November 2023
Not surprisingly, images of ‘Santiago Peregrino’, or ‘St. James the Great in the guise of a pilgrim’, are everywhere along the ways to Compostela. You see him carved and painted, full-size and minuscule, medieval and modest (with books, staves and scallop-shells), or baroque (in capes and cavalierish hats). The figure I want to focus on, however, is a little out of the ordinary. For one thing, he’s modern. For another, he’s English: carved in England, by an English sculptor, in an English stone called ‘Ancaster White’, to be exact. How did he get from England to a niche in the façade of Refugio Gaucelmo in Rabanal del Camino? It’s an endearing story, prompted by the recent death of Mary Ivens, who shared with her husband Walter the role of prime mover in the creation of Refugio Gaucelmo.
Back in 1988, two years after Walter cycled to Santiago, Mary wanted to mark his 60th birthday by giving him a small statue of a pilgrim St. James. She spent weeks looking for an artist prepared to accept the commission before finding the sculptor Beauford Linley – who, as Mary put it, ‘knew nothing of St James, but happily created the birthday present’ in a durable resin, using a photo supplied by Mary to guide him.
By 1991, Mary, Walter and the rest of the Confraternity were deep in fundraising for Refugio Gaucelmo. One evening, at one of the many convivial meetings held at the Ivens’s, the idea arose of creating a similar, but larger, statue for the Refuge. Mary went out of the room for a moment, then returned, flourishing her address book, and with it, Beauford Linley’s contact details. Luckily, as she later recalled, ‘he remembered me, and St James’, and within minutes we had an appointment to meet him at his home near Grantham in Lincolnshire.
There followed a sequence of visits, as Walter, Mary and I watched ‘Santiago Peregrino’ gradually emerge from the block of white stone in Beauford’s garden workshop. It’s a long way to Lincolnshire, but the Linleys’ hospitality was reminiscent of the Camino’s. Tea and conversation were enjoyed in equal measure, largely thanks to Mary, whose genuine interest in people made friends everywhere. When at last the metre-high statue was finished, it was bundled into a van and driven, first to Portsmouth and the ferry to Santander, then on to Rabanal. On the day before the official opening of the Refuge, with the help of a crane and a sturdy villager named Jesus, Joe May wrestled ‘Santiago Peregrino’ into the newly created niche. And there he remains.
Mary was a mainstay of the Working Party (and of many later ones): good-humoured and unflappable as she cooked, cleaned, painted, weeded and tended the inevitable cases of nerves as Opening Day approached. At the end of it, with typical thoughtfulness, she found a moment to phone Beauford and assure him that all was well. His reply, as I learned later, was ‘A blessing on you, Mary!’ (words which I and all who knew her now echo).