IRISH MEMORIES

IRISH MEMORIES

BY
E. Œ. SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS

AUTHORS OF “SOME EXPERIENCES OF AN IRISH R.M.,”
“THE REAL CHARLOTTE,” ETC.

WITH 23 ILLUSTRATIONS FROM DRAWINGS BY
E. Œ. SOMERVILLE AND FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

THIRD IMPRESSION

NEW YORK:
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
FOURTH AVENUE AND 30TH STREET
1918

PREFACE

I have to explain what may strike some as singular, viz., the omission, as far as was practicable, from the letters of Martin Ross, and from this book in general, of the names of her and my friends and relatives who are still living. I have been guided by a consensus of the opinion of those whom I have consulted, and also by my remembrance of Martin Ross’s views on the subject, which she often expressed to me in connection with sundry and various volumes of Recollections, that have dealt with living contemporaries with a frankness that would have seemed excessive in the case of a memoir of the life of Queen Anne. If I have gone to the opposite extreme, I hope it may be found a fault on the right side.

E. Œ. SOMERVILLE.

September 20th, 1917.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE TENTS OF THE ARABS.

From “Plays of Gods and Men,” by Lord Dunsany.

IRISH MEMORIES

INTRODUCTORY

These vagrant memories do not pretend to regard themselves as biography, autobiography, as anything serious or valuable. Martin and I were not accustomed to take ourselves seriously, and if what I may remember has any value, it will be the value that there must be in a record, however unworthy, of so rare and sunny a spirit as hers, and also, perhaps, in the preservation of a phase of Irish life that is fast disappearing. I will not attempt any plan of the path that I propose to follow. I must trust to the caprice of memory, supplemented by the diaries that we have kept with the intermittent conscientiousness proper to such. To keep a diary, in any degree, implies a certain share of industry, of persistence, even of imagination. Let us leave it at that. The diaries will not be brought into court.

CHAPTER I

THE MARTINS OF ROSS

My brother Robert’s life began with the epoch that has changed the face and the heart of Ireland. It ended untimely, in strange accord with the close of that epoch; the ship has sunk, and he has gone down with it.

He was born on June 17th, 1846, the first year of the Irish famine, when Ireland brimmed with a potato-fed population, and had not as yet discovered America. The quietness of untroubled centuries lay like a spell on Connemara, the country of his ancestors; the old ways of life were unquestioned at Ross, and my father went and came among his people in an intimacy as native as the soft air they breathed. On the crowded estate the old routine of potato planting and turf cutting was pursued tranquilly; the people intermarried and subdivided their holdings; few could read, and many could not speak English. All were known to the Master, and he was known and understood by them, as the old Galway people knew and understood; and the subdivisions of the land were permitted, and the arrears of rent were given time, or taken in boat-loads of turf, or worked off by day-labour, and eviction was unheard of. It was give and take, with the personal element always warm in it: as a system it was probably quite uneconomic, but the hand of affection held it together, and the tradition of centuries was at its back.

The intimate relations of landlord and tenant were an old story at Ross. It was in the days of Queen Elizabeth that they began, when the Anglo-Norman families, known as the Tribes of Galway, still in the high summer of their singular and romantic prosperity, began to contemplate existence as being possible outside the walls of Galway Town, and by purchase or by conquest acquired many lands in the county. They had lived for three or four centuries in the town, self-sufficing, clannish and rich; they did not forget the days of Strong-Bow, who, in the time of Henry II, began the settlement of Galway, nor yet the leadership of De Burgho, and they maintained their isolation, and married and intermarried in inveterate exclusiveness, until, in the time of Henry VIII, relationship was so close and intricate that marriages were not easy. They rang the changes on Christian names, Nicholas, Dominick, Robert, Andrew; they built great houses of the grey Galway limestone, with the Spanish courtyards and deep archways that they learned from their intercourse with Spain, and they carved their coats of arms upon them in that indomitable family pride that is an asset of immense value in the history of a country. Even now, the shop-fronts of Galway carry the symbols of chivalry above their doors, and battered shields and quarterings look strangely down from their places in the ancient walls upon the customers that pass in beneath them.

It was in the sixteenth century that Robert Martin, one of the long and powerful line of High Sheriffs and Mayors of Galway, became possessed of a large amount of land in West Galway, and in 1590 Ross was his country place. From this point the Martins began slowly to assimilate West Galway; Ross, Dangan, Birch Hall, and Ballinahinch, marked their progress, until Ballinahinch, youngest and greatest of the family strongholds, had gathered to itself nearly 200,000 acres of Connemara. It fell, tragically, from the hand of its last owner, Mary Martin, Princess of Connemara, in the time of the Famine, and that page of Martin history is closed in Galway, though the descendants of her grandfather, “Humanity Dick” (for ever to be had in honourable remembrance as the author of “Martin’s Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals”), have kept alive the old name of Ballinahinch, and have opened a new and notable record for themselves in Canada.

Of Dangan, the postern gate by the Galway river remains; of Birch Hall, the ruins of a courtyard and of a manorial dove-cot; Ross, the first outpost, nurse of many generations of Martins, still stands by its lake and looks across it to its old neighbour, the brown mountain, Croagh Keenan.

Through a line of Jaspers, Nicholases and Roberts, the story of Ross moved prosperously on from Robert of Elizabeth’s times, untouched even by the hand of Cromwell, unshaken even when the gates of Galway, twelve miles away, opened at length to Ireton. Beyond the town of Galway, the Cromwellian did not set his foot; Connemara was a dark and barren country, and the Martins, Roman Catholic and Royalists to the core, as were all the other Tribes of Galway, held the key of the road.

From that conflict Ross emerged, minus most of its possessions in Galway town and suburbs; after the Restoration they were restored by the Decree of Charles II, but remained nevertheless in the hands of those to whom they had been apportioned as spoil. The many links that had bound Ross to Galway Town seem thenceforward to have been severed; during the eighteenth century the life of its owners was that of their surroundings, peaceful for the most part, and intricately bound up with that of their tenants. They were still Roman Catholic and Jacobite—a kinsman of Dangan was an agent for Charles Edward—and each generation provided several priests for its Church. With my great-grandfather, Nicholas, came the change of creed; he became a Protestant in order to marry a Protestant neighbour, Miss Elizabeth O’Hara, of Lenaboy; where an affair of the heart was concerned, he was not the man to stick at what he perhaps considered to be a trifle. It is said that at the end of his long life his early training asserted itself, and drew him again towards the Church of his fathers; it is certainly probable that he died, as he was born, a son of Rome.

But the die had been cast. His six children were born and bred Protestants. Strong in all ways, they were strong Protestants, and Low Church, according to the fashion of their time, yet they lived in an entirely Roman Catholic district without religious friction of any kind.

It was during the life of Nicholas, my great-grandfather, that Ross House was burned down; with much loss, it is believed, of plate and pictures; it had a tower, and stood beautifully on a point in the lake. He replaced it by the present house, built about the year 1777, whose architecture is not æsthetically to his credit; it is a tall, unlovely block, of great solidity, with kitchen premises half underground, and the whole surrounded by a wide and deep area. It suggests the idea of defence, which was probably not absent from the builder’s mind, yet the Rebellion of twenty years later did not put it to the test. In the great storm of 1839, still known as “The Big Wind,” my grandfather gathered the whole household into the kitchen for safety, and, looking up at its heavily-vaulted ceiling, said that if Ross fell, not a house in Ireland would stand that night. Many fell, but Ross House stood the assault, even though the lawn was white with the spray borne in from the Atlantic, six miles away. It has at least two fine rooms, a lofty well-staircase, with balusters of mahogany, taken out of a wreck, and it takes all day the sun into its heart, looking west and south, with tall windows, over lake and mountain. It is said that a man is never in love till he is in love with a plain woman, and in spite of draughts, of exhausting flights of stairs, of chimneys that are the despair of sweeps, it has held the affection of five generations of Martins.

A dark limestone slab, over the dining-room chimney-piece, bears the coat of arms—“a Calvary Cross, between the Sun in splendour on the dexter limb, and the Moon in crescent on the sinister of the second”—to quote the official description. The crest is a six-pointed star, and the motto, “Sic itur ad astra,” connects with the single-minded simplicity of the Crusader, the Cross of our faith with the Star of our hope. In the book of pedigrees at Dublin Castle it is stated that the arms were given by Richard Cœur de Lion to Oliver Martin, in the Holy Land; a further family tradition says that Oliver Martin shared Richard’s captivity in Austria. The stone on which the arms are carved came originally from an old house in Galway; it has the name of Robuck Martin below, and the date 1649 above. It is one of several now lying at Ross, resembling the lintels of doorways, and engraved with the arms of various Martins and their wives.

The Protestantism of my grandfather, Robert, did not deter him from marrying a Roman Catholic, Miss Mary Ann Blakeney, of Bally Ellen, Co. Carlow, one of three beauties known in Carlow and Waterford as “The Three Marys.” As in most of the acts of his prudent and long-headed life, he did not do wrong. Her four children were brought up as Protestants, but the rites of her Church were celebrated at Ross without let or hindrance; my brother Robert could remember listening at the drawing-room door to the chanting of the Mass inside, and prayers were held daily by her for the servants, all of whom, then as now, were Roman Catholics.

“Hadn’t I the divil’s own luck,” groaned a stable-boy, stuffing his pipe into his pocket as the prayer-bell clanged, “that I didn’t tell the Misthress I was a Protestant!”

She lived till 1855, a hale, quiet, and singularly handsome woman, possessed of the fortunate gift of living in amity under the same roof with the many and various relations-in-law who regarded Ross as their home. Family feeling was almost a religious tenet with my grandfather, and in this, as in other things, he lived up to his theories. Shrewd and patient, and absolutely proficient in the affairs of his property, he could take a long look ahead, even when the Irish Famine lay like a black fog upon all things; and when he gave up his management of the estate there was not a debt upon it. One of his sayings is so unexpected in a man of his time as to be worth repeating. “If a man kicks me I suppose I must take notice of that,” he said when reminded of some fancied affront to himself, “short of that, we needn’t trouble ourselves about it.” He had the family liking for a horse; it is recorded that in a dealer’s yard in Dublin he mounted a refractory animal, in his frock coat and tall hat, got him out of the yard, and took him round St. Stephen’s Green at a gallop, through the traffic, laying into him with his umbrella. He was once, in Dublin, induced to go to an oratorio, and bore it for some time in silence, till the choir reiterated the theme, “Go forth, ye sons of Aaron! Go!” “Begad, here goes!” said my grandfather, rising and leaving the hall.

My father, James, was born in 1804, and grew up endowed, as many still testify, with good looks and the peculiarly genial and polished manner that seemed to be an attribute of the Galway gentlemen of his time. He had also a gift with his pen that was afterwards to serve him well, but the business capacity of his father was strangely absent from the character of an otherwise able man. He took his degree at Trinity College, Dublin, and was intended for the Bar, but almost before his dinners were eaten he was immersed in other affairs. He was but little over twenty when he married Miss Anne Higinbotham. It was a very happy marriage; he and his wife, and the four daughters who were born to them, lived in his father’s house at Ross, according to the patriarchal custom of the time, and my father abandoned the Bar, and lived then, as always, the healthy country life that he delighted in. He shot woodcock with the skill that was essential in the days of muzzle-loaders, and pulled a good oar in his father’s boat at the regattas of Lough Corrib and Lough Mask, as various silver cups still testify. I remember seeing him, a straight and spare man, well on in his sixth decade, take a racing spin with my brothers on Ross Lake, and though his stroke was pronounced by the younger generation to be old-fashioned, and a trifle stiff, he held his own with them. Robert has often told me that when they walked the grouse mountains together, his father could, at the end of the day, face a hill better than he, with all his equipment of youth and athleticism.

Among the silver cups at Ross was a two-handled one, that often fascinated our childhood, with the inscription:

“FROM HENRY ADAIR OF LOUGHANMORE, TO
JAMES MARTIN OF ROSS.”

It was given to my father in memory of a duel in which he had acted as second, to Henry Adair, who was a kinsman of his first wife.

My father’s first wife had no son; she died at the birth of a daughter, and her loss was deep and grievous to her husband. Her four daughters grew up, very good-looking and very agreeable, and were married when still in their teens. Their husbands all came from the County Antrim, and two of them were brothers. Barklie, Callwell, McCalmont, Barton, are well-known names in Ireland to-day, and beyond it, and the children of his four elder sisters are bound to my brother Robert’s life by links of long intimacy and profound affection.

The aim of the foregoing résumé of family history has been to put forward only such things as seem to have been determining in the environment and heritage to which Robert was born. The chivalrous past of Galway, the close intimacy with the people, the loyalty to family ties, were the traditions among which he was bred; the Protestant instinct, and a tolerance for the sister religion, born of sympathy and personal respect, had preceded him for two generations, and a store of shrewd humour and common sense had been laid by in the family for the younger generation to profit by if they wished.

My father was a widower of forty when he first met his second wife, Miss Anna Selina Fox, in Dublin. She was then two and twenty, a slender girl, of the type known in those days as elegant, and with a mind divided in allegiance between outdoor amusements and the Latin poets. Her father, Charles Fox, of New Park, Co. Longford, was a barrister, and was son of Justice Fox, of the Court of Common Pleas. He married Katherine, daughter of Chief Justice Bushe, and died while still a young man; his children were brought up at Kilmurrey, the house of their mother’s father.

The career of the Right Honourable Charles Kendal Bushe, Chief Justice of Ireland, is a public one, and need not here be dwelt upon; but even at this distance of time it thrills the hearts of his descendants to remember his lofty indifference to every voice save those of conscience and patriotism, when, in the Irish House of Commons, he opposed the Act of Union with all the noble gift of language that won for him the name “Silver-tongued Bushe,” and left the walls ringing with the reiterated entreaty, “I ask you, gentlemen, will you give up your country!”

His attitude then and afterwards cost him the peerage that would otherwise have been his; but above the accident of distinction, and beyond all gainsaying, is the fact that in the list of influential Irishmen made before the Union, with their probable prices (as supporters of the Act) set over against them, the one word following the name of Charles Kendal Bushe is “Incorruptible.”

His private life rang true to his public utterances; culture and charm, and a swift and delightful wit, made his memory a fetish to those who lived under his roof. My mother’s early life moved as if to the music of a minuet. She learned Latin with a tutor, she studied the guitar, she sat in the old-fashioned drawing-room at Kilmurrey while “The Chief” read aloud Shakespeare, or the latest novel of Sir Walter Scott; she wrote, at eight years old, verses of smooth and virtuous precocity; at seventeen she translated into creditable verse, in the metre beloved of Pope, a Latin poem by Lord Wellesley, the then Viceroy, and received from him a volume in which it was included, with an inscription no less stately than the binding. In her outdoor life she was what, in those decorous days, was called a “Tomboy,” and the physical courage of her youth remained her distinguishing characteristic through life. Like the lilies of the field, she toiled not, neither did she spin, yet I have never known a more feminine character.

It was from her that her eldest son derived the highly strung temperament, the unconscious keenness of observation that was only stimulated by the short sight common to them both, the gift of rapid versifying, and a deftness and brilliance in epigram and repartee that came to both in lineal descent from “The Chief.” An instance of Robert’s quickness in retort occurs to me, and I will give it here. It happened that he was being examined in a land case connected with Ross. The solicitor for the other side objected to the evidence that he gave, as relating to affairs that occurred before he was born, and described it as “hearsay evidence.”

“Well, for the matter of that, the fact that I was born is one that I have only on hearsay evidence!” said Robert unanswerably.

My mother first met my father at the house of her uncle, Mr. Arthur Bushe, in Dublin. She met him again at a ball given by Kildare Street Club; they had in common the love of the classics and the love of outdoor life; his handsome face, his attractiveness, have been so often dwelt on by those who knew him at that time, that the mention of them here may be forgiven. In March, 1844, they were married in Dublin, and a month later their carriage was met a couple of miles from Ross by the tenants, and was drawn home by them, while the bonfires blazed at the gates and at the hall door, and the bagpipes squealed their welcome. Bringing with her a great deal of energy, both social and literary, a kicking pony, and a profound ignorance of household affairs, my mother entered upon her long career at Ross. That her sister-in-law, Marian Martin, held the reins of office was fortunate for all that composite establishment; when, later on, my mother took them in her delicate, impatient hands, she held the strictly logical conviction that a sheep possessed four “legs of mutton,” and she has shown me a rustic seat, hidden deep in laurels, where she was wont to hide when, as she said, “they came to look for me, to ask what was to be for the servants’ dinner.”

For the first year of her married life tranquillity reigned in house and estate; a daughter was born, and was accepted with fortitude by an establishment already well equipped in that respect. But a darker possibility than the want of an heir arose suddenly and engrossed all minds.

In July, 1845, my father drove to the Assizes in Galway, twelve and a half English miles away, and as he drove he looked with a knowledgeable eye at the plots of potatoes lying thick and green on either side of the road, and thought that he had seldom seen a richer crop. He slept in Galway that night, and next day as he drove home the smell of the potato-blight was heavy in the air, a new and nauseous smell. It was the first breath of the Irish famine. The succeeding months brought the catastrophe, somewhat limited in that first winter, a blow to startle, even to stun, but not a death-stroke. Optimistically the people flung their thoughts forward to the next crop, and bore the pinch of the winter with spasmodic and mismanaged help from the Government, with help, lesser in degree, but more direct, from their landlords.

In was in the following summer of stress and hope that my brother Robert was born, in Dublin, the first son in the Martin family for forty-two years, and the welcome accorded to him was what might have been expected. The doctor was kissed by every woman in the house, so he assured my brother many years afterwards, and, late at night as it was, my father went down to Kildare Street Club to find some friend to whom he could tell the news (and there is a touch of appropriateness in the fact that the Club, that for so many years was a home for Robert, had the first news of his birth).

Radiant with her achievement my mother posted over the long roads to Ross, in the summer weather, with her precious first-born son, and the welcome of Ross was poured forth upon her. The workmen in the yard kissed the baby’s hands, the old women came from the mountains to prophesy and to bless and to perform the dreadful rite of spitting upon the child, for luck. My father’s mother, honourable as was her wont towards her husband’s and son’s religion, asked my mother if a little holy water might be sprinkled on the baby.

“If you heat it you may give him a bath in it!” replied the baby’s mother, with irrepressible lightheartedness.

It may be taken for granted that he received, as we all did, secret baptism at the hands of the priest. It was a kindly precaution taken by our foster mothers, who were, it is needless to say, Roman Catholics; it gave them peace of mind in the matter of the foster children whom they worshipped, and my father and mother made no inquiries. Their Low Church training did not interfere with their common sense, nor did it blind them to the devotion that craved for the safeguard.

A month or two later the cold fear for the safety of the potatoes fell again upon the people; the paralysing certainty followed. The green stalks blackened, the potatoes turned to black slime, and the avalanche of starvation, fever and death fell upon the country. It was in the winter of 1847, “the black ’47,” as they called it, when Robert was in his second year, that the horror was at its worst, and before hope had kindled again his ears must have known with their first understanding the weak voice of hunger and the moan of illness among the despairing creatures who flocked for aid into the yard and the long downstairs passages of Ross. Many stories of that time remain among the old tenants; of the corpses buried where they fell by the roadside, near Ross Gate; of the coffins made of loose boards tied round with a hay rope. None, perhaps, is more pitiful than that of a woman who walked fifteen miles across a desolate moor, with a child in her arms and a child by her side, to get the relief that she heard was to be had at Ross. Before she reached the house the child in her arms was dead; she carried it into the kitchen and sank on the flags. When my aunt spoke to her she found that she had gone mad; reason had stopped in that whelming hour, like the watch of a drowned man.

A soup-kitchen was established by my father and mother at one of the gates of Ross; the cattle that the people could not feed were bought from them, and boiled down, and the gates were locked to keep back the crowd that pressed for the ration. Without rents, with poor rate at 22s. 6d. in the pound, the household of Ross staggered through the intimidating years, with the starving tenants hanging, as it were, upon its skirts, impossible to feed, impossible to see unfed. The rapid pens of my father and mother sent the story far; some of the great tide of help that flowed into Ireland came to them; the English Quakers loaded a ship with provisions and sent them to Galway Bay. Hunger was in some degree dealt with, but the Famine fever remained undefeated. My aunt, Marian Martin (afterwards Mrs. Arthur Bushe), caught it in a school that she had got together on the estate, where she herself taught little girls to read and write and knit, and kept them alive with breakfasts of oatmeal porridge. My aunt has told me how, as she lay in the blind trance of the fever, my grandfather, who believed implicitly in his own medical skill, opened a vein in her arm and bled her. The relief, according to her account, was instant and exquisite, and her recovery set in from that hour. She may have owed much to the determination of the Martins of that period that they would not be ill. My mother, herself a daring rebel against the thraldom of illness, used to say that at Ross no one was ill till they were dead, and no one was dead till they were buried. It was the Christian Science of a tough-grained generation.

The little girls whom my aunt taught are old women now, courteous in manner, cultivated in speech, thanks to the education that was given them when National Schools were not.

Our kinsman, Thomas Martin of Ballinahinch, fell a victim to the Famine fever, caught in the Courthouse while discharging his duties as a magistrate. He was buried in Galway, forty miles by road from Ballinahinch, and his funeral, followed by his tenants, was two hours in passing Ross Gate. In the words of A. M. Sullivan, “No adequate tribute has ever been paid to those Irish landlords—and they were men of every party and creed—who perished, martyrs to duty, in that awful time; who did not fly the plague-reeking workhouse, or fever-tainted court.” Amongst them he singled out for mention Mr. Martin of Ballinahinch, and Mr. Nolan of Ballinderry (father of Colonel Nolan, M.P.), the latter of whom died of typhus caught in Tuam Workhouse.

When Robert was three years old, the new seed potatoes began to resist the blight; he was nearly seven before the victory was complete, and by that time the cards that he must play had already been dealt to him.

Part II

The Famine yielded like the ice of the Northern Seas; it ran like melted snows in the veins of Ireland for many years afterwards. Landlords who had escaped ruin at the time were more slowly ruined as time went on and the money borrowed in the hour of need exacted its toll; Ross held its ground, with what stress its owners best knew. It was in those difficult years of Robert’s boyhood, when yet more brothers and sisters continued to arrive rapidly, that his father began to write for the Press. He contributed leading articles to the Morning Herald, a London paper, now extinct; he went to London and lived the life that the writing of leading articles entails, with its long waiting for the telegrams, and its small-hour suppers, and it told on the health of a man whose heart had been left behind him in the West. It tided over the evil time, it brought him into notice with the Conservative Party and the Irish Government, and probably gained for him subsequently his appointment of Poor Law Auditor.

His style in writing is quite unlike that of his eldest son; it is more rigid, less flowing; the sentences are short and pointed, evidently modelled on the rhythmic hammer-stroke of Macaulay; it has not the careless and sunshiny ease with which Robert achieved his best at the first attempt. That facility and versification that is akin to the gift of music, and, like it, is inborn, came from my mother, and came to him alone of his eight brothers and sisters; in her letters to her children she dropped into doggerel verse without an effort, rhymes and metres were in her blood, and to the last year of her life she never failed to criticise occasional and quite insignificant roughnesses in her son’s poems. Of her own polished and musical style one verse in illustration may be given.