by Ultan Macken
WALTER MACKEN
DREAMS ON PAPER
ULTAN MACKEN
MERCIER PRESS
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© Ultan Macken, 2009
ISBN: 978 1 85635 630 5
Epub ISBN: 978 1 78117 011 3
Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117 010 6
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INTRODUCTION
I first planned to write a biography of my father over twenty years ago. I remember writing about forty pages of a first draft and reading it to my mother in the kitchen of our house in Menlo. She listened very carefully and expressed her concern about how personal it was. I taped a series of interviews with my mother which included some valuable insights and I talked to her constantly about him. Her husband was her favourite subject and she loved to talk about him.
One of the cornerstones of my research work was the papers and manuscript material he left in his filing cabinet. Unfortunately in the late 1970s, my mother decided to sell his papers to a German university – Wuppertal. They bought 6,000 pages of documents for £12,500. I was disappointed at the time, as I had hoped to draw on them in writing the biography, but I visited Wuppertal in the early 1980s and photocopied 800 pages of material from these documents, trying to focus on personal matters.
I began training regularly for marathons in 1980 and in the autumn of 1981, I got pneumonia. The doctors insisted I was to stay indoors for six weeks, so I gathered all my father’s letters and the photocopies from Wuppertal and I catalogued them in five folders. Among these papers were the love letters my mother and father wrote to each other and I thought that my mother was very generous to allow me to read these intimate letters.
Another obstacle to my writing the biography, was the traumatic experience of my marriage of nineteen years, which ended in 1990 when my wife and I decided to separate. That summer I also decided to leave my staff job at RTÉ and search for alternative employment. In the years since 1990, I spent the first few months in America and then returned to live in Galway with my mother. I went back to teaching and worked as a substitute teacher and a freelance journalist until I joined the Irish Civil Service in 2006 as a clerical officer. I worked for the Department of the Environment and then came to Dublin to work in the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment. I left that job in the summer of 2009 and now work as a freelance journalist and writer.
Meanwhile I kept researching and trying to understand the life of the extraordinary man who was my father. I published an open letter in the national newspapers asking for people’s memories of my father. I received some great replies, and have been able to draw on some of them for this book. I have also talked about him quite a bit on the radio. When I went home to live in Menlo with my mother, for the two years that remained of her life, we became very close and she talked for hours about my father and about their life together. I think that I gained a greater insight into his life from those years at home with my mother than from anything else I did. After she died in April 1992, I felt I had the freedom to write this biography.
My father was born on 3 May 1915, the youngest child of Walter Macken and Agnes Brady. He had two sisters, Eileen born in 1912 and Birdie born in 1913. Less than two months after Walter Jnr was born, his father, becoming suddenly unemployed, volunteered to join the British army and went to Dover to train as a member of the Royal Fusiliers. In 1960, my grandmother Agnes gave my father the letters her husband had written to her and I have quoted extensively from them in Chapter One.
My grandfather was killed in the trenches of France on 28 March 1916 and so my father grew up without a father and in poor circumstances. He seems to have wanted to write since he was very young; my mother told me that he began writing when he was eight. On leaving school, apart from a brief period working as a clerical officer with Galway Corporation, he went straight to work at the Taibhdhearc theatre in Galway. There he met my mother, Peggy Kenny, and after they eloped to marry in Dublin in 1937, they moved to London where he worked as a life insurance salesman for a little over two years. When the resident producer at the Taibhdhearc, Frank Dermody, decided to leave, they asked my father to return to Galway to work as their producer. He returned in the spring of 1939 and he worked there until the end of 1947. He then moved to Dublin to work in the Abbey Theatre, where he stayed for three years. By that stage, he had two plays and two novels published, and was working on his third novel, Rain on the Wind, while living in Dublin.
The successful production of M.J. Molloy’s play, The King of Friday’s Men, in which he played the leading role, resulted in his being offered a chance to act on Broadway, so he resigned from his job with the Abbey. While he was in the USA, Rain on the Wind was published and its success meant that he was able to earn a living as a full-time writer. He bought a house on the shores of Lough Corrib near Oughterard and we moved there in the summer of 1951. He was to spend most of his life in Galway and wrote novels, plays and short stories. In September 1966, he moved from Oughterard to the small Gaeltacht village of Menlo, some three miles from Galway city, where he had a small bungalow with two bedrooms built. Brown Lord of the Mountain (his last adult novel) had just been published and he was working on his second children’s novel, Flight of the Doves.
In January 19767, he was approached by an English songwriter, Peter Hart, to write a stage musical based on the life of Fr James McDyer; he called it God’s Own Country. In mid-April, he was having some stomach trouble so he was admitted to hospital and had a battery of tests. He continued working on the musical while in hospital and was allowed home on Friday 21 April. My parents went for their usual walk on the prom that afternoon and that night they watched television for a while. They retired to bed at around 11 p.m. My father could not sleep, so at about 2.30 a.m. he told my mother that he was going into the sitting-room, to see if he could get to sleep on the couch. Half an hour later, my mother heard him making a noise and she went to the sitting-room to check on him, but found him dead. The doctors said afterwards that he died of a massive heart attack. He was only fifty-one.
In writing this book, I am drawing not only on the memories of my mother about my father, but also my own memories and especially my brother’s memories and the letters my father wrote to him. I’m also drawing on memories of my cousin, Tom Kenny, and on many close friends of my father.
Since my brother left home when he was only seventeen and I was twelve, I was at home alone with both of my parents for the rest of my teenage years. I was very close to my father and spent many days fishing and walking with him. I absorbed a lot of what he was saying and, while writing this book, I recalled many of our conversations.
I gave theatre audiences an introduction to my father’s life and times when I presented my one-man show My Father, My Son in 2001 and again in 2004. I first presented that show at the Studio in the Town Hall in Galway in May 2001. From there, I took it to Andrew’s Lane in Dublin and also brought it to a number of schools. I took it to Boston in June 2001 as part of the Boston Irish Cultural Festival. When I returned to Ireland, I took it to Belfast and to Inisheer on the Aran Islands. I revived the show in 2004 and staged it at the Taibhdhear
c in Galway. I also took it back to Belfast. In writing this book I wanted to create a more permanent record of my memories of my father’s life.
Dreams on Paper is a culmination of all the research, reading and listening I have done over the years, and I hope that readers will get some idea of the man who was Walter Macken.
Ultan Macken
FAMILY TREE
Walter Macken married Mary Jane Rodgers
(Born 1837) (Born 1850)
Walter
Tom
John
Michael
Mary
Nannie
Pat
Hannah
b.1888
b.1889
b.1890
b.1891
b.1892
b.1893
b.1894
b.1895
In 1911 Walter Stephen married Agnes Brady who was born 1880, one of fifteen children from Eyrecourt near Ballinasloe, County Galway. They had three children: Eileen born 1912, Noreen born 1913 and Walter Augustine born 1915. Walter Stephen Macken died at St Eloi, France on 30 March 1916.
Walter Augustine Macken married Peggy Kenny (b. 1909) on 9 February 1937 at Fairview church, Dublin. They had two children: Walter Óg born 10 April 1938 in London and Ultan born on 10 September 1943 in Galway.
1
GRANDFATHER MACKEN – HIS LIFE AND TIMES
The 3 May 1915 was an important day in the life of a young Galway couple as their son, Walter Augustine, was born. They already had two daughters, Eileen born in 1912 and Noreen (later given the nickname Birdie) born in 1913. The young couple must have looked forward to a reasonable future together, as the father of the house was a skilled carpenter and was in full-time employment. He was Walter Stephen Macken, born in Cong, County Mayo on St Stephen’s Day, 26 December 1888. Walter Stephen was the eldest of a family of four boys, Walter, Tom, John and Michael and six girls, Mary, Nannie, Pat, Hannah, Kate and Margaret. Their father, whose name was also Walter, was the chief forester on the Ashford Castle estate. The job supplied the family with a house and his wife, Mary, worked as a cook at the castle. But tragedy struck when Walter died suddenly. We do not know if it was an infectious disease, such as pneumonia, that killed him or quite possibly, he may have died from a heart attack. His death was devastating for the family, as the landlord evicted them from their estate house and for a few years they lived locally in poverty-stricken circumstances.
My father had planned to research his family history and write about it. I’m sure that he had gathered facts about his family when he visited the Macken aunts in the United States in the 1950s. I remember visiting Cong with him in the mid-1960s and his attempts there to find out something about his father, Walter Stephen’s, family. I learned from my father that my grandfather and his brothers ended up at Letterfrack Reformatory School near Clifden, but I had no idea of how they actually came to be there. Having been told stories about their time at Letterfrack, I wondered if these were true, as I was shocked to hear they had been sent to an industrial school. I looked up the census of population for 1902 and found the names of my grandfather and his three brothers as residents of Letterfrack Reformatory School. Even when I was growing up in Galway in the 1950s, it was a mark of shame for anyone to be sent to such a school and it was clearly a matter of shame for the brothers in later life.
To clarify the details of my grandfather and his brothers’ time at Letterfrack, I contacted the Congregation of the Christian Brothers in Ireland who were able to check their records and give me details of the exact times and years that the four brothers spent there:
Walter and Michael arrived in Letterfrack aged nine and eight on 1 March 1897. Their parents’ names were given as Walter and Mary. At the time of their arrival, their father was dead. Begging is given as the reason for the committal. The other two boys, Thomas and John arrived on 9 August 1899 aged eight and seven, the reason given for their committal is that they were receiving alms and did not have a proper guardianship.
What these records reveal was that because the two older boys were begging, they had been brought before a court and sentenced to a period of detention at Letterfrack, which was of course thing of terrible shame for them. The records also revealed:
Walter was discharged on 11 February 1904. He had been employed in the school as an assistant carpenter. By May 1905, the school authorities had been told that Walter was doing well in Galway. Michael was officially discharged on 1 February 1905, although he stayed on in the school for a short period. In May 1905, he left the school and emigrated to the United States. The school was informed in March 1907 that he was doing well. Thomas was officially discharged on 1 August 1907 but remained at school while waiting to be placed in employment. Eventually he was sent as an apprentice to a Mr Spellman, a journeyman tailor in Galway. By February 1908, the news from him was that he was doing well.
Their records about John are interesting: ‘John was officially discharged on 1 August 1908, kept on in school and then later on in August went to be an apprentice tailor to a Mr Patrick Conroy of Carna in the Connemara Gaeltacht.’ However, their records also indicate that John went to America, that they heard from him in 1910 and he was doing well. I’m almost certain that this information is incorrect, as all the references to Uncle John in my grandfather’s letters clearly indicate that he was living and working in England. From my own research, I believe both he and Tom lived most of their lives in South Shields in the north of England. However, in their letter to me, the Christian Brothers further add to the confusion by making another reference to John being in America. ‘John paid a visit to the school with his wife in 1959, we would regard him as a credit to the school, took a look around the school, home from holidays in America, he gave £1 to the boys to buy sweets.’
In all my grandfather’s letters, he talks about his brother John having joined the British army as he had. Auntie Birdie also told me about Tom and John living in the north of England. The account of him coming back to visit the school was I think the year he visited us in Oughterard. I can remember clearly his visit to us at our home and he brought his second wife, Lorna, with him. I was only thirteen at the time, but my impression was of someone who was very English, with a strong northern English accent.
When I began my research work for this biography in 1981, I discovered from my father’s American first cousin, Sabina Walsh, that my father’s uncles, John and Tom were still alive, and she sent me their addresses. Without thinking, I wrote and asked them if I could come over to talk to them about their childhood. With hindsight, I should have gone over to my Auntie Birdie’s house in Sunderland and then arranged to go to visit them with her. Instead, by writing to them and telling them I knew that they had been in Letterfrack, I destroyed any hope that they would talk to me. Uncle John wrote back first, saying that he would have to contact Tom about talking to me. The following week he wrote again and told me that he and Tom had talked, and they had decided that they were not interested in speaking to me. They referred to the fact that our American cousin, Sabina, like other Americans, seemed obsessed with finding out about her roots, but they did not think that I would be like that and were disappointed in my desire to find out about both their experiences and the experiences of their brothers and sisters. They would prefer it if I left them in peace. John said that when he met me, he found me to be a reserved person who he thought would respect other people’s privacy and not a brash person like their American cousin seemed to be. So I don’t know what happened to them as they grew up, and I also don’t know what exactly happened to their mother or indeed to their sisters. I believe it is quite likely that the sisters could have been sent to a girls’ industrial school. There was one run by the Sisters of Mercy in Clifden at that time. There is also the possibility that they were sent to the orphanage in Galway city. I do know that my great-grandmother, Mary Macken, came to live in Eyre Street, because it was from that address that my grandfather wrote the first letter we have from him to my grandmo
ther, Agnes Brady.
When my grandfather, Walter Stephen came to Galway in February 1904, he was sixteen, and because he had experience and qualifications he had no problem finding a job. Emerson Builders employed him as a carpenter, a job he held for the next eleven years. From his photographs, you can see that he was a strikingly handsome man. As well as working hard as a carpenter, he was also a very talented actor, singer and performer and soon after he came to Galway, he joined a drama group and appeared on stage regularly. Apparently, he was a wonderful actor. When I worked for a period on the docks in Galway, the dockers told me stories of how when they were children they used to go to see Walter Macken on stage. My grandfather always played the lead role in the melodramas they watched and they would come out of the plays and imitate what they had seen.
The drama group staged their plays in a place called the Father Crotty Hall in Middle Street, right in the heart of Galway beside the Augustinian church. Beside the Father Crotty Hall there was a pub come dance-hall called the Racquet Court. Each night when the plays were over, the actors used to go in there for a drink and it was there my grandfather met my grandmother, Agnes Brady, a striking-looking woman who originally came from Ballinasloe. Her family were farmers from East Galway, near Eyrecourt. There were fifteen children in the family: five boys and ten girls. Agnes was one of the youngest. As each one grew up, they emigrated to the United States and I think most of the Brady boys and girls ended up in the Boston area.
Mr and Mrs O’Shaughnessy, the owners of the Racquet Court, visited the Brady home (they may have been relations or from the area) and when Mrs O’Shaughnessy discovered that Agnes (fourteen) was to be sent to America, she persuaded them to allow her to take Agnes to Galway. When Agnes came to work in the Racquet Court, she was too young to serve in the bar, so for the first few years she cared for the O’Shaughnessy children. When she reached eighteen, she began to work in the bar and, as she was a beautiful woman, all the young men enjoyed chatting to her.