Audrey Rule

Audrey Rule de Ough
By First Cousin Martin 14 June 2025

Audrey died yesterday. I got the email message this morning, a day ahead at breakfast New Zealand time.

She was in her 95th year and her huge heart had just stopped beating. So her passing was evidently peaceful and seemingly without pain. She left this mortal coil in her small flat in the centre of the ancient part of Mexico City.

She did not die lonely. She was surrounded by love and respect. in the company of some of her immediate Mexican family.

My immediate response to the news was sadness and a very deep sense of loss. But then I thought, why on earth would I want to wallow in such self-indulgence? Better still to celebrate her memory and her legacy of hard work, achievement, disasters overcome and a family spread all over the place yet bound by strong ties of love, affection, and loyalty.

To do justice to Audrey and her life will take a book which may be for me to attempt or some other member of her family with a longer outlook and more energy. But let me give you, my patient listener, a taste and the emotions these recollections evoked.

Audrey was born in Mexico in 1930 into a very wealthy family. Her heritage was very British but very much a part of the local history and the development of the mining district. Her great grandfather had come to Mexico in the mid 1800’s as a young man from Cornwall to seek his fortune in the silver mining industry in which his fellow Cornish men had played and continued to play such a vital part. Through good luck, hard work, shrewd investment and some sharp dealing oFrances ( also known as Fransisco or Ele Rey de Plata ") Rule acquired an immense fortune, His wealth included several haciendas, prosperous mines, hotels, mansions and much else. His legacy included the famous clock tower with the chimes of Big Ben in Pachuca capital of the state of Hidalgo in the high Sierra mountains of distant Mexico. His mansion is now used as the Municipal central office.

So Audrey’s early life was spent in the Hacienda Chavaria. The hacienda was an enormous undertaking for those times. It covered thousands of hectares used mainly for growing maguey cacti from which pulque, the local drink, was the main source of wealth. The large and central house where she lived was one of the many buildings in the hacienda in a large open space surrounded by stone walls. Built of stone in the typically Spanish tradition it was of two storeys with many rooms surrounding a central courtyard with fountains playing in the manicured gardens within.

Fransico Rule had married twice, first a Cornish lady Mary Hoskings, to establish a family of 9, and then when she died he married a Mexican lady Maria Cristina Cardenas y Sanchez and together produced another family of 6. So when he died in 1922 his fortune was split many ways. Audrey’s grandfather inherited the hacienda Chavaria.

A mixture of anticipation, happiness and envy were the emotions I experienced when as a small boy my family, “the poor cousins” visited Audrey at the hacienda. Audrey’s mum was my dad’s sister Amy who had married Cecil in 1929. Cecil was born into wealth and lacked for nothing. He was public school educated in England He was the younger grandson of Old Man Rule. It was Cecil’s s father who had inherited the hacienda. This included an old automatic piano a so-called Pianola, and an old-fashioned radio that relied on lead acid batteries for power. There were lots of horses and an old stage coach parked in one of the many out houses of the hacienda.. By the time I got to explore the coach it had become much neglected and , in the day of the modern car, never used. I remember it covered in dust, spiders’ webs and dead cockroaches smelling of old sweat stained leather. On pegs in the shed there still hung the harness and trappings for the team of 8 mules that had pulled it along the dusty roads of the state of Hidalgo in a time long past.. There were also the smells, the effluvia of the pig skin vats in the distillery close by . Here the honey water from the maguey was fermenting to produce the smelly pungent, rsmells of rotten eggs, glutinous,. watery milk like pulque.

Audrey’s life in the hacienda certainly lacked for nothing …. but she had a terrible accident whilst there. A carboy of sulphuric acid somehow broke near her splashing her with the corrosive chemical son her lower leg and ankle. It must have been agony for her and she bore the scars for the rest of her life. Yet she overcame that accident and its afte effects with fortitude.

She also suffered along with her family the upheavals when the Mexican Government under the leadership of the reformist President Cardenas sequestrated all foreign owned businesses and property in the years 1937 -1938 The family as a result of the agraian reforms, lost the hacienda in its entirety along with all the fortune and privileged lifestyle that went with it. Her grandfather died in much reduced circumstances in 1941 by which time Audrey had moved three times with her family from one job to another in Pachuca to finally end up living in a small flat in Mexico City which came with the job her father had obtained as Manager of the British Reforma Club. Like his father Cecil was now living in very much reduced circumstances.

School for Audrey initially was the British American Scool in Pachuca, run by the foreign owned mining companies of the city. When the family moved to Mexico City in about 1942, she attended the American International School. This wasba far cry from the traditional schooling and up bringing her parents had in the UK. Nevertheless the family still hung on to its British traditions and prejudices. Audrey’s father Cecil forbad her marrying a local Mexican, despite his belonging to an old established family – just because he was a Mexican. That was hard for Audrey whose future happiness was ruined. Sometime after her parents separated, Audrey went on to marry another suitor Raul Romero also a Mexican. Unfortunately for Audrey the marriage did not last but happily Monica, Raul junior and Adriana were the result of this union. Audrey separated from her husband when they were living in Chihuahua in Northern Mexico ….an ancient city but by that time increasingly riven with crime and the machinations of the drug cartels. Audrey displayed courage and fortitude to move her very young family to Mexico City where she set up home in a small flat near the ancient Zona Rosa and the Statue of Independence on Avenida de La Reforma. She got a sceretarial post with one of the better known legal firms and remained with them for the rest of her working life..
She earned enough to keep her family together and certainly gave them all a good start. She finally gave up working in her late seventies!

Like Audrey Monica, Raul and Adriana were fluent in both Spanish and English. Monica went to university and qualified as an economist. She went on to work for the Mexican foreign legation in Paris to establish her country’s membership of the OECD. She became fluent in French. Monica married Patrick Lafitte to live in Gif-Sur-Yvette some 23 kilometers south of Paris. Now retired she lives in Clermont-Ferand and regularly commutes to Mexico to maintain family links there. Raul joined the firm of KPMG as an interpreter and has since gained and MBA at the ripe old age of 40 odd showing that he had inherited Audrey's grit determination and courage to get on in the face of adversity. Raul married Gina and they have a lovely fmily of two.. Adriana became an air hostess, married Juan Carlos Rodriguez to live in Nantes They now live in Barcelona where Adriana is now owner of a real estate company with her own family. She too has inherited Audrey’s ability to work hard and demonstrate loyalty to family and friends. She also commutes regularly to Mexico to maintain family ties and look after her mother.

Audrey never lost her sense of fun and adventure. Despite the constraints of a modest job and the problems of bringing up her family, she did manage to travel. She came to NZ once and “did NZ” in something like 8 days. She was always immaculately turned out and followed female fashions in the American style with manicured hair, make up, well-chosen outfits. She often wore stiletto heeled shoes; in fact they were a familiar appendage. She enraged me on that visit by insisting on wearing her stilettos on board my teak decked boat and in the house with wooden stairs, The decks and the stairs bear the marks of her depredations to this day!

Audrey was herself one of the strongest, most resilient people I have had the privilege to know. She faced and overcame a lot of hard knocks and problems in her life with determination and with good humour. Family was everything to Audrey of which she has been the effective and caring focus. She will be missed very much, but remembered through happy memories of a full and challenging life.
I will miss Audrey hugely as she was for me the focus of all my most valued Mexican connections, never failing in her hospitality and good will. She was the remaining link of my generation to the past family history in Mexico and England. She was the invaluable conduit to family and friends in both countries.

She was responsible for generating in me the varied and strong emotions of affection, rage, frustration, fear, admiration, envy, nostalgia, sadness and finally admiration and happiness.
RIP Audrey 14 June 2025

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