Buried Lives

by Bury, Robin;

  Tonight I was called up and shown a large glow in the sky overlooking the castle about a mile away. The rebels had burnt the castle down as they said they would. I was very, very sorry for all that lovely silver, the beautiful glass and splendid linen all being burnt, and all those gorgeous statutes and pictures, the wonderful drawing room all burning, for what?20

  This house had an interesting history. It was owned by the Puxley family, friends of Daphne du Maurier, who wrote the book Hunger Hill based on the house and area. The Puxleys were originally from Galway, going back to 1685, and one of their number married a Sarah Lavallin from Castletownbere. Their son ‘Copper John’ started the copper mines at Allahies hills in 1812, employing local men. His son Henry started work on the Gothic mansion, Dunboy, in 1866. They were burnt out, it seems, because some houses of local IRA families had been burnt by the Auxiliaries. The family was Protestant, supporters of the enemy, England, which also made them an enemy. One night 10 IRA men called, saying that they were going to burn the castle down on the grounds that local soldiers stationed on Bere Island were to take it over as their headquarters. Albert Thomas, who knew the soldiers, told them this was untrue.

  I asked them quietly if, being local men, it had struck them that without the castle and its grounds there would be no work for six of them; no rates and taxes could be collected, and between £800 and £1,000 a year less would be spent in the town if the castle were no more. They listened for at least 6 of them could see my point. The head one was, no doubt, on the run and appeared to be domineering the others, so I suggested putting it to the vote. At this point it was almost twelve o’clock, and just on the stroke a most awful, gurgling noise came from the passage, and a hollow rattling of chains. As the wife was with me, the men could see they were not responsible for this, and, as the noise drew nearer, they up and ran from the castle as one man, just as if ‘Old Nick’ had spoken to them.21

  It was the dying sounds of a hen Albert had not killed properly. It was upside-down, having been hung by the legs to bleed in the armoury when it suddenly started making gurgling noises and flapped its wings, terrifying the supposedly tough IRA men.

  A few weeks later, the colonel called to tell Albert and his wife, who was half Irish, that their lives were in danger as ‘he knew from information he had received that they were going to burn down the castle’.22 They left with the army. Soon afterwards, they saw the glow of the burning castle at night, described above by Albert. He was convinced that the ‘rebels were under the impression that the soldiers were going to take the Castle over’.23 Three houses of the IRA were later burnt down as punishment for burning the castle, while the Thomases left Ireland to take up employment in England.

  The Puxleys were awarded £17,900 as compensation by the Free State government. Today, a huge new hotel stands on the site of the old castle, using the shell of the old mansion. It appears that the hotel was built to take advantage of the tax incentive scheme to encourage more hotels to be built in Ireland. Although the Puxleys had lived in Ireland for over 250 years, they are described on the poster outside the tourist board office in Castletownbere as ‘The English Puxley family’.

  In Tipperary, some 20 houses of Anglo-Irish occupants were burnt during 1923, including a dwelling belonging to writer Hubert Butler’s mother. A large early Victorian building, it was called Graiguenoe Park in Holycross. A revealing and touching letter was sent by the housekeeper to Mrs Clarke, Butler’s mother-in-law.

  Madam,

  By now you know the bad news how Graiguenoe Park is burnt down. Oh it was terrible to see it blazing away.

  Just at 5 past 12 on Wednesday night the bell was rung. I was only just in bed, so I jumped up and called the girls and went to Nolan; but he was up. They never stopped ringing till Nolan and I went to the hall door; and there were two men with revolvers and demanded to know why we did not open before and come out; so I said, “Surely you will give us time to get our things out.” He said, “Yes, if we were not too long.” He wanted to know who were all those inside the house. I said “Three girls more.” He wanted to know who were all those inside there. I said, “That is yourself in the mirror”. He thought (when he saw our reflections in the glass) that a lot of people were there. So we all got our things put together as quickly as we could, but all of us had to leave a lot of things as they kept asking, “Are you ready, as we are in a hurry”, so we got out. Nolan saved three pictures out of the dining room and your dressing case and a small case under the bed and Mr Clarke’s dressing bag, but they did not want him to take anything only his own things. He also saved the harness; he worked like a nigger but he could do nothing more. He also tried to save the harness room by throwing buckets of water on the inside and the roof; but no use. The fire got too firm a hold on everything before those demons left. They had petrol, straw and hay so they made a good job of it. The only place not burnt out is the scullery and Mrs Curtun’s room. We were in the coach house watching it blazing. The flames were very high but the wind was in our favour or the outhouses would also be in flames.

  It was heartbreaking to see the house burning where we were living so long. But we were thankful Mr Clarke was not there for the story was bad enough and he may be shot. They asked several times where was the Boss. We all came up to Mrs Hilton’s at 7 o’clock in the morning. Bridget has gone home, also Maggie and Josie. I am staying here with Mrs Hilton for the present. I will never forget the sight and experiences of Wednesday night. I feel sorry for you and Mr Clarke, but I’m thinking there will be no gentlemen’s places soon.

  She was right. Not many of the gentry stayed on. Hubert Butler, descended from a Norman family that settled in Kilkenny, the Ormondes, believes the Anglo-Irish could have prevented their fate if their interest and involvement in Ireland had been deeper. If they had been Roman Catholics, I question whether they would have been intimidated. Butler notes:

  … they largely did recognise a duty to their neighbourhood and this duty was usually intelligently fulfilled, but only rarely happened that, like Plunkett and a few of their contemporaries, they could give their first love to their country. I believe that in a generation or two, had there been no 1914 war, no rebellion and no civil war, this duty might have turned itself into love as it often had in the eighteenth century.

  Then, for a brief period, they had been able to represent something very precious. Only they could give Irishmen a sense of historical continuity and of identity. It was to be found in their bookshelves, when those who remained no longer read books, in their estate maps when they no longer had estates, in their memories when they no longer had the leisure or literary skill to write them down. The Irishmen who burnt down those Tipperary houses were sawing away the branch on which they were sitting. Clamouring that they were a distinctive people, they obliterated much of the heritage that distinguished them. The burning of the Four Courts, which swept away the records of eight centuries, was only a single instance in this tale of self-destruction.

  A new and more suffocating ascendancy, that of international commerce, was on the way; many of those ruined houses would have been strongholds of resistance to it, and the Anglo-Irish, with their easy-going pragmatic Christianity, would certainly have tempered the religious and political passions of our northern countrymen.

  Butler perhaps protests too much, and the ‘international commerce’ he refers to so disparagingly became an unstoppable wave after the Second World War. The protectionist Ireland inspired by Arthur Griffith held out for far too long against it, leading to a stagnant economy and mass emigration. It was only when Ireland embraced it, perhaps too wholeheartedly, that it became a prosperous and vibrant country. It educated its young, providing free secondary education in 1967, at last catching up with the North, which had provided free secondary education since shortly after the war. It did not need the Ascendancy to achieve this. But what if the Irish Parliamentary party had led Ireland after the First World War within the United Kingdom under Home Rule, along the lines of devol
ved government at Stormont? That would have secured a better-educated, more egalitarian South drawing down funds from the British exchequer. Roman Catholics in the North fared better than their fellow Catholics in the South in terms of both educational support and a superior universal health care system.

  No, the Ascendancy was not going to provide leadership for a new Ireland, and in any case, by 1914 it was a spent force. But their houses are another matter.

  Lady Fingall wrote:

  The country houses lit a chain of bonfires throughout the nights of late summer and autumn and winter and early Spring … People whose families had lived in the country for three or four hundred years, realised suddenly that they were still strangers and that the mystery of it was not to be revealed to them – the secret lying as deep as the valleys in the Irish hills, the barrier they had tried to break down standing as strong and immovable as those hills, brooding over an age-long wrong.

  It was those who tried to atone for that wrong and to break down this barrier that did most of the paying.24

  ‘Brooding over an age-long wrong’. Perhaps that is part of why so many mansions were burnt. It certainly seems to be the case at Castle Mary in Cloyne. Rebels hanged by the Ponsonbys in 1798, and later evictions of some tenants in the nineteenth century, were long remembered for a variety of reasons. Undoubtedly one was a military response, such as at Summerhill. Other mansions were burnt as reprisals. Some of the houses of senators – such as the house of the patriot Horace Plunkett, who worked tirelessly and at some personal expense to establish co-operatives in Ireland – were burnt by Irregulars opposed to Senators post the Treaty. Plunkett left for England, never to return.

  Many houses, especially in Co. Cork, were destroyed in retaliation for actions taken by the Black and Tans, such as the Peacocke residence. These houses were the precious possessions of Protestants, politically and economically humbled prior to the burnings, knocked from their pedestals. Their mansions were burnt in part because they were no longer considered to be Irish, or to be supportive of the drive for separation. I doubt they were considered ‘strangers’, despite Lady Fingall’s account. They were deeply involved in Ireland, some for hundreds of years. They knew their Irish neighbours well, and their ‘fathers and mothers, their grandparents, all their children’, as Maurice Headlam wrote in Irish Reminiscences. No, they were no strangers, nor were they any longer a political threat.

  The owners of the burnt houses were understandably shocked by the harshness with which they were treated. Ireland was left the poorer, with much of its rich architectural heritage destroyed. The IRA destroyed buildings, furnishings, paintings and plate. The message was clear: their owners were made to feel homeless at home.

  John Pentland Mahaffy argued that the landlord class did little or nothing to defend itself, as noted in Dooley’s The Decline of the Big House in Ireland. But with the Land League vigorously attacking it and the Home Rule movement alienating it, the onus was on London to protect its own people, people who had unstintingly given generations of their offspring to serve in the Empire.

  They were much too small and scattered to organise an effective political opposition against leaders like Parnell and Redmond, who had the mass of the Irish people behind them. They were, in effect, doomed once Westminster decided to give way to the Land League and the demand for Home Rule. Their own let them down, people like Parnell, perhaps inheriting anglophobia from his American mother. The Irish nationalism that triumphed through political organisation at Westminster and violence in Ireland saw them branded as mongrels and hyphenated as Anglo-Irish, a label that sticks to this day: neither fish nor fowl. Their houses were seen as monuments to an oppressive class, an affront to the nation. Up to recently, schoolchildren were taught that landlords in general were tyrannical, rackrenting and responsible for heartless evictions. Historical reassessment has changed this picture, however. We now know that many were helpful and generous to their tenants, men such as Lord Fingall, Lord Meath, and Horace Plunkett. In any case, it was their agents who managed their estates, the landlords giving them responsibility for collecting rents and for evictions when rents were well in arrears.

  Nevertheless, a harsh impression of landlords largely remains. Sean Moylan T.D. said of their houses that remained post-1922:

  Not structurally sound, they have no artistic value and no historic interest. From my unregenerate point of view, I choose to regard them as tombstones of a departed ascendancy and the sooner they go down the better. They are no use.

  Some of the owners left for England and the colonies, fearful for their future in a country that was not to welcome Protestant ex-loyalists. The destruction of their homes was a personal assault on the owners. The message was in the flames, as James Hayter-Hames wrote about the burning of Castle Mary (p. 83): you have outlived your welcome. This class was the detritus left behind on the spring tide of Irish nationalism and became, scapegoats for British rule in Ireland. The new nation was built on the embers of their destroyed houses, embers that may have heralded the beginning of the end of the British Empire everywhere.

  After the end of the civil war, the expense of maintaining the big houses became prohibitive and many were abandoned and some – such as Island House, a large Georgian mansion built by my family on Little Island in Co. Cork – were demolished. Tarquin Blake’s two books are an eloquent testament to the decay and abandonment of Ireland’s mansions.25 Recently, attitudes have changed and some of the finest big houses have been restored, both by the Office of Public Works and by their wealthy new owners. The Irish Georgian Society has played a crucial role in preserving some of the architectural treasures of the nation, particularly under the leadership of the late Desmond FitzGerald, the Knight of Glin, Desmond Guinness and the late Kevin B. Nolan. Castletown was saved by Guinness and is now cared for by the Office of Public Works. Malahide Castle and Newbridge house were bought by Dublin County Council and restored and the parklands are maintained. Killkenny Castle and Belvedere house in Mullingar, once owned by Colonel Howard-Bury, are now in the hands of the Office of Public Works.

  Some of Ireland’s finest mansions have been restored, often at great expense. Castle Hyde in Fermoy was bought by Michael Flatley and lavishly restored. David Davies bought Abbeyleix, Martin Naughton restored Stackallan in County Meath and Killeen Castle is a conference centre and golf course, as is Carton House and demesne. Powerscourt in Enniskerry has been restored and has magnificent gardens, an exhibition hall, restaurant and golf course. Some of Ireland’s big houses and rich architectural heritage has been saved, but alas, all too much of it has vanished.

  4

  Low-Intensity Unhappiness

  What sort of Ireland emerged after the establishment of the Free State in 1921? The American poet Richard Tillinghast was unequivocal when he wrote: ‘… the new nation, defining itself as Gaelic, Catholic, and nationalist, became anti-intellectual and inward-looking to a pathological degree.’1 It was an agricultural country with few industries; a frugal country, profoundly influenced at political and personal levels by the Roman Catholic Church. People were rooted in their local communities, with social life centering on market days, daily visits to the local creameries, the local pub and parish halls. Sunday Mass was the focal point of the week; almost all Catholics attended, the parish priest being accorded unquestioned allegiance and deference well beyond his spiritual duties. It was an Ireland that ‘placed great emphasis on the appearance of things. That culture was increasingly authoritarian in its approach to the ordering of the nation, and a preference for autarchy in not only economic but cultural affairs emerged as the dominant mode of the de Valera years.’2

  The small number of Protestants who stayed on after independence lived in separate communities from their Roman Catholic neighbours. A form of apartheid came into being, accepted by both Catholic and Protestant communities. The cliché has it that Protestants ‘kept their heads down’ and only spoke openly to each other behind closed doors. Few Protestants subsc
ribed to de Valera’s vision of a Catholic, Gaelic, Irish-speaking rural republic. Most resented the imposition of compulsory Irish language learning in their primary and secondary schools. As the Canadian Kurt Bowen wrote, perhaps somewhat harshly, that the Department of Education used schools:

  … as the chief means of restoring Irish to the status of the national language…No other government policy provoked such widespread and sustained criticism from Protestants. For forty years, the annual reports of the Church of Ireland’s Board of Education repeatedly condemned the compulsory and restrictive character of the regulations…the minority regarded Irish as an alien, primitive, and anachronistic language with no roots in their own English-speaking tradition … In the main, they argued on the pragmatic ground that the heavy emphasis on Irish reduced the amount of time available for other more important subjects, had no practical value, and was doing little to further a true revival in the everyday use of Irish … In 1966 an independent and quite sophisticated piece of research vindicated many of their claims when it found that the great amount of time devoted to Irish was responsible for the lower standard of education among Irish primary school children compared with their counterparts in England. But arguments of this sort when they came from Protestants, has no appreciable influence on the government before 1945.3

  Brian Walker tells us: ‘… many in that community (Protestant) objected strongly to how the Irish language was made compulsory in schools and for all government positions, public appointments, such as law, and cultural bodies.’4

  Walker goes on to quote the bishop of Limerick, Dr H.V. White, who said at the 1926 General Synod of the Church of Ireland: ‘We have no wish to discourage the teaching of Irish, but we have every wish to discourage the compulsion placed upon our people.’ A little later, on 9 June 1929, an editorial in The Irish Times ‘described how many Protestants regarded the State policy of compulsory Irish as not only a substantial material burden, but also a “denial of intellectual freedom”.5 Not all Church of Ireland parishioners thought like this; however, two archbishops of Dublin, George Otto Simms and Donald Caird, spoke Irish fluently and ‘were enthusiastic supporters of the Irish language’.6