I am quite satisfied to go to the States.” He then goes on to give an eye-witness account of the siege and capture of Lima by the Chilean Army. Chile and Peru were engaged in the war of the Pacific at the time. One of the recent casualties of the war was Mr Barron, whose body had been discovered not long before the letter was written.

Ten years later, in 1890, he was still working as travelling salesman for a Manchester house, which is slightly odd because one would have expected him to be working in some capacity for the family business which was established in Mexico by then. Dorothy Golding, Thurston’s daughter, used to tell the story of how her father, on a visit to Mexico, was walking in the Alameda park in Mexico City when he saw a young woman who particularly caught his attention. He managed to be introduced to her, and they were married on Feb 9^th, 1891. The young woman was Rose Mary Rennow, known as Rosita, and she was a member of an English family called the Phillips who had connections with Mexico going back to the early nineteenth century. The young couple lived in an apartment near the Alameda park, above an undertaker’s, and then they moved to a house on Calle Colon, where their third child, Dorothy was born.^[1]

According to Dorothy, Thurston did not want to travel after he got married, and so he started a business with a friend of his, which failed, and he lost everything. He moved back to England with his small family intending to make a fresh start, but before he found work he was summoned back to Mexico by his father Job. His brother William who had been working as the accountant at ‘La Linera‘, the family business, had died of typhoid fever, and Thurston was needed to take his place. In 1898 the family was living in a large house at Calle Sur 10 (Calle Sur is now known as ‘Isabel la Catolica’), and they lived there for many years. They had a staff of five servants. Dorothy gives a description of the house and the household in her reminiscences.^[2]

Thurston eventually built his own house, in what is now the Zona Rosa, on Calle Genova opposite the Geneve Hotel. I believe the architect was Charles Grove Johnson, who also designed the building that is now the British Embassy in Mexico (follow this link). The children were all initially schooled at home by governesses, but as instability increased in Mexico the older children were sent away to school, but I’m not sure where. I think it may have been England and Canada.

The Mexican Revolution had been rumbling along for some time, and in 1913 it finally started to have major repercussions on Mexico City. During the ‘Decena Tragica’ in February 1913 Thurston and Rosita locked up their house and went to the Hotel Iturbide with their youngest child, Richard (‘Jimmy’), hoping to be able to leave the city by train. An armistice was called, and Thurston packed his wife and youngest son into a carriage with suitcases around them and there was a dash to the station.^[3] The firing started again before they got there, but they were uninjured, and family legend has it that they caught the last train out to Veracruz. There they hoped to catch a boat to the States, and in the end they had to go to Coatzacoalcos to do so, enduring quite a lot of hardship.

I think it must have been in 1913 or early 1914 that they set up home for a while in Ontario, Canada. There are photographs in family albums of the family enjoying time in the Muskoka Lakes. In August 1914 they went on an ill-advised holiday to England, and got caught up in the early days of the First World War. There is a letter from Thurston (their son, the second Thurston) to them dated 18 August 1914, written from Canada. He says ‘it does seem so frightful to think of you going over for a holiday to get into this state of affairs. An Ottawa paper mentioned you the other day as trying to get back to Mexico for business reasons.’^[4]

In January 1915 Geoffrey Hamer, Thurston’s brother, who was holding the fort at La Linera, wrote to Thurston in Vercaruz telling him that he has decided to close the Mill ‘for want of flax’.^[5] In 1919 the Linera was started up again, but this time as a cotton mill rather than a linen mill. There is a letter from Geoffrey Hamer to Thurston dated Jan 15^th 1920 in which he reports that the previous seven months have been busy getting the mill started up again. He says he ‘saw Rose and the children last Sunday’ and she told him that Thurston was expected back in Mexico at the end of the month. It is not clear where Thurston was at the time, but Geoffrey wanted him back for a meeting.^[6]

My grandmother Dorothy used to say that her father was opposed to changing production at La Linera to cotton, because the production of cotton was heavily dominated by French companies in Mexico. She used to say that he was outvoted by his brothers.

There is a letter from Geoffrey Hamer to Thurston in Sept 1920. Thurston was in Tampico and seems to have written to his brother suggesting he could sell some of the Linera’s products there. Reading between the lines it sounds as if Geoffrey is fairly impatient with Thurston, and it is odd that as the eldest brother Thurston is a salesman living off a 2.5% commission while his younger brother is managing the family business.^[7] In any case, the Linera eventually went out of business in the early 1920s.

I don’t know much about Thurston’s later life. I know that Rosita died in 1933, and after her death Thurston lived with his youngest son Jimmy in Mexico City. He died in 1945 at the age of 84, but from what I have heard from family stories he did not have a happy life in his later years.

Michael Johnson

Feb 2017

NOTES

1. Dorothy Golding 2.1
2. Dorothy Golding 2.1, 2.2
3. Dorothy Golding 1.4
4. Letter from Thurston Hamer II dated 18/8/14 from Val Morin, Quebec
5. Letter from Geoffrey Hamer to Thurston dated 4/1/1915 from Mexico DF
6. Letter from Geoffrey Hamer to Thurston dated 15/1/1920 from Mexico DF
7. Letter from Geoffrey Hamer to Thurston dated 28/09/1920 from Mexico DF