by Jan Morris
In the evening all the local people came to Duckett’s Grove for the fireworks: from Ballyhade and Uglin, Killerig and even Ballyhacket Cross they came on foot and in donkey-cart, dressed in their respectful best, and grateful in advance to Mr and Mrs Duckett and Miss Olive Thompson. A great tar barrel blazed as the sun went down, and presently the rockets soared over County Carlow, while Mrs Duckett gave a magic lantern lecture in the coachhouse. They danced till midnight, and then home to their lodges, their gatehouses, their whitewashed cottages went the Irish, and Mr Duckett, Mrs Duckett and the Children’s Friend, making sure the flag had been correctly lowered, parted along the long polished corridors of the mansion, and went to bed.
3
Many Anglo-Irish were understandably distressed, when accused of being oppressors. The absentee landlord of evil memory had rarely survived the land reform laws, and the resident landowners were often admirable employers of the paternal kind. If they did not exactly love Ireland, they were often passionately attached to their particular slice of it: they treated their tenants like wayward children, and thought that nobody else understood them. Gladstone and his supporters aroused their bitter mockery. You had to live among the Irish to know them. One had nothing against the people, but one had only to look around to realize that they needed strong leadership. The Irish were priest-ridden, credulous and stubborn, but nobody could deny their charm, and surely nobody would dispute that the fête at Duckett’s Grove, for example, showed how happy the relationship was, between the right kind of landlord and his tenantry.
These were familiar imperial sentiments. The British in Ireland did not think of themselves as Empire-builders, but in a way they were. The land hunger which drove many Englishmen to the distant colonies took many more over the Irish Sea, and there was still a steady flow of retired Army people who lacked the capital to buy estates in England, but could, like Kitchener’s father, live a gentleman’s life on the other side.1 They forfeited nothing by emigrating to Ireland. They could still vote in the English elections, and all the appurtenances of privileged English society were available on the spot: an English church in the village, excellent hunting, Trinity College, Dublin, for the boy to go to, if he had a taste for the Church or the Law, fine Irish regiments of the British Army waiting to welcome a soldier’s son. The Anglo-Irish were the Establishment of Ireland. Their newspaper was the Irish Times, their church the Church of Ireland, disestablished by Gladstone in 1869, but still ornately representative of Authority. Their social life was full and agreeable, and they formed a racy and good-looking élite—‘tall, strong, handsome chaps’, Friedrich Engels thought them in 1856, with ‘enormous moustaches under colossal Roman noses’.
Anglo-Irish generals sometimes seemed to enjoy a monopoly of British command, perhaps because Ireland gave more chance of authority to the upper middle classes: the indigenous Irish aristocracy had mostly left long before for France or Spain. The flow of Irish recruits was almost essential to the survival of the volunteer British Army, and the part played by the Anglo-Irish in the wars of the Empire was out of all proportion to their numbers. The shrine of the Ascendancy was St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, where Swift had been Dean. It was decked with Anglo-Irish monuments. Irish wolfhounds lay sleepy at the foot of the Royal Irish Regiment’s memorial, scrolls and battle honours all around, with a frieze illustrating the storming of the Shive Dagon pagoda in 1852. Cobwebby flags of Connaught Rangers and Royal Irish Fusiliers hung from the high ceiling, and here was the tomb of the hero Thomas Rice Henn, Royal Engineers, whose troop of eleven soldiers had, in Afghanistan in 1880, covered the retreat of an entire British brigade—‘I envy the manner of his death’, his compatriot Garnet Wolseley1 had written of him, ‘—if I had ten sons, I should indeed be proud if all ten fell as he fell’. Near by a Viceroy of India was remembered: the Earl of Mayo, who was assassinated while inspecting a penal settlement on the Andaman Islands in 1872: an Anglo-Irishman par excellence, descended from ten generations of settlers, son of an evangelical father, an excellent shot and rider to hounds, educated at Trinity College and Unionist in all things.
In the choir hung the helmets, swords and banners of the Order of St Patrick, a knightly order which represented the flower of the Anglo-Irish chivalry. In the nave a large royal crest marked the pew of the Viceroy of Ireland, Lord Cadogan,2 and his wife, a niece of the Anglo-Irish Duke of Wellington. Opposite sat Lady Plunket, whose husband, the fourth Baron Plunket, had been until his recent death Archbishop of Dublin—a Trinity man again, and the grandson of a Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. Next to hers was a pew dedicated to the memory of Sir Benjamin Guinness, the richest man in Ireland, who had restored the cathedral entirely at his own expense, and who was, as it happens, Lady Plunket’s father. It was a close-knit society, the Protestant Ascendancy, and seldom abashed.
4
The Cadogans stood, ex officio, at the summit of social life in Ireland. As Lord Lieutenant and Governor-General of Ireland the Viceroy had great statutory powers: he was also, like his peer in India, the representative of the Queen and thus the fulcrum of pomp and snobbery. Around his citadel, Dublin Castle, revolved not only the hierarchy of the Anglo-Irish proper, but also the class of favoured Irish gentry, the Parsees of Dublin, known scornfully to nationalists as the Castle Catholics. The Cadogans lived spendidly up at the Castle, or in the superb Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park that was the official residence. They no longer expected the minstrels, foot-guards, heralds, masters of the revels and gentlemen in waiting who had gone with the job earlier in the century: but there was still a sumptuous protocol and ceremonial to their lives, enacted against a background of great State apartments and historical bric-à-brac. The Viceroys were usually great noblemen, and society aped or adulated them. The Viceregal route to England, from Kingstown to Holyhead, was considered much smarter than the Liverpool route: if a hostess needed extra help for a dinner party, she would cheerfully pay extra for a man advertising himself as a ‘Castle waited. Young girls listened, hearts a’ thump, for the clattering hoofs of the mounted orderly who, trotting from door to door in the Georgian squares of Dublin, distributed the Viceregal invitations to ball or drawing-room.
Sometimes Viceroys had been boycotted, by one party or the other—the Dublin Corporation had declined to meet Lord Cadogan when he made his State entry into Dublin in 1895. In times when the Home Rule movement was in the ascendancy in London, Viceroys were often ignored by passionate Irish Unionists, and the Anglo-Irish disappeared from balls and levees: in times like Lord Cadogan’s, with Unionists on top, Irish nationalists were more careful than ever not to be seen dead at the Castle. On the whole, though, the Viceroys were spared the worst of Irish acrimony. They looked decorative, they opened functions with aplomb, and most people loved a lord. At the gates of the Castle, whenever the gentry assembled there for a function, a little crowd of the Irish poor was to be seen, tattered in their thin clothes in the dusk, and sometimes waiting there for hours: not to throw bombs or cat-calls, but only to watch the lords and ladies ride by, in a shimmer of silks and decorations, towards the imperial luxury inside.
The Viceroy was sometimes a member of the British Cabinet, though he was not often in London. The Chief Secretary of Ireland was always a member of Parliament, often a Cabinet Minister too, and generally spent most of the Parliamentary session at Westminster, dealing with Irish matters in the Commons, and returning to Dublin for the recess. He was the most powerful figure in the Government of Ireland, occupying one of the most demanding posts in the British Empire.1 He lived in another lovely Phoenix Park mansion, within sight of Viceregal Lodge,2 and it was he who bound together all the disparate and sometimes anomalous departments of the Irish administration—some branches of the United Kingdom Government, some specific to Ireland. In the Commons he answered questions on behalf of all these departments: as though one Parliamentary Secretary were to deal with the affairs of all the separate Ministries of the United Kingdom. What was more, he was directly respo
nsible for security in Ireland, much the most dangerous of the Queen’s dominions, and it was to his office in the Castle that officials of every kind brought their problems and submitted their budgets.
He supervised a peculiar form of government. Some of its anomalies, like the office of Lord Lieutenant itself, were survivals of the eighteenth century, when the island governed itself under the Crown. Others were symptoms of the country’s schizophrenic status, half-way between a colony and a Government department. The senior Civil Servants in Dublin were mostly Anglo-Irish, rather than plain English, and many were Catholic: but their loyalties were to London, and they had often come to Dublin after experience elsewhere in the Empire. They ran the place generally on a basis of informal collusion. In so small a city as Dublin, where clubs, Government offices, hotels and restaurants were all within walking distance, they met each other frequently, and were inclined to govern Ireland over whiskeys before lunch. They were cultivated, often talented men, and many of them wrote books, often on obscure or scholarly subjects. Bram Stoker, who was on the staff of the Registrar of Petty Sessions, wrote several. One was a textbook on the duties of petty sessions clerks. Another was Dracula.
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This queer régime remained undeterred by all the centuries of Irish opposition. Many of the Anglo-Irish were convinced that they would always be needed in Ireland, or that the Irish peasantry was being deceived by unscrupulous nationalists. The Irish in return, with their gift for social lubricance, generally gave the answer they thought would give most pleasure, doffed their caps with courteous respect, and were perfectly sweet with the children.
The British laboured on with their task of persuading the Irish that they were British, too (though ‘West-Briton’ had long been a term of derision for the Anglo-Irish). At Galway, in the west, a very odd building gave expression to this intent. This was Queen’s College, one of three university colleges set up in the 1840s to educate Irish Catholics in the proper English way, and it was a kind of parody of Christ Church, Oxford, that unshakeably royalist instrument of education: a mock-up, that is, like a plaster mould of a building, with the proportions all wrong and the detail disregarded, but a stumpy Tom Tower unmistakable in the middle, and a general vague impression of Oxford quadrangles. The Irish patriots showed a predictable contempt for such institutions, but many Irish Catholics emerged from them, all the same, to serve the Queen and the Empire. Some entered the Indian Civil Service, and took to India qualities particular to their kind. Michael O’Dwyer, for instance, a famous administrator of the Punjab, was one of the fourteen children of an Irish Catholic farmer and did his best work in intimate contact with the Punjabi peasants—often rogues to an Irish pattern themselves, living lives as close to the soil, and as shot through with brutality, as poor men lived in O’Dwyer‘s native Tipperary. And Antony MacDonnell, in 1897 Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, first distinguished himself in Bengal famine relief, an all too proper task for a passionate son of County Mayo.
There were even attempts to convert the whole island to Protestantism, as a first step to civilization. Before Catholic Emancipation, in 1829, the Irish Catholics had virtually no rights at all—as was said in an Irish court case in 1759, the law ‘does not presume a Papist to exist in the kingdom, nor can they as much as breathe here without the consent of the Government’. Later, in the days of the famine, missionaries had sometimes persuaded starving peasants to ‘turn’ by giving them a bowl of soup. All this was cynically and bitterly remembered by the Irish, but resolute men of Protestantism still tried. The Society for Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics still worked ‘to promote the glory of God and the salvation of the souls of our Roman Catholic fellow subjects’: and on Achill Island, off the Galway coast, a shabby church, a pair of schools, an old printing office, a hostel and a vicarage stood testimony to the efforts of the Reverend E. Nangle, who had established a mission colony there in the 1830s, as a pilot project for the conversion of all Ireland.
He had been enthusiastically supported in England, where it was then widely believed that the True Light would solve all Ireland’s miseries, and he was able to buy a large part of the island. He published his own newspaper, the Achill Herald, violently assaulting the Catholic priests and their morals, and since he not only controlled all the media of information but was also the chief landowner of the island, it seemed a foregone conclusion that Achill would soon submit, establishing a precedent for all the Irish. Somehow it did not work. A number of islanders were temporarily saved from the burning, but they soon slipped back into the old faith, and the mission lost heart. Mr Nangle found no worthy successors in his office, and by the 1890s the project was abandoned. It was the most determined attempt to proselytize the Irish, except for the French Canadians the largest Catholic community in the Empire: but the Cardinal Archbishop of Dublin, three Catholic Archbishops, twenty-three Catholic Bishops and 7,000 Catholic priests had proved too strong for Mr Nangle, and remained the shepherds of the Irish soul.
6
Much more permanent were the barracks, all over Ireland, by which the British kept the country quiet. They seemed to be everywhere. Whole towns had arisen around them over the years, and hundreds of thousands of Irish people ironically depended upon them for their livelihood. A good example was Fermoy, in County Cork. This was a town actually created for the British Army. A Scottish merchant who had bought land there in 1789 offered it to the British Government as a barracks site, and himself built the town to serve the garrison. Grey slabs of barrack blocks dominated the little place, high on bluffs above the Blackwater River; ranges and training-grounds surrounded it; the garrison church commanded the town bridge; the garrison commander lived in a pleasant house in a park; Fermoy itself was laid out in regimental fashion, four-square and apple-pie, so that one might almost expect to find its municipal crest set out in whitewashed pebbles in the square, and a British battalion coming here from Poona or St Lucia, Halifax or the Cape, would feel itself instantly at home.1
Fermoy seemed organic to Ireland, for all its alien bearing, so long had it been embedded in the lush greenery of Cork: the great military base called the Curragh, in the centre of Ireland, looked more like a transit camp of conquerors, or perhaps the setting for some Anglo-Irish durbar. It lay well away from the town of Kildare, in the middle of a magnificent bare plain—the Salisbury Plain of Ireland, 5,000 acres of unenclosed grassland reserved for the occupying army. Off the Dublin road on one side was the barracks, first established in 1646, a little town of its own, built in the drab railway brick so dear to the British Army, and equipped with the Indian verandas so familiar to us by now from so many parts of the Empire. On the other side of the road was the Curragh race-course, the best in Ireland, where they ran the Irish Derby at the end of June. The Curragh was a sacred place to Irish patriots. There St Brigid, after St Patrick the most revered saint in Ireland, had traditionally grazed her sheep in the Celtic noonday long before. There, in 1798, 350 Irish revolutionaries had supposedly been massacred after laying down their arms. The Irish had been racing horses on the Curragh, it was said, for 2,000 years, and it was in Donnelly’s Hollow on the Curragh that Dan Donnelly the Irishman beat the great English prizefighter, George Cooper, in a never-forgotten bout in 1815.
All these race memories were overwhelmed by the presence of the British, their Irish mercenaries and their Anglo-Irish allies. The soldiers in khaki lines of open order laboured on afternoon exercises across the windy downs. The crackle of rifle fire echoed from the ranges. There were jolly English shouts from the playing-fields, and watery English smells from the cookhouses. Officers jangled merrily, in brake on or horseback, to and from the race-course and the stables, and often the local gentry were to be seen about, clattering home from luncheon with the General, or picking up a party from the mess for a jaunt into Kildare. Nearly every British regiment knew the Curragh. The Prince of Wales had been stationed there in the 1860s, with the Grenadier Guards: his mother came ov
er for a review of the troops, and thought that her dear Bertie, as he marched past with his company, ‘did not look at all so very small’.
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Of all the cities the British had created across the waters, Dublin was the most beautiful. Its sense of space and flow was pure English, and its broad streets, decreed by the Dublin Wide Streets Commission in 1757, allowed the fresh air and sunlight off the sea to flood the city with an invigoration the most ascetic public school prefect would have applauded. Everybody felt the sparkle of the place, its tingle in the air, its mingled suggestions of wit and threat, like a bubbly drink laced with something lethal.
Nelson presided over the capital, high on his column in Sackville Street, and the Georgian public buildings of the city were monuments of patrician authority—hardly touched, since Ireland was not a place where the British wanted to invest money, by the showier display of the Victorians. The Castle itself was grand but forbidding—Victoria thought it gloomy—its great cobbled yard surrounded by the long ranges of the Viceregal offices, and surveyed by the white cupola of the Office of Arms. Justice stood above its ceremonial gateway, balancing her scales on an unmistakably Anglo-Irish hand. Up and down its pavements the sentries laconically tramped, guarding not only the Viceroy but also any prisoners of State there happened to be in the Bermingham Tower, and keeping an eye on the Chapel Royal at the end of the yard, whose Viceregal heraldics seemed to invite vandalism.1 The splendid classical buildings of the old Irish Parliament had been sold to the Bank of Ireland, with the stipulation they should be so rebuilt that the people would no longer associate them with lost privileges: but the reconstruction had been tactful, and the buildings still stood with properly restrained authority down Dame Street from the Castle. There was nothing remotely Irish to the splendid domed building of the Four Courts, on the banks of the Liffey, or the dark Dickensian close of St Patrick, or the collegiate facade of Trinity. The famous residential squares, terrace after terrace across Dublin, might have been lifted there bodily from London, and even Guinness’s great brewery beside the river had a stalwart London look—it had only been permitted to survive, the nationalists said, because the Guinnesses were such staunch Protestant Unionists. Dublin was an English city, one of the loveliest. The most Irish thing about it was the shifting drab flow of the poor people which ebbed through the streets with handcarts and thin horses—innocents from the country in search of jobs, or talkative town sparrows who formed, even then, perhaps the most entertaining proletariat in Europe.
