Mad dogs and Englishmen ...

I’ve been giving my opinion recently of people who play dangerous games with bulls and my friend Colin has been having some correspondence about the Galician attitude to bullfighting. Well, it seems that la corrida is the thing to be interested in at the moment for I have just found an article in the Guardian online about an Englishman who does rather more than just run with the bulls in Pamplona.

At the age of 67, most Spanish bullfighters have hung up their sword and cape and have consigned their traje de luces to the local bullfighting museum. Frank Evans, known in the world of bullfighting as El Inglés, the Englishman, comes from Salford, just next door to Manchester, where there is no bullfighting museum and he doesn’t give in so easily. Maybe it’s the Salford spirit which I know reasonably well, having taught there for a number of years before escaping to Spain.

Despite having had a heart bypass operation some time in the past and being the proud owner of a titanium knee (his own wonky knee forcing him to retire from the bullring some four years ago), El Inglés is about to make his comeback in the plaza de toros in Benalmádena.

Apparently he became interested in bullfighting as a child when his father told him stories of seeing bullfights in Andalucía when he was stationed in Gibraltar during World War Two II. He was further encouraged by a Spanish family living in Salford who were all devotees of Manuel Benítez, celebrity bullfighter of the 1960s, better known as El Cordobés.

Now I remember El Cordobés. When I was studying A Level Spanish in sixth form, one of my best friends went on holiday to Spain and came back with photos and posters of this torero who had the kind of following that glamorous football players can count on. We all, of course, fell in love with him. Our Spanish teacher, a formidable lady born both too early and too late – too early to be a suffragette and too late to be a hippy but with something of both – almost certainly vegetarian, fiercely women’s lib in her way and a great upholder of animal rights, refused to speak to poor Beryl for weeks because she admitted to having been to a bullfight!

So, anyway, Frank Evans took himself off to Spain and became a bullfighter – eventually, becoming a fully fledged matador in 1991. Now he is making a comeback at the ripe old age of 67. He is not the first Englishman to don the suit of lights. In fact, in his earliest appearances in the ring he was mistaken for another inglés, one Henry Higgins who fought bulls in the 1930s.

Then there are the women. I did say, only yesterday I believe, that women are generally too sensible to get involved in this kind of activity but it is, sadly, not the case. Cristina Sánchez wanted to be a bullfighter from the age of 14 and made it up there with the famous ones. She retired in 1999, I believe, and is now the mother of a couple of sons of whom she says that she would prefer them not to become bullfighters. She does take them to bullfights however.

Even she was not the only torera in Spanish history. Juanita Cruz was the pioneer of female bullfighters in the 1930s and is reported to have said, “If I run from the bull, someone in the audience will yell that I am running because I am a woman and I am scared. So I will not run." However she was unable to continue her career in Franco’s Spain. No toreras allowed.

Now, though, she has inspired fashion design. “Acne has been inspired by the strength of these characters (Juanita Cruz and Cristina Sanchez). Juxtaposing powerful shoulders and narrow waists, with soft skirts in fine silks, creating a contradictory, yet united, silhouette.” Strange that two women who went against convention should influence that most feminine, not feminist industry.

Getting back to El Inglés, until I came upon the Guardian article about Frank Evans, El Inglés was for me an un-named Englishman who played flamenco guitar with a group called Julio, formed in 1988 and whom I saw in Manchester not many years later. Now that is another way to get absorbed into Spanish culture and, as far as I know, a much less dangerous one.