A Twisted Root

by Patricia Craig

  It was not a good time for principled dissent. The Reverend Drummond is at one with William Blacker in his adulation of the English connection, and consequently his historical references fall within a tradition of unionist orthodoxy: ‘Boyne foams with blood – a coward monarch flies, / War sheathes his gory blade – Rebellion dies’ (the coward monarch, of course, being the unfortunate James II). It’s likely that Drummond had a more recent rebellion in mind when he wrote these lines; and indeed, at this reactionary moment (the early years of the nineteenth century) ‘rebellion’ was discredited as a means of effecting social change, and not only among those of a conservative bent. The weaver poet James Orr, for example – author of the wry and disabused poem ‘Donegore Hill’ – never relinquished his hopes for a true democracy in Ireland. But after 1798, when he’d witnessed the inadequacy of republicanism in action, he attached these hopes to a different system: reformist rather than revolutionary.

  Orr, as an ex-rebel, one-time contributor to the radical newspaper the Northern Star, and ultimate pragmatist, exemplifies the attitudes prevailing one after the other among the Presbyterians of the North. At one moment, it seemed, the republicanism of Wolfe Tone, Henry Joy McCracken and others was an impeccable doctrine, and the next moment it wasn’t. It was impeccable while it grew apace in opposition to misgovernment; but lost repute when it began to be viewed solely as a disruptive force. Events were taking some complicated turns, and among them arrived a hesitancy, even among liberals, in relation to the kind of anti-Catholicism purveyed by Blacker and others. This was still to be deplored – but deplored, perhaps, with reservations. The anti-sectarian instinct had a strong foundation in the North, and the thing that chiefly got it up in arms was the treatment of Catholics. But at times it looked as if any such benevolent instinct might not weather an absence of democratic principles among Catholics themselves, whenever this absence became apparent – as it did, for example, in Wexford during the Rebellion, and again at the height of the Emancipation struggle. Catholic smugness or xenophobia is as much to be regretted as any other sort.

  Those Protestant ‘United Irish’ advocates of tolerance, though, who lived on into the nineteenth century, continued to speak out on behalf of Catholic Emancipation – even though it’s unlikely that Daniel O’Connell, with all his magniloquence and southern showmanship, would have held much personal appeal for them. It’s true that both James Orr and William Drennan had died (in 1816 and 1820 respectively) before O’Connell’s Catholic campaign reached its zenith in the 1820s, and thereby evaded a possible erosion of their sympathies. They retained their liberal values to the end. Drennan’s famous directive with regard to his funeral arrangements shows a wit and a kind of enshrinement of his lifelong concerns. He left instructions that his coffin should be carried to its final resting place in Clifton Cemetery, Belfast, by an equal number of Protestants and Catholics – six of one and half a dozen of the other.

  Daniel O’Connell’s ‘Catholic Rent’ – the scheme by which a penny a month was subscribed by individual Catholics to a pro-Emancipation fund – this scheme was embraced less vigorously in Ulster than in other parts of the country. Poverty was the reason: many poor northern Catholics lacked even so small a surplus income as the Catholic Rent required. They found themselves ‘overwhelmingly confined to the lowest rungs of the social ladder’, the historian Jonathan Bardon says. The most prosperous members of the Catholic population, and it was only a very limited prosperity, were ‘the farmer-weavers of the Linen Triangle’. Among them, I think, we may place the Crossmacahilly Tippings, who probably would have contributed their penny-a-month as the idea of a Catholic nation took hold among the disaffected. Was ‘Popish power’, at last, actually becoming a possibility? If so, it was a glorious prospect for the downtrodden and something to be encouraged at all costs.

  At this time, the 1820s, the Tipping farm is home to the brothers James, John and Matthew, and possibly their mother Sarah (née Magee) is still alive and living there as well – though by 1833 it seems she isn’t, since her name has disappeared from the records. Within the next ten years the youngest son Matthew has vanished too, maybe dead of whatever it was that had killed his father, when he (Matthew) was only four. That leaves James and John. By the mid 1820s both were married and occupied adjoining farmhouses, the smaller forming a right angle with the larger. At this time, it is possible that Matthew was employed by his brothers as a labourer. And, if the Catholic Rent was paid by anyone in the family it was undoubtedly James who paid it, as the oldest and steadiest of the brothers and the one most strongly endowed with Tipping gumption.

  James might have relished the sense of a growing Catholic solidarity not tied up with what he already knew only too well, the deadly and ruinous faction fights still bedevilling the Armagh countryside. The old Defenders and their Peep o’ Day antagonists hadn’t died out, they hadn’t gone away, and neither of them had absorbed a jot of United Irish idealism. Under the new names of Ribbonmen and Orangemen they went on implementing their complementary programmes of cruelty, blackguardism and intimidation. ... I don’t know if any of the Catholic Tippings were caught up in Ribbon activity, but I think it unlikely: at least, I hope I needn’t add arson and attacks on innocent Protestant cattle to the list of ancestral (or quasi-ancestral) enormities I’m contemplating with alarm.

  A Ribbon/Orange confrontation which later gained a magnified status had taken place in County Derry in 1813. It became known as ‘The Battle of Garvagh’, after the title of an anonymous ballad which began to circulate shortly after the event:

  The day before the July fair

  The Ribbonmen they did prepare

  For three miles round to wreck and tear

  And burn the town of Garvagh.

  Needless to say, their terrible plan of action was foiled by the Orange Boys of Garvagh, who shot dead one Ribbonman and wounded others. This, along with many other similar incidents, didn’t have a calming effect on denominational excitability. Finally, local and national authorities could stand no more of it, and by 1823 both Ribbon and Orange societies were proscribed organisations under an Unlawful Oaths Act passed in that year. This piece of ‘anti-Orange legislation’ – I’m quoting the useful J.S. Kane again, in his Blacker family history – was followed by the Unlawful Associations Act of 1825, which to Kane’s indignation clamped down on the Orange Order, and even (God save us) on the Freemasons, ‘neither of which was in any way unlawful’. Well! As a consequence, he adds, ‘the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland dissolved itself in March 1825’.

  But unholy passions continue to be exacerbated. Picture a scene in Lurgan town, in May 1828, when hundreds of anti-Emancipationists take to the streets armed with sticks and cudgels in an episode of organised violence against Catholics. ... There they run, in an access of roaring hostility. Papist doors and windows succumb to their blows, driving them on in a triumph of rage to further acts of destruction. And here comes John Hancock, Protestant magistrate and agent to Charles Brownlow, riding up on his chestnut horse to read out the Riot Act, confident in his position as law-enforcer. Well, he can read it out till he’s blue in the face but no one takes a bit of notice. Restraint is not imposed on the Lurgan berserkers, whose number includes members of a local yeomanry corps. Far from helping to round up the rioters, these yeomen are running pell-mell with the worst of them, yelling and bawling and wrecking all before them. At the same time, their overexcited sergeant heaps abuse on the head of John Hancock for his ‘Papist’ pusillanimity.

  In the end, only nine of the rioters are arrested and dispatched to Portadown gaol. The others get off scot-free, dispersing themselves among alleyways and back streets known only to local residents. On the way to the gaol, passing along Edward Street in Lurgan – location of the magistrate’s substantial home – the caught miscreants are accompanied by an Orange band blaring out ‘The Boyne Water’, ‘No Surrender’, ‘Croppies Lie Down’ and anything else guaranteed to cause offence to any Papist ears in the vicinity. A ha
stily composed ballad attacking the Protestant magistrate Hancock hits the streets a few days later:

  Oh, Lurgan town’s an altered town,

  Since Papish Hancock he came to it.

  If ye walk out upon the Twelfth,

  You may depend he’ll make you rue it.

  And if you sing an Orange song,

  You’ll be jailed for eight and forty hours;

  Fresh orders he gave the police,

  To make prisoners of none but ours.

  That’s Lurgan for you: a town of bitter enmities, where ‘the residents of Ballyblough and the Pound River are for ever stoning and fighting’. At this date, the late 1820s, the Orange Order is still an illegal body, and rumbles among disbanded Orangemen deprived of their July shenanigans finally come to a head in 1835, when, from all over County Armagh, they converge on Carrickblacker House and assemble on the lawn (an awesome twenty thousand of them, according to a contemporary newspaper report, ‘of all ages and sexes’), thereby involving the upright Colonel Blacker in an inadvertent act of law-breaking. He rises to the occasion, however, addressing the crowd like a Dutch uncle and prevailing upon the lot of them to go home in a peaceable spirit (as reported, again, in the Evening Packet), never deigning to notice any Ribbon provocation they might encounter along the way. (The leaders of this demonstration were, nevertheless, brought to justice by the aforementioned John Hancock, an action creating strong ill-feeling between him and William Blacker.) The colonel’s lady, Mrs Blacker, makes a rare appearance on the same crowded lawn, causing questions to arise: how did she fit in among that vast assembly? Wasn’t she intimidated by the masses of Orange hoi polloi? It would seem not – for here she is, wearing an orange dress to proclaim her enthusiasm for the Protestant cause. And, for good measure, in festive exuberance, Carrickblacker servants are milling about the place with orange lilies entwined in their hair.

  (I think of my grandmother Tipping’s pronunciation of the word ‘orange’ which she reduces to a single syllable, articulated with a growl: ornge. ‘Them oul ornge bigots’. And again, I think of the field at Edenderry in the twentieth century, with daft middle-aged women draped in Union Jacks weaving drunkenly through the thickets of Orange celebrants.)

  Crossmacahilly, 1830s. The place is coming down with children, the offspring of James (eight born between 1826 and 1839) and John (father to at least four). We can visualise them tumbling about the stone-floored kitchen, boys and girls alike wearing woollen petticoats, and applaud the adults’ unremitting efforts to maintain a certain standard of comfort and hygiene. (I’m taking this to be true, because it was a ferocious preoccupation with all of their descendants. Woe betide the speck of dirt that would show its face in any Tipping or Tipping-related household.) If it’s summer, we might see homespun blankets spread over hedges drying in the sun; or the same lumps of children foraging for wild strawberries and mushrooms in the fields (and maybe exchanging insults with infantile Protestant neighbours: ‘Proddy gets’; ‘Papist pigs’). Cold damp winters might bring running noses and chilblains (a common Tipping affliction). And always, there are chores to perform: water to be fetched for cooking and washing, floors to be swept, the kitchen ‘redd’. By this stage it’s likely that the linen-weaving enterprise is merely a sideline, as the growing number of flax mills and factories signals an end to home production. Farming would be the main source of income for households like the Tippings’, with all its drawbacks of incessant labour and uncertainty of outcome.

  Crossmacahilly. I’d like to think the place provided scope for seasonal pleasures too, with ancient customs like the Cutting of the Calliagh still going strong. ‘The calliagh’ was the last sheaf of corn left standing after the rest had been harvested. Separated into three strands where it grew, and plaited by one of the women working in the fields, it was then cut down by having a sickle thrown at it. ‘Cut her down, cut her down,’ the reapers would cry, and afterwards raise a cheer when the deed was done. A celebratory meal – the calliagh feast – would then take place in a farm kitchen, with perhaps dancing and singing until well into the night. Though the purpose of this ritual would largely have been forgotten, even in the nineteenth century, it had something to do with an idea that ‘the spirit of the corn’ resided in the last sheaf, and that the actions connected with the calliagh would ensure a good future harvest.

  There were other rituals, to be enacted at due seasons. ‘Above my door the rushy cross’, John Hewitt wrote,

  The turf upon my hearth,

  For I am of the Irishry,

  By nurture and by birth.

  The ‘rushy cross’, St Brigid’s cross, placed above the door to protect the home, was traditionally fashioned from rushes gathered on the last day of January – they had to be plucked, not cut, and carried indoors after sunset, whereupon the work of shaping them into crosses would begin, accompanied by a meal of pancakes or apple potato bread. Rushes grew in abundance around the Crossmacahilly bogs, and no doubt generations of Tipping children were sent out to collect them, with instructions not to get their feet wet or their clothes destroyed. Like other country families the Tippings would have been dutiful towards immemorial customs, I think, and wishful not to neglect any time-honoured means of drawing good fortune to themselves.

  But even in towns and cities the custom of making Brigid’s crosses persisted until well into the twentieth century. I was shown how to do it myself, instructed by the nuns of my primary school Aquinas Hall in Windsor Park, Belfast, in the 1950s. It made a welcome respite from the usual classroom ennui (geography or elocution lessons – ugh!), and it was satisfying to view the finished article you’d knocked together with your own hands, once you’d grasped the technique of folding the rushes one on top of the other into a swastika-like shape. The crosses we turned out each year on 1 February made a pretext for a lecture on our religious heritage. We sat at our desks wearing royal blue gym-slips over grey winter blouses, hair neatly plaited or cropped and curled, and learned that Brigid was one of Ireland’s holy trinity of ancient saints, along with Patrick and Columcille – but not that the abbey over which she presided at Kildare was a ‘mixed house’ (i.e. one in which monks and nuns were at liberty to marry, if they chose); or that Brigid herself was ordained a bishop, in a society that placed few restrictions on women’s advancement. These facts would not have been considered suitable for our infant ears. Neither was the fusion of pagan and Christian customs dwelt on. This was the 1950s: Irish Roman Catholicism reigned supreme and nuns’ power over their charges was absolute.

  At Crossmacahilly there are good years and bad years, and through it all it’s James who shoulders the heaviest burdens of both families, his own and his brother’s; James the good manager, the cautious risk-taker, the one blessed with foresight; James my grandmother’s grandfather. James pays the whole of the Crossmacahilly rent to the Duke of Manchester’s agent Henry John Porter (John repaying his share whenever he can). James borrows money from the Tandragee Castle Loan Fund – set up by the same agent – to buy lime, rye grass, turnip and parsnip seeds, making regular repayments to the fund. John borrows too, for clothes as well as seeds and crops, but, unlike his brother, he gets into difficulties and has to appeal to James to settle his debts (which he does). James takes advantage of a drainage scheme which improves the land and increases the yield of farm produce. It is all carefully thought out – and when he dies in 1853, James leaves no debts for his heirs to grapple with. All his borrowing is repaid to the last farthing. It’s a lesson in good husbandry, confounding the implications of indolence and fecklessness attached to the letter ‘R’ – ‘R’ for Romanist – which appears beside the names of the Tipping brothers in the estate rentals. In the townland of Crossmacahilly there are only eight Catholic families, alongside forty Protestant.

  ‘Romanist’ or not, throughout his industrious life, James would have had more pressing worries than the state of his soul. The Tippings and their neighbours lived with constant fears, fear of sectarian harassment, fea
r of bad weather, fear of hard times. Praying is a resource though, especially when it seems apocalyptic anticipations are about to be realised. There comes a night in January 1839 when, through sheer expedience, the entire townland would likely have been down on its knees asking God for deliverance from a raging storm: the Night of the Big Wind, as it’s gone down in folk memory. This was the night when roofs were lifted clean off houses and hurled through the air, when trees toppled like a deck of cards, when the 184-foot chimney of Mulholland’s flax mill in Belfast crashed to the ground. To those of a religious turn of mind, it looked as though the end of the world had come. One consternated cleric, the Reverend William Boyce of High Street, Belfast, could hardly take in the extent of the destruction being wrought around him, and later recorded his impressions of that wild night in an awestruck outburst.1

  How dreadful raged that storm o’er Erin’s face!