The Curlew's Call

Before we were old enough to go to Sunday school Martha and Lily read us Bible stories from colourful picture books. God’s Heaven with white-winged angels for the saved, the horned Devil stoking his fires for sinners. And always, God watching you, knowing what you were thinking and doing. While the Ten Commandments were beyond us then, we were gathering a list of sins. And quickly got a sense of how simple it was to err under God’s eye:  disobedience, fibbing, fighting. Other more serious ones were later added: stealing, cursing, playing with the Devil’s cards, gambling, smoking, the list got longer. They taught us the Lord’s Prayer; although its nightly refrain never settled in our own house.

We spent some Sundays there too, flat inside days. No playing or laughter outside. A day for church and bible study.  Maybe ‘Songs of Praise’ on TV. To Martha and Lily at that time, life appeared full of danger and risk. When hunger drove us back from the field red-faced, panting hard, with scrapes and the odd bruise we would hear dire warnings that our ‘hearts might burst’. One that I particularly remember was being told that so-and-so ‘got blood poisoning from a rusty nail, and watched a poison move up his arm, into his heart and killed him.’ Ferocious cleaning with splashes of Dettol would follow. Inside the house there was danger too, ‘You’re sitting too close to the fire, you’ll melt like a jelly baby.’ And one that frightened me at first, after I swallowed chewing gum, ‘That dirty gum it’ll stick to your insides, and everything will stop working.’

While much of this apprehension must have been related to Lily’s early diagnosis of heart disease, the impact of the failure of their father’s coachbuilding business must also have come to bear. In later years he was said to be painfully shy, almost a recluse. My father too had an aversion to risk, unlike my mother, and was happy to let life run smoothly with no appetite for change as long as problems stayed away from his door.

Over time the influence of Martha and Lily’s cautious natures was offset by experiences elsewhere. Particularly so at our grandparents’ farmhouse in County Leitrim. Here farm life was a more basic struggle against the forces of nature; more precarious, with some level of jeopardy part of daily life.  From a young age, we were regularly called upon to help with some farm job or other.

Halfway through my time at primary school, Martha opened a small shop on High Street. She had for some years been an agent for Kays mail-order catalogue, garnering sales from friends and neighbours. The shop sold biscuits, sweets and some basic foodstuffs. It was next to the family’s first home and her father’s coachbuilding workshop. For two years it was on my route home from school, and a welcome stop. Martha was generous with sweet treats.  

After about ten years of shopkeeping, she applied to be postmistress of the new post office in the Ballykeel estate. There was spare floor space for a shop as well. She sold babies and children’s clothes this time.  Martha’s sister Jean and my mother soon became involved. Small in stature, Martha didn’t lack grit and resilience and in time appeared to throw off any effects of her father’s timidness. She clearly was a good bookkeeper and had enough business acumen to keep both enterprises running through difficult years. During the Troubles, the post office was raided by gunmen a couple of times, but she kept going. Martha had a wicked laugh, often in response to something that went against her religious instincts.

The sisters were happy in Ballymena and had little desire to travel. The Free State was a foreign and distant place. And I am not sure if they ever understood, or even forgave, their brother for marrying a woman from County Leitrim. While my mother was a member of the Protestant Church of Ireland, among Ballymena Presbyterians the church appeared closer to the ‘Church of Rome’ than to their own faith.

Over the past couple of years, while I have been writing these pieces on my families in County Antrim and County Leitrim, I have been struck by different patterns that appear across several generations. Patterns that influenced individual lives and their journeys. In Leitrim, as part of a Protestant minority, there appeared a restlessness, a hunger for something different, whether through emigration, ambition or simply expanding their farms. In Ballymena, by contrast, there was apparent contentment in lives dominated by strong religious belief and practice; where there was no desire to look too far beyond their own place, happy in their trades and with their lot.

END

Print pdf here.

My dad had four sisters, May, Lily, Martha and Jean. No brothers. May and Lily were born just before the 1911 census, when their father, Hugh was running his coach building business in a workshop at the rear of their house on Albert Street, Ballymena. The business was failing. Few wanted a horse and carriage. The car was taking over.

The early years of the young family were shaped by the collapse of the business, shrinking the family’s life and aspirations. It appeared to have a devastating impact on Hugh. Martha, Jean, and Tommy were born after they moved into a smaller rented terrace house at 45 Princess Street. Here there were a number of families who were closely realted to Hugh and Lizzie.

Hugh was a very religious man, raising his children after his own severe fashion, and was a staunch member of the Orange Order. The story goes that he spent a night in Carrickfergus gaol and walked home, after ‘standing up for his faith’ in defying an order to cross Harryville Bridge, most likely during an Orange Order protest against Home Rule in the early 1900s. He was a strict adherent to Sabbath Day observance and demanded the same in the household: Sunday’s food preparation was carried out the previous day and there was no work or play of any kind. Sunday was for church attendance, prayer and bible study. After their parents died, and during my first years staying with them, my aunts continued this strict weekend regime.

May, the eldest got married locally and became Mrs Templeton. The wedding in Kells Presbyterian Church was at some distance from the family’s home church. This was done most likely in reverence to it being at the iconic epicentre of the Ulster Revival (a religious revival in 1859) which strongly influenced May’s father and grandfather. May died in 1943 not long after the birth of her first child, Maurice. Hugh and Lizzie, May’s parents, felt her death was preventable and fell out irreconcilably with her husband’s family; an aunt and cousin I never knew. Next, Jean married Tom Williams. Tom had been in the Military Police during the North African World War 2 campaign and was stationed in Northern Ireland at the end of that war. After marrying they moved to Lurgan, where they got a house and Tom found work. Tom was a Welshman, proud to recite the poetry of Dylan Thomas. Lily and Martha never married.

Martha and Lily doted on my brother Ivor and I. We looked like twins as they pushed us in buggies around the town, their friends stopping to admire our blond curly heads sticking out of the fur-lined hoods of our suits. Their mother Lizzie, my granny, was still alive then. I recall her as a severe woman with none of the laughter or fun of her daughters. Each of the girls had taken a trade, and probably worked for a short while in one of the town’s mills. When she was in her thirties Lily was found to have a serious heart condition and never worked outside her home again. Living as she did on the steep hill of Princess Street, neither did she walk it again. A few years later after another ’turn’, her doctor advised her to move her bedroom downstairs and strictly avoid anything strenuous. Preparing the Sunday dinner on Saturdays in a small dark scullery was the extent of her work. She rarely went out, not even to church.

My brother and I fell into a pattern of spending Saturdays with Martha and Lily, at ‘Princess Street’ as we referred to it. This gave my mother some relief and time with our younger siblings Elaine and Nigel. At Princess Street, we were joined by my cousin Gareth after his parents returned from Lurgan when Jean wanted to be nearer her family and church.

The laneway outside the tiny backyard with its larder and toilet, dropped sharply down to a field below. It was triangle shaped. At its broad edge, away from the town was a field of allotments. My father worked the family plot there before he married and continued for a few years afterwards. The field narrowed towards the town into a laneway near the Memorial Park on the Galgorm Road. We played on the unused part of the field, joining the town’s children, shouting and squealing as we rolled down the bank and played various games while Saturday afternoons flashed past. The field was silent on Sundays. There we discovered the street skills of chewing bubble gum, spitting and cursing, trying them all out until hunger drove us back to the red-bricked terrace. Our highly religious aunts were mortified at the state we would often return in, but their outbursts of laughter often took any sting from their rebuke. However, I got a stunned reaction trying out the ‘c’ word during one of the regular Saturday evening fry ups. Uncle Tom was there and lent greater gravitas to my telling-off, although I later discovered his army background tempered his anger somewhat.

It was on a Saturday that the coalman came stooping through the front door, him blackened carrying his large sack, walking over papers on the carpeted hallway then through the living room to tip the sack into the small cubby hole under the stairs, the coal clattering into a heap. And also on Saturday came the rent collector, a small suited man called carrying a rent book and pencil. His coy manner was unbroken by the jokes and taunts of Lily and Martha as he stood stiffly marking off their payments. Before their mother died and against her wishes, the two sisters turned the house from its hard linoleumed, dull brown tones into a carpeted home, softer and brighter, prompted by colourful images from their well-thumbed Kay’s Catalogue.

Continued next blog.

Print pdf version here.

(Written in memory of Hugh Gilmour killed by the Parachute Regiment in Derry, as a contribution to the Community Writing Archive on the 50^th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday.)

30^th January 1972

“Is Hugh alright?” an anxious Derry mother might have asked earlier that day, after the first news of trouble reached the house, gun shots already heralding disaster.

“Hugh? Dunno yet.”

“Hugh. Is he alright?” An innocent question dropped from a mother’s lips. A terrible answer that would roll and echo down the years, demanding justice.

—ooo—

I was twenty-one, a green first-year at college, studying engineering, coming to terms with student life in London. After a few drab months in digs, I had moved into bright new student accommodation; a small room on the eight floor with a bird’s eye view of the city. I had a bank account, had time on my hands and was drinking too much. It was great to be away from home, Ballymena. But I was suffering somehow.

Almost every Sunday evening, I would ring home between seven and eight, from some noisy coinbox. That Sunday too, as the body of seventeen-year-old Hugh Gilmour and the twelve others lay in the disorder and chaos of Altnagelvin Hospital, I called. I hadn’t heard the news. My mother usually answered the phone, daddy always desperate to hand it on.

“Are you alright?” she started, “You didn’t call last Sunday.”

“Yeah, I’m good. How’s everything at home?” I said diverting further explanation. My sister? Youngest brother, Nigel? Brother, Ivor in Belfast? Daddy?

“There was trouble in Derry today,” she said at some point. Her judgement already clouded by insinuations dropped into the news bulletins of an illegal march, possible gunmen.

Ours was not a family that entertained political discussion.  Our community was not in disarray, or under threat. It seemed solid enough, yet there was always an unnerving tremble at the edges. My first vote had been for an SDLP man from the Glens.  I kept that to myself.  Before that I followed Austin Currie’s occupation of a property at Caledon where, with a colleague, they demanded housing equality. It helped fix my gaze. I kept that to myself as well. There was nothing overtly sectarian in our house. Just a quiet regard for the status quo.

“Terrible trouble,” she said. I sensed her upset.

—ooo—

“Is Hugh alright?”

“Hugh. Is he alright?”

End

Notes:

1.  All contributions to the Bloody Sunday 50 Community Writing Archive Anniversary are here at: https://bloodysunday50.com/community-writing-archive/

2.  The summary of the Saville Enquiry finally exonerating the victims is quoted in Wikipedia, “The firing by soldiers of 1 PARA on Bloody Sunday caused the deaths of 13 people and injury to a similar number, none of whom was posing a threat of causing death or serious injury,” and also said, “The immediate responsibility for the deaths and injuries on Bloody Sunday lies with those members of Support Company whose unjustifiable firing was the cause of those deaths and injuries.” Saville stated that British paratroopers “lost control”,fatally shooting fleeing civilians and those who tried to aid the civilians who had been shot by the British soldiers. The report stated that British soldiers had concocted lies in their attempt to hide their acts. Saville stated that the civilians had not been warned by the British soldiers that they intended to shoot. The report states, contrary to the previously established belief, that none of the soldiers fired in response to attacks by petrol bombers or stone throwers, and that the civilians were not posing any threat.

Prime Minister David Cameron addressing the House of Commons after the publication of the report on 15 June 2010, apologised and described what British soldiers had done as “both unjustified and unjustifiable, it was wrong”.He acknowledged that all those who died were unarmed when they were killed by British soldiers and that a British soldier had fired the first shot at civilians.”

3.  The following is a brief bio of Hugh Gilmour provided by the organisers of the archive:

Hugh Gilmour 

Aged 17

Hugh Gilmour was the youngest of a family of eight and lived in the Rossville Flats. The son of a former Derry City player, he worked as a trainee tyre fitter in Northern Ireland Tyres in William Street. Living in the Rossville Flats, Hugh found himself at the forefront of the civil unrest that swept the north in 1969, and he contributed to the defence of the Bogside in August 1969. A typical football-mad teenager, he was an avid Liverpool supporter and he attended the pictures every Friday night with his friends, who called him ‘Gilly’. His family remember him as a prankster with a free spirit who would sometimes get into trouble for bunking off school. However, they also remember him as a hugely affectionate wee brother who they doted on. He had just bought a car and was learning to drive – his sisters remember he and his friends tinkering with the beloved, battered little red car, with its special parking space which they marked out with white paint. This was a step up from the go-carts he and his friends would cobble together from scraps as children. They aren’t sure what happened to that little red car after Bloody Sunday, and presume it was probably burnt during a routine riot. Hugh and his friends would spend sundays exploring the town and the docks, doing odd jobs here and there to scrape together their money to buy a bag of chips to share or a day out in Buncrana. A dare-devil, his sisters remember him scaling the multi-story block of flats where they lived or crossing the Craigavon bridge by walking along the parapet with no fear of the cold river Foyle below!

 On Bloody Sunday he left for the march wearing a fashionable new pair of Doc Martens. His family say that Hugh’s friends recognised his body being put into an ambulance by the Doc Martens he was wearing. His loss is still very raw for his family, who say that in many respects they can picture him as if it were yesterday despite the passage of 50 years.

He was shot dead as he ran towards the safety of the Rossville Flats, dying just below the windows of his own home. The banner of the Derry Civil Rights Association was laid over his body. 

Hugh Gilmour was shot by Private U, who claimed to have fired at a man armed with a handgun. The BSI rejected his account as ‘knowingly untrue’. 

Pdf version here.

It was the job that found us. Not one you’d go looking for. Teenaged brothers at a loose end for a week before Christmas, on school holidays. Daddy said we had work. No questions asked.  Handy we thought, a ten-minute cycle from home at Carniny to Galgorm Parks – the townland of my grandmother’s birth.

We were always up for work. We had been brought up to it. Whether picking spuds from the cold autumn clay on some farm outside the town, or the multitude of jobs we grew into at Granny and Granda’s farm in Leitrim, or for me working in one of Ballymena’s many shops.

Here there was no job application, no cv. There was no interview. No chance to ask questions. Working conditions? Career prospects? It was a small chicken factory, its block walls and corrugated asbestos roof bursting out of its small-farm beginnings. The boss was a farmer, and a businessman, I was later to discover. He was also an elder in our church – a spiritual leader – like daddy.

“Tommy?” I guess he asked, “I have a place for your two lads for a week before Christmas, if they’re interested. It’s very busy coming up to the holidays. I need the extra help.” 

Daddy would never have turned him down; in deference to his air of confidence, the hint of authority that seeped from him, a man with ambitions. I guess that if daddy had been a solicitor or a teacher he wouldn’t have been asked. Or if he had been, it would have prompted him to find some alternative, rather than have us spend our week before Christmas, killing and gutting chickens.

—000—

Johnny – name changed and imagined.

‘Johnny, you’re not the full shillin, son.’ Me Da used to say regular. ‘But there’ll always be work for ye. Always wans want ye. Tell me if they ever rough ye up tae much.’ They did, when A was young. But A never tauld him. A learned tae handle meself. When A lost me temper something happened tae me. All A knew was everyone scattered. An A was left standin on ma own. A did a lot of that, standin on ma own. A know they all thought a was soft in the heed. A just saw things different.

A worked in a wee chicken factory for a wheen a years. Course they gave me all the jobs nobody else wanted. A knew that. Cept when new ones come in. They did them fur a while – shovelling blood intae bins, loadin the lorry for the weekly dump, boys that was bad, specially in heat o summer. Thosens there thought a felt nothin doin that work. A did. A didnae like the place, just got used tae it. We all got used tae it. A was nae different.

The wemen groped me. A didnae mind it, most o the time. First thing in the morning. The smell of fresh soap still on me. Afore the stink of the place had soaked into me, into them all. Sometimes across the gutting table they would wink at me. Obvious like. The rest o them watchin. The big one, Joan, she would hauld her hands wide apart like A was that big, her pretendin tae be shocked. A always started tae laugh, giggle, couldnae stop. Then everyone started up. A had tae go and stand on ma own for a while. Till a settled.

A was the one who slit the throats of every chicken that went through the place – well most o them. A’ll tell about that in a minute.  An them birdies endin up on all the fancy tables frea here tae Belfast. They didnae  know A had me hands on them.

The line worked maybe every other day. A used to sit on me plastic chair, way me three or four sharp knives. It was a kinda dull corridor, the flur made tae catch the blood. The line of stunned birds hangin upside down comin at me like there was no stopping them. There was no stopping them. When a cut their throats the blood spilt over ma white plastic gown and boots, japinn me face as well.

Well, one day a fell asleep. In ma chair. A didnae know it. The chickens movin on past me. A woke tae a wile roarin.  Heeds lookin at me from either end of that bloody place, all gulderin and laughin. The line had stopped. The birdies were waking up in the scaldin water doon the line frea me. The chickens in front a me hangin upside doon, swinging about at all angles. Took me A while tae come tae ma senses. Tae know where a was. They never let me forget that day.

—000—

Working in a chicken factory teaches you a lot about life and death, class and capitalism. The look of it, the smell of it. I had been with Granny as she dispatched chickens and geese for Sunday dinners, helped pluck them, and was familiar with the messy nature of life and death on farms, but this was different, the noise, the scale, the smell.

It was a temporary job that I never put on my CV, but one that my brother and I kept up the following summer and for a couple of years afterwards. That first year we gave all our earnings to our mother. Later when I had my driving licence, I jumped at the chance to deliver the oven-ready chickens around the war-torn streets of Belfast; ignoring the added danger of an old backfiring Transit van. I had escaped from that putrid place.

There was always a smell, always worse in summer. Blood and guts, and feathers, going off in bins that should’ve been taken to the dump days before. There was a putrid mix of chicken shit and viscera that the powerful hoses and no volume of water could ever eradicate. But you got used to it. When you arrived in the morning you donned a long white cape and boots and the world was transformed. When you got home you dropped your stinking clothes in the garage.

Johnny had something different about him, ‘especially challenged’ you might say now, and at the time he got some vicious slagging. I knew him from the Boy’s Brigade, our regimented church youth club. Generally, he got along well with everyone, but we knew that when he lost his temper it was best to stay well clear of him. He was strong as an ox and could do severe damage. Sometimes when he stood on his own after some incident or other, looking flat and lost, you wanted to give him a hug and tell him it was alright. But you never did. In the small factory when he put on his white waterproof gear and with a slight sway to his walk, he reminded you of a white penguin; that was until he became splattered in blood from head to foot.

Within earshot of the squawking, flapping birds being fixed upside down on the line, Johnny bled the stunned chickens. He sat in a chair, his boots in the pooled blood, drawing his knife across their throats as they moved in front of him. Further along the chickens were submerged in scalding water, before rubber flails would remove most of their feathers. Four or five of us stood on inverted milk crates to pluck the rest of the wet feathers.

One day someone screamed “Stop the line!” after the birds had started to show signs of life as they were being beaten with the flails. The line jerked to a sudden stop as the chickens swung wildly. We ran to where Johnny was sitting. He had fallen asleep, head to the side, arms dangling, palms open, under the line of swinging birds.

The boss called us around a wide stainless steel eviscerating table one afternoon, empty except for a weighing scale and a knife. About ten of us spread out around three sides of the table. He was a tall heavy-boned man, well spoken, who carried his ownership easily, nothing overtly aggressive. Mind you, when he let out a roar at us, all heads would turn. He pulled on a white coat from a wrack on the wall, picked up a knife and flashed it across a sharpening steel. The way you see butchers do it. Second nature. Delicate sweeps of the blade to sweeten the edge. Peter, his gaffer, set a chicken on the table, chilled and headless. With a firm hand on the chicken, the boss slipped the knife into its back end, deftly cutting a U under the bishop’s nose, like we’d been shown. He inserted his hand and drew the entrails out in one sweep, then checked to see if the cavity was clean.  He dropped the hollow carcass on the bench, for effect maybe. Nothing new here. He hadn’t said a word, though all eyes were on him.

“Now. Watch!” He said pulling out the back-end flap and holding the attached piece of fat between finger and thumb. He cut it off. “That’s what you’re all doing,” The fat landed on the scales with a splat. “One ounce,” he paused.  “Peter, how many we killing a week?”

“Four and a half thousand a week. More coming up to Christmas, say six.”

“Let’s take four and a half thousand a week, by one ounce. What’s that in pounds?” he asked, knowing the answer. “Just under three hundred pounds of chicken. At seventy-five pence a pound that’s about two hundred and thirty pounds a week. Two hundred and thirty pounds a week I’m losing!”

“But’s just fat,” somebody started.

“That’s the point, it’s not just fat! It’s the same price as the rest of the chicken. You know what’s in your pay packets. And you know how many of yous that would pay. A whole lot. So, leave that wee bit of fat on there for God sake! I don’t want to go through this again.”

And now, as sure as Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital, every time I cook a chicken, there it is, at the back end, a useless flap of fat, that no one needs, but that we all pay for.

End

Print and pdf here.

A spinney of aspen stands out bright yellow on the hillside behind our farmhouse at Colpey. It grows on the edge of an ancient woodland that stretches a mile west to Gortcormican. If you look and listen closely, the leaves tremble in a gentle breeze; aptly named Populus Tremula, or in Irish, Crann Creathach, the tree that whispers with the world beyond. The aspen blaze briefly on the damp spring line that marks a pattern of old settlements, our farm included. Each tree is most likely suckered underground, a clone of its near neighbour, hence the spinney.

On arriving, some thirty years ago, we planted thousands of trees that have now become a forest; but not the aspen, who knows how long they have been here. As the verdant shades of spring, and the reds and yellows of autumn bookend each growing year, so this autumn bookends our time living here at Colpey. Next spring, we will have moved into our renovated terraced house near the pier in Buncrana.

After the forest was planted, we established a tree nursery. At the time we had three young children, Berenice was about to return to teaching, and shortly I would be offered work at an engineering start-up, both better paid than the unknown returns from a risky venture. However, the notion of some type of farm enterprise had always attracted us and had brought us here in the first place. We had the energy, and farming the ‘25 good acres’ with its cattle and sheep seemed not enough at the time. The nursery, primarily a large poly-tunnel, was planned and set up with green hopes, to grow an annual crop of forty thousand broadleaf saplings. During the first and second years we found it impossible to discard the ten percent or so of plants that didn’t make it to saleable size. These saplings, no taller than twenty centimetres were set aside, and when time permitted, were dug into stony and rocky ground, near the aspen, where we thought they might survive. A few did, a handful of the couple of hundred we planted. They were either too small or weak to survive the rampant grasses and briars or were browsed by cattle. The nursery itself survived for about five or six years, its scale too small, the climate too wet, the soils too heavy.

The forest we planted seemed, on the face of it, simpler – and there’s a very inaccurate saying about forestry that you plant it and close the gate on it for forty years, until harvest. After a few years we had to replace hundreds of young wild cherry trees after they became infected with a canker; many of the sycamore and ash stems forked, needing to be heavily pruned; deer came to browse other young trees, and now over thirty years on, hundreds of semi-mature ash trees are dying with ash dieback disease (caused by an invasive fungal pathogen Hymenoscyphus fraxineus). Last winter many of these ash trees were replaced with sapling birch, and a new generation of deer came for the tasty green shoots. Tending the forest is good and pleasant work, and goes on. To see the forest, grow tall and full of wildlife is a wholesome pleasure.

About twenty years after we saved those small puny plants, I discovered a surviving oak tree, now over six meters tall. How had I, and the cattle, missed it all that time, although it had blended into the rest of the alders, ash and sycamores? It grows beside a track I walk regularly, into what we call ‘the rough ground’. It is tall, upright and sturdy. I gave it a hug last summer but missed its reply. A stone’s throw away is the spinney of aspen, which with the oak and rest of the trees on the hillside, will glow in shades of yellow and gold for autumns to come.

The townland name ‘Colpey’ – with only two farmsteads – or ‘Colpey Rocks’ as I have heard it called, is likely to derive from the old Irish word colpa or collop, meaning the area a cow would graze in summer; perhaps that too is appropriate for us now, alluding to an autumn movement more clement pastures.

End

Print and pdf version here.

One afternoon when I was about eight or nine, we returned to the empty farmhouse at Larkfield. There was a note under a stone on the windowsill, at the back door. It was scribbled in pencil on a torn sheet of lined paper. My mother laughed and read it out. As best I can remember, it went something like this. Certainly, it mentioned ‘tea’ and ‘the dog’s nip’.

My mother said that it was probably a travelling man, wanting a mug of tea and a slice of bread. He’d give you a note when he goes, as a ‘Thanks’. Sometimes he might want to sleep in the loft, though he had his favourite houses roundabout. He’d carry stories and recite poems. In summertime he could sleep outside, at the back of a ditch maybe. The tinkers used to come around too, with their tin cans and porringers for sale. They would mend buckets and such, with holes in them, here in the street.

I came with a blessing, and for a sup of cold tea,

Got the dog’s nip, for my trouble, ye see.

And bad cess to ye all, if ye hid from my sight.

Sure the next time I call, ye can put it to right.

Unknown travelling bard, around the late 1950s.

End

Print pdf here.

In the last couple of blogs, ‘Brothers at Law’, I told the story of brothers Alex, John and Richard, hoping to throw some light on the question as to how much this generation of the Davis family had a hunger to acquire land. Since posting these I have discovered a piece of work which gives considerable insight into the lives of Protestant tenant farmers at the time; the many pressures and influences that impacted them, and how they responded during those turbulent years.

But firstly, a brief mention of Mary Jane Davis, the only female of that generation. She appeared, by local recollections, to be a very strong-willed character. While her influence on her brothers can only be guessed at, it is likely to have been significant. After Mary Jane’s mother died in early 1910, she was noted on the next year’s census form as ‘head of the household’. Later that year Richard and Alex inherited the farm after their mother’s death, while Mary Jane was left a sum of money. Her imagined voice can be read in previous blogs, and I sense her influence behind the actions of Alex and Richard.

In Miriam Moffit’s chapter entitled, ‘Protestant Tenant Farmers and the Land League in North Connacht’ published in the “The West of Ireland” in 2010 (see Notes), she examines the responses and reactions of this group to the sometimes-violent campaign for land reform during the period, roughly 1870 to 1920. Her initial question was posed thus: ‘The commencement of populist land agitation in the late nineteenth century created a dilemma for Protestant tenant farmers. Was it in their best interest to support their Catholic neighbours, showing solidarity within their social class, or were they better served by aligning themselves with the landlords, thereby demonstrating a religious cohesion?’ Moffit goes on to examine the various forces at play and specifically examines the support and opposition to the Land League in South Leitrim (where John Davis and his friend John McCordick were boycotted when they took up evicted farms) and in Riverstown in County Sligo.

If you are interested in the question as to how Protestant tenant farmers, like the Davis and Gillmor families managed to live through this campaign for land reform then the full article can be read here. Moffit states that ‘Evidence from north Connacht confirms that the majority of Protestant farmers, both tenant and owner-occupiers, obeyed the law of the UIL (United Irish League, formerly The Land League) with some taking part in its organisation.’ Police (RIC) records from September 1901 showed that rents were universally unpaid in some Leitrim estates in areas with considerable numbers of Protestant farmers. The Church of Ireland Bishop, Alfred Elliot, whose diocese included all of Leitrim, complained that some of his flock were won over to the League ‘through their pocket’, ignoring religious and political ties. He also said there was intimidation of some, forcing them into withholding rents.

The resistance to the League and their actions against the Protestant famers and their families in South Leitrim and Riverstown are described by Moffit in considerable detail. In South Leitrim, the League’s boycotts and campaign were primarily directed against two Protestant families who maintained their position for some ten years. These were the families of McNeils and McCordicks, the later most likely John Davis’ friend – John McCordick and John Davis were born in the neighbouring townlands of Boihy and Boggaun. However, by 1910 John had built a house and was living with his family on his farm in County Meath.

It appeared that counter to the efforts of the leaders of Church of Ireland, aligned with Irish Protestant political forces, and the leadership of Orange Order lodges, many Protestant tenant farmers supported the Land Leagues efforts for a greater access to land in Ireland, withholding rent from the landlords and not taking up the farms of evicted tenants.

However, Moffit notes in conclusion: ‘In spite of evidence of accommodation between the communities, political leaders on both sides imbued agrarian hostilities with sectarian influences and portrayed them to a wider audience in a manner that did not accurately reflect the more accommodating situation on the ground.”

It is impossible to say how this impacted on the motivations of my grandfather’s generation at Boggaun, or indeed if it was a factor in the rift between the brothers described in ‘Brothers at Law’. However, the League’s campaign led to changes in land laws in the early years of the 1900s which enabled tenant farmers to finally purchase their lands. At Buggaun, the Davis farms, previously leased, were purchased during this time. The Land Commission, set up some years earlier became more involved in the re-distribution of estate lands, and again Alex and Richard made use of this opportunity to add to their farm. While some of the holdings re-distributed were described as ‘uneconomic’, by the mid-1920s there was an overarching sense that a greater social justice had been achieved.

From my earliest memories of visits to my grandparent’s farm, I have a sense of the good relations between the Protestant and Catholic community in north Leitrim, likely an outcome of the ‘accommodation between the communities’ during this period of land agitation.

End

Notes

Print / pdf version here.

Miriam Moffitt, ‘Protestant tenant farmers and the Land League in North Connacht’ in Carla King and Conor McNamara (eds), The West of Ireland: new perspectives on the nineteenth century (Dublin: The History Press, 2010), pp 93-116. Chapter 5 here.

Wikipedia: The Irish National Land League. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_National_Land_League

Continuing the story of ‘Brothers at Law’, with John and Alex Davis, Alex’s wife Margaret and his brother Richard, involving a farm in County Meath and in County Leitrim.

By 1910, when John’s father and mother had died, he had moved to County Meath and was building a substantial house, ‘Boyne View’, after living and farming for some fifteen years in south Leitrim. In his mother’s will, his father having died the previous year, John was left 10 shillings while his brothers, Alex and Richard, inherited the family farms. John never claimed his share, probably considering it derisory, and perhaps feeling it an affront to his sense of himself as a “self-made man”. Maybe he had fallen out with his parents, or they considered him wealthy enough without any of their inheritance, we do not know.

Alex married Margaret Taylor in 1918, a few years after her husband died. Margaret was John’s widowed sister-in-law who had spent time living with his family before her first marriage. Alex claimed that when he moved to Margaret’s farm, he came with nothing. This must have further stoked John’s ire towards his brother. It appears from postcards between Margaret and Alex, aged 36 and 49 respectively when they married, that they had some plan in mind, possibly that the brothers, Alex and Richard, would attain a foothold in County Meath, as John had done. For ambitious farmers in the west, a move to the better lands in the east was considered a major achievement. Significant land reform at that time had encouraged a broader ownership and, along with the breaking up of large estates, resulted in considerable land sales and transfers.

A year or two after Alex arrived there, John sued him for damages to one of his horses. John was exhibiting his farm stock at various shows, including the Royal Dublin Show, and had a considerable standing within the farming community. Due to the War of Independence and then Independence itself, court work was upset for some years, and it was 1925 before John’s case came to the District Court in Drogheda. Indeed, in the previous year there was a trespass case in the courts against Margaret and Alex, which was supported by John, against the couple. Clearly there was considerable friction between the two neighbouring households. In a further unexplained twist that same year, Margaret advertised their farm for sale in a local newspaper. 

The case, ‘Brothers at Law’, and Alex’s appeal is reported in the Drogheda Argus, 1^st August and 14th November 1925. It is interesting to read it in full, particularly as the court reporter appeared to have an ear for dialogue, read it here in full. Some highlights are as follows:

Mr Tallen, representing Alex, defended the charge,

“(Alex)… had no means of any description. The debt of £34 17s 3d sued for was not an ordinary debt as between the plaintiff and defendant. They were two brothers and lived next each other. There had been a lot of bickering going on for a number of years and there was an action brought by John Davis against Alex Davis for injuries to a horse which was alleged to have got frightened as the defendant’s conduct and the Co Court Judge gave a decree.”

Mr Mullen for the plaintiff, John, cross examining,

“Are you going to tell the Court you walked into a woman with thirty acres and had absolutely nothing yourself?

Alex – “Yes, sir.”

“You walked into the woman without a penny piece?”

 Alex – “She asked me … ” (laughter)

“We won’t mind the romance; let us come to the £ s d part. Did you bring any cattle?”

Alex – “I didn’t bring one heifer.”

Mr Mullen questioned Alex on the will on the home farm in Co Leitrim,

Alex – “There were 23 acres odd in the farm that I assigned at Dromahaire, Co Leitrim. It was of more value when it was above water (laughter). There was a claim against me by a workman named Gallagher, and my brother (Richard, smcw) took payment of it. As a consideration for that I released any claim I had to the farm, and soon afterwards I came to the Co Meath. My brother (John) was living beside the widow and annoying her. I took the widow and her small farm – or she took me in.” (laughter)

Mr Mullen – “And that put the tin hat on your brother’s chance of the small farm.”

Justice Goff’s judgement,

“Mr Goff said he was satisfied that the defendant’s services on the farm for a number of years were very valuable, and if he had got no payment, it should be a very small thing for his wife to settle this debt. Accordingly, he would make an order for payment by instalments of £5 a month and £1 5s costs, the first instalment to commence 29^th August.”

On appeal by Alex, Circuit Court Judge Doyle ruled a few months later, this was again reported in the same newspaper,

“His Lordship said he was perfectly in accord with the order of the District Justice. Apparently, the defendant had evaded the responsibility in Co Leitrim by some subterfuge which he could not understand. He had contracted responsibilities in Co Meath which had been forced against him in Co Louth, and very properly. He affirmed the order.”

Margaret died four years later in 1929, and some three years afterwards Alex returned to his home farm in County Leitrim.  For Richard, other events in the mid-1920s had overtaken any hopes of farming in County Meath, if that had been his intention, with the collapse of his cattle business after his partner absconded to Canada with the proceeds of a cattle shipment.  It is not known what happened to Margaret’s farm, or if it was ever assigned to Alex after her death. Local reports said that Alex returned home penniless.

This murky dispute, however unpleasant, had little impact on the wider families and in subsequent years the Davis families in Meath and Leitrim kept up close ties, visiting each other regularly, drawn together, to a degree, by a mutual interest in horses.

End

Print and pdf here.

The past series of blogs have attempted to capture a sense of the lives of my grandfather Davis’ generation, all born at the Boggaun farm in County Leitrim. There is a final story I want to relate which illustrates an aspect of the family that puzzled me. Doing the background for these stories I had asked a number of times if the Davis family had a hunger for land, and the answer I got back was that it seemed no greater than that of most farmers. However, I discovered a report of a 1925 Drogheda court case that indicated the potency of land in a protracted quarrel between three of the Davis brothers: John, the eldest, Alex, his younger brother by eight years, and Richard, the youngest.

John Davis was born in 1861 at Boggaun, his grandfather having taken up the lease there by 1850, most likely on what was a bankrupt Famine-era farm. Richard, my grandfather, the youngest died there in 1961. This period of 100 years saw enormous transformation in Ireland. In 1861 Ireland was governed by the Protestant Ascendancy, a century later it had been independent for forty years.

I have fond memories of my grandfather Richard. He gives me some connection to his older brothers and sisters, none of whom I knew. He witnessed a period of significant change. While keeping the values of his Church of Ireland community, and with a strong ambition to better himself and his family, he was able to accommodate the transition to a new Ireland, at a time when many of his contemporaries emigrated. After Independence he stood for election with the Ratepayer’s Defence Association (a proto Fine Gael party) and polled a reasonable number of cross-community votes. He won widespread support and respect when he put his family and farm into severe debt, following the collapse of his cattle shipping business, to pay farmers for their stock.

‘Brothers at Law’ is a story of the conflict primarily between John and Alex, with Richard apparently involved. John left his home farm on his marriage to Anna Maria Cartwright in 1883 and moved to her home in south Leitrim. At that time Alex was farming at Boggaun, while Richard was a child of four. In south Leitrim John became embroiled in a conflict with the Land League, settling on an evicted farm at Garradice where he was boycotted as a “land grabber”. He faced down this opposition and appeared to prosper. Ten years later with a family of eight he had the resources to move ‘lock-stock-and-front-door’ to a farm at Corballis in County Meath. ‘Lock-stock-and-front-door’ because John brought with him his County Leitrim front door which was fitted to his new home, ‘Boyne View’. Some years ago, this door was replaced by the current owners and was used in an out-building, as it was still of good quality and in some respect to its history. John’s family most likely travelled to County Meath by train as there was a train halt very close to their Garradice farm.

John encouraged a south-Leitrim friend, William Taylor to make the move to County Meath, and William built a house on a thirty-acre farm adjacent to John at Corballis. Their houses were some 50 yards apart. In 1911 William married John’s sister-in-law Margaret Cartwright. William died in 1916 and in his will, he left everything to Margaret. The will was challenged in the High Court by William’s brother. The Court ruled for Margaret, and she took ownership of the farm. Two years after William’s death, Margaret married Alex Davis and he moved into the farm beside his brother John; Alex was 49 and Margaret 36 at that time. Margaret appeared to play some role in the brother’s quarrel.

To be continued in next blog.

Print and pdf here.

Another piece of the Davis family jigsaw falls into place around Dick Davis and scant memories heard in my grandparent’s house. It begins with Dick’s father Thomas, and again with emigration. Thomas was the second eldest brother of my grandfather’s generation, born in 1865 at the Boggaun farm. He emigrated to Canada in 1886 when my grandfather was four years of age. Some six years later Minnie Gillmor from Dromahair emigrated to Toronto, and Thomas and Minnie were married there in 1893.

Thomas, like his uncle and namesake who had emigrated from the farm in 1861 (see earlier blog), was an Orangemen of a conservative mind, and both carried these concerns into their new lives in Canada. As Thomas was preparing to leave County Leitrim his Orange Lodge became engaged in what would be a twenty-year-long opposition to the Home Rule Bill, which Unionists saw as a threat to their position, giving greater autonomy to the Irish parliament. The nation of Canada was only thirty years old when Thomas arrived. It was a turbulent time. The previous year saw the military defeat of a major insurrection of native peoples in the North-West.  One of the leaders of the rebellion Louis Riel was tried and executed for the killing of Thomas Scott, an Irish immigrant and Orangeman. Scott was seen in Ontario as a martyr while the outcome of the rebellion, particularly the execution of Riel increased Anglo-Francphone tensions.

Thomas Davis first settled in Barrie some 40 miles north of Toronto before moving to the city where he was married six years later. At that time, he was a tradesman, a painter. Minnie Gillmor with her assistant, Mary Sweeney, left Dromahair for Toronto in 1891. It is possible that Minnie’s emigration was driven by some defining incident or perhaps an independent streak which was out of step with the times. Minnie, with Mary arrived, in Toronto with funds in reserve and it is possible that these helped Thomas move into a career in journalism, writing for The Mall and The Empire among others, and then later to set up a real estate business, Thomas E. Davis and Co, which he ran for twenty years.

Thomas and Minnie were probably acquainted before they left Ireland. Thomas’s family would have known the Gillmor family and frequently visited their general shop in Dromahair.  However, Minnie was some 6 years older, and a match would have been seen as inappropriate. In addition, the Davis family at Buggaun were of farming stock with little notable wealth or pedigree, at least within their Protestant community, and Thomas would not have been considered a suitable match for Minnie.  When Thomas emigrated, the two may have kept up some form of communication. As a tradesman it is unlikely that he would have been able to afford the fare back to Ireland to see Minnie. The steerage fare to Ellis Island during these years was approximately half the yearly wage of an Irish labourer, not including the transport and expenses at either end.

Minnie’s family background is interesting. In 1850 her parents Robert and Mary Ann Gillmor had emigrated to Cascade, Iowa, in the United Sates along with Mary Ann’s sister, Sarah and her husband, the Rev John Bates, a Baptist minister. The Gillmor family converted to the Baptist faith. Iowa was seeing large numbers of European families arrive at that this time following the earlier ‘Black Hawk Purchase’ when the government forcibly took over native lands after their defeat under their chief Black Hawk. The Sauk, Meskwake and Ho-Chunk native peoples were forced to give up all rights to the lands for the equivalent of around 11cents an acre.

The Irish colonists settled around Cascade, a small settlement of about 400, setting up a homestead and a farm in difficult and unfamiliar conditions. Stuart James, Minnie’s eldest brother, and his sister Ann were born in Washington Township near Cascade. The family ultimately decided to return to Ireland, possibly after news of the death of Mary Ann’s father.  With continued immigration driving up Iowa’s land prices, the sale of their farm and homestead turned a tidy profit.

On returning they settled in the townland of Cleen just outside the village of Dromahair. Stuart went on to establish ‘S.J. Gillmor’ a general merchant shop in Dromahair, where my mother, Ena Davis, later worked work in the 1940s. The family joined their old church.  Drumlease Parish Church records show their unusual adult baptisms in 1878, when Minnie was nineteen.

Whether her parent’s experience of emigration and return impacted the young Minnie is speculation. However, when she emigrated across the Atlantic to Toronto Old-World traditions were easier to ignore and in 1893 Minnie and Thomas married. On their marriage certificate Minnie and Thomas are shown as being the same age, perhaps consigning the thorny issue of Minnie’s age to Old-World history. Mary Sweeney would remain living with the family throughout her life, helping to raise their family. She outlived Thomas and Minnie and continued to live in the family home after their deaths and she is buried with them in the family plot.

The global economy was turbulent during the early years of the 1900s, and similarly Toronto was going through cycles of boom and bust, with high employment compounded by returning WW1 soldiers. Thomas’ real estate business rode these choppy waters. Despite renting out multiple properties at one point, at the end of his life it was said that Thomas’ only property was the family home.

Minnie clearly had an independent streak and became a woman of some substance. As her family grew, she became a noted writer and poet, according to her obituary. She used the name ‘M. Gillmor Davis’ or Mrs Gillmor Davis’. In 1912 she penned the noted patriotic WW1 sone ‘Fly the Flag’ and also ‘The Old Homestead’.

Their family household would have been an interesting place to grow up and develop. Their first son, Richard “Dick” Davis was born in 1894 when Thomas was still a painter.  He contracted TB at an early age, permanently damaging one knee and rendered him ineligible for service in WW1. He developed different sensibilities to his father, earning a Masters in Economics and Sociology. Dick began his working career with the YMCA. He then led the Canadian Youth Commission and went on to become the Executive Director of the Canadian Welfare Council, an NGO which influenced social policy development in Canada. He also held Adjunct Professorship in Social Work at The University of Toronto. Dick married Margaret Svendsen, originally from Oslo, Norway, who became a recognised child psychologist in her own right. They had one son Eric and one grandson Reade, both of whom became professors.

Despite his father’s lifelong involvement in conservative politics, Dick was strongly shaped by the economic depression of the Interwar years and became somewhat more left-leaning In his politics, with a strong commitment to social justice and robust social programs. For his contributions to the field of social welfare in Canada, Dick received two honorary PhDs and was awarded with the Order of Canada.

End

Notes

Print pdf version here.

Dick and Margaret Davis had one son Eric and one grandson Reade, both of whom became professors. Dick had two brothers and a sister; his eldest brother Stewart barely survived WW1 nerve gas but returned home to become a professional football player with the Toronto Argonauts. Like his father he later moved into real estate and then into his father-in-law’s coal business. He had a family of four. Dick’s sister, Kay worked in the Admissions Office of The University of Toronto and never married. His youngest brother, Alf, after a university education followed Dick into the YMCA. He was married twice and had one child.

It is interesting to note that in the above mentioned North-West Rebellion, Louis Riel, one of the leaders, was a descendant of Jean-Baptiste Riel dit L’Irlande born in Limerick, who emigrated to Canada around 1700.

Thanks to Reade Davis and Des Gillmor for the benefit of their research and review.