by Darrell Webb
In May 2016, Stonehouse History Group received an interesting email from Christina Douglas now living in San Francisco USA. She was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and lived there for many years. Christina was researching her English great-grandfather who owned a brick factory in Buenos Aires, and came across our web site mentioning that Stonehouse Brick and Tile Co. Ltd. supplied the 55,000 bricks for the English Tower in Buenos Aires in 1912/13. She said that, for a moment, she wondered if her ancestor had supplied the bricks for the tower, but Brick & Tile Co. manager A.W. Anderson’s papers state that the bricks came from Stonehouse.
Christina remembered the Torre de los Ingleses (as it was called until it changed after the Falklands War). She did not know that it had been vandalised and bombed at the time of the Falklands War as she was no longer living in Argentina by then. She told us that the government was doing a refurbishment of the tower to commemorate its centenary in 2016 and opening it to the public again.
On hearing this information from Christina, Stonehouse History Group thought it would be a good opportunity to supply a brass plaque to commemorate the tower’s centenary and send it to Buenos Aires (BA) to fix at the base of the tower – from the people of Stonehouse to the people of Buenos Aires.
Darrell Webb suggested that we should request donations for the plaque from our members and due to their generosity, the money was soon raised. We then contacted Christina and asked her for a contact in BA to put forward our idea. She put us in contact with John Hunter who was the Chairman of the English residents in BA, and he thought it a great idea too. We got the plaque made, complete with inscription and SHG logo. It took three months from posting for that plaque to get to them, but it eventually got there.
John Hunter receives the plaque
Darrell with the plaque
The plaque at the Tower