by Fergal Keane
* Forde’s real name was Tomás O’Maoileoin, from Nenagh in County Tipperary. However, it was as Forde that he was known and hunted by the government forces throughout the campaign.
7
Sunshine Elsewhere
If Ireland did not accept them, they did not know it – and it is in that unawareness of final rejection, unawareness of being looked at from some secretive, opposed life, that the Anglo-Irish naive dignity and even, tragedy seems to me to stand.1
Elizabeth Bowen
I
I drive through the half-yellowed trees of October. Moyvane, home parish of Con Brosnan and his descendants, is across the fields to the north. Tarbert and the Shannon are beyond that again, and the Limerick and Cork borders ahead to the east. There are handsome houses along the road, a garden with football posts, a children’s trampoline. I drive towards where Kilmorna once stood, five miles east of Listowel: the site of burnings and death during the Civil War. The road here is narrow. There has been no cause for widening in the years since independence. It is a road that still leads to small villages and to other small roads. Not far away is the spot where Mick Purtill saw his friend Mick Galvin shot dead beside him in the spring of 1921, when they ambushed the military. Mick was lucky to make it out alive that day, racing across the fields with the Tans and soldiers close behind.
My people had the comfort of knowing that they belonged to a majority. They had struggled to assert their right to own the land and to establish their country as an independent nation, and they were reassured in their struggle by the strength of their numbers and the teaching of their schoolmasters and priests who declared them the true indigenous Irish: the Gaels who carried the true faith through centuries of oppression. It was a certainty that had grown as the eighteenth century progressed and the fortunes of the Anglo-Irish ebbed ever more swiftly. A community that had survived rebellions, agrarian violence and rapidly changing economic fortunes would be fatally diminished by the aftermath of the Famine and the consequent rise of a strong Catholic landowning class. The war that swept through north Kerry after 1919 foreshadowed their final dispersal.
The first time I visited Kilmorna, it was with my father, and nearly fifty years after the terrible events that occurred there. We walked into a place where newly planted fields, patches of weed, had erased the Anglo-Irish past. Where, my father swore, the Irish crown jewels were hidden but would never be found because the house’s owner, Sir Arthur Vicars, had done such a good job of concealing them.
In the beginning Vicars had not been a target of the IRA. To the locals he was just a ‘harmless craythur’, as my father described him. In 1921, Vicars had been living at ‘the Great House’ at Kilmorna for over a decade. He was the son of an Indian army officer but had no military inclination himself, being bookish, slightly eccentric and fatally trusting.
As a boy Arthur developed a consuming preoccupation with heraldry, having been convinced that his mother’s family lineage stretched back to the earliest Kings of Ireland. He spent his school holidays at the Irish homes of his half-brothers, the Gunn-Mahonys, Protestant landowners with strong nationalist sympathies who had lived at Kilmorna since the mid-1820s. The family’s nationalist credentials stretched back to the days of Daniel O’Connell and the campaign for Catholic Emancipation. Later in the century they were closely allied with Charles Stewart Parnell and the Home Rule campaign.
From 1893, Vicars had served in Dublin Castle as Ulster King of Arms, a role which gave him responsibility for the security of the Irish Crown jewels. These were composed of Brazilian stones, diamonds, rubies and emeralds and were the regalia of the Sovereign and Grand Master of the Order of St Patrick – the monarch when they were present, the Lord Lieutenant in their absence. Unhappily for Vicars, on 6 July 1907, just four days before the King and Queen were due to visit Dublin, the jewels vanished.
Sir Arthur Vicars in better days when keeper of the Irish Crown Jewels (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)
The theft caused apoplexy at Buckingham Palace and scandalised Edwardian Britain. There were rumours that a group of homosexual men were meeting and throwing wild parties in Dublin Castle and that these included Vicars’s deputy and friend, Francis Shackleton, brother of the Polar explorer, Ernest, who, in the fullness of time, would be exposed as a scoundrel of extravagant proportions.* Francis Shackleton was almost certainly the thief but the police could never prove it. Vicars was negligent but nothing more – despite claims made in the Daily Mail that he had passed a key to the woman reputed to be his mistress. Vicars won the subsequent libel suit against the Daily Mail but by this stage he had already lost his job.
Vicars tried in vain to clear his name and would express his resentment at king and government in his last will and testament. ‘I might have had more to dispose of,’ he wrote bitterly, ‘had it not been for the outrageous way in which I was treated by the Irish government over the loss of the Irish crown jewels in 1907, backed up by the late King Edward VII whom I had always loyally and faithfully served.’ He claimed to have been scapegoated ‘to save other departments’ and to shield ‘the real culprit and thief Francis R. Shackleton (brother of the explorer who didn’t reach the South Pole). My whole life and work was ruined by this cruel misfortune and by the wicked and blackguardly acts of the Irish government.’2
To denounce the King was out of character but it reflected the deep personal hurt. There is a hint of Vicars’s somewhat otherworldly character in the closing statement of his will where he writes that he had ‘hoped to leave a legacy to my dear little dog Ronnie, had he not been taken from me this year – well we shall meet in the next world’.3
Vicars loved Kilmorna, with its ivy-covered walls and woodland paths that belonged to a childhood world of fantasy he had never left behind. The house was a mix of faux knight’s castle and country mansion, composed of three interlinked lodges and set in 600 acres of farmland and forest through which the River Feale flowed on its journey towards the Atlantic. By the time he arrived to live in north Kerry, he was forty-eight years old, still a young man in terms of public service but with no hope of government employment again. He had been rusticated to the country house far earlier than planned: an exile from the Dublin imperial establishment that left him a figure of ridicule. Vicars had neither private wealth nor government pension and, with his wife, depended largely on the munificence of his sister who now owned Kilmorna.
Arthur Vicars may have been broken in spirit but, according to his Irish valet, he was ‘a thorough gentleman who always mixed freely with the tenants on the estate’.4 In 1917, the fifty-five-year-old had married Miss Gertrude Wright, daughter of a County Wicklow Anglo-Irish family. It was a late and childless marriage which seems to have been happy. His wife kept fox terriers and whenever one died, so the local story goes, Lady Vicars would insist ‘the workmen dress in black and look solemn’.5 In the folk memory Vicars is depicted as a kindly man, as evidenced in the recollections gathered for a local magazine more than sixty years after his death:
There were over 100 local people employed directly or indirectly by Sir Arthur, who paid them wages above the average for this backward area of Ireland. The old people of Kilmorna in my childhood still remembered the huge party that was organised for the local children by Sir Arthur at Christmas. He loved to ride about the neighbouring farms on horseback. He owned the only car in the district and, once or twice a week, he would drive to Listowel, handing out produce from the Kilmorna gardens and orchards to needy families, Protestant and Catholic alike.6
He also busied himself in the life of the Protestant Church, helping to restore an historic chapel associated with the nationalist rebel leader Robert Emmet, executed for treason in 1803. Vicars had sympathy with the land and people of Ireland. He also remained, despite his harsh treatment by the late King, an empire loyalist. He did not see a contradiction between an instinctive sense of Irishness and the obligation of loyalty to the monarchy. Well after the outbreak of the War of I
ndependence, Vicars continued to welcome parties of young army officers to Kilmorna to fish for salmon and trout in the River Feale, which flowed through the estate.
Perhaps because he was an outsider to Kerry, a summer visitor schooled and largely reared in England, Vicars was probably not as sensitive as local Protestants to the dangerous possibilities of the revolutionary war. For the established families of north Kerry, mostly descendants of English settlers who had arrived with the Elizabethan and Cromwellian conquests, the IRA hinted at ancestral terrors. These ‘Anglo-Irish’ had supplanted the old Gaelic lordships and the so-called ‘Old English’, descendants of the Norman settlers of the twelfth century who had long ago gone over to native ways and held to the Catholic faith, and by the mid-eighteenth century the plantation was securely established. The Trinity-educated doctor, Charles Smith, wrote an account of his travels in the area in the late eighteenth century, a volume of sharply observed social commentary and vivid descriptive prose written from the vantage point of a social improver and aesthete. At Lixnaw, the ancient seat of the earls of Kerry, Smith visited the house of a lord on whose walls were painted copies of ‘the celebrated cartoons of Raphael at Hampton Court’.7 He marvelled at the reproduction of the lame man healed by the apostles Peter and John, with ‘figures larger than life’. Elsewhere in the mansion he saw busts of Homer, Virgil, Milton and Pope. To Smith the land of my forebears was waiting to be turned into a paradise for landlords and workers alike. In his words, though expressed in more liberal terms, was the old planter’s dream of making Ireland a land fit for English civilisation, the perfect ordered land of those Elizabethan warriors who had carved their bloody way through my childhood stories:
This barony besides the ocean and the River Shannon, hath the advantage of the rivers Feal and Cashin to export and import commodities to and from almost every part of it … the soil is so naturally rich in most places that it would take but very little manure of any kind to bring it to produce corn … No people in Europe can have a better opportunity of employing the poor, and improving their country than the gentlemen of estate in Ireland. When they are at their feats every object that presents itself may remind them of these designs: their houses being removed from the tumults of cities, afford them the best opportunity and freedom of observation how their lands may be improved … and how their tenants are employed, not only among the labouring men, but also among the women, and children, in whose young hands industry ought to be planted, in order to its thriving and taking root the better.8
By the time the English traveller Arthur Young arrived in north Kerry in 1762, it was possible to detect a sense of an eclipse foretold. ‘Left Ardfert, accompanying Lord Crosbie to Listowel,’ he wrote. ‘Called on the way to Lixnaw … but deserted for ten years past, and now presents so melancholy a scene of desolation, that it shocked me to see it. Everything around lies in ruin and the house itself is going fast off by thieving depredations of the neighbourhood.’9
To a people whose footing in the land was insecure, the ‘big houses’ they built were of paramount psychological importance. They proclaimed the conviction that this Protestant version of Irishness was no alien hybrid to be eradicated, but deep-rooted and enduring. Like Shelley’s Ozymandias, the decline of a great house like Lixnaw was a reminder of the transience of all greatness, though not in those days a possibility entertained by the mass of the north Kerry gentry.
Passing through Ballydonoghue, the hinterland of my Purtill forebears, Arthur Young went on to the coastal town of Tarbert, which sits where the River Shannon enters the Atlantic. Here he found an altogether more pleasing demesne, the home of Edward Leslie, a liberal Protestant who hosted Benjamin Franklin during his visit to Ireland in 1771, and who supported the cause of Catholic Emancipation. Later visitors to this Arcadian retreat included Charlotte Brontë and Winston Churchill. Young described a house ‘on the edge of a beautiful lawn, with a thick margin of full grown wood, hanging on a steep bank to the Shannon, so that the river is seen from the house over the tops of this wood … The union of wood, water, and lawn forms upon the whole a very fine scene.’10 Young saw this enlightened Anglo-Irish demesne as the model for Ireland. He marvelled at the atmosphere of industry around Tarbert with one hundred boats bringing turf to Limerick from the bogs of north Kerry and Clare.
II
In my family lore, the Anglo-Irish around Listowel lived in draughty houses, sent their children to boarding schools in England and read the King James Bible. The eldest sons inherited the estate; the younger usually made their way into the army or the imperial civil service, and then there were the inevitable ne’er-do-wells for whom no career could be constructed and who provided a ready supply of gossip for the servants. Protestant Bertha Creagh, who wrote of fin de siècle Anglo-Irish life in the area, recalls one neighbour who was encumbered with the following epitaph: ‘He was handsome, a good shot, inoffensive and popular – but whiskey was cheap and there was little else to do.’11 Writing in the middle of the previous century, William Makepeace Thackeray encountered some of the county bucks on a journey through north Kerry, observing on his coach ‘a company of young squires … and they talked of horse-racing and hunting punctually for three hours, during which time I do believe they did not utter one single word upon any other subject. What a wonderful faculty it is.’12
The local Irish that Bertha Creagh encountered on the family estate were usually kindly maids, or ex-soldiers retired from the colonial wars now employed as stable grooms and farm labourers. There would be jolly parties when the Royal Artillery would stop overnight on their way south for gunnery practice, the air filled with the sound of their bugles and the jangling of spurs. Bertha’s childhood was dappled and carefree. Her memories evoke a childish wonder at the customs of the Catholic world. Her Irish nurse blessed her with holy water when thunderstorms approached and fell to her knees to pray when the Angelus bell rang. ‘Little streams played about and made a happy, gentle music,’ she remembered. ‘One nursery maid who took me there as a small child told me that if I was not good “Biddy-Bark” who lived behind he trees would carry me off … there were few things we did not attempt, playing tennis before breakfast which we felt was a “grown up” thing to do, was one of our escapades … we were allowed to wander about and do what we liked apparently, as long as we kept to ourselves.’13
There were exceptions to this exclusivity. The clergyman, Reverend George Fitzmaurice, married his Catholic servant and had twelve children. Winifred O’Connor was nineteen years old and pregnant with his child when they were betrothed. On Sundays he would leave his wife at the Catholic church for mass before going on to take the Protestant service. Years later, a Catholic neighbour would remember the Fitzmaurice family as ‘good people even though they were Protestant’.14 The writer Cyril Kelly could recall his Ulster Protestant grandfather, who married a County Limerick Catholic and came to Listowel as a constable in the RIC, living at 88 Church Street an ‘intensely private Protestant man’.15
Looking back, it is clear that the age of Protestant supremacy was in a state of terminal decline from around the 1830s, and even earlier there were warnings from the more perceptive observers of the age. Henry Grey Bennet, lawyer and politician, wrote of Irish Catholics in 1803, two years after the Act of Union, that it was ‘fallacious to say they are satisfied, because they do not rebel; nor is it true, that the Catholics have always continued quiet and contented … If ever there were a time in which it became the interest, as it always is the duty, of governments, to watch over the welfare of their subjects, it is surely that in which we live.’16 Sadly Bennet was a minority voice in the early nineteenth century and he was to leave the scene too early, distracted by grief over the death of his only son and one of his daughters. His career was ruined by a later scandal over claims he tried to seduce a male servant.
The remaining anti-Catholic laws which guaranteed Protestant supremacy were ended. Pressure from Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association and Repeal movements
had led to the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, while the Irish Land League and relentless economic pressure drastically reduced the size of many Anglo-Irish estates and opened the way for a new Catholic elite.* My Purtill family would have seen the physical decay of the local Protestant church at Lisselton, which by 1917 had been reduced to a simple tower. A visitor remarked on how a ‘bonfire having been made of the remains of old coffins inside of the tower, much of the ivy was burned to the obvious improvement of the tower, which stands out as a landmark’.17
No longer a political elite, the Protestants of north Kerry were becoming an increasingly marginal social caste. They lacked the Calvinist certainty of the northern Presbyterians, and the crucial numbers and working-class muscle that made the Protestants of Ulster such a formidable foe.
One of those who lived through the Anglo-Irish twilight near the Purtills was Horatio Herbert Kitchener, avenger of Gordon of Khartoum and future field marshal. His father had purchased land that became vacant due to the bankruptcy of an Anglo-Irish landlord and, according to an early account of Kitchener’s life, it included ‘a little village depopulated by the potato Famine’.18 Kitchener’s father Henry was a man on the make among the embattled estates of the old Anglo-Irish world. The rural hinterland of Listowel offered the prospect of a gentleman’s life at a fraction of the cost in England. The Kitcheners arrived in 1850 while the Famine was still killing in north Kerry. They were outsiders. They could trace no lineage to the Elizabethan or Cromwellian plantations. But Anglo-Irish society welcomed them by virtue of their Protestant faith, and the social status incumbent upon Henry Kitchener’s former rank of lieutenant colonel. His son Horatio was born at Gunsboro near Ballydonoghue the year they arrived. It appears that the family came under attack from agrarian raiders at some point in the 1850s. A fawning article in the local press, published half a century later, described how the brave lieutenant colonel had single-handedly fought off the gunmen. ‘Mr. Kitchener during his residence at Gunsboro was most popular in the district,’ wrote the Kerry Evening Post.
