Walter Macken

by Ultan Macken

  My father did not realise that, like his mentors Edwards and MacLiammóir, Frank Dermody was a practising homosexual. In his novel, Cockle and Mustard, he tells a very disturbing story about a weekend trip where the main character encountered a number of homosexual men and one of them attempted to seduce him, but whether this experience happened to my father or not is unclear.

  Either way, my father went to the Taibhdhearc and watched, learned and listened. The theatre’s records show that he played a part in a play based on the famous rebel song, ‘The Croppy Boy’, between 9–11 July 1933, during his school holidays. My father played the part of a priest – Sagart – who was also a captain in the British army. The ‘Croppy Boy’ comes to the church to have his confession heard before he goes off to join the rebels of 1798. My father, as the priest, having heard his confession, jumps out of the confession box, tears off his clerical clothes and reveals that he is actually a red-coat captain, then arrests the ‘Croppy Boy’. It was a one-act play, staged as part of a night’s programme, where there was a full-length play staged as well. Both plays were directed by Frank Dermody who also played a part in the main play as indeed did the chairman of the Taibhdhearc committee – Liam Ó Briain.

  In the autumn of 1933, on 16 and 17 November, the young Walter made an appearance in an Irish language version of a Eugene O’Neill play, Where the Cross is Made. Also that autumn he appeared in another one act play, The Hunchbacks, based on a folklore tale adapted from French to Irish by Liam Ó Briain.

  The next part my father played was Seán Mattias, in Pádraig Pearse’s dramatisation of his short story, Íosagán. Fr Eddie Divilly told me that he saw my father playing this part and he would never forget it, as the seventeen-year-old Walter convincingly played a man in his sixties. It was first staged at the Taibhdhearc between 12–14 December 1933. Two one-act plays were also performed, as Íosagán was a very short play, and my father also had a part in the other play, Scaipín na gCleas, based on Molière’s The Rogueries of Scapin. Íosagán was also staged as part of the end of year prize-giving ceremony for the Jesuit School, so the production was at the Columban Hall.

  He learned his theatre craft under the tutelage of Frank Dermody, while he was still at school. Although he learned a lot from Dermody, I do not think he agreed with his style of directing. My father felt that each actor must make a part his own, whereas Dermody wanted each actor to play the part strictly as he told them, without giving them the freedom to find their own interpretation. Frank Dermody acted out the part of the character as he believed the actor should play it and demanded that the actor do what he wanted him to do. He was not able to do this with my father, who was very much his own man and who liked to delve deep into the character he was playing, much like the method actors of later years.

  While learning his trade in the theatre, my father was also finishing his education. I once asked him if he liked the subjects he did at school and he told me he didn’t. He was interested in English and History, but found the teaching methods boring. However, he read extensively, novels, plays and biographies from Europe and America, and was secretly harbouring a dream of becoming a writer himself.

  As soon as he finished his Leaving Certificate exam, he arranged to go on a holiday to Cleggan. His stay there was to inspire him, and he obviously met people who had survived the famous Cleggan Disaster, where twenty-five local fishermen drowned during a sudden storm only five years previously, in 1927. Meeting the men who had survived and meeting the relatives of those who had died obviously made a huge impression on him, as his first novel, Quench the Moon, was set in this area. But another important thing happened, my father fell in love with Connemara, something that inspired him to go back to live there many years later.

  When he returned to Galway after his holiday, he received the results of his Leaving Certificate exam:

  This Certificate was awarded to Walter Macken who passed the Leaving Certificate Examination with Honours in 1934 in the following subjects: English (Full Course), History and Geography, and passed in the following subjects Irish (Full Course) and Latin.

  My father chose not to go to university, as he felt that if he did he would end up indulging his love for research and he would never become a writer. After school, he resumed his career with the Taibhdhearc, but his mother was not convinced that her son should be wasting his life working in a small Irish-speaking theatre. She went up to the city manager and persuaded him to give my father a job as a clerk in the corporation – he only stayed in the corporation for about two months. He completed his tasks quickly and then spent the rest of the day whiling away the time, whistling the latest popular music hits. Eventually the city manager summoned him and they mutually agreed that working as a clerk did not suit him, so he returned to the Taibhdhearc again.

  One day in 1935, his life changed when a new young actress came to join the company at the Taibhdhearc – Peggy Kenny, the woman who would win his heart.

  4

  PEGGY KENNY AND THE TAIBHDHEARC

  Peggy Kenny, who played such a vital role in Walter Macken’s life, had an interesting life herself. She was the eldest of the six children of Tom and Catherine Kenny. Tom Kenny was a journalist and was known as Tom Cork Kenny as he had been born in the southern capital. When Tom was a young man, he worked for a time at the famous English newspaper, The Manchester Guardian. When he returned to Ireland, he worked for a newspaper in Kilkenny, The Kilkenny Moderator. While there, he met his future wife, Catherine Hunt, who came from a rich farming background. Catherine and her sister ran a hat shop in Kilkenny city. Of course, there was a problem: Catherine was a Roman Catholic and Tom Kenny was a Church of Ireland Protestant. To get married, Tom Kenny had to convert to Catholicism first and then sign the Ne Temere decree, by which the Catholic Church insisted that all their children would be brought up as Catholics. Tom was happy to comply and so they were married. His wealthy father-in-law suggested that he help Tom to establish himself as a newspaperman. Tom knew that the local paper in Galway was for sale and so with financial help from his father-in-law and other business people in Galway, including Gus O’Reilly, Tom Cork Kenny bought out the newspaper owner and founded a new paper, the Connacht Tribune, in 1909.

  That was also the year my mother, Margaret (always known as Peggy), was born. She was the first born of the Kenny family and became the apple of her father’s eye. The other children were Mary (shortened to May) just a year or so after my mother, followed by Jack, and then came Desmond, Kitty and Joan. They lived in the centre of town for the first few years and my mother went to an exclusive private school run by a Mrs Spellman. Later she was sent to Taylor’s Hill Dominican Convent School at Taylor’s Hill. Then tragedy struck, in 1923, when Peggy was only thirteen – her mother contracted breast cancer and died. Her father decided that as a man without a wife, he could not take care of his daughters, so he sent them to a boarding school in Balla, County Mayo, run by the St Louis nuns. Both Peggy and her sister May went there straightaway and the two younger girls went later. It was a culture shock for my mother, as she was used to living in a house where there were staff who did everything for them, but she enjoyed boarding school and made good friends there. About a year later, she received a big shock when her father visited her with a new girlfriend – Lou McGuinness. She was a native of Dublin and had been coming to Tom’s office on behalf of a typewriting firm (she was a saleswoman). He told my mother that they planned to marry in August 1925. In later years, whenever my mother talked about her stepmother, it was always full of painful memories. She tried her best to be friendly with her stepmother, but did not succeed. My mother, like many people of her generation, believed that a person should marry only once and that there was an element of betrayal in someone marrying for a second time.

  While still in school, she began to write, and wrote articles for her father’s paper, including one about a school visit to Lourdes. There was an inevitability about her career path: her father planned that she would take over
as the editor of his newspaper, while one of his sons would work as the business manager and another as a photographer. To prepare her for her career, she went to university in Galway and studied for an Arts Degree, eventually graduating with a first class honours degree in her majors, Irish and French (coincidentally under Professor Liam Ó Briain, the Taibhdhearc chairman), and her minor in History.

  On graduation in 1929, my mother began working as a reporter and learned from men like Larry Delacey who was the news editor of the newspaper. When she joined the newspaper, her father decided to launch a mid-week paper called the Connacht Sentinel. Tom Cork Kenny was an excellent journalist. He built up a group of correspondents all over County Galway and the newspaper he published became known as one of the best provincials in the country. During the First World War, he had travelled to the front in France and sent back excellent reports on how the soldiers were doing. In 1919, one of his correspondents in Clifden phoned him to tell him about an extraordinary incident he had just witnessed. Two American pilots, Alcock and Brown, had crossed the Atlantic and had landed in a bog near Clifden. Tom Cork Kenny told him to tell no one. He jumped into his V8 and drove out directly to the men. The two pilots had spoken to a number of local Clifden men. One local recalled how he had seen the plane flying over his home and crashing into the bog. He ran towards the plane and the pilots opened the cockpit and shouted at him – ‘Here’s a fresh orange from Newfoundland.’ He never forgot that. Tom Kenny picked the two airmen up and brought them to a hotel in Galway, where he hid them from all other newspapermen. Once he had compiled the material to write their story, he arranged for them to travel to Dublin by train, and he had a scoop that was published all over the world.

  Another world scoop came through his trusty correspondent in Clifden. In October 1927 the correspondent rang my grandfather to tell him there had been a terrible accident at sea. Local fishermen at Cleggan and Inish Boffin had gone out herring fishing on the night of 28 October and the fleet was struck by a fierce storm. Twenty-five men from Rossadilisk, Cleggan and Inish Boffin died. My grandfather travelled to Rossadilisk and heard first-hand the stories of the survivors and what had happened to them at sea. He wrote a heart-rending report in the Connacht Tribune. There had been men drowned in Mayo, Donegal and Kerry during the same storm, but the Cleggan Disaster, as it became known, attracted the most attention. My father talked to the survivors when he visited Cleggan in 1934.

  In 1968, I visited Cleggan myself and recorded some of the survivors’ experiences. Four years later, I returned with a camera crew and we made a fifteen-minute documentary for the Tangents magazine programme which was broadcast on the anniversary of the disaster, 30 October 1972. While researching material for that programme, I met many of the relatives of the survivors. The local curate brought me to the house of one of the survivors who he wanted me to meet. As we approached the house, the man came stamping out of his house and said: ‘When that journalist [my grandfather] came to write the story for the newspapers, he never talked to me and since he didn’t talk to me then, I’m not talking to any journalist now.’ His story was the most dramatic of all, as he had succeeded in bringing his boat back safely to the shore and, having landed at the base of the cliffs, he managed to climb the cliffs and get help to save his crew.

  Over the years, Tom Kenny built a reputation as an outstanding newspaperman, but he was also a shrewd businessman and he wanted to create employment in Galway. He was one of the first businessmen to come up with the idea of establishing a state body to promote tourism and became the first chairman of the Irish Tourist Board as it was called then. He was also involved in aviation and Peggy flew on one of the first cross-country flights to Dublin. Tom had all the latest gadgets, new radio and new cars. He witnessed Marconi’s experts sending the first telegraph messages from their station in Clifden to Newfoundland and Massachusetts.

  Tom also had his problems. He did not drink alcohol until he was in his late thirties and began then by simply drinking wine at dinner, but from this he progressed to the hard stuff. My mother was horrified to see her father spending so much of his time in bars and drinking with his friends. He used the excuse that he heard about great stories in the bars, but my mother did not accept this. His heavy drinking made her totally opposed to alcohol, as she saw the way it ruined her father’s life.

  Within two years of Peggy joining the newspaper, the news editor, Larry Delacey was offered a job with the Dublin newspaper, the Irish Times. Her father was going to appoint an older, experienced journalist to the post, but Larry persuaded him to give Peggy the chance to prove herself, so at the age of twenty-three or twenty-four, she was running the newspaper. But this didn’t stop her living a very full life. She had a job she loved and a good social life. She moved in the upper circles of Galway society and never in the course of her ordinary day would she have had the opportunity to meet someone like my father, as they moved in very different social settings. The only downside was the way her stepmother treated her and she found it extremely difficult to establish any kind of friendly relationship with her. However, her godmother, Esso (I think her surname was Spellman), was a substitute and my mother could open her heart and talk about all her troubles to her. Her troubles increased when her father began to drink heavily. He came to rely on her more and more, stopped turning up at the office and left the job of writing the editorials for both newspapers to her. She found it increasingly difficult to cope and worried constantly about her father’s drinking.

  One day when she went into work, her father summoned her into his office: ‘Your French Professor, Liam Ó Briain talked to me the other day. They have launched this Irish language theatre, the Taibhdhearc, in Galway. They really need people who are fluent in Irish and those who know French to work on the plays down there. So he asked me to ask you would you be willing to go down there and work with them, probably as an actress. It would only be for a few evenings a week.’

  Peggy was reluctant to go – she liked her work at the paper and she enjoyed playing tennis, badminton and swimming and dancing. She didn’t know where she could fit in a few evenings a week at the Taibhdhearc. She told me that, ‘Although, I really was not that interested in the theatre, in those days, daughters did what they were told to do by their fathers. I was a good obedient daughter and I obeyed my father. Thank God I did. Wouldn’t it have been terrible if I had not joined the Taibhdhearc? I might never have met your father and that would have been a tragedy.’

  My mother went down to the Taibhdhearc in May 1935 and when she walked in, the producer, Frank Dermody, was delighted to see her. Within minutes, she was cast to play the principal male character’s mother in their latest production, The Wonderful Life of Bernard de Menthon, a play written originally in French. A young Walter Macken was playing the lead role. She also appeared in an original play by Gearóid Ó Lochlainn called Na Gaduithe (The Robbers) on 6–7 December 1935. Her next role was as Isolde’s mother in Tristan and Isolde (16–18 February 1936). The part of Tristan was played by my father and the part of Isolde was played by May Kilmartin. Máirtín Ó Direáin, who later became one of Ireland’s most famous Irish language poets, played the part of the King of Ireland. From 1–3 May 1936, she appeared in an Irish translation of a famous French farce by Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.

  There was an instant rapport between Walter Macken and Peggy Kenny. When the rehearsal for that first play, The Wonderful Life of Bernard de Menthon, was over, Walter asked if he might walk her home. She agreed and as Peggy lived in the Crescent and Walter lived in Henry Street, they did not live far away from each other. There was an immediate chemistry between them and my mother said: ‘Right through my life, I was an avid reader and when I was at college, I studied a lot about writers and writing, and for me, I always hoped that one day I would meet a living writer and get to know him. Here he was, an actor who was primarily a writer.’

  My father knew immediately that he had fallen in love with this young woman and that she was t
he one he was going to marry. After that first walk home, it became usual whenever they rehearsed that Wally walked her home and then, within a week of meeting, he invited her to come to a dance with him in the Hangar. This famous dance hall venue lasted up to my own time. A tin structure, it had originally been an aeroplane hangar and had a beautiful wooden dance floor. Situated right opposite the promenade, there were dances there in the afternoon as well as at night. My mother noticed that my father was a very good ballroom dancer. When they were on a break from dancing, my father asked my mother to marry him. Her reaction was to laugh. ‘Why would I marry you? A young fellow like you is it?’

  While my father knew immediately that he had found his soulmate, I do not think my mother was as sure. She was six years older than my father and at that time, that age gap was regarded as substantial. (It is an interesting fact that my father’s mother was also a few years older than my father’s father.) But my father was determined and he told her that he planned to marry her and he was going to persuade her that this was the right course of action. In many ways it seemed an unlikely pairing, the eldest daughter of one of the richest men in Galway matched with the son of a carpenter. Peggy had completed a university course and was working as a news editor for the local newspaper, and Walter had left school at eighteen and was working as an actor in the Taibhdhearc. In those days, these differences in educational and social background could have resulted in a gulf between them, but for this couple it made no difference.

  During the period when they were rehearsing the play, the couple had begun their courtship. Meanwhile my mother was still going out with another boyfriend, farmer/teacher Harry Casey. He had black hair and wore a lot of brylcream, and I often heard my father joking about how he could smell the brylcream off my mother’s lap. Within about two months, my mother realised that Walter was the man for her. So Harry Casey was dismissed and Walter Macken became the steady boyfriend. Reading through the love letters, as you will see, it seems that Harry Casey stayed around for a while, as her family believed he was a much more suitable candidate than my father.