Posts Tagged With : Uruguay
Rejoice for Mr Jackson
Mr Geoffrey Jackson British ambassador to Uruguay, is on his way home.
Safely delivered from eight months incarceration by terrorists.
His ordeal and the sufferings of his family during the months following his kidnapping are impossible to imagine.
What is known is that Mr Jackson and his wife bore the terrible uncertainty of their enforced separation with a faith, dignity, and fortitude that few of us are ever called upon to display.
The British people rejoice in his safe return home.
Joy of Geoffrey Jackson
“My Lovely World”
Portrait of a man back from the living dead, a happy man on his way home.
Geoffrey Jackson, British Ambassador to Uruguay, was “suspended in time and space for eight months” as captive of Tupamaros guerrillas.
“Suspended” was the description of his wife Evelyn, waiting in Sussex for him to fly in today.
Our man in Montevideo was set free at a church, and he stayed to say a thanksgiving prayer before going to hospital for a check-up.
He is not bitter about his ordeal. He tells local reporters in his fluent Spanish, that he is leaving, as his wife left, “still in love with your country in spite of everything.” And adds “You will see the Jacksons here again.”
But the lost months must leave their scars. For Mr Jackson time stopped still on January 8th and did not start again for 245 days and nights.
In solitary in a people’s prison he had scarily a clue of what was going on outside windowless walls. But in those eight suspended months Uruguay itself was in constant crisis, and the rest of the world duly made it’s history in a scatter of headlines: Moonflight, Ashes, Ulster, Decimals, All Blacks, Rolls Royce and Ulster again.
Geoffrey Jackson dozing in a jetliner on the way home last night had a lot of catching up to do.
Foreign secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Hume will probably head the reception committee at Gatwick. Mrs Jackson will of course be there and their banker son Anthony, “thrilled and delighted.” And the ambassadors twin brothers, Seymour and Frank, doubly pleased.
Geoffrey Jackson phoned his wife as soon as he was freed. Mrs Jackson confessed she did the talking and that he could hardly get a word in edgeways. She thanked the press for being “marvellous” and in Montevideo he repeated that.
Doctors said the 56 year old envoy, who has heart trouble was fit to travel. So in blazer and slacks and with a “V” sign, off he flew, via Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Madrid.
“One thing he was quite insistent on,” said his son at the family home on Chelsea’s Cadogan Square, “was that he would continue in the Foreigh Service.”
That is after a long rest in England and a slap up party.
