 A
wandering dog, ash trees and Don Martín. He is in his seventies,
and lives in Villa Piaggio, San Martín, one of the most popular
neighbourhoods of great Buenos Aires. Don Martín, a retired
worker from the metallurgic industry, still remembers Maestra
Catalina. When he was about eight years old, his parents
wished to enrol him in the ‘English School of San Martín’,
the school founded by Kathleen Milton Boyle. They wanted to
give him the best possible education, but the tuition was
too high for them, so Ms Boyle waived it. At 76, Don Martín,
originally from Spain, still reads out loud his English copy
of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's Travels. He is one of
the more or less 3,000 students who were educated by Maestra
Catalina, a pioneer of teaching English in South America.
 It
is a suburban landscape, with many industries who are today
in poor economic conditions. Lower middle class population.
It is also the place where in the late 1970’s and early 80’s,
shameful events occurred during the Dirty War. One of the
clandestine prisons used by the military forces was located
in the nearby neighbourhood. Torture and slaughtering are
still on the memory of the people. Most of the neighbours
wish to forget the ominous presence of the soldiers and the
absence of their victims. However, they are willing to remember
Maestra Catalina.
We read
in a 1931 letter to the editor of a Socialist newspaper: ‘I
am a member of a poor workers’ family, and I worked since
I was twelve years old. I am indebted to the generous heart
of my dear teacher Missis Boyle, who helped me to learn
some English. This high-minded and honest lady, whom I admire
and respect, even got me my first job’ (Trabajo, 2
October 1931, letter from Manuel Ramírez). 'Thanks to her
personal recommendations', according to other newspaper, 'many
of her students managed to get very good jobs in the British
companies', many of which had offices in Buenos Aires (El
Noticioso, San Martín, 25 October 1962). Now Catalina
is remembered by a street in Villa Piaggio and a bronze bust
in the entrance of San Martín cemetery.
 On
18 October 1869, Kathleen Milton Jones was born in a house
of N° 54 Rathgar Road, Dublin. She was a member of a Church
of Ireland family, who later sent her to England to study
literature in the University of Cambridge. Her mother was
Elizabeth Dowling, and her grandfather, James Dowling, was
a Surveyor in his Majesty’s Customs. Kathleen's father, Francis
P. Jones, was a Civil Engineer. He was employed in the Government
Office of the General Valuation, and died in 1886. Three years
later, when she was twenty, her family emigrated to Rio de
Janeiro following the late nineteenth-century stream of emigration
from Ireland to almost every part of the world. In Rio, she
taught English, Music and Arts in the ‘Colegio Americano Brasileiro’,
but a yellow fever outbreak forced the family to travel southwards.
Two cousins, John and Robert Hallahan, sons of the Rev. John
Hallahan from Castletown, Berehaven (Co. Cork), were working
as medical doctors in the British Hospital at Buenos Aires.
They received Kathleen’s mother and her four children in Buenos
Aires.
 Once
in the River Plate, where they arrived in 1891, Kathleen resumed
her teaching profession. In 1894, the Colegio Inglés
(later renamed San Patricio), was founded in San Martín,
open to students of any origin.
Five
years later, Kathleen married Andrew T. S. Boyle, a former
Major in the British Army and an engineer, who founded the
San Martín Boy Scouts group. Maj. Boyle was born in 1844 on
a war ship near the shores of north-west India. He went to
the school in England and then entered the Royal Military
School at Sand Hutton. In 1888, serving under the celebrated
Connaught Rangers 88th Regiment – The Devil's
Own – he was promoted to Major. During his appointment
in India, he received eight proud wounds, which he would carry
during the rest of his life. Andrew Boyle, who was also Church
of Ireland religion, became Catholic after a cholera break
in India. As a family member recalls, ‘all the ministers left
with their families and the Catholic priests remained. That
made him change.’ He retired from the Army and was engaged
by a British company with businesses in Argentina. Andrew
Boyle worked in several Argentine cities and his last executive
position was in the Ferrocarril Buenos Aires al Pacífico.
Kathleen and Andrew married in the Anglican
Church in Buenos Aires. She later converted to the Roman Catholic
church and they both remarried and re-baptised their children
in the new faith.
From the time of its opening, the Colegio
Inglés was a laboratory to test modern educational techniques.
Kathleen managed to implement new methods to teach English
as a foreign language and, according to the examination results,
there was a significant improvement of the students’ knowledge
and enthusiasm. Her motivation schemes, including awards to
the best students, prompted the children to work harder. When
the number of students grew and she was not able to teach
to everybody, she hired qualified teachers with diplomas from
prestigious Argentine schools. A newspaper of the 1930’s argues
that ‘the awards should be given to Mrs. Boyle, whose commitment,
effort and determination have been proven during long years
of full-time dedication to her worthy service.’
 However,
Kathleen works were not limited to education. Many Sundays,
the Major of San Martín received her request to visit the
prisoners in order to take them cigarettes and magazines.
The three Boyle girls, Catalina, Agatha and Ruth, wandered
several times with her mother through the poor streets distributing
supplies to destitute families. One day, when Kathleen learnt
that a Chinese person had died from an infectious disease
and in appalling circumstances, she was the only one with
the courage to get into his room, wash the corpse, and prepare
it for the burial. These examples chosen among those cited
by newspapers in her obituary are an expression of her qualities.
I wonder if these simple and concrete actions are not a little
outdated today. Does it look unfashionable to spend our Sunday
time on aiding hungry kids or poor immigrants? Nevertheless,
solidarity is a primary duty for individuals like you and
me, and like Kathleen.
As a citizen, the works of Catalina
were exemplar. As a woman, her role in her developing society
was precursory. At that time, Argentina was a country whose
the society was growing dramatically. Its post-colonial bourgeois
structure was changing to an ethnic melting pot of immigrants
from disparate cultures in Europe and the Middle East. On
4 August 1932, an unknown reader sent a letter to the Editor
of The Standard, the newspaper founded in 1861 by the Irish
estanciero Edward Thomas Mulhall and targeted at the
English-speaking community. Signed by Miss Justice,
the letter argued against the quite chauvinistic perspective
that in order to relieve unemployment, working women should
give up their jobs in favour of men. In her letter, Miss
Justice managed to re-focus a gender issue on its actual
social context: a proposed 10% cut on salaries should be applied
only to those with higher income, not to low-paid workers
with large families. ‘Why have they any business to have large
families? I have heard this question discussed by men with
large salaries and only one or two children at most. Who is
more to blame, the rich man with his only son or the poor
man with his 8 or 9 children?’ She ended her appeal to ‘big
salaried men: sacrifice half of your salaries or more if necessary
and see that those working under you earn a living
wage, and that their miserable little pittance is no further
encroached upon’ (The Standard, 4 August 1932). The mystery
writer, Miss Justice, was indeed Kathleen Boyle. Shouldn’t
contemporary executives and professionals accept her appeal
to generosity and solidarity?
 Catalina's
bronze bust in San Martín has a peripatetic history itself.
To honour her memory, a memorial committee submitted a proposal
to the City Hall to place Catalina’s sculpture - a
work of the artist Francis de la Perutta - in a grass island
in 9 de Julio at Mitre, in the heart of the city. On 20 April
1944, the bust was unveiled before a crowd, and many of Catalina’s
acts of charity and her 48 years dedicated to the education
were recalled. However, in 1952 the image of the Irish English
teacher vanished: the grass island was torn up to build a
new approach road to the suburb. The workers placed it on
a municipal storehouse under the bandstand in San Martín’s
main square. Catalina's former students rallied again
and obtained a new location for the bust. In 1956, it was
placed at the San Martín cemetery… though people thought it
was Evita and would either shower flowers or throw rocks at
it!
Catalina
remains an example to all of us. Being originally Church of
Ireland and coming from an urban middle-class family from
Dublin, she was not the typical Irish girl who emigrated to
Argentina. The street in Villa Piaggio and the bronze portrait
of a rather stern-looking woman are, as a Buenos Aires Herald
reporter wrote in 1961, the remainders of 'who was, perhaps,
the kindliest woman the city of San Martín has ever commemorated.'
She died
at 72, on 27 October 1941.
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