As children, we were told stories of why the family left Cleggan. In the first decade of the twentieth century, my grandfather Robert lived in the family house with his parents and then his own family. He farmed the land, and also ran a thriving fish-salting and marketing business, taking the catch of local fisherman and preparing it for sale on the London market. He employed a good number of local men and women. But in 1910 that all changed. A local priest told his flock they had to boycott his farm and business because Robert was Protestant. No Catholics would work for him.
In the nineteenth century in Ireland, ‘boycotting’ was a popular and efficient form of revolt against, first, absentee English landlords, then against the activities of the mission agents. The boycotts arose, Miriam Moffitt writes, from Catholic resentment at the mission’s controversial approach and its system of bribing converts to attend service or send their children to mission schools. However by 1910 there is no evidence that Michael King or his family were active mission agents. Indeed they seemed to have left proselytising well behind to become merchants and farmers. The boycott seemed more of a local thing, organised by a local priest, and seemingly more against Robert than his brother Hal, who was allowed to buy the farm and continue the business. Hal was then or later became a Catholic convert, so perhaps that’s why he was spared. Whatever the reasons for the social and economic ostracism, our family were pawns caught in the struggle for supremacy between the Catholic and the Protestant churches and, like so many in such circumstances, they were forced to leave.
Of course all this would be nothing more than the propensity of one half of humanity to make life miserable for the other half, except for some intriguing documents relating to Seaview House that Fiona’s visit brought to light. Legal documents relating to house sales tend to be kept. There are plenty of stories in Ireland of Americans who returned and peremptorily tried to claim their ancestors’ cottages. Through the new owners of Seaview House, Fiona was introduced to John O’Toole, the step-relation who had inherited and sold the property. John had kept some important documents. He said: ‘I’ve been waiting for a King to return.’ Fiona took him to the pub and got the stories.
To backtrack for a moment: some of our family stories come from unpublished memoirs of my uncle Wallace, who was born in Ireland in 1902, and had some clear memories of his first ten years there. Reading his memoirs today, it is clear he didn’t know much about his grandparents Michael and Matilda. As Wallace was a doctor, it was clearly a professional matter for him to record, if not the date of death, then the causes of the deaths of his family members. But of Michael he had little information, and of his grandmother, though he supposedly lived in the same house as her, he said: ‘Matilda was a small slight woman, who was not very well, so that we didn’t see much of her’.
What Fiona discovered when she went back was that Michael did not die until 1917, well after his son Robert came into ownership of Seaview. She learned of bad blood between the brothers Robert and Hal when Robert was faced with boycott, and planned to sell the house. She learned of the legal dispute between the two brothers. She heard about a buried treasure, and a fortune gained and lost. She found out that Michael King had descended into madness, which was why Robert came into ownership of Seaview well before the death of his father. Here is some of what John told Fiona on video:
Once again my grand-aunt Hal’s wife told me this. It was her testimony. Mike King invested money in a new bank that had started business in England. I don’t know the name of the bank but this bank went bust after a short period and Mike lost all his money and this I’m afraid had a very detrimental effect on his mind and then he had some money left in sovereigns, perhaps a few hundred pounds which would be quite a bit. Well then he went and buried the sovereigns somewhere in his own land. I’m afraid I was never able to locate the place and the story goes that he was seen burying the money and when he went back to find it, and it had been stolen, and that led him if not to full insanity then it certainly tipped him along.
John produced a copy of Michael’s will, and it makes for sad reading. In 1917 Michael had died in the Oughterard Workhouse. All but one of his children had emigrated by then. No doubt the will was a fairly standard Workhouse will for someone with little to leave except his mare. But from the will it is also clear that Michael died a Catholic, asking for a priest to say mass for the repose of his soul, and for burial in the Catholic Cemetery at Oughterard.
Death in the Workhouse—this was a shameful family secret none of Michael’s Australian grandchildren ever knew. Death as a Catholic in the Workhouse—that would have been even worse for his children, and they never mentioned it, at least not to the family chronicler, Wallace. It would not have worried my father and his siblings, who were glad to be free of the sectarian troubles of Ireland. Michael’s wife, Matilda, we discover from other documents, was in New York for part of the time Wallace lived in the house, from 1905 to 1908 and again from 1909 until her death. Her emigrant daughters Isabella and Martha must have rescued her from an impossible situation. The reason Wallace didn’t often see his grandmother, though he thought she was living in the same house, was that she was in America. That’s a family secret for you.
My cousins are sorting through the family papers we have, and making copies for each other. Marvellous things are turning up. We were excited to find a poem written by our great-uncle Robert Manning in 1897. Robert was the second son of William and Mary Jane Manning. He wrote the poem on the death of his niece Mabel Greer at the age of twelve, of peritonitis. (We have the fact she died from peritonitis, as Wallace recorded it.) The poem was no doubt written fairly quickly for the sudden, sad occasion. It describes this world as a transient dwelling-place full of suffering, and says there is a better home in heaven, an ultimate place of rest.
The poem survives on a printed broadsheet, possibly for distribution at the funeral. A few lines will give the gist:
This day in darkness dawned for me,
This day, loved May, has set you free—
This day to me brought tears and sadness
To you, sweet child, eternal gladness
A crown of bright robes, Heaven’s golden street
Harps, palms and songs, for pure lips meet.
Heaven’s golden streets, a throne of gold, and a bright crown—the images are conventional, yet compelling for my missionary forbears. ‘May His spirit gently lead us home / Home to that land where sighings cease / And all is love and joy and peace.’ For young May: ‘Death’s wave was faced, and heaven’s shore reached.’ She has ‘gone home’.
What we know of May’s short life is that it was tough. She was one of twin girls born to my great-aunt Sarah Greer née Manning, who was widowed when her children were small. The twins were ‘farmed out’, we don’t know where, while their mother worked at a Protestant orphanage and school in Limerick. In 1913 May’s surviving twin, Annie, migrated with her mother Sarah and my grandparents to Australia.
My family’s experience of exile from home well fitted the sentiments of ‘Home Sweet Home’. They mourned a place of beauty at which they looked back with sorrow, even if it was sorrow mixed with anger at what had happened. There was homesickness, yes, but a determination, in coming as far away as they could to Australia, to leave their experience of religious intolerance behind. They left and never went back. They arrived just before World War One. Next came the Great Depression. They lived through tough times in Australia, but they missed the Civil War in Ireland, and the rest of the troubles, which in 1921 claimed the life of their cousin, another Alice King, by IRA or Auxiliary gunfire.
Robert died in 1931, Alice in 1939, in Sydney. They never returned to Ireland. Today their grandchildren and great-grandchildren travel the world, accepting the new era of mass travel as their right.
One of the reasons for the huge popularity of the song ‘Home Sweet Home’ was that it captured so well the sense of longing for home amongst those forced into exile to all corners of the world in the vast
social changes of the nineteenth century. I can also claim a personal connection with the song. My late husband, Harold, took great delight in a distant family relationship to the singer Dame Anna Bishop, wife of the Englishman Henry Bishop, who in 1823 added the lyrics of ‘Home Sweet Home’ to a tune he had composed in 1813. Anna was Harold’s great-great-great-aunt. Her sister and sometime accompanist Louisa was Harold’s great-great-grandmother.
When, in 1839, Anna Bishop ran away from her London home with the French harpist, convicted forger and bigamist Nicholas Bochsa, she took the song with her, and performed it all over the world to enraptured audiences of exiles. In 1854 she sang in a canvas and deal theatre put up for her in the Californian goldfields. Her rendition of ‘Home Sweet Home’ reduced rowdy miners to tears. In 1866 she was shipwrecked on Wake Island in the Mariana Islands and, after three weeks and 1400 miles at sea in an open boat, arrived in Guam with twenty-two other survivors. In gratitude, Anna and her group gave a concert for the Governor, where her ‘Home Sweet Home’ brought down the house. By 1876 Anna was in South Africa where she sang to soldiers in the military garrison at Pietermaritzburg and they cried too. Two years later, many of the soldiers fought and died in the Zulu Wars, a long way away from home. Through the power of her voice, Anna aroused emotions of loss in her listeners, to whom music also brought release and consolation. She sang the cadences of home.
In 1849, while travelling by coach in country Mexico, Anna and her entourage were accosted by robbers. According to Bochsa’s version of the story, which may be a little embroidered, brigands forced their coach to stop in a lonely place, and called to Anna: ‘Senora Bishop, do not be alarmed! We wish only to rob you of a song.’ In this situation, ‘Home Sweet Home’ would not have been appropriate, for the brigands were very much at home, and the song was remote from their expectations. Anna, however, was an accomplished performer, and adept at pleasing her audiences. In every country she toured, she learned some local songs. As the brigands waited impatiently for the accompanist to get organised, Bochsa unpacked his harp and found two broken strings. Forced to play on, he performed sitting on a wayside grave. Anna had a song even for this occasion: ‘La Pasadita’, a satirical take on the activities of American soldiers in Mexico City. She sang to a wild ‘Bravo!’ from her wild audience.
As an ambitious young woman, Anna found in Nicholas Bochsa someone who both recognised her talent and knew how to exploit it. At fourteen years of age, Anna had been selected as a student of piano for the Royal Academy of Music in London. At sixteen she began to study singing, and soon saw the possibilities of making an exciting career of her own. At the age of twenty-one, she married her singing teacher, Henry Bishop, a month after the death of his first wife. She began her professional career in the concerts Bishop organised. But Bishop was hopeless with money, and did not promote Anna’s career as much as she wanted. When Anna met Bochsa and took part in his concerts, she found she was able to earn good money doing what she did best. Both musicians were well placed to exploit the dramatic rise in the music industry and music market in the nineteenth century. They fell in love, and ran off to tour the world together, though forced to avoid France where there was a warrant out for Bochsa’s arrest. Sir Henry Bishop was left to bring up his and Anna’s three children. Anna and Bochsa were the scandal of London.
Bochsa was an entrepreneur in a new mould: indeed some of his activities indicate he was possibly one of the first of the dodgy musical entrepreneurs. As a child, he was a prodigy, from the age of eight playing six different instruments in the orchestra of the Lyons Opera. He was harpist to Napoleon Bonaparte from 1813 until 1814, then to Louis XVIII of France. He was widely acclaimed as the finest harpist of the nineteenth century. His departure from France was both sudden and scandalous. In 1817, on hearing that he was about to be arrested for forgery, Bochsa arrived at the Paris theatre where he was billed to appear. He kept the coach waiting as he raided the cloakroom of valuables and stole the night’s takings. He escaped to London, and began organising concerts there.
In March 1839 Bochsa organised a tour for Anna through Ireland and Scotland. In Dublin he set the price for tickets a little higher than Dubliners were accustomed to paying, as a hook to make them think they would be getting something really special. It worked. Clever publicity ensured that the theatre was sold out in advance. Bochsa knew the bigger the audience, the better—that the crowd would be more easily swayed by shared emotions. He also gave value for money. The concerts were long, and the programme packed with variety. Anna sang solos from opera, with spectacular changes of costume to suit each character. On this tour, her sister Louisa Rivière played the piano accompaniment. A massed band performance by the ‘the complete and eminent Band of the Eleventh Fusiliers’ added to the spectacle. Bochsa capped his virtuoso performances on the harp with a flourish of variations on tunes called from the audience.
Bochsa knew how to draw the crowds, and how to manipulate their emotions. ‘Home Sweet Home’ found a ready place in his concerts. Together, Anna and Bochsa were a musical, professional and emotional partnership. They remained a devoted couple until January 1856 when Bochsa died suddenly on their Sydney tour. Above his grave Anna erected an elaborate statue of a woman seated in mourning beneath a harp with broken strings. What remains of the grave can still be seen in Camperdown Cemetery.
Not just ‘Home Sweet Home’ but songs of exile more generally appealed to the new audience for mass entertainment. I mentioned earlier how rapidly ‘Home Sweet Home’ made the transition from the opera stage to the street. The lyrics were published as a broadside ballad and sold by street singers. One ballad sheet surviving from 1850s Manchester has the words of ‘Home Sweet Home’ on one side, and on the back the words of a song of lesser fame today, ‘When This Old Hat Was New’. The two songs complement each other. Once ‘this old hat was new’ and times were good, but alas, present times are bleak, and the owner, poor, hungry, and dispossessed, is a reluctant wanderer far from home. ‘When this old hat was new’ suggests home exists now only as a memory and, wherever the audience is now, it is no place like home. In the lyrics of ‘Home Sweet Home’ the rhyme of home with roam is repeated three times. Yet ‘Home Sweet Home’ also projects an ideal of home as a place of comfort and safety. ‘Home Sweet Home’ was a song to be sung after rescue from shipwreck, or to soldiers going to war, or to itinerant goldminers. Songs of exile were popular because they spoke to the real experience of so many lives lived in far away places from which there would never be a return.
In 2008 Dame Kiri te Kanawa recorded ‘Home Sweet Home’ in Maori. When I first heard it on YouTube, I imagined she was singing her own translation of the words. I admired her impassioned performance, and the enthusiastic response of her audience. I marvelled at how a song performed for an English domestic audience in 1823 could be so transformed in time, place and language, yet maintain a popular appeal. I discovered, however, that the Maori translation had been made in 1914 by Sir Apirana Ngata, the first New Zealand Maori parliamentarian, when he compiled a songbook for the use of the Maori Contingent in World War One. Here is how a verse of the song translates back into English:
You can search this whole world
For a place resembling
Your home villlage
and find a profound emptiness there.
I like to imagine that the men singing these words in a hostile place remote from their home villages found something that helped them, if only for a moment. Such is the power of music that it moves into the place of profound emptiness, allows for the experience of loss, and hopelessness, and terror, and then, ultimately, grants solace. That ‘Home Sweet Home’ might possess that quality is perhaps a revelation, yet not a complete surprise. Songs that speak of home, or exile from it, trigger emotions and memories that are part of the experience of us all.
The New Jerusalem Gabrielle Lord
Habira Hotel, Jerusalem, June 09
‘Home,’ muses one of Robert Frost’s characters in h
is Browningesque dialogue The Death of the Hired Man. ‘It all depends on what you mean by home.’
‘Home’ is such an emotionally loaded word, and those emotions are different for each of us. For some, it’s a cosy, snuggly kind of concept, for others, especially those who grew up in something called a ‘Children’s Home’, it would undoubtedly have very different associations. Robert Frost’s first narrator goes on to define home as: ‘the place where, when you have to go there, / they have to take you in.’
‘I should have called it,’ suggests the second speaker in the poem: ‘Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ The first speaker’s idea of home is grudging; the second speaker’s sense of home, although a little more generous, is still expressed as a negative, something that doesn’t have to be earned, her notion of home is that it is something given. ‘It all depends on what you mean by home,’ the poet reminds us via his character.
So what do I mean by ‘home’? Something wide, generous and accepting. A place of sanctuary and refuge.
As I sit in the deserted shabby-genteel dining room of the Habira Hotel, just off Jaffa Road, Jerusalem, writing this essay from my notes, I think how fortuitous it is that I should be working on an essay about ‘home’ here, in Israel, the country that has witnessed the greatest story about ‘home’ in history—the return home for millions of scattered Children of Israel to the land so many of them had been forced, by invading Babylonians, Romans, Muslims and crusading Christians, to flee. Over the centuries of exile every year, every observing (and probably not so observing) Jew prayed at the end of the ancient Seder feast of Passover, ‘next year, in Jerusalem’.
Home Truth Page 2