Geoffrey Hamer’s family

Geoffrey Hamer was born in 1878, the ninth child of Job Hamer and Mary Hamer nee Moseley. Mary was 37 years old when he was born, and she died when he was only five years old.

We don’t know exactly when Geoffrey went to Mexico, but he did become involved in his father Job’s linen business, and eventually became the general manager of the business. Job Hamer moved from Mexico City to Cuernavaca around the year 1900, and Geoffrey (who was only 22 or 23 at the time) seems to have been very involved in running La Linera.

This is a story told by Nancy Hamer, Geoffrey’s granddaughter. “Geoff would come to Cuernavaca on weekends to “rendir cuentas” [‘settle accounts’ or ”report on the business’] with Job and on one occasion, missed the train to Cuernavaca. He was at the Mexico City station and didn’t want to go home, and remembered that the Turnbull family lived in Puebla, so he took the next train there and looked the family up.” The result of this unplanned journey was that he met Eleanor Turnbull. They fell in love and got married. Nancy goes on to say “My grandparents did not leave the country during the revolution, but did send their two older sons, Walter (my father) and Reggie to Military school in San Antonio. I imagine the younger children stayed with their parents in Mexico City, where at some point, my grandmother took in boarders. They were mostly single Englishmen or couples known to them.”

Here are some more reminiscences of Nancy Hamer:

“Eleanor Turnbull was my grandmother and lived on a big hacienda in Puebla (until the revolution, of course). Her mother’s sister was married to a Zapata, who had the hacienda next to theirs, I believe, and my grandmother, whom we called Machula, (other members of the family called her Nellie and her children called her Linda), wanted very much to fit into the Mexican part of the family, so she re-christened herself Leonor and became a Roman Catholic and of course, spoke perfect Spanish. I have a copy of a travel log she kept when she and some other members of the family went to England for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and then a tour of Europe. Mostly it`s about where they stayed and where they ate, but I am re-reading it after many years and hope to find more interesting stuff. I think she was just sixteen, so not very mature.”

“My father worked at The Bank of Montreal in Mexico City and was charged with helping to make final arrangements in closing down the branch here in Mexico. During this time he used to go to Zochimilco very early in the mornings to practice rowing at the British Boating Club, and became the undefeated rowing champion of Mexico. He then went to work for the bank in Montreal, where he met my mother, who was studying at McGill and joined a rowing club there, too. They married in San Antonio (which was more or less half-way from Ontario to Mexico City, so that the two sides of the family could attend without going all the way to the other location). They lived in Mexico City where my sister Eleanor (Nina) was born, moved to Halifax where my brother Stuart was born and then my father joined the United Fruit Company, probably thanks to his uncle Walter E. Turnbull (Nellie’s brother) who was vice-president. Walter’s brothers Reggie and Herbert also worked for the UFCo. Walter was first sent to La Lima, Honduras, where I was born, then the Dominican Republic (during the time of Trujillo), Jamaica, Guatemala and finally Costa Rica, where his brother Reggie had been General Manager but was killed in a plane crash. We were there for about 11 years, during which time my brother, sister and myself were shipped off to boarding school in Canada. Interestingly, Nina and I went to Havergal, where apparently other members of the family had studied and Stuart attended Trinity College School. In 1957 my father accepted a job in Ecuador as they offered him a salary he could not turn down, but after two years decided to come back to Mexico where he started working as General Manager of Cameron Iron Works in Mexico. They built a weekend house in Cuernavaca where they moved when my father retired years later.”
(sourced from emails sent by Nancy Hamer to Michael Johnson in June 2019)