by Tim Robinson
The last of the daylight, sodden with porter, eased itself out of the door, but the creature of sticks and crumpled brown paper behind the bar showed no inclination to replace it with the cheer of a lantern. Three or four elderly islanders on a wooden bench along one wall looked down as if observing the occasional involuntary shiftings of their boots on the concrete floor, glanced from under their brows at the stranger on the bench opposite, looked down again, left the silence to thicken, broke it with a brief sardonic interchange about the old sack that had been thrown over the vomit left in the corner from the previous night, let their eyes stray across the stranger again. George Stoney, professor of Film and Television at New York University, noted with an eye trained by his medium the symptoms of their reluctance to answer his queries. That afternoon he had located the grave of his grandfather in the farthest corner of the Protestant churchyard; it was marked, not by a proper tombstone like those of the coastguards but by two small boulders, like an unbaptized child’s grave, one of which bore the name “Dr. Stoney,” and no date. As a doctor, Stoney would have been one of the élite. What then was the reason for this ignominy? So far all he had prized out of the taciturn natives was some gossip about Dr. Stoney’s wife, a drunkard. Stoney used to lock her in her bedroom to keep her away from the public house, and still he would find her roaring drunk when he came home, for the old crone from the shebeen would come round with a sup of poitín for her, which Mrs. Stoney would suck up with a straw through the keyhole. The professor sighed, and nodded to the lugubrious publican, and waited while another round of pints materialized like fungus on the damp counter. The natives were all leaning together in whispering consultation. Apparently one of them was seeking the authority of the rest to tell the tale of Dr. Stoney’s burial, for he eventually leaned a little forward of the others, and a slow hesitant muttering emerged from between the peak of his cap and the great knot of fingers before his face. With difficulty the American disengaged a narrative from the repetitious web of obscurities. Dr. Stoney, he gathered, had been a drunkard too, and also used to take laudanum from the dispensary he ran. One day he had been found dead, or apparently so. Mr. Kilbride, the minister, didn’t like the doctor because once when some poor people were in arrears and their cases were due to be heard, he had got into the land-agent’s office—it shared a building with the dispensary—and forged the agent’s signature on the dockets saying the rent had been paid, and the agent hadn’t noticed the signatures, so that when he produced the dockets in court everyone laughed and the judge threw out the case, and the poor people couldn’t be evicted. All the same, Dr. Stoney was a Protestant, so Mr. Kilbride had to let him be buried in the Protestant graveyard. Four men carried the coffin on their shoulders, and each one of them thought he heard the body shift in it, but didn’t like to say so for fear of making a fool of himself. And some say that Mr. Kilbride heard Dr. Stoney stirring too, but “he got him buried while he had him ill, because there was a rumour out that Stoney was going to turn Catholic.”…
Professor Stoney is not a horror-film director—he had come to Aran, not just to look up his grandfather’s grave, but to make a documentary on the filming of Man of Aran—and so we have no further development of this promising scenario. We are left to consider an incredible allegation, that the Protestant rector allowed one of his flock to be buried alive rather than risk losing him to the Catholic faith. How could such a thing come to be believed? Sadly, the whole history of Protestantism in Aran answers that question.
In the far background of Irish folk attitudes to Protestantism stands Cromwell, synonymous with massacre and sacrilege, and in Aran there are ruined churches and the battlements of Arkin Castle to keep his memory alive. But by the early nineteenth century the garrison had so long departed and the abandoned fort had been so thoroughly recolonized by the village that his long shadow would have been greatly attenuated. Protestantism then was a handful of government officials and the twice-yearly visits of the landlord’s agent; it was in the long-settled nature of things that the alien faith went with a secular authority emanating from so far away as to be almost abstract, and whose representatives on the ground of Aran were not too pressing, not too hard to outwit. In practice the islanders were ruled by their priest and by the Catholic middleman, Patrick O’Flaherty. A Protestant school had been opened in 1826, funded by the London Hibernian Society and later taken over by the Irish Island Society, a charity founded expressly to service the Protestant communities of such remote areas as this. There was also, briefly, a Protestant minister in Aran in 1835, whose congregation was composed of a few coastguards, and there were schools in Kilmurvey and Kilronan at which both the Protestant and the Catholic catechisms were used. Such a state of affairs was to become unthinkable within twenty years.
However, even in that relatively ecumenical pre-Famine period Protestantism was held in strict quarantine by the Catholic priest. In 1841, when a Presbyterian missioner, the Rev. Henry M’Manus, asked an Aran boatman in Galway docks to bring him over, he was told “Sure we’re ordered not to take any Jumpers into the islands.” (The OED states that the word “jumper,” meaning a Protestant, originated from the leapings of a Welsh sect.) The offensive term was new to M’Manus, but he ignored the insult and jumped into the boat, saying in Irish “I’ll go in, in the name of God.” This half-convinced the Aranmen that he was a priest, and they carried him to Cill Rónáin for nothing and were kind to him in his seasickness during a stormy crossing that took thirteen hours. Once on the island, however, he found he could do nothing to bring the Bible to the people. A coastguard told him that the priest allowed no communication, not even a common salutation, between his flock and the Protestants, while a Methodist missionary who was lodging with the coastguard was “barely permitted to exist on the island” and was denied all access to the people. M’Manus wanted to preach a sermon in Irish, but he was told that “even if the people were willing to come, they durst not, so great was the persecution that would ensue.” Taking his Irish Testament he went from door to door, but was everywhere politely refused permission to read from it, and eventually he retired to a lonely place among the rocks and spent a solitary Sabbath reading comforting words in view of the great Atlantic. Then, having found no “door of usefulness” open to him, he decided to return to Galway; but no boat would carry him, and it was only after eight days of detention that he was rescued by some Galway gentlemen who happened to land on the island. The experience showed him “the utter inexcusableness of that system of intolerance to which they [the islanders] were subjected by their clergyman,” for that clergyman was not putting into their hands the means of enlightenment, the Scriptures, in the Irish language. In fact M’Manus claims that in twenty years of travelling in the Irish-speaking west and south he never once found an Irish school set up by the Catholic clergy, or an Irish Bible circulated; whatever had been done in that way was exclusively the work of Protestant churches. And as for the Catholic idea that the means of salvation could be taught without Scripture books, it was in his opinion totally discredited by the instances of gross superstition and blind credulity he had come across in Aran, such as an attempt he had witnessed to calm a storm by immersing a bag containing two temperance medals and a scapular in the sea.
Nevertheless the Island and Coast Society (as the Irish Island Society had renamed itself) could report some progress in that decade before the Famine. In 1833 their officers had found not a single native who would listen to the Gospel, but ten years later their school in Cill Rónáin had twenty-five scholars on its rolls despite that fact that “the most unworthy means have been used to induce the parents to withdraw their children.” In 1845 it was supporting a minister in Aran, the Rev. Mr. Cather, who joined with the Catholic clergy, Patrick O’Flaherty and other members of the local relief committee in gathering money and distributing meal to the starving. By 1846 the church had been built, and “though as yet silent and unconsecrated, the erection of this beautiful edifice, sacred to the worship on wh
ich they have hitherto looked with contempt, seems already to have produced an effect on the minds of the natives, who now treat with respect those persons they had been taught to despise—formerly a walk around the largest Island, nineteen miles in circuit, without food, was the penance for communication with any of the Protestants or converts—this is entirely done away with.” The boiler brought in by the Society was providing two hundred quarts of soup a day to the Aran poor—and in this charitable act, here as throughout Ireland, were the poisonous seeds of “souperism,” the use of food to bribe the hungry to quit their native faith.
It was not until 1851 that Aran got a permanent and resident minister. The Rev. Alexander Hamilton Synge spent four complaintful years in the island, which was not for him the adored if difficult mistress it was to be for his nephew J. M. Synge nearly thirty years later. The minister’s letters to his brothers show him cringing away from the place in disgust. At first he lodged in the inn, where
… the bad cooking & dirty things & sour milk etc are some of the little inconveniences of my present abode the screaming of the women and children sometimes is dreadful it quite addels my head & it is too hot & close to shut the window—shd you happen to come to Dunmore that week w you bring some small cookery book for me for I must learn to make up some mess of some sort—meat is not to be had & their bacon poisons me & the fish is not always to be had either.
He saw himself as a castaway from all comforts:
Here I am Lord of all I survey—surrounded with dirt + ignorance … it is a very wretched Island, the soile very scanty almost all a barren rock—we have a little church—20 & 25 make our congregation mostly of the families of the coastguard … I shall have one dirty little chap for my man Friday—who I expect will always be where I don’t want him to be + never to be had when he is wanted however we must not be nice—it is very hard to make off a living here … I am a regular prisoner—I get on with the people so far very well but how will it be when we begin to attack their bad ways & religion etc. I don’t know.
In fact his letters report only one such attack:
I have succeeded in putting a stop to a ball match that used to go on here every Sunday I attacked them very sharply the other Sunday & the next Monday the priest was the first to begin pulling down their wall tho’ the rascal had seen them playing there 100 times before.
As for his ministry to the Protestants, “the sermon writing is the most difficult of all & takes up a great deal of time—then preaching it to a very small number makes it some thing harder I think.” The newly built rectory he moved into in December of the next year was “a wet and windy concern—it leaks like a sieve & rocks in the wind.” From all this his refuge was the open sea and the deck of his fishing smack, the Georgiana, which he bought within months of arriving in Aran, and the fortunes of which fill most of his letters. At that period the fishermen of the Claddagh, the Irish-speaking and semi-autonomous village outside the walls of Galway, claimed exclusive rights in the whole of Galway Bay, and the “Jumper’s boat” aroused their resentment. Unable to market his catch in Galway, Synge had to have it basketted and sent by the recently established railway to Dublin, and even to Liverpool. The Claddagh men then became dangerously threatening. The Galway Vindicator of 2nd June 1853 reported the confrontation:
The Rev. Gentleman with a crew of one boy and three Arran men, had been trawling in his yacht off Costello Bay, when a fleet of Claddagh boats bore down upon him, with the view of boarding his little craft. The crews of the attacking boats were armed with sunfish spears instead of boarding pikes, and stones instead of hand grenades, which missiles they discharged to some effect. Mr. Singe was struck on the arm with a large stone, and severely hurt; some of his men were also more or less injured; and one of the hookers came under the boom of the yacht and prepared to board, but was beaten off by Mr. Singe, who presented a loaded musket at the foremost assailant, and threatened to shoot him if he advanced further….
Two similar incidents took place the next year, after which:
With the view of bringing the perpetrators of the outrage to justice, the Rev. Mr. Synge proceeded last night to the Claddagh Quay, for the purpose of identifying the owners of several boats whose register numbers he had noted on the former occasions. But, being recognised by the Claddagh women, he was immediately assailed with stones and every available missile. Attempting to make his escape through the Fish Market, he was met by the denizens of that fragrant locality and was thus literally hemmed in by his assailants. No other means of escape being left he jumped into the river with the intention of fording it, but even there his pursuers continued the attack and it is difficult to say what might have been the result had not the Police immediately come to his assistance.
As a result the authorities stationed a paddle-steamer in the bay to protect the fishery, several Claddagh boats were seized, and twenty-five of their crew members taken prisoner. However it was clear that only desperate poverty had driven the men to attack boats better equipped than their own, and the Harbour Committee suggested a collection be taken up to assist them in acquiring the gear for trawling. Synge himself spoke in favour of this, and a fortnight later the newspaper was able to state,
It is gratifying to see these men, instead of committing acts of lawless violence, and unsuccessfully endeavouring to prevent others from availing of the natural resources that Providence has bountifully bestowed, abandoning those unfounded prejudices, and peacefully entering upon a career of industrial occupation.
At the assizes a month later, the prisoners all expressed their regrets, the Crown did not press for prosecution, and the Claddaghmen walked free, “loudly protesting their gratitude to the judge,” while Synge had the riot charges against their womenfolk dropped.
It seems probable that Synge’s disinclination to strenuous evangelism, the dangers he shared with his Aran crew, and the magnanimous resolution of the Claddagh cases, made his term in the islands one of relative interdenominational warmth. If so, the arrival of the young Rev. William Kilbride, who replaced him in 1855, must have been felt like a squall of hailstones. Kilbride’s previous posting had been at Salrock in the north of Connemara, on the estate of a retired Peninsular War veteran, General Thomson. At that period Connemara was infected by a much more virulent strain of proselytism than Aran had suffered from. An English high-church evangelical rector, the Rev. Alexander Dallas of Wonston in Hampshire, had convinced himself and a number of rich and influential supporters that he was to be the tool of Providence in the liberation of Ireland’s peasants from “the anti-Christ of Rome.” The task was one that the established Church of Ireland was too well-dressed to plunge into:
I know what miserable, groveling, ignorant, superstitious creatures they are…. If their filth, and folly and superstition and passion repel your love you are not fit to go amongst them. You must be able to see the jewel of God in the midst of that dunghill, and condescend to be the scavenger to get it.
Fortunately the Famine, “a direct judgement from God on account of the tolerance of idolatry,” had softened that dunghill for his digging:
The state of Ireland during the whole of this year [1848] was most appalling: disease, in the shape of fever and cholera, had followed upon starvation. Many hearts were thus being prepared to receive those consolations which the glorious Gospel of God can alone impart. The oil of this joy was to be poured in by His missionary servant, and his tours there were full of encouragement, speaking as he did beside the dying and the dead with the full realisation of eternal truths.
In Connemara, where untold thousands had died and the enfeebled survivors were for years to be dependent on the charity of their betters, Dallas obtained the backing of several Protestant landlords, and most crucially of the Rev. Hyacinth D’Arcy of the Clifden union of parishes (which in fact included Aran until Synge’s arrival). By 1849, when Dallas formally founded his Society for Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics, he already had a number of mission schools in operation a
round Lough Corrib and Clifden. Substantial churches and rectories followed, around which little communities of converts, shunned by their former neighbours and cursed by their priests, huddled for protection. A contemptuous rhyme is still remembered in Connemara about the congregation of a church built under the patronage of General Thomson:
Dá bhfeicfeá Jumpers Dhumhaigh Ithir
Agus iad cruinnithe ar chrocán amháin
Pota den “soup” a’ dul timpeall
Agus freangach ag snámh ar a bharr…
[If you should see the Jumpers of Dooyeher / All gathered on one little knoll / A pot of the soup going round / With a dogfish floating on top…]
It was from this background of degradation and bigotry that Kilbride came to Aran in 1855. Soon he was joined by a Protestant schoolteacher, Thomas Charde, who had been involved in proselytism in Inishbofin, and in fact was thrown out of that island for it, according to accusations made against him by the Aran priest some years later.
Dr. James Johnston Stoney arrived soon after Kilbride, in 1858. The younger son of a moderately well-off Anglo-Irish family from Tipperary, he had graduated from Trinity and acquired his Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons at Edinburgh. As he must have been married and had children at this time (he was to die in 1869, having had fourteen children by two wives), the move to Aran in itself calls for explanation, but nothing in the meagre records suggests whether it was an ideal of service that moved him so to seclude himself, or an addiction to the laudanum that killed him in the end. By the time of Stoney’s arrival Thomas Thompson had succeeded his father George as landlords’ agent, and so all the characters of the next few years’ little tragi-comedies were assembled on the bare stage of Aran.