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PC 499 Évora, Portugal

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Évora in the centre, Lisbon to its west.

A snippet cut from The Times’ Travel Section over a year ago says that ‘Portugal’s south-central Alentejo (note 1) region is an underrated spot for fine red wine and ‘porco preto’, that’s pork from acorn-fed black pigs. The walled city of Évora is a charming base from which to explore. Between outings to hilltop Monsaraz and along the Alentejo Wine Route, queue to try that pork inside Botequim de Mouraria or to scoff typically simple local dishes such as dogfish soup at rustic Fialho. Évora also has temples and a skull-filled Chapel of Bones to explore, while its markets offer ewe’s milk cheese.’

The DK Guide adds: “The town rose to prominence under the Romans and flourished throughout the Middle Ages as a centre of learning and the arts. It was a popular residence of Portugues kings but fell out of favour after Spain’s annexation of Portugal in 1580. Its influence waned further when the Jesuit university closed in the 18th century.”  Today in the C21st, students once again throng the streets, joined by visitors to this UNESCO World Heritage Site.

So, we went! Évora is about an hour’s drive east of Lisbon; by noon the temperature had reached 39C and it was baking! We had rooms in the Pousada dos Lóios, a hotel converted from the old Monastery of St John the Evangelist, which had been founded in 1485. Today the hotel’s bedrooms are the old ‘cells’ of ‘Cónegas Regrantes’ – although my little suite suggested there was a little luxury permitted!

Our first lunch was in a small restaurant, Luar de Janeiro, somewhere in the maze of tiny streets below the hotel.

I am not a fan of Alentejo food, or most Portuguese food for that matter, but I had to try the little ham, but not its accompaniment of goat, cheese and garlic rice.

Near our hotel stood the Roman Temple, thought to have been built in the 2nd or 3rd century AD.

In daylight it’s a glorious reminder of the deep history evident on the European continent. By night it’s altogether different; more ethereal.

The nearby square has some marble sculpture. I thought this was interesting:

I didn’t find out its creator and wasn’t sure whether the crack splitting it in two was intentional or not!

Some of the shops nestling down Évora’s little narrow streets sell cork products, for the Alentejo region in Portugal is the world’s largest producer of cork; for example, 30 million corks for the wine industry, per day. Hats, bags, purses, waterproofs, those cork mats for the kitchen and even a cork postcard!

Cork trees cover some 7000 sq kms of Portugal. Harvesting cork is a skilled business; mature trees have their bark stripped off every ten years or so, leaving the exposed wood raw and red. 

Most shops shut during the heat of the afternoon but the guide had highlighted a C16th church, the Igreja da Graça, on the top of which are ‘four muscular figures supporting globes. They are quaintly nicknamed Os Meninos’ (The Children). Despite the temperature, (Note 2) I had to go and have a look. The church is undergoing a major restoration and is covered in plastic sheeting. Fortunately, the authorities had stuck a photograph of what it looks like on the outside and I was able to identify Os Meninos; sort of ‘boys will be boys’?

You can make out the four old men, two left and two on the right

Later, back in the wonderfully cool hotel, we had dinner. I chose the ‘stewed peas and Alentejo tomatoes’ as a starter …. more out of curiosity than anything else, although when Nuno the waiter asked whether I wanted the poached egg with it, I was slightly nonplussed; I declined. However, I was completely gobsmacked to be served a bowl of lukewarm soup, complete with bits of pork!

‘Lost in Translation’

I am seriously not one to take photographs of what I am eating although this … took the biscuit! Their ‘orange pie’ for dessert was not a pie!

Beside the C15th church of São Francisco sits the Capela dos Ossos.

The largest and oldest ‘Chapel of Bones’ in Portugal, built in the first half of the C17th, is a space ‘that can only be understood within the context of the Catholic spirituality that originated it.’  The chapel holds the skeletal remains of some 5000 monks and others associated with the church … and has a rather strange invitation at its entrance: ‘Nos ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos’ (‘we bones that are here await yours’)

I found it very, very odd, strangely mesmeric, these skulls and bones artistically laid out. I can imagine the chat between those who created it: ‘José, have you got a small skull, just need one to fill a hole?’ or ‘Carlos, do I place the leg bones in a fan shape, or shortest to longest?’ – just seeing them as pieces in some macabre display.

European walled cities have always held a fascination for me, be it St Malo in the northwestern corner of France, Dubrovnik in Croatia or Kotor in Montenegro. Carcassonne in southern France remains on my bucket list.

In Évora fragments remain of the inner Roman walls, whilst the C14th outer wall is very much in evidence, made in the 1640s into a major fortification. 

Water was carried into the town by the aqueduct, built between 1531 and 1537.

Today it’s used by the local water company to pipe water into the town; some 9kms of the old aqueduct still survive. Finally, you remember that marble sculpture near the hotel? With the sunset behind it ….

…. it reminded me of the lines from the song ‘As Time Goes By’ by Louis Armstrong ……. ‘a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh, the fundamental things apply, as time goes by.’  

Évora? Enchanting!

Richard 10th July 2026

Hove

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

Note 1 The Romans valued this land ‘beyond the Tagus’ – além Tejo – for its wheatfields; grain was exported all over their empire.

Note 2 Only ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun’ wrote Sir Noel Coward (1899 – 1973)

PC 493 Force 136 (1)

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In my postcard ‘Five days in May’ (PC 484 March 2026) about my time as Battery Commander of 43 Air Defence Battery (Lloyd’s Company) Royal Artillery, I mentioned that my stepfather, Philip Thomson-Walker, had spent just over two months of 1945 in the Malayan jungle as part of Force 136. As I scribbled the note (Note 1), I thought it could become a stand-alone postcard, about Force 136. So here it is; actually, the first of two!

My divorced mother met Philip skiing in St Moritz in 1954 and one weekend he came to stay in the old servants’ quarters where we lived, on the top floor of No 15 Royal Crescent in Bath. As an eight-year-old I remember his pyjamas were made from an old camouflage silk parachute. They married and moved to Balcombe, some twenty miles north of Brighton, in 1955.

Like many of his generation he didn’t talk about the recent World War and his part in it, although the occasional nightmare and his bad back, injured in some hard parachute landing, were no doubt personal reminders, but somehow I knew he’d been part of Force 136, whatever that was! He died in 1993 aged 81. In 2002, some months before my mother died, I wrote to the SOE (Special Operations Executive (note 2)) Advisor in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, at that time in the Old Admiralty Building on Whitehall. My enquiry was extremely timely, as nine days afterwards the office was officially closed, but Duncan Stuart (an SOE Advisor) came up with most of the information I needed to fill in the enormous blanks in my knowledge of ‘Uncle’ Philip’s wartime experiences.

He graduated from Clare College, Cambridge with a MA in Mechanical Sciences in 1934. On 2nd September 1939, the day before war was declared, he was granted an emergency commission in the Royal Engineers. Three years later he was posted to the Special Operations Executive where he used his technical knowledge to enhance SOE’s equipment and operational capability. In September 1944 he joined Force 133 which had responsibilities for operations in The Balkans. The Military Mission to Jugoslavia (sic) was set up to support the partisans led by Josip Tito, who would become President of Yugoslavia.

Second Lieutenant Royal Engineers September 1939 (aged 29)

Based on the island of Vis, opposite Split on the now Croatian coast, Tito’s partisans were assisted by the author Sir Fitzroy Maclean (See PC 391 Tales of Croatia June 2024). The latter was allowed to purchase a house in Korčula, not normally allowed for a foreigner.

In February 1945 Philip attended a JEDBURGH course in Market Harborough. JEDBURGHs were originally 3-man parachute teams first used for post-D-Day operations, to liaise with and to reinforce resistance groups in France. The three men were of British, French and American nationalities, one the leader, another the deputy and the third the radio operator. By now an acting Major, Philip was posted (see photograph) to Malaya as Patrol Leading Officer in Force 136.

Malaya had been overrun in December 1941 by the Japanese Army, which also took Singapore the following February. Before Philip joined, a Force 136 officer, Captain Freddie Spencer Chapman, had succeeded in carrying out offensive operations against the occupying Japanese for over three years, with the aid of fighters from the Chinese Communist guerillas. For more than a year and a half, he and two other members of Force 136, John Davis and Richard Broome, had lived in jungle camps with Chinese Communist guerrillas, traveling long distances through dense and difficult jungle, while often suffering high fevers caused by malaria, beri-beri, black-water fever, tick typhus and pneumonia. Somehow, they had survived. In his book ‘The Jungle is Neutral’ (1950) Chapman attributed his survival to the ‘basic rule that the jungle is neutral, that one should view the surroundings as neither good nor bad’.

A photograph of Freddie Chapman from Philip’s album

Although the top command of Force 136 were British officers and civilians, most of those it trained and employed as agents were indigenous to the regions in which they operated. Burmese, Indians and Chinese were trained as agents for missions in Burma, for example. British and other European officers and NCOs went behind the lines to train resistance movements. Former colonial officials and men who had worked in these countries for various companies knew the local languages, the peoples and the land and so became invaluable to SOE.

Philip’s black & white photograph of the ‘green hell of Malaya’. It was into this inhospitable landscape that Philip parachuted on 10th July 1945.

A year after the end of the war, Philip was made a Member of the British Empire (MBE). His citation gives an indication of what he did in Malaya:

“Major Thomson-Walker dropped into Selangor on 10th July 1945 to take command of a patrol established by Flight Lieutenant Robertson. His organisation and planned dispositions for offensive action were exemplary, and his ability and attention to detail under the rough and ready conditions of jungle life were exceptional. In covering the main North-South railway from Kuala Lumpur to Ipoh, he provided much pre-surrender intelligence on enemy troop movements, the value of which was enhanced by the fact that it was received from an area directly inland from the invasion beaches. As an organiser in Selangor, Major Thomson-Walker was outstanding amongst the Force 136 Liaison Officers, and the quality of his work is reflected in the praise accorded to his patrol on the occasion of an inspection in Klang on 11 September 1945 by the Supreme Allied Commander.”

Philip’s photograph album is full of grainy black & white photographs from his time in Force 136. First up, an indication that he didn’t land where he should have done.

To be continued …….

Richard 29th May 2026

Hove

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

Note 1 On a trip to Belize I spent one night in the jungle: “Night comes early, and it was noisy, wet, extremely humid and hot.”

Note 2 The Special Operations Executive was raised in July 1940 on the orders of the Prime Minister Winston Churchill; its sole aim was to “set Europe ablaze”. It operated behind enemy lines to conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance, while aiding local resistance movements against Axis powers. 

Often referred to as Churchill’s “underground army,” the SOE’s unconventional warfare tactics and operatives profoundly impacted the war through a variety of dangerous, covert operations.