DEATH ANNOUNCEMENT
ANTÓNIO MANUEL FERREIRA
“Tonio”
2 April 1942 – 17 December 2021
Renault Flins worker, CGT delegate and Portuguese son of the Minho who made Mantes home
António Ferreira crossed the Pyrenees on foot in the autumn of 1964, aged twenty-two, with a cardboard suitcase, a borrowed coat and an address in Champigny-sur-Marne written on the back of a cigarette packet. He used to say it was the longest walk he ever took and the only one he was glad to have done alone.
He was born in 1942 in a stone farmhouse near Ponte de Lima, in the Minho, the second of seven children, and left school at eleven to work the land. France offered a wage; Portugal in those years offered the colonial war. He lived in a shantytown for two years, then in a hostel, then at last in a flat on the new estate in Mantes-la-Jolie. In 1966 Renault hired him on the assembly line at Flins, and he stayed thirty-eight years.
He joined the CGT in 1968 and served as a union delegate for twenty-two years, the man workers sought out when a form needed translating, a shift needed swapping or a foreman needed a quiet word. He never raised his voice, and he opened every meeting with the same sentence: 'Comrades, let's be short and let's be right.' He drove only Renaults, and kept one Renault 12 alive for twenty years and 380,000 kilometres, down to the Minho every August with a roof rack of presents.
He married Maria da Conceição in 1969 and they raised Paulo and Sandra in the Val Fourré, where Portuguese, Moroccan, Malian and French children shared stairwells and football pitches. Tonio kept an allotment beside the Seine, growing kale, tomatoes and his mother's scarlet runner beans, and every Christmas Eve he cooked the bacalhau himself. He wept openly at the Euro 2016 final, which half the building watched in his living room.
He retired in 2004, spent summers at Arcozelo and winters in Mantes, and called the ache of living between two homes saudade, saying he was lucky to feel it for both. He died on 17 December 2021 at the Hôpital François-Quesnay, with Maria and the children beside him. He leaves Maria, Paulo, Sandra, three grandchildren and a brother, Joaquim, who still tends the family vines.
“Comrades, let's be short and let's be right.”