A twisted pattern begins to take shape around this incident. Hancock, in fact, is at one with the young stone-throwers in being a major opponent of the Orange Order – a circumstance which, in the past, has got him into very bad odour with Colonel Blacker in particular. Blacker, as a matter of principle, opposes every suggestion put forward by Hancock when both are serving on the Lurgan Union Workhouse board of guardians. The aversion felt by this pair towards one another goes back to the Orange demonstration in the grounds of Carrickblacker House in 1835 and subsequent arrest of some of the demonstrators by the then young magistrate Hancock. ... Had the 1870s rioters been apprised of this fact, would they have held their fire while Hancock and his son drove by? Or, for the young male Lurgan poor and derided with stones in their hands, is any carriage-owning person fair game? The spirited thing is to be for ever trying to get your own back for the miserable circumstances fate has dumped you in, to achieve social or tribal recompense in any way available.
So here is Matthew’s son James, the first and most heedless of the tearaway Tippings, perhaps, immersed to the full in games of defiance and ‘Fenian’ assertion and ignorant to the same degree of his own oblique family connection with the topmost Orange dynasty of them all, the bigwig Blackers. And here’s John Hancock, whose effigy was once burned by Orangemen, now a target for the other lot and similarly unaware that one of his would-be assailants possesses a modicum of the dread Blacker blood – or indeed that his own well-appointed home will be taken over in due course by people related to the same young stone-thrower through his stepmother Ellen Jordan. Ah, hindsight.
James Tipping was ten years old when his father Matthew uprooted his family from Crossmacahilly and its bogs and trundled them into nearby Lurgan town on a cart; wife, seven children, belongings and all. We can picture the weariness, the squabbling youngsters, the put-upon wife and exasperated father, as they finally reached their destination, a recently constructed terrace house in James Street, and set about obtaining a bit of order. The year is 1869, and along with its meagre possessions the family comes carrying its strong convictions to a town already vehemently divided along sectarian lines. Two years previously, in the wider world of Irish politics, the Fenian uprising was quelled by the Irish constabulary, aided by ‘a great fall of snow’ which scattered the insurgents. Jubilation among Orange Lurganites, and concomitant nationalist bitterness, ensued.
The Irish Republican Brotherhood, better known as the Fenian movement, was founded in 1858 by the veteran revolutionary James Stephens; and although it never really took hold in the North, its progress would have been carefully monitored by Catholics and proto-nationalists such as the Tippings. Major events of the time such as the attempted rescue of Fenian prisoners in Manchester and subsequent execution of three of those involved (the Manchester Martyrs), and the explosion at Clerkenwell in London which killed twelve people in the same year, 1867 – these would have had a tremendous impact on ordinary families all over Ireland primed to come down with ferocity on one side or the other. I don’t know what degree of literacy prevailed among the nineteenth-century Tippings, but I believe at least some of them would have had sufficient reading skills to get to grips with a newspaper. And certainly, after about 1850, you had local and provincial papers circulating even among the poorest of the population. Even the illiterate had a resource. In every townland there were special houses where groups could gather to hear one person read out the burning news of the day, after which a heated discussion would be set going. (The Tipping farm at Crossmacahilly was one such gathering place in its later days; see p. 116 below.)
‘... a deep fall of snow’. This phrase, which I misquoted above, comes from Alice Milligan’s best-known and most beguiling poem, ‘When I Was a Little Girl’. When she was a little middle-class girl in Omagh, County Tyrone, in the 1870s, the Fenians had acquired an extraneous role. The name was uttered with fear and drama as a topical bugbear, like Bonaparte earlier in the century, to scare small Protestants into instantaneous obedience: ‘Come in! or when it’s dark / The Fenians will get ye.’ The old nurse’s nightly threat has an immediate effect on all the little Milligans who scuttle indoors squealing – all bar one.
But one little rebel there,
Watching all with laughter,
Thought ‘When the Fenians come
I’ll rise and go after.’
Wished she had been a boy
And a good deal older –
Able to walk for miles
With a gun on her shoulder ...
Thus was the family rebel shaping up to be an Irish nationalist of the future. Even when the Milligans had moved to Belfast, where Alice found herself ‘submerged amid an Orange population’ (going to school at the Methodist College), the convictions she’d acquired at an early stage didn’t undergo the smallest modification.
It was a cause of annoyance to Alice Milligan that anyone should be considered less of an Irishwoman through being born a Protestant. A strong tradition of Protestant nationalism, from Grattan onwards, reinforced her own particular attachment to Ireland’s cause. Among her antecedents, she could point to a great-grandfather who, with his sons, had marched on Antrim with the insurgents of 1798. ... Her attitude in this respect, perhaps inevitably, provoked a degree of estrangement from at least one sibling, her sister Edith who was married to a unionist; but on the credit side it brought Alice many dazzling friendships. She conducted Yeats on an excursion up the Cave Hill when he visited Belfast, and accompanied Roger Casement to a feis at Toomebridge. And among her neighbours on the Antrim Road she found a kindred spirit and fellow poet in Anna Johnston (‘Ethna Carbery’). The two young women, one Protestant and one Catholic, joined forces in Belfast, in the late 1890s, to edit a nationalist newspaper, the Shan Van Vocht.
James Connolly, who believed the working classes were ‘the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom’ in Ireland, was a regular contributor; and the name of Miss Maud Gunne (sic) occurs in more than one issue. (But not Constance Markievicz, whose peculiar gardening notes were reserved for the slightly later Bean na hÉireann. She advised her readers to look on the English in Ireland in exactly the same light as slugs in a lettuce bed – a view which would have found favour with the Shan Van Vocht clientele.) Poets in droves came up with verse for the magazine whose dominant motifs – the heathery hill, the spinning wheel, the milk churn, the holy well, the misty glen, the little green linnet, the black, black wind from northern hills – are full of potent associations for the romantic nationalist. I know, because I lapped them up at an appropriate age, while I was undergoing a sentimental education.
Some of them I encountered for the first time in a small thick notebook, four inches by six and a half, carefully covered in brown paper, into which my mother, as a sixth-former at Mount St Michael’s, Lurgan, and later as a student at Queen’s University, had transcribed her favourite poems. Yeats was there, and Wilfred Owen, and Hardy and James Stephens and Padraig Pearse and Helen Lanyon. Ethna Carbery and Alice Milligan were well represented in this personal anthology. Their verses struck a chord with me too, when I was sixteen and believed the essence of Irishness resided in some mystical locality of the unadulterated West. Mary O’Hara, Donal of the Rosses, mirth and song, windswept heather ... all these denoted an indigenous exquisiteness far removed from the cinema-going, coffee-drinking, fashion-conscious populations of towns and cities that was our milieu. And by extolling the West, we thought we might aspire to a touch of that aboriginal integrity.
When Alice Milligan’s Hero Lays was about to be published in 1908, she didn’t want the poem ‘When I Was a Little Girl’ included in the collection. She thought its spirited pro-Fenian stance might offend the Catholic clergy (who had proscribed the movement), or aggravate readers averse to infant militarism. Fortunately George Russell, AE, who edited Hero Lays for the publishers Maunsel & Co. in Dublin, told her to catch herself on (or words to that effect). ‘The story of your little night-dressed Fenian has put fire in m
e and in the name of that child I confront you and defy you.’ The appeal was irresistible. The poem went in.
Though he regarded himself as a Dubliner, George Russell was actually born in Lurgan (in 1867) and spent his first ten years in the town, attending the non-denominational Lurgan Model School along with his brother and sister. The Russells lived in William Street at the time of his birth, before taking up residence in a gate lodge inside the North Street entrance to Lord Lurgan’s demesne. Their circumstances were undoubtedly a lot more comfortable than those available to the incoming Tippings; but, since the town was not large in the 1870s, the younger members of both families must at least have passed one another in the street. Were catcalls exchanged? The insults-and-fisticuffs atmosphere of the Lurgan streets was anathema to the future poet and mystic – and once the Russells had bettered their prospects by moving to Dublin, George never ceased to give thanks ‘to Providence for the mercy shown to me in removing me from Ulster’. ‘[T]hough I like the people,’ he goes on, ‘I cannot breathe the political and religious atmosphere of the North-East Corner of Ireland.’ However, he continued to spend long childhood holidays with his maternal grandparents in County Armagh, staunch Church of Ireland people whose parish church was the one at Seagoe originally restored by Valentine Blacker in the seventeenth century.
The James Street lodging was only a temporary resting place for Valentine Blacker’s disreputable descendants, Matthew Tipping and his brood. Before long we find the family installed in another terrace house, this time at 3 John Street,3 which becomes a permanent residence for some of them. Matthew has his trade as a cambric weaver, whether he engages in it at home, or in one of the numerous factories and spinning mills springing up all over Lurgan in response to the increased demand for linen cloth. (It was probably at home; my grandmother remembered an enormous loom taking up half the meagre ground-floor space in the house during her childhood in the 1880s.) To supplement the family income he also sells foodstuffs such as buttermilk and vegetables, obtained from his relations left behind in Crossmacahilly. His outlet for this produce is either an improvised huckster’s shop set up in another tiny portion of the John Street house (a common expedient at the time, and later), or a barrow in the market, I am not sure which.
Six years after the move to Lurgan, in 1875, Matthew Tipping’s wife Eliza dies in childbirth and is buried in Dougher Cemetery. She is forty years old. She bequeaths to her husband a houseful of children, ranging from Helena (aged twenty-four) down to newly born Peter. Both of these, too, will be dead within a few years, one a victim of tuberculosis and the other uncared for in the immediate aftermath of his mother’s death.
As well as sickly Helena, the disrupted household contains two girls aged eight and five, but the others are all boys and probably not attuned to domestic management. Something needs to be done – and it’s up to Matthew to do it. Within six months of Eliza’s death, her widower has entered into a new arrangement to restore a measure of order and felicity to the bereft, throughother and overcrowded house. In St Peter’s Church in North Street, on 15 May 1876, he is married for the second time, this time round to a tough-minded widow and mother-of-three named Ellen Dowds (née Jordan). This step, indeed, doesn’t ease the problem of household congestion; but in other respects, we may suppose, it engenders an improvement. The mystery is how Matthew Tipping persuaded Ellen Dowds to take on the hefty domestic burden he was offering her.
Her own children were then aged ten (Mary Ann), eight (Susan) and five (John), and when the newly-wed couple emerged from the chapel in North Street, instead of confetti they were showered with stones by Ellen’s infuriated five-year-old in a bid to drive away the bearded old man who was stealing his mother. It wasn’t an auspicious beginning – however, the newly configured family had no option but to settle down and make the best of things. Matthew, the champion ‘begetter’, promptly sets about founding an extra Tipping dynasty. Fortunately this time he stops at two. I think this final pair of girls may not have been entirely welcome in a house already bursting at the seams, but they quickly learned to stand up for themselves (and for each other). Their names were Ellen and Sarah, and they grew up mettlesome and attractive, with their leg-o’-mutton sleeves and tennis rackets and ability to gad about on bicycles in their spare time. Like all their half-siblings, they were put to work in a local factory at the earliest possible age (maybe the factory owned by their mother’s relations), as veiners or stitchers or winders or smoothers. But a new century was dawning, and with it came an opening out of possibilities, hardly discernible at first but increasing as time went on. The last two Tipping daughters were among the brightest of the family – a family sufficiently extensive to form itself into cliques and groups, at one minute antagonistic, the next conciliatory. A saying of Matthew’s, in this respect, has gone down to posterity. Ructions were going on upstairs in the tiny house, and Matthew was dispatched by his formidable wife to put a stop to the uproar. When he came back down, having quelled the noise, his wife Ellen demanded to be told what was going on. He shrugged. ‘Ach, just the usual. Your childer and my childer fightin’ wi’ our childer.’
There must have been occasions when Matthew took his youngest daughters to visit the farm at Crossmacahilly where he grew up. I see these Lurgan girls, wearing black laced boots and pinafores, running through the fields, making daisy chains, searching for new-laid eggs, ‘supping’ buttermilk with oatcakes baked on the griddle. ... All right, a tinge of rose-coloured spectacles is entering into these images of alluring country pursuits, but for all that I don’t believe they’re unduly fanciful. What else would they have done? ... It’s unlikely that Matthew’s girls would have had any memory of their Uncle James (another James!), their father’s older brother, since he died in 1884 when they were only five and three. But James’s remaining offspring stayed on ... and on. The few that were left, that is: out of a family of eleven, it seems, only three survived beyond the age of twenty-five. One of these was a daughter, Bridget, who married a blacksmith from nearby Lylo. The other two turned gradually into a pair of those old bachelor brothers who feature strongly in the literature of the Irish countryside. ‘Only Pad is married,’ writes Polly Devlin in her enchanting memoir of County Tyrone, All of Us There; ‘the other brothers, like so many of that generation, have continued to live where they were born.’ And Benedict Kiely’s story, ‘Homes on the Mountain’, has ‘John and Thady ... still alive in the old house on Loughfresha. Like pigs in a sty ...’.
We needn’t, I hope, attribute a comparable degree of slovenliness to Mattha (an archaic form of Matthew) and Barney Tipping, as their seniors and siblings one by one died or moved away from Crossmacahilly until only the two remained. The farm, by this stage, was known in the district as ‘a ceilidhe house’, where, as I’ve indicated, neighbours would gather on Saturday nights to hear Mattha read aloud the entire contents of the Irish Weekly (a weekend supplement of the nationalist paper the Irish News and Belfast Morning News) and debate the urgent events of the day. Mattha enjoyed a reputation as the leading Catholic intellectual of the neighbourhood, and his opinions carried a good deal of weight. When he died in 1922, his brother Barney took over his role. After all the years of overcrowding, the house has now come down to a single occupant. Barney lived on for a further twenty-two years, until 1944, after which time the farm fell into a state of dereliction. Returning to the clay, in William Trevor’s potent phrase. Returning to the clay.
I don’t think old men like Barney exist any more, living on in the houses in which they were born, eking out a diminished existence in deteriorating circumstances. They’d be whipped off to sheltered accommodation at the first sign of a memory lapse, or tea spilled down an ancient jacket unaccustomed to dry cleaning. But the past, in actuality and in fiction, is full of them. Michael McLaverty’s short story, ‘Stone’, has one, Jamesey Heaney, ‘sitting with his hands on his knees, his shoulders drooped forward, [waiting] for the fire to light. At his feet lay his black and white collie,
her forepaws in the ashes, a wet nose on the flags. The closed door was slitted with light, and through the nests of cobwebs on the deep windows came a blue wintry brightness. It was cold.’ It could be Barney Tipping he’s describing.
The two unmarried Tipping brothers (my grandmother’s cousins) had a good deal of local and national news, at various times, to air with their friends and neighbours. The fall of Parnell, the presentation and defeat of successive Home Rule Bills, the Boer War, the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force and then the Irish Volunteers, gun-running at Larne, the signing of the Covenant, the outbreak of war with Germany, the 1916 uprising, Michael Collins visiting Armagh, Partition. ... And always and incessantly, trouble in the streets: the streets of Belfast, Lurgan, Armagh, Portadown. ... Trouble sparked off by deadly and ineradicable religious affiliations. As the novelist and satirist John Morrow has it, the problem with Ireland has always been sects (and you have to be very careful how you say it).
Chapter 5 – All the Dead Dears
Processionals of lives go by
On delicate, crisp treads;
Blurred fragrances, gently percussive,
Stir among leaves.
Top-hatted heads of firms and kitchen-maids
Visit the instincts of the eye.
Douglas Dunn, from ‘The People Before’
Like everyone else in the world, I have four great-grandmothers. Unlike many people, though, I know their names: and there isn’t an Irish name among them. Ellen Jordan, Catherine Harland, Emily Anne Thorpe, Mathilda Clara Maria Heller. The closest is Ellen Jordan’s, though that name is likely of Anglo-Norman provenance; still, if your ancestors have been in the country since the twelfth century, I think you can call yourself Irish. She certainly did – and claimed an unbroken Catholic lineage to boot. She was my mother’s feisty maternal grandmother. Nora’s other grandmother, her father’s mother, was Catherine Harland. At least, Harland was the name she went by. It was her mother’s name. Young Catherine began life in post-Famine Lurgan under a serious social disadvantage. She was illegitimate. And unlike Helena Tipping, who was also born out of wedlock in the same decade, she didn’t have parents who belatedly gave in to church and family pressures (if that was what Matthew and Eliza did). She didn’t have parents, plural. As far as we know, her father’s identity was never disclosed.
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