Eça de Queirós in Newcastle and the impact on his Newcastle novels

Author: Joe Fean

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Year: 2026

Subject Matter: Anglo-Portuguese relations

The Loyal Lusitanian Legion (Part I)

Author: Richard Tennant

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Year: 2026

Subject Matter: Military History

The British in Portugal

The development of railways in Portugal often involved British companies, surveyors, and engineers. As we shall see, relations with the Portuguese authorities were not always harmonious.

In 1845 James Anthony Emslie, who became insolvent for a second time in 1847, suggested the construction of a railway along the Tagus valley towards Spain, and some Portuguese engineers also suggested possible routes. The Portuguese government then signed a contract with a local company that included building a line between Lisbon and the Spanish border. However, the Revolution of Maria da Fonte, followed by the Patuleia civil war, prevented anything from being done at that time.

After conditions began to stabilise, a British businessman, Hardy Hislop, submitted a proposal involving a line to Badajoz in Spain. In 1851 the government issued a tender for the first stage of the line, from Lisbon to Santarém. Hislop, who had established the Central Peninsular Railway Company for this purpose, won the tender in May 1853, beating two other rival consortia. Little is known about Hislop but it appears that he had no prior knowledge of railway construction, having previously had concessions to supply gas in Porto and Coimbra. His consortium included the Waring Brothers, who were engineers and Kitson and Company, who were locomotive manufacturers. One of the competing consortia was also British, headed by Thomas Brassey who had built about one-third of the railways in Britain by 1847 and, by the time of his death in 1870, had built one in every twenty miles of railway in the world. Given this competing expertise, Hislop must have been very persuasive indeed.

Soon after Hislop had been awarded the contract, Queen D. Maria II cut the first sod of earth at a glamorous inauguration ceremony in Xabregas (picture), beginning the work on the first stretch from Lisbon to Carregado, just north of Vila Franca de Xira. The Society has a fading typed document describing the experiences of a Mr. Kerr on that day (possibly Archibald Kerr, a businessman who was to die from yellow fever in 1858). It is unclear whether this was a contemporary piece that had been retyped or something written more recently.

Work on the construction proceeded under the supervision of John Sutherland Valentine from Burton-upon-Trent. Valentine would later obtain a contract for the South-Eastern of Portugal Railway from Vendas Novas to Evora and Beja. That line was laid out and the contract let to a Mr. Edward Price who hailed from Shropshire and had previously worked on railways in Brazil. He completed the work to the government’s satisfaction and was made a Knight Commander of the Order of Christ.

In December 1855, the minister of public works, Fontes Pereira de Melo, rescinded Hislop’s contract, signing a new one with a Mr Shaw and the Waring Brothers. While Hislop was accused of failing to deliver, there were two sides to the story. The government wanted the company to provide its share of the capital in advance, while withholding its own share due to the lack of enthusiasm for the public subscription to raise funds. The government also tried to reduce the agreed payment per kilometre, and would not reimburse increases in prices for timber, over which the company had no control. It was also alleged that land prices were corruptly fixed.

A modified version of a route to Spain was approved for the Shaw and Waring Brothers contract. This had been surveyed by Thomas Rumball, who had previously worked with Sir Marc Isambard Brunel on the Thames Tunnel and was to work in Portugal and its colonies for forty years, also being made a Knight Commander of the Order of Christ. Despite continuing conflicts over payments, contractual obligations and, on one occasion, government armed guards seizing rolling stock, the first official journey on the Waring Brothers’ line from Lisbon to Carregado took place on 28 October 1856. The inauguration, which involved the royal family, was not without its hiccups: one of the locomotives, built in Manchester by Beyer Peacock & Company, broke down at Sacavém and the other therefore had to make two trips to get everyone back to the capital after the lavish celebrations.

The fate to befall Hislop was the first of many cases where railway contracts in Portugal were rescinded. These included those of the British entrepreneur and railway developer, Samuel Morton Peto, who contracted to build a line between Lisbon and Porto but failed to make any progress. It is likely that he was working with Sir John Fowler, the engineer responsible for London’s Metropolitan Railway, the world’s first underground line, as the Society’s library has a copy of a map of the proposed route between Lisbon and Porto, with Fowler’s name on it. A line to the Algarve contracted to a British consortium was also not completed. Additionally, Joseph Bleck, recently arrived from England, received a concession in 1878 to build and operate a railway from Lagos to Vila Real de Santo António in the Algarve. This also never came to fruition.

However, it was not only the British who failed to deliver. In 1854, the French businessman, Claranges Lucotte, who had earlier constructed a suspension bridge over the Douro at Porto, contracted to open a railway between Lisbon and Sintra with branches to Colares and Cascais, but he did not begin construction. Nevertheless, despite Lucotte’s failure in this case, accumulated bad experiences of working with British companies, probably more to do with financial rather than technical limitations, led the Portuguese government to initially turn to French rather than British companies for railway development, before Portuguese companies, such as that run by Henrique Burnay, became prominent.

Book Review

The Return, a novel by Dulce Maria Cardoso, describes the experiences of over half a million Portuguese citizens in the Portuguese colonies who fled their homes after the Carnation Revolution, which led to those colonies rapidly being declared independent. In 1975, some 4,000 men, women and children were landing daily in Lisbon, arriving in a country totally unprepared to cope with such an influx of so-called colonists, who in many cases had been born in Africa. Cardoso, at the time aged 11, was one of those seeking refuge in the Motherland, one of the retornados as they were called by the government. There is clearly a biographical element to the novel, although it is written from the perspective of a young boy.

Rui, the hero, is an unreliable narrator of what is happening around him for he understands little of the world at large. But for every racist comment he makes about life in Angola, another character in the story undermines his opinion and shows that reality is a very complex issue to comprehend and only time will put events into a truer perspective. Young Rui, in limbo between childhood and adulthood, forced to become a man in ways that might seem shocking to us today, is personifying the limbo of his-there-in-Angola and his-here-in-the-Motherland, Portugal.

At the beginning of the book, safely in Portugal with his mother and sister but without his father, he reminisces on life in Angola: his mother, father, sister, dog, friends, the father's workmen, the neighbours, the shop-keepers, the girls he fancied, the cherries that girls were supposed to wear as earrings in the Motherland (try doing that here with a pitanga fruit, he jokes) in a continuous stream of consciousness that is both very touching and very disturbing. We learn of his mother's mental illness; her rose garden; the half-packed suitcases; the gunfire and the bullets; his father putting down the dog and setting fire to his eleven trucks so the Angolans couldn’t use them; and the gun that he was not allowed to have even when the Africans went around with one in each hand, threatening people indiscriminately.

Tension mounts as we come to realise that all the clichés still in use today about Blacks and Whites are being used here to depict a very crude and brutal reality in a city progressively abandoned to rioters and vandals; with squatters who have taken over the houses of the Portuguese who have already left; shops boarded up then abandoned by their owners, fleeing by road, by boat, by plane, and on foot, something that Rui's father was not yet prepared to do.

When soldiers arrive outside the hero's home, drunk and drugged, his father tries to reason with them, offering them more beer and cigarettes but, realising that it is too late for words, then turning his son round and half-dragging the boy back to the front-door of the house, both expecting to be shot in the back, saying: “Let's go home, son”.

Finally deciding to leave Angola, they make their way to the airport, but the father is arrested before departure. In Portugal they are among the lucky ones, being accommodated in a 5-star hotel in Estoril. Lucky, even though it is one room per family, the food is atrocious and they have to queue for ages to get it. Four chairs to a table; the empty one for their father. The hotel’s paying customers are allocated the top floor and a better restaurant, but few people are visiting Estoril so soon after the Revolution. We learn about the role of the Instituto de Apoio ao Retorno de Nacionais (IARN), which Rui said was “more generous than God” as it gave every adult 5,000 Escudos.

Letters are sent to Angola, phone calls placed to their old home, but there is no news from their father. Rui finds other father figures. In an often-amusing way, the author uses him to provide information about life in Portugal in the mid-1970s as civil war threatened, very different from the more traditional lifestyle followed by the Portuguese in Africa. The Retornados are looked down upon by the mainlanders, the local girls won’t go near the boys in the hotel, and Rui can’t understand why they are treated in such a disrespectful and discriminatory manner. We come to understand what a family, uprooted from a home and a land, must go through to survive, to feel once more part of the society.

Rui feels constantly the fear of ending up on the street having to look after his mother and sister. He dreams of taking his family to America. His future brightens when he is engaged by vigilantes to be part of the night-teams guarding the packing cases of returnees that stretch for miles along the Lisbon docks. No crates can be moved until the owners have a home to go to. His mother is not happy, believing that he should study. She has no skills that would get her a job and sells her few jewels. Eventually her husband turns up, unwilling to talk about what happened to him or why he has scars on his torso. He dreams of starting a concrete building-block factory. “You can’t build a nation without concrete”. But Rui thinks the dream should be to buy tickets to fly across the Atlantic.

IARN closed in 1976 and the support to the retornados disappeared. They had to accept the housing they were offered. Jobs were hard to come by. People with senior positions in Angola or Mozambique became labourers or gardeners. Although they were gradually accepted into the community, those with long memories still know who they were. Where are they today? Perhaps on the bus or train sitting next to you?

Although there are several non-fiction books on the topic, Cardoso’s wonderful fictional rendering of the lives of the people that went through this experience make one wish that she had written a sequel, charting their experiences after they left the hotel. She brings home to recent arrivals in Portugal, such as many members of the Society, the reality of this difficult time in the country’s history. And let us not forget that the experiences of the retornados are just a drop in the ocean of those of the 117 million refugees in the world today.

The Return, by Dulce Maria Cardoso. Translated by Angel Gurria-Quintana. Quercus Publishing. Isbn 9780857054364. Around €15.

N. T.

50 Years Ago

April 1976 commenced with an announcement in the Anglo-Portuguese News (APN) that the next meeting of the British Historical Society of Portugal would be on 22 April at the Royal British Club at 6.30 pm when Denis Brass B.A., Ph. D (London) would be giving a talk entitled “Historical Links between Portugal and Bristol” with particular reference to Eça de Queiroz. Supper was to be served after the lecture.

The front-page article of the APN of 23 April featured a summary of the new Constitution of Portugal, which was promulgated by H.E Francisco de Costa Gomes, President of the Republic, on 2 April. The APN commented: “It is difficult to review a constitution (this one has 312 articles) so little more can be done than to pick out sundry clauses likely to be of interest to our readers.”

The following edition of 7 May contained an article reporting on the 25 April 1976 General Election for the legislative assembly of the Republic. The article commented that this election was conducted with, if anything, even more decorum that that held in the previous year to elect the Constituent Assembly. There was no conspicuous number of policemen and the army, though “alerted” in barracks, was not called out to put down rowdy behaviour such as had taken place at pre-election meetings.

The results were:

Socialists (PS)                              106 seats

Popular Democratic Pary (PPD) 71 seats

Social Democratic Center (CDS) 41 seats

Communists (PCP)                        40 seats

Portuguese Democratic Union      1 Seat

The result of the election was really a stalemate. It was noticeable that there was a growing sympathy for middle-of- the-road parties. The next step was the election in June of the President of the Republic who would choose the next Prime Minister and ask him to form a government. Till then, the present Government continued to function.

A rather prominent tomb-stone announcement appeared among the social pages of the 21 May edition of the APN. It was headed “QUEEN’S BIRTHDAY PARTY” and informed readers of a decision taken by the British Government some months ago that in future the official celebration of the birthday of Her Majesty the Queen, outside the United Kingdom, was to take a different form and be on a more modest scale than in the past. The reception at the British Embassy would consist of a vin d’honneur before lunch on 15 June, to which would be invited leading Portuguese personalities and members of the Diplomatic Corps. The only celebration involving British subjects in the Lisbon area would be the traditional one organized by the British Community Council at St. Julian’s School in Carcavelos on 18 June, to be attended by the ambassador.

An announcement in the edition of 4 June stated that the British Community Council would be holding a Garden Party at St. Julian’s School in honour of H.M the Queen’s birthday on Friday 18th June from 5.30 to 7.30 pm. This would be organized by the WRVS. Finally, in the edition of 18 June, readers were advised that the Annual General Meeting of the British Historical Society would take place on 23 June 23 at the Royal British Club. Following the meeting, Dr. Carlos Estorninho O.B.E would give a talk on Macau, to be followed by supper. All those interested in the history of Anglo-Portuguese relations and the historical links between the two countries were invited to attend.

E. G. 

Members' News

Our chairman, Edward Godfrey, was invited to participate in the 4th Edition of the Atlantic Conferences held in Câmara de Lobos, Madeira on 20 February. These conferences are a joint initiative of the Regional Government of Madeira, the City Council of Câmara de Lobos and the Institute for Political Studies of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa. The central theme was “Winston Churchill, Liberal-Democracy and the Euro-Atlantic Alliance”. The final event was the Winston Churchill Memorial Dinner held at the Pestana Grand Hotel, Funchal, where Edward delivered an after-dinner speech entitled “Two Lives in Contrast – Churchill and de Gaulle”.

Following on from Angus Blair's talk on spies in Lisbon at our annual lunch, members might like to know that the BBC has issued a short podcast on Duško Popov, called The playboy spy who inspired James Bond. 

As many of you will know, Eduardo Gomes has been giving a series of lectures on Anglo-Portuguese History under the title of the Cascais Memorial Lectures. Recordings of these presentations, together with the slides used by Eduardo, are now available by clicking here.

Members Rui Moura, Edward Godfrey, Mark Crathorne and Ricardo Sciolti were invited as guests to the 67th anniversary commemorations of the Directorate of Military History, which was held at the Museu Militar on 23 March. The Chief and Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff hosted the event, accompanied by the Director of Military History and Culture. Over 100 Army officers were present, including three from Brazil.

One of the main points of the agenda was the signing of an agreement celebrating the sponsorship by four British associations to finance in its entirety an enterprising project organised by the Arquivo Histórico Militar to classify nearly 6,000 digitalised records of 320 British officers who served in the Portuguese Army in various roles during the Peninsular War (1807-1814) and later the Portuguese Civil War (1828-1834). The first stage of this work has already been completed and will soon be available to researchers. The associations involved are the Waterloo Association, the British Historical Society of Portugal, the Friends of the British Cemetery, Elvas and the Friends of the Lines of Torres Vedras. The resultant information will be made available online in open-access, which will be of great value to not only the members of the four donor associations, but also to researchers and the public in general. 

Inspired by an article by Carol Rankin in our 2009 Annual Report, our editor Andrew Shepherd recently visited the "Portuguese Fireplace" in the New Forest. His photograph can be seen here. Unfortunately, the plaque that Carol quotes in her article is now missing.

Answer to Quiz: The line between Cascais and Lisbon was the first to be electrified in Portugal in 1926, shortly before the new station at Cais do Sodré was completed. In 1945, the Portuguese Government decided to end the system of separate company franchises and by 1951 the entire network was run by Comboios de Portugal (CP), with the exception of the Cascais line, which did not become part of CP until 1976.