by Tim Robinson
He went down the slope eastwards. There were two big hookers beached at the mouth of the river. The anchor of one of the boats tore the priest’s calf and cut it badly. All the same he was able to walk with it – he had to – until he came to a kelp kiln that was being burned in Roisín na Maithnioch. A man of the name of Faherty was burning the kelp. The Faherty man himself saw the army and they coming. Faherty told him to take off his coat and his ‘coroline’ (a high hat), so that he would put them on himself and take the army for a run. ‘Let you stay here with the seaweed covering you,’ he said.
Father Miley took off his things and hid himself under the seaweed. Faherty put on the priest’s coat and hat. He went off eastwards over the mountain making for Cill Chiaráin. He kept on until he reached Ros Dúgáin on the edge of the sea in Coill Sáile. He went into a house there and told them that he had run in place of the priest, and the hard case he was in. The man of the house told him to take off the hat and coat and that he himself would hide them. There was a basket of potatoes on the floor and they were eating a meal. They told him to sit at the basket like the rest of them and it wouldn’t be known that he was not one of the household.
It wasn’t long before the army came. They enquired had they seen any man in black clothes going by. The man of the house said that they had seen him, that he was gone off with one of the boats that had just sailed from the beach, that he had heard the stranger calling to the boatmen, asking them to take him to Béal an Daingin on the other side of the bay. The army went on as far as Inbhear Ros Muc but they didn’t get any boat that would follow the boat that had gone out, and they didn’t get any news of Father Miley either.8
Nicknames of two families commemorate this adventure; the famous nineteenth-century strongman Seán an Chóta (of the coat) was the son of the man who had changed coats with Father Miley, and as late as the 1930s a descendant of the man who had freed him from the cellar was called Colm an tSagairt (of the priest). In the version of the story I heard from a pious old lady in Coill Sáile, the Faherty is an old man, and says that since his life is nearly finished anyway, it would be better if the Yeos caught him instead of the priest; and Father Miley accepts his reasoning – an interesting moral point.
In any case, Father Miley lived to minister to his flock until the 1840s, making a living by playing the bagpipes at weddings. He used to write out the Gospel according to St John, for people to wear around their necks as a charm. He was once seen taking off his hat when caught in a hailstorm, to let the hailstones strike his head as a penance. In his old age, when he had been called upon to anoint a man dying after a faction fight at the fair of Ballinaboy, he said that that was the last of his services for God. He was living in a little cottage in Gowlaun near Clifden when the Yeomanry found him at last, and he was so decrepit that they left him to die in his own good time. His colleagues in the rebellion of 1798 had by then long gone abroad or died or vanished into obscurity. A verse from a lament9 for another of these rebel refugees can be their epitaph:
Is gurb as Cill Álaidh a ghluais an dé-smál
A dhíbir sinn ó chéile,
Na Francaigh a thíocht go hÉire,
Mo léan agus mo chrádh!
From Killala came the blast of misfortune
That drove us asunder,
The Frenchmen’s coming to Ireland,
My grief and my sorrow!
THE LANDLORD’S AGENT
Throughout all such times of adventure and tragedy and song, the business of earning the rent, and collecting the rent, went on. Over 160,000 acres of Connemara belonged to the Martins of Ballynahinch, but successive profligate generations had left the estate deep in debt long before 1845, when the onset of the Great Famine made it impossible to extract money from the tenantry. In 1847 new legislation placing the burden of famine-relief schemes on the local landowners completed their downfall. Thomas Martin died of a fever caught when visiting his former tenants in the workhouse at Clifden, his daughter fled the country, and the huge desolation that had been their estate passed into the hands of the financiers to whom it had been mortgaged, the Law Life Assurance Society of London. Whereas the Martins are said never to have evicted anybody, their successors knew that their only hope of selling the land for a profit was to rid it of superfluous human beings, and so they energetically carried on with the clearance the Famine had begun.
Law Life Assurance, a faceless, distant abstraction, has left no trace in Connemara lore that I know of, and its representative in oral history is its land-agent, George Robinson. George came to Connemara in about 1857. He had previously been employed as a civil engineer at Shannonbridge, where he had married Rebecca, daughter of the Protestant minister of Aughrim and a descendant of the Martins and Wood-Martins of Sligo. The former Martin residence, which is now the almost glamorous Ballynahinch Castle Hotel, was then a plain two-storey house looking down through a few trees to a lake; as a surveyor a few years earlier had reported,
There is a good field, not of land, but of rocks and water, to be worked upon, and the scene might be made truly a ‘Highland House’, but up to the present time the cutting and carving that has taken place, and the unfinished and poverty stricken state of everything around the Castle, has only weakened the natural romanticness of the spot.10
Although the Law Life Society furnished the house with battlements in about 1858, cannyness still outweighed romantic sentiments in prospective purchasers’ minds, and the estate remained on their hands until a London brewer, Richard Berridge, bought it in 1872. Thus the Robinsons occupied the Castle up to that date, and probably until 1885 when they built a fine bay-windowed mansion near Roundstone, for George became agent to the Berridges, who themselves did not opt for residence in those increasingly dangerous times.
The society the family grew up in was as bleak as its setting. Two photographs by the well-known William Lawrence of Upper Sackville Street, Dublin, have been preserved by the Robinsons’ descendants (whom I have got to know on the strength of our common name). One shows the Protestant chapel a mile or so away from Ballynahinch on the Galway to Clifden road. Not a tree or shrub mediates between the pretty little Gothic-revival building and the windswept boglands around it. The occasion is surely the inauguration of the chapel in 1865, for about seventy people line the drive up to the chapel, facing the eye of the future, and behind them a long stretch of the road is occupied by waiting horse-cars and carriages. All the beleaguered gentry of the Roundstone and Clifden area would have mustered for this show of solidarity, for Connemara had been racked by sectarian strife ever since the Reverend Alexander Dallas had been blown in from England by the ill wind of the Famine to fight the priests for the souls of the hungry. One needs a lens to individuate the tiny figures: the minister in his shovel hat and cassock, the ladies pyramidal in poke bonnets, mantles and crinolines, the gentlemen all stiffly vertical and extended upwards by tall top hats, the Robinsons’ butler Old Burke bringing up the rear with one of his young masters, and three men dressed with propriety but immediately identifiable as ‘natives’ by the way they sprawl against the gable of the chapel, near the bellrope they have probably just finished pulling. These last remind me of the contemptuous nickname the Catholics of Kingstown near Clifden had for their neighbour who performed the same office for the little Protestant chapel there: ‘bell-slasher’.
The other photograph, perhaps taken on the same day, shows the Robinson family posed on a slope which one can deduce is that now occupied by balustraded garden steps and hydrangea beds opposite the front door of Ballynahinch Castle. No such charms existed then; patches of stone show through the poor, strawlike grass, and the only other vegetation is a gaunt tussock of hazel scrub farther up the slope. George is on the left, Rebecca on the right, and the nine children between them, despite the formality of their grouping, seem to have started from their father’s loins in a disconcerting rush. George’s body looks undersized, angular, his trouser-leg strained by one acutely bent knee, the other leg doubled unc
omfortably beneath him. His top hat has been put aside; one can see his receding hairline and anxious eyebrows and drawn cheeks. His longish beard is frosted. Rebecca seems more settled, matron-formed in her striped blouse and vast dark draperies of skirt, but her face is set and unsmiling. The three teenage daughters – known as the Rose, the Lily and the Ivy, says family lore – are artistically displayed, straw hats in their laps, each with her face at a different angle to the camera. Only the middle one seems happy with her looks, though (and she did become a beauty, as later portraits of her witness, including one by Oscar Wilde’s friend Frank Miles, who thought she excelled another of his sitters, the Jersey Lily herself). The light tones of the girls’ dresses are set off by the dark formality of the two male youngsters behind them. One of them, hand in pocket, manages to lean back in an almost raffish pose despite his tightly buttoned waistcoat and the sharp upward stabs of his collar-points. The other, Henry, who will succeed his father as Resident Magistrate and agent to the Berridges, already mirrors him in attitude and expression, but is as yet unmarked by his cares. And set into this composition here and there are the three younger children and the baby, all glancing askance at the camera in apparent foreboding and mistrust. Despite their architectonic grouping, the family looks fragmented, forlorn. Too much of the surrounding vacancy is shown. The top of Benlettery Mountain rears behind them, as bare as a skull.
Were it not for these images, I would have little idea of George Robinson as a person, rather than as that figment of ideological history, the wicked land-agent, for the only view I have of him from the side of the oppressed is of some absurd, semi-mechanical creature. In his autobiography Mise, the nationalist and revolutionary Colm Ó Gaora describes the journey he made by foot when he was young, from his native Ros Muc to Tourmakeady in Mayo.11 Passing through the lonely valley of Mám Trasna, he thinks of the gruesome and mysterious slaughter of the Joyce family there in 1882, and quickens his steps to Paire an Doire, where another memory disturbs him:
It was near this place that seanRobinson [Old Robinson] was shot one day. He was coming by pony-car with a couple of policemen when he was fired on. Damned bad luck it was that every inch of him was armour-plated [plátáilte] except his head. The shooters were so keen and eager they aimed to put the lead into his heart. The shot didn’t touch him there, because he was plated. The police who were there to guard him were so drunk they couldn’t draw their guns or get out of the car.
Robinson’s own view of the job that exposed him to such dangers is clear from a letter he wrote in 1875 to Dublin Castle, concerning ‘an outrage which has been perpetrated on this Estate, near Oughterard’. Certain leases having fallen in, on the tenants’ deaths, Robinson had it in mind to ‘readjust and square the lands’, that is, to put higgledy-piggledy smallholdings together into viable orderly farms. The obstacle to such improvement was the usual one of there being undertenants in possession. Young Henry Robinson had called on them with the sheriff to offer them an arrangement by which they could become temporary caretakers of their farms until new agreements should be drawn up, but their parish priest had refused to let them agree to this proposal, saying that both Isaac Butt, the nationalist MP, and Archbishop McHale of Tuam had advised tenants not to sign such agreements. So the sheriff had evicted them, but did not put out their furniture, and in one case, ‘moved with compassion’, did not remove an infant in a cradle. That night the families all broke into their homes again, and George was advised that, as legal possession had not been obtained (had young Henry been insufficiently forceful in not putting out the furniture?), it would have to be taken again. So George himself called on the undertenants, accompanied by the sheriff and the local Justice of the Peace:
We went first to the house of John Sullivan of Garranagry a man aged about eighty years. Mr Jackson, the Sheriff and I strongly advised him to consent to be put in as caretaker & not allow his furniture to be removed. His reply was that he would not sign any caretaker’s agreement, that he would pay his rent, & that the furniture might be removed as soon as we liked, he then walked out of his own accord & possession was taken by the sheriff. In the course of an hour or two we received intelligence that the poor old man had died.
In the meantime we went from house to house offering the same terms but receiving the same answer, – they dared not sign caretakers’ agreements as the priest had ordered them not, and had moreover taken their money stating that he would settle with me. After having taken possession of all the houses we returned to the village of Garranagry where we found the priest & with him a mob of I should say two thousand men & women. On our arrival he addressed me & stated that the old man had been murdered & that he would swear informations before a Magistrate …
The verdict of an inquest, to which Robinson and his colleagues were not called as witnesses, was that John Sullivan had died as a result of rough handling in being put out of his house. Robinson claims that this finding was contrary to fact, and calls on the authorities to hold a sworn investigation into the whole transaction. What the outcome was I do not know, but such incidents must have been part and parcel of George’s professional life in those dreadful years of class and sectarian strife.
By the time of the Land War, when the peasantry’s sporadic and pathetic acts of terrorism were being co-ordinated into a political campaign by the Land League, agents and bailiffs had to go about their business with large escorts. In 1880, when ejectment notices were served on a number of Roundstone tenants, forty police confronted a crowd of three hundred armed with pitchforks, the Riot Act was read, and eighteen arrests were made.12 A couple of years later, when thirty-two Roundstone families were evicted for arrears of rent, the echo of cannonfire from gunboats in the bay underlined the gravitas of the proceedings.13 But if the Robinsons were plátáilte their property was vulnerable; on the night of 27 November 1879 three of their bullocks were driven over a cliff into the sea near Roundstone, and seventy-six sheep and two rams were killed or injured.14
Evictions on the Berridge estate continued until at least 1894, and as Henry Robinson was also agent for the Digbys who owned the Aran Islands, he would have ordered the eviction that J.M. Synge witnessed there as late as 1898. Nevertheless, with the passing of the Land Acts leading to large reductions in rent from the mid-1880s, and the developmental work of the Congested Districts Board from 1891, the worst of times were over. George, who died in 1890, hardly saw them, but Henry is remembered in ways that suggest the good old days rather than the bad, probably because he outlasted the Berridges and became agent to the Land Commission when the estate was bought out in 1914. The plantation of beeches and pines he wrapped around Letterdyfe House, his home just north of Roundstone, has prospered, shadowing the house too darkly but mellowing the stern magnificence of the village’s famous outlook. In the harsh terrain of Connemara, mature woodland is historically synonymous with landlordism, and those trees are still ‘Robinson’s Wood’. Henry’s sheep, on the hillside behind the house, used to be watched over by one Mattie O’Donnell, and Mattie’s grandson, himself a shepherd, has told me a story that shows Henry in benevolent mood. One day Mattie was attending the Clifden cattle fair, and Robinson offered him a lift back to Roundstone in his pony-car. As they were rattling along the track that winds across the immense bog between Clifden and Roundstone (a labyrinth of lakes and streams that only the shepherds know), O’Donnell said, ‘Let me down here and I’ll go and get a hare for my dinner.’ Robinson was amazed, and said, ‘How will you kill a hare, with no gun and no dog?’ O’Donnell replied, ‘If I don’t get him on the run, I’ll get him some other way.’ Robinson was sceptical; he said, ‘Well, if you can meet me at Lydon’s Bridge (which is on the road into Roundstone) with a hare, I’ll give you five pounds.’ Of course five pounds would have been a fortune to O’Donnell, who had, as they say, a long weak family to support. So off he went into the bog, and he crept up to a place where he knew a hare would be lying in its form (a hare makes a hollow in the heather for itself, in
to which it fits exactly and invisibly, called its form), and he tiptoed up and grabbed the hare, and carried it in his two hands across the bog until he came out on the road again just as Robinson was coming round the corner in his pony-car. Robinson looked at him and said, ‘If that’s not Mattie O’Donnell it must be his ghost!’, and true to his word, next time he was at the bank, he got Mattie the five pounds.
So, the Robinsons are not totally locked into their historical roles as ogres; something of their whims and oddities is preserved. In one of their eminent namesake Sir Henry Robinson’s books of reminiscences I found this:
Another instance of queer so-called humour I remember when I was staying on a wet wintry day in Murphy’s Hotel, Oughterard. Walter Seymour, the secretary of the Grand Jury, a very peppery gentleman with a wooden leg, was staying in the house, and also a large land agent, a namesake of my own, Henry Robinson of Roundstone. Seymour pulled his chair close in to the fire and, with foot on the fender and the wooden leg on the hob, fell fast asleep, and he snored so loudly that he irritated Henry Robinson, who was trying to wind up the accounts of his day’s collection. To put an end to this disturbance, Robinson went to the fireplace and piled the turf sods around the wooden leg on the hob, and then went back to his work. Very soon the leg ignited, burned for a while, and at last with a loud crack split up, waking Seymour, who at first didn’t know what had happened, and hopped about the room on the sound leg with the other crackling and burning merrily under him. Robinson proceeded to remonstrate with Seymour, ‘Ah now, will you stop your pranks?… That’s a dangerous thing to do, man; you might burn the house down.’15
