A Twisted Root

by Patricia Craig

  And who may tell t’effect on Land, in part?

  Chimneys, tiles, and slates, gas lamps, and spinning mills,

  Demolished windows, houses, roofs, huge funnels tall,

  Factories, walls, mill-chimnies, prostrate laid;

  A watchman killed by Falls-road mill’s descent! ...

  The wings of Windmills, canvas, rails, and nails,

  Completely torn asunder! ...

  So it goes on, page after page of heartfelt unrestrained verse commentary: ‘Then yelled the tempest furious through Portrush’; ‘It rushed through Aghalee, by Finaghy, / By Lurgan, Markethill, the Middleton, Pointzpass.’ ‘It broke huge elms, / and oaks,’ so it did, while going about the fearsome work of ‘smashing ships, trees, towers, and men’. No portion of the North escaped its fury. Even at supposedly unassailable Carrickblacker, alarmed inhabitants felt the great house shake to its foundations, they heard hundreds of tiles erupting from the roof, and then the tremendous noise of trees uprooted in the demesne. The following day, the damage was contemplated with awe and disbelief. Hundreds of Carrickblacker elms lay strewn about the estate like fallen participants in some mythical battle.

  But it wasn’t all despair and ruin. A future prosperity was in store for local carpenters who rushed to buy up the sudden glut of wood. (Just as the income of glaziers was substantially increased during the Troubles of the late twentieth century.) One uprooted elm, however, carefully selected by William Blacker himself, was set aside and earmarked for his coffin. Duly constructed and stored in an outhouse, the coffin sat awaiting its future occupant who wandered out every now and then to take a look at it – not a morbid procedure at all, he said, just a practical acknowledgement of his ultimate end.

  I believe I have a slight understanding of what the population of Ireland went through on that January night in 1839, having experienced the great English storm of 1987, when my husband and I lay huddled together on the top floor of a tall house in Blackheath waiting for the roof to blow off or the chimney to crash down on top of us. (‘Terrific howled the hurricane around,’ as Boyce might have put it.) Earlier, we had listened to the wind increasing in volume and were shocked by the sudden extinguishing of all the lights of south London as the power supply went kaput. Plunged into total blackness, we twentieth-century sceptics were braced for a moment to undergo an apocalyptic outcome. And indeed the morning’s devastation didn’t seem to fall far short of it. Though it wasn’t on the scale of Oidhche na Gaoithe Moire, the Night of the Big Wind, enough havoc was caused by the 1987 storm to etch it into the remembrance of everyone who endured it. As for me – I’m exhilarated by most extremes of weather, cold, rain, snow: but not wind. My anxiety level rises with every blast of rising wind.

  So I can all too easily enter into the state of mind of the Crossmacahilly family hunkered round the fire – to borrow an image from Richard Rowley’s Tales of Mourne – ‘waitin’ every minute for the walls to blow in on top o’ them’. Did one of them, again like Rowley’s narrator, see himself in desperation ‘houldin’ on the thatch wi’ my finger-nails ... afore mornin’? However the thatch was held on – perhaps weighted down with ropes and stones before the worst of the weather struck – it seems to have stayed in place; at least, there are no reports of the farm or outbuildings being whirled away into oblivion. But appalling sights met the eyes of people creeping out at daybreak to begin the work of salvage. Dead birds and animals, fields churned up, hedges flattened. A yellow, overladen sky and an ominous atmosphere. And in the battered towns of Lurgan and Portadown, where people gathered in the streets to view the wreckage left by the storm, the dishevelled houses and shops, the broken-down factory chimneys, the fallen spires of different churches, all crushed alike by a force of nature.

  Tenant farmers gritted their teeth, in the wake of the storm, and got on with the next thing. But the nineteenth century has further catastrophes up its sleeve for the Irish nation. Some years after the Big Wind comes the first potato-crop failure. The ensuing Famine provides a standard against which all subsequent calamities may be measured. Nothing – the reaction to some later scourge might go – nothing has bred so much consternation in the townland since the wee boy came running into the farm kitchen bearing news of a terrible smell in the potato fields.

  He might have been my great-grandfather Matthew Tipping, that archetypal small boy, Matthew the third son of diligent James and one of a clatter of weans – that’s the word they’d have used, weans or the equally expressive ‘childer’ – growing up on the edge of a bog, all imbued with a strong sense of kinship and thoroughly schooled in argument and assertion. (Remember those forty Protestant families occupying the same small area.) All of us there. What kind of people were they? Even if the world they inhabited is essentially unknowable, faded away to nothing like a badly preserved sampler, there are clues to be picked up about the way they viewed it and each other, and how particular traits were evolving within the family, distinguishing each individual member from all the rest. I think I’m right, for example, in attributing a certain headstrong quality to Matthew, a kicking-over-the-traces predilection. I’ll come back to this – but in the meantime the overwhelming consideration is the rotting potato crop of 1845 and subsequent years.

  No one died of starvation on the Tipping farm and this was probably due to James and his turnip- and parsnip-sowing, his continuing production of flax and whatever oats could be salvaged from a lesser but not insignificant blight, concurrent with the potato blight. None of the family died of actual hunger, but the Famine claimed its Tipping victim nevertheless. In December 1848, James Tipping’s younger brother John, the one continually in need of propping up, is admitted to the Lurgan Union Workhouse suffering from typhoid fever. It kills him within a couple of weeks. Fifty-seven years old and long a widower, John Tipping already had the disease – the dreaded famine fever – before he went in, but conditions in the workhouse made it a place to die, not a centre of proper medical treatment. ... There John lies among the destitute poor, perhaps on a damp and insanitary cot, bedlam around him, until he simply gives up the ghost. He is hastily buried on the following day, taken from this place of doom and wretchedness in a makeshift coffin, over which not a single funeral offering is made (according to the Seagoe Catholic parish church records). The previous horrendous year, Black ’47, had depleted all the meagre Tipping resources. James at least must have suffered bitterness and mortification at the failure to do things properly, to arrange a respectable exit for his brother John, but circumstances were against him. For all his frugality and astuteness, he was overtaken by events. And he could point with some pride to what he had achieved: a tribe of children pulled through the crisis. All of them, on their shaky smallholding, were lucky indeed not to go the way of John.

  The Lurgan Union Workhouse – hmn. Who is chairman of its board of guardians at this fraught time? Stiff-necked, high-principled William Blacker, that’s who. While John Tipping lies approaching his appalling end, we might find Colonel Blacker journeying abroad on one of his holiday trips to Frankfurt, Paris, Brussels or London, avoiding the chills of an Armagh winter and the countryside heaving with disease and distress. Driving in a carriage around Belgian boulevards might be on the cards for the Blacker party, or elaborate dinners attended by glittering guests. At Cheltenham, another favourite holiday destination, Ulster grandees away from home, including Charlotte Lennox-Conyngham of Springhill, play host to one another or gather to applaud Colonel Blacker’s speechifying at a Conservative dinner. A lavish, assured and highly organised life – and with all these divertissements to absorb his attention, a dying Catholic workhouse inmate, one among hundreds, would be the least of William Blacker’s concerns.

  Don’t worry, I’m not making a facile point here about heartless gentry and suffering peasantry (though there’s scope enough for it). I don’t mean to do down William Blacker and his lord-of-the-manor hauteur (well, not really). His views on social responsibility are in line with the mores of the day.
He is deputy vice-treasurer of Ireland. He’s a great committee-man, militiaman and occasional host at Carrickblacker to the ‘cream’ of the Protestant ruling elite. And if it’s a world away from the scrabbling, swarming underclass of tenant farmers and tramps and artisans – well, no one can blame Colonel Blacker for making the most of his fortunate position in the world. Nothing happens in his life to topple his landowner’s certainties. But – here comes another instance of ‘had-he-but-known’ – there were reasons why this particular stricken subsistence farmer John Tipping might have impinged on the aloof Blacker consciousness. Though neither was aware of it, both the gentleman and the famine victim had a common ancestor, in the direct line, in the Royalist officer Valentine Blacker who built the manor house known as Blacker’s Bawn and restored the seventeenth-century Seagoe parish church. It’s the genealogical irony that snares my attention here.

  But let us consider young Matthew growing up in the wilds of Crossmacahilly, living through the years of Famine with all the frantic expedients to stay alive, and perhaps already fixing his sights on better things. Matthew is the fourth child and third son of farmer/weaver James, and himself an eventual father of twelve – whose lives, bar two, I don’t propose to examine in detail (Whew! I hear you go). The exceptions are Matthew’s youngest child, my grandmother Sarah, and to a lesser extent her half-brother Henry, twenty-five years her senior, who frightened her under the kitchen table with his impassioned rendering of the patriotic ballad ‘Fontenoy’ when she was two years old; but as yet, these are only figments of a shadowy future.

  Matthew gets round to begetting early on. Like his grandfather James (perhaps), he doesn’t curb, indeed I imagine he flaunts, his erotic drive; and it’s possible that more than one local girl is warned to consider him a danger and affront to good Catholic chastity. One girl at least pays no heed to the voices of prudence, however: Eliza O’Hara from nearby Legahorry, who bears Matthew a daughter long before the pair of them are out of their teens. Is agitation engendered by this event? Or is a shrug and a grimace more in keeping with contemporary country attitudes? You can’t stop nature taking its course, any more than the effects of the potato-crop failure can be reversed, or the howling wind be stopped in its tracks. And here’s Helena Tipping to prove it, a babe in arms when her parents finally stand before the parish priest of Seagoe to take their marriage vows. What took them so long? Was it reluctance on the part of one or the other? Perhaps Eliza O’Hara was gifted with foresight and jibbed at the state of almost continuous pregnancy looming in front of her like a wrecking ball. It would finish her off before her time, she might have feared – and it did. Or maybe it’s simply a question of space, the marriage-delaying factor, with the Crossmacahilly farmhouse so crammed with inhabitants that absolutely no further bodies can be squeezed in.

  Be that as it may, Matthew the married man installs his wife and daughter in his parents’ home, and swiftly increases the congestion on the spot by begetting another six young Tippings. (Inadequate accommodation, caused by too much procreation, is just one of the scourges the nineteenth-century poor have to put up with.) Before the first new infant arrives, however, Matthew’s father James has bowed out of the proceedings, creating a bit of space by dying in 1853 at the age of sixty-odd years. ... No doubt James Tipping’s funeral is an altogether more seemly affair than his poor brother John’s. But for a real showpiece Armagh interment we need to look higher up the social scale. And here it comes. Two years after the death of James, in November 1855, his distant kinsman William Blacker’s long and punctilious existence reaches an end. The elmwood coffin from the Night of the Big Wind gets its rightful occupant at last. At twelve noon on the last day of November Colonel Blacker’s funeral cortège leaves Carrickblacker House for old Seagoe Church, ‘headed by the children of the schools which William Blacker had done so much to encourage over the years’. A long line of respectable gentry follows, J.S. Kane goes on; and next come high-up representatives of all denominations: Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic,2 Quaker. Also present are ‘William’s most trusted Orange colleagues’ (well, they would be there, wouldn’t they), his nephew and heir Stewart Blacker, members of parliament and peers of the realm. (Kane is careful to specify the peers of the realm.) And lining the funeral route along the Gilford Road are rows of tenant farmers and weavers come to pay their last respects and suitably chastened, no doubt, by the solemn appearance of the six black horses festooned with black ostrich feather plumes, the hearse with its black-clad coachman, the mourning coaches, the slow procession of dignitaries following after. I don’t think you’d have found any deferential Tippings, though, standing with bowed bared heads along the roadway, even though the stately cortège was making its way towards the very spot where an ancestor of theirs, the seventeenth-century John Tipping, lay buried with his in-laws in the Blacker family mausoleum.

  Eighteen-forty-eight, the year of the later John Tipping’s death from famine fever, was also the year in which the planned ‘Young Ireland’ uprising failed to come to fruition. In March, Charles Gavin Duffy of The Nation had announced that ‘Ireland’s opportunity, thank God and France, has come at last’; but his rhetorical gratitude turned out to be without foundation. Neither he nor his colleague the Banbridge Presbyterian solicitor John Mitchel was able to drum up sufficient fervour in the North to get any kind of revolutionary enterprise going. The reason isn’t hard to find: ‘a starving people,’ comments Jonathan Bardon drily in his History of Ulster, ‘... had no interest in insurrection.’

  No interest, but in households like the Tippings’, nevertheless, there’d be talk of misgovernment, and of ways to engage in nationalist dissent. In the parishes of Shankill, Seagoe, Tartaraghan, people were dying of hunger and disease until it seemed the whole of society was collapsing in on itself, its day-to-day enactments driven by fear and distress. A world was being unravelled, and then, at some point, it would have to be put back together again, as survivors like the Tippings were left to pick up the pieces. It was a defining moment. Protestants had died – indeed, in north Armagh, more Protestants than Catholics were counted among the famine victims – but for Catholics and nationalists, the potato famine was tied up with cruelty and exploitation of the whole population of Ireland. Starving people standing on a quayside, silently watching as tons of provisions are shipped elsewhere, ‘relief work’ consisting of roads going nowhere, soup kitchens, derelict townlands, mass graves, coffin ships: these images are entering into the nationalist mythology, as a powerful opposition to all representatives of a ruling elite takes hold. Being ‘“agin” the government’ is coming to constitute a way of life.

  Another image from those years comes to mind. It was relayed to me by my mother, who got it from her grandmother, who figures in it. Ellen Jordan was a young child when the Famine struck north Armagh, and among her sharpest memories was one of herself, wrapped in a shawl, being carried by her mother, Susan McCorry from Moyraverty, to a soup kitchen hastily set up to aid the starving poor. She recalled the sense of desperation felt by many in the blighted countryside as their livelihood, and indeed their lives, were put in jeopardy. There is utter subjugation in the air. ... And here’s another anomaly of my up-and-down ancestry. These Jordans may have been poor (how poor I don’t know), but some of their relations were, on the other hand, well placed to savour the benefits of a provincial affluence.

  Ellen’s father is Edward Jordan, and Edward’s cousin Thomas is the founder and managing director of the Lurgan linen-handkerchief-manufacturing firm of T. Jordan & Sons. They are business people with a steady income and highly developed sense of their own importance. Thomas has arranged matters so that his wife and children will rise to their feet when he enters the breakfast room of their Lurgan home, and has them call him ‘Sir’. ‘Good morning, Sir’; ‘More toast, Sir?’ And this in plebeian Lurgan with its adept deflating tactics! (Actually, of course, this kind of paterfamilias formality was a commonplace of the era, and I shouldn’t make too much of
it – it’s just hard to resist a soupçon of mockery at mercantile Thomas Jordan and his pretensions. ...)

  The prospering Thomas Jordans will eventually take over the former home of Lord Brownlow’s agent John Hancock in the centre of the town, the manor house at the bottom of Edward Street. By this time, though – the late Victorian era – the Jordan sons have probably succeeded the autocratic father. They may have been equally full of themselves, for all I know. I only mention this pompous branch of the Jordan family, my great-grandmother’s relations, to show an unprecedented type of life evolving in post-Famine County Armagh. These factory owners and large-scale employers may be taken to represent a new rising class, the Catholic middle class despised by W.B. Yeats for its go-getting drive and philistine orientation. It had gained a foothold once Emancipation was secured, and now nothing was going to stop its progress. (It pleases me to think of these uppish Jordans in their grand town house being disgraced by the presence of huckster relations just round the corner in lowly John Street. ... and how the latter came to be there I’ll relate in a minute.)

  The Lurgan of those days in the nineteenth century has a reputation for discord. Rioting in its streets is a feature of the times. Fury and resentment are in the air it breathes. And anyone may get caught up in its shindigs. Take the elderly John Hancock – still the owner of the Manor House – who, driving home in his carriage one day along Edward Street, is attacked by a stone-throwing mob assembled at the corner of Shankill Street (though it seems their main targets are members of the police force and I don’t think Hancock is hit, though no doubt he is shaken and his horses frightened). One of the attackers caught and arrested on a charge of riotous behaviour is a young James Tipping, a son – one of many – of Matthew and his wife Eliza O’Hara. James, unable to pay a fine of 16s 6d, is sentenced to fourteen days in gaol.