News - Friendship with Mexico Revived
University of Exeter press release
Cornwall's historic links with Mexico were cemented for the future in a meeting on the Tremough Campus, Penryn, on Monday 24 November. The University of Exeter welcomed officials from the Mexican State of Hidalgo to its Tremough Campus.
A party of senior officials, including the Mayor of Pachuca, Omar Fayad Meneses, and the State Director of Tourism, Aunard del la Rocha, met with staff from the University's Camborne School of Mines (CSM), Institute of Cornish Studies and School of Biosciences. They had a tour of the Campus facilities, including the cutting-edge mineral analysis tool QEMSCAN and CSM's museum, which has an extensive geology collection, including items from Mexico. The visit included a display of a 3-dimensional underground laser survey of a mine in Mexico recently carried out by James Jobling-Purser of CSM using his remote surveying vehicle.
Professor Frances Wall, Head of CSM, presented the Mayor of Pachuca with a CSM shield, which will go on display in Pachuca's town hall. The Mexican delegates presented the University with a copy of a specially produced book on the history of the links and the town hall of Pachuca, formerly the house of Frank Rule who originated from Troon near Camborne.
The meeting was part of a visit to Cornwall, organised by Richard Williams of the Cornwall Mexico Cultural Society, which included meetings with local people with family links, dialogue with councillors and officials in Cornwall and visits to sites of interest. The aim of the visit was to revive links with the State of Hidalgo, a destination for great numbers of Cornish people in the 1800s, who left to work in the silver mines around Pachuca and Real del Monte. Many people living in the region have Cornish names and the influx of Cornish people in the nineteenth century is often cited as the beginning of the industrial revolution in Mexico. A visit by Cornish people from the Association to Mexico took place earlier this year when the towns of Redruth and Real del Monte signed a twinning agreement.
Professor Frances Wall, Head of Camborne School of Mines, officially welcomed the guests. She said: "CSM has its roots firmly in Cornwall but our reach is international and we have good friends and contacts overseas. Cornwall has long-standing links with the State of Hidalgo and this week those links have been revived. This visit was a great opportunity for us to build on the past by showing our guests how we are helping to set the agenda for the future of mining."
Dr Jon Bennett, Research Associate and industrial co-ordinator at CSM, whose great-grandparents are buried in the Cornish cemetery at Real del Monte, said: "Meeting people from the region of Mexico that we have talked about so much as a family and looking at the book they have produced has been a moving experience for me. I hope very much that we can establish a genuine exchange based upon mining and academic contact that will build our friendship from the nineteenth century migration into a fruitful twenty-first century collaboration."
Carleen Kelemen, Director of the Objective One and Convergence Partnership Office, added: "Visits such as this to the Combined Universities in Cornwall are extremely important as they encourage preconditions for international trade through exchange of knowledge."
The £100 million Tremough Campus is a Combined Universities in Cornwall initiative -of which the University of Exeter and University College Falmouth are two of the founding partners. It is funded mainly by the European Union (Objective One), the South West Regional Development Agency, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, with support from Cornwall County Council. Set in 70 acres of countryside, but close to the waterside towns of Penryn and Falmouth, the campus offers a lively student community. The University of Exeter now offers degrees in Biology, Modern Celtic and Cornish Studies, English, Geology, Geography, History, Law, Mining Engineering, Politics and Renewable Energy on the Tremough Campus, which has expanded rapidly as part of the Combined Universities in Cornwall initiative.