Henry never came before a magistrate on a charge of riotous behaviour, and in this he failed to uphold the family reputation. They were great belligerents, all highly active on the nationalist side. I’ve already mentioned the young James Tipping (b. 1859) who was caught ‘clodding’ stones at poor John Hancock (who wasn’t his enemy) and gaoled as a consequence (see Chapter 4). Henry’s and James’s brother Matthew,1 born at Crossmacahilly in 1861 and likewise a dab hand with a cobblestone, was arrested in 1881 and charged with assault on the say-so of a Protestant youth named Thompson, who claimed he was innocently passing the Convent of Mercy in Edward Street when a stone flung by Matthew struck him in the face. It split his lip wide open, he complained, and broke a couple of his teeth. The incident took place in the early part of the summer, with the marching season imminent and sectarian passions running sky-high. Matthew’s offence was beyond dispute, and the presiding magistrate, fed up with rowdyism and hotheads and endless faction fights disfiguring the streets, sentenced him to a month’s imprisonment. (Matthew could have stayed at large if he’d had the resources to fork out twenty shillings and costs, but I doubt if this was an option for a poor factory hand.)
It wasn’t the last of Matthew’s court appearances. Four years later he’s up again before the same JP, Colonel Waring, after supposedly running with a crowd in North Street pelting the police with stones and bottles, shouting and rampaging and barging their way through to a Protestant quarter. A St Patrick’s Day parade was the occasion for this particular fracas. The nationalist faction was asserting its right to march along a stretch of ground at Church Place – between North Street and Edward Street – which the Protestants held to be Orange territory. It was the usual recipe for a flare-up of violence, with the usual police injuries suffered as a consequence – for which, in this instance, Matthew Tipping was held responsible. He denied the charge but several witnesses put him at the scene, making a guilty verdict inevitable. This time, it was a forty-shilling fine or two months’ imprisonment. I don’t know which of the two Matthew opted for. But by proclaiming his innocence, he added fuel to the nationalists’ burning conviction of being unfairly targeted, penalised and kept down, in a hostile state. It was always and ever, ‘us and them’. ‘There was then,’ William Carleton had asserted earlier in the century, ‘no law against an Orangeman, and no law for a Papist.’ The nineteenth-century Tippings would have gone along with that, and no doubt could have cited experiences of their own to back it up. But it was only from the 1880s on, in the bitter, grimy, insubordinate streets of Lurgan, that their Papist orientation blossomed into a full-blown commitment to all things Irish. Playing Gaelic football, joining Cumann na nGaedhal, attending every local ceilidhe and Irish concert, marching with Na Fianna Éireann and Óghlaigh na hÉireann ... these activities brought a charge of glamour and purposefulness to workaday Catholic existences, and Tippings were there in the thick of them, along with other prominent local families, Thornberrys and Bradys and O’Hagans and Haugheys and others. (I’ll go into this more fully in Chapter Six.)
Another of that unruly generation, the first Matthew’s oldest son and Henry Tipping’s brother John, fulfilled family expectations by getting himself arrested in his turn for disrupting the peace. Twenty-eight years old, John faced a charge of being drunk and disorderly and assaulting a sheriff’s officer in the street. The date of this particular shindy was September 1882, and the magistrate, wearied, no doubt, by all the unrepentant Tipping faces popping up before him, one after the other in a grim succession, delivered a typical verdict: ten shillings or fourteen days. I’m sure Colonel Waring hoped he’d seen the last of them. But then, only a month later, up comes yet another of the hooligan crew. Bernard Tipping, born in 1862, the youngest of Henry’s brothers. This time, though, proceedings are the other way round. Bernard is the plaintiff here, charging a youth named James Mulholland with having stabbed him in the left side during an encounter in Market Street on the night of 9 October. ‘Some blows were struck between him and me before I was stabbed,’ Bernard declared; and, in a burst of candour, ‘I believe I struck the first blow when we “squared” out to fight.’ Mulholland, an employee of Bullick, Hamilton & Co.’s linen factory and a Protestant, said he happened to be carrying an opened knife when Tipping hit him in the eye, implying that the subsequent stabbing occurred more or less by accident. Confronted with exhibit A – Bernard’s bloody shirt – Mulholland insisted he was so frightened and damaged that he couldn’t help striking out with the knife. Matthew, Bernard’s father, then weighed in with a statement to the effect that a Dr Gribben, summoned by him to patch up his bleeding son, had pronounced Bernard ‘dangerously ill’. This drew from the exasperated Colonel Waring a surprising retort. ‘I would not take Dr Gribben’s evidence as to the health of a cat,’ he snapped. The case was adjourned – and as the press failed to follow it up, the outcome remains unknown. I suspect that Bernard won a small amount of compensation, but I can’t be sure about this.
One does not envy Colonel Waring his job as presiding magistrate at Lurgan Petty Sessions Court in the 1880s, inundated as he was with batch after batch of cases involving sectarian delinquency. The old courthouse on the corner of William Street and Charles Street might have been purpose built to discourage Protestant-versus-Catholic street-ferocity. Not that any deterrent was sufficient to restrain ancestral, or quasi-ancestral, convictions, during encounters between immemorial opponents. But local JPs did their best. And irony, albeit unrecognised irony, was not excluded from the courthouse precincts. I’m thinking not only of the Tipping/Blacker connection, with its implications for neutralisation, but of slighter anomalies which inevitably crept in. For example, in the case of Tipping versus Mulholland, a member of the bench was John Johnston, Esq., JP – original employer of the child Elizabeth Harland and father of her three contemporaries, James, William and Courtney. If my suppositions regarding the Johnston family have any substance, the JP is involved at this moment in passing judgement on his infant great-grandson’s future wife’s half-brother. Ah, Lurgan interdenominational, cross-community complexities.
This was the world into which my grandmother arrived at the tail-end of a boisterous family, in a house filled with firebrand half-brothers and flouncing half-sisters, a world of grievances, street brawls, arrests, consternation and uncertain tempers in the home. Born on 10 July, she’d have woken, at two days old, to the sound of Orange menace, drum-beaters and Taig-baiters marching in a show of domination and pageantry. It was a day for Papists to stay behind firmly closed doors (though many didn’t). My grandmother is getting a foretaste of the life of contention in front of her, with which certain well-honed survival skills, including self-reliance, humour and assertion, will enable her to cope. I don’t see her as suffering from the character defect she later attributed to me, when she’d inform all and sundry that I was ‘very backward in coming forward’. She meant it kindly, but it bewildered her. Shyness was not an option in the household to which fate had consigned her. The quality she most admired was gumption, and in this, at the time, I was sadly deficient.
When Sarah is just eight years old, her father Matthew has his turn before the magistrates – not in the guise of an elderly brawler backing up his street-fighting sons, as you might think, but standing accused of selling ale from his front-parlour shop without a licence to deal in liquor. Some ‘begrudger’ has tipped off the police, who raid the John Street premises and confiscate a half-barrel of ale. Matthew claims the ale was brought in for his own use, to appease a weak digestive system which baulks at milk and tea. (Was there laughter in court? And did the aforementioned Dr Gribben testify on Matthew’s behalf? One wonders.) He pulls it off. The case is dismissed. Counsel for the defence, a Mr Menary, is eloquent about the state of affairs that leaves ‘a rich man’s cellar’ free from intrusion, while a poor man’s solitary half-keg of ale makes an occasion for a criminal prosecution. His remarks raise a cheer in the courtroom, where it is felt that some kind of democratic princ
iple has been asserted. Matthew’s ale is returned to him. His wife Ellen Jordan, herself a tremendous ‘argufier’ by all accounts, would have relished the verdict but found it mortifying to be so publicly designated ‘poor’. Ellen has many obstacles to surmount in her bid for respectability, with the antics of her immediate family high among them.
It’s 1889, and Lurgan resounds to the blare of factory hooters, the din of rappers-up rousing people out of their beds to hasten to their work, the clip-clop of horses’ hooves, the raucous voices of bulky Belfast women, just off the train and trundling handcarts towards the Thursday market. Dealers in second-hand clothes and poor people’s delph. The raggedy, heavy, crow-black clothes of these market women would have rendered them slightly sinister in the eyes of local children, including eight-year-old Sarah Tipping on her way to and from her girls’ elementary school in an outbuilding attached to the convent in Edward Street. Baba Yaga. The Hansel-and-Gretel woman. Not that Sarah isn’t venturesome and alert, for ever on the go, dodging in and out of the crowds, maybe licking a toffee apple or buying a penny bun from a countrywoman come to town with her huge wicker basket full of wares. Is the eight-year-old dressed in a pinafore over a woollen dress and black laced boots? (I don’t want to superimpose an E. Nesbit garnish over nineteenth-century Lurgan realities, but some images stick in your head and won’t be eradicated.) Is her sister Ellen larking about with her, or her best friend Minnie Cochrane? If they step incautiously into alien territory, are their ears assaulted with sectarian taunts (while they give as good as they get: ‘Fenian scum’; ‘Proddy pigs’ – accompanied by giggles and scurrying down the nearest alleyway)? ... Well, I know you can’t conjure up a truthful picture of ancient unrecorded activities; but perhaps if you make an effort you may just catch sight of some ghostly ancestral figure vanishing round a corner – the corner of Wellington Street and Black’s Court, say – with a swish or a flash of an antique garment, corduroys or britches or a ground-length woollen skirt, intent on some pursuit of the far distant past.
Grandmothers, great-grandmothers. In my particular line of descent, the counterpart to Catholic Lurgan is Protestant Wexford. However, the great-grandmother I know least about is the Wexford one, Emily Anne Thorpe. My paternal grandmother’s mother. Born in Enniscorthy (I think), c.1849. She was farmer William Lett’s second wife, and that date of birth would put her at forty when her only child, my father’s mother, was born. (As with the Lurgan Tippings, there were Lett half-siblings about the place.) Am I right in attributing to Emily Anne a background filled with Enniscorthy shopkeepers? Perhaps. Some ‘modest gentlemen’s houses’ in the neighbourhood were inhabited by people with the name of Thorpe – Castle View, New Ross, for example, Knockroe House, New Ross, and Shanballyroe House, also in New Ross – but again, I can’t pin down a connection to any of them. I wish I could, for these are elegant, evocative, stone-built, eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century houses, not unlike the house in Antrim in which I’ve lived for the past decade or more. ... As a passionate conservationist and architectural aficionado, I offer thanks to God, or whatever means the good (and to the Irish Georgian Society), that so many ancient Wexford houses have survived into the twenty-first century. I don’t care if these houses carry associations with yeomen or Orange magistrates or Protestant supremacy or any other historical embodiment of devilishness. Even those disfigured by oppression or bloodshed have long transcended the darkness imposed on them. Their aesthetic impact today is the thing that counts. They are vivid conduits to an earlier life. They are part of the Irish heritage common to all of us, high or low or at whatever point in between.
Having a Wexford grandmother and further-back relations from the tail-end of the country, was for me a way of boosting my Irishness in the eyes of my contemporaries – as long as I didn’t mention the awkward Protestant bit. Wexford, Loch Garman, was all to do with heroic pikemen, 1798, ‘The Croppy Boy’, the thatched houses of the Irish poor, extreme devotion to the Catholic church. It’s hard to fit Letts and Thorpes and Hornicks into that cultural dynamic, but I was happy if the implied indigenousness passed unchallenged. I suppose I was hoping to transmit an impression of my grandmother as a barefoot cailín in a red cloak on a wild mountainside surrounded by gorse and heather and the fumes of turf.
The turf may be authentic, but the rest was not. It derives from a picture postcard, c.1910. (I shouldn’t forget the Connemara donkey-and-cart along with the rest of the ‘autochthonous’ baggage.) My grandmother’s father belonged to the ‘strong farmer’ class; he kept indoor and outdoor servants and slept in a four-poster bed. He attended the local Church of Ireland church. He had four daughters and a son – the son he disinherited in a fit of pique in 1928. Everything he owned was willed to his second (unmarried) daughter, Annie Tennant Lett. Well, aside from two bequests of fifty pounds each, one to his daughter Emily Craig. Father and daughter must have been reconciled by this stage – if reconciliation was required. I’m guessing again, but there is evidence to suggest they fell out earlier, and it’s possible that Emily came very close to being disowned altogether: she was a wayward girl! (I see the hand of Aunt Annie as a peacemaker in any subsequent mending of relations.)
I was thirty or thereabouts when my grandmother Emily died, but I never got to know her well, or felt that she and I had a great deal in common. True, until I was twelve or so, I was taken at least every other Sunday to visit her Dunmurry home, travelling with my parents from Belfast on the Hillhall bus; and after that time I’d still see her at regular intervals. But I never spent time alone with her. The gate lodge was always coming down with grown-up relations and other visitors, and I’d escape into an outhouse to leaf through mildewed copies of Woman’s Home Journal, or a pile of my Auntie Hazel’s old Girls’ Crystals. Or I’d borrow an old rusty bike and keep on wobbling round and round the house until I’d actually succeeded in staying on the rickety thing, sailing past the kitchen window before the amazed eyes of assembled grown-ups. (Perhaps.) That was how I learned to ride a bicycle, in my tenth year. Some relations I was pleased to see (and the spaniel Sha), but my grandmother’s presence I just took for granted. She was part of a world filled with fixed points of reference and changeless circumstances, changeless as the whitewashed gateposts and Belleek china tea set laid out on the damask tablecloth. Besides, old people really were old in those days – nowadays they’re Claire Tomalin or Joanna Lumley. My grandmother would only have been sixty-something when I knew her best, but she seemed ancient to me, slippered, toothless, shapeless, clad in a patterned overall, a hairnet enfolding her thin grey hair.
So it came as quite a surprise when I first saw a photo of the young Emily Lett – or Emily Craig as she’d have been at the time (you can see her wedding ring). It’s a formal photograph of a well-dressed couple seated side by side on elaborately carved chairs in some photographer’s studio, my grandparents in their glossy youth. They gaze impassively at the camera, seated bolt upright, he with folded arms across a well-cut jacket and waistcoat, she in a pale cotton, high-necked blouse, thick dark hair arranged on top of her head in accordance with the style of the day. The very image of a handsome, well-omened Protestant Irish pair. They seem to be asserting their presence in the world, and their commitment to one another. There’s an innocence about her, however, a guilelessness, while he wears a challenging look.
And what you don’t see in the picture is the drama and agitation surrounding their wedding, the tears and recriminations and delays. Neither do you see their infant son Stanley, born in October 1910. The Craig/Lett marriage was solemnised just a month earlier, on 7 September. A significant date: it was also my grandmother’s twenty-first birthday, the day she came of age. You’d have to infer from this that Emily’s engagement to William Craig did not go down well with the Clonleigh household. I don’t know if Emily’s mother was still alive (she wasn’t a year later, I learn from the 1911 census). She is missing from the domestic fracas. But the girl’s father was there, a man of strong opinions,
and something impelled him to keep his fecund daughter from ‘regularising’ her situation until the last possible moment. Had he had other plans for her? It made no odds. The instant she was free to do so – and just in the nick of time – Emily Lett married William Craig. Had she already run away from home and moved in with the villain of the piece at his New Ross lodgings? Or did she remain at Clonleigh and brazen it out before the neighbours, all the while enduring paternal anger and disapproval? It can’t have been an easy time – and I’d never have thought of my grandmother as bold or strong-willed or enterprising; a pliable girlhood, I’d have attributed to her, a docile, amiable disposition. Perhaps I was wrong. Or perhaps none of the above scenarios existed. But you can’t get away from the facts, the dates of the marriage and of Stanley’s birth.
Stanley – or Robert Stanley, as he was christened – was born in Ayr, far from Clonleigh and its contretemps. The previous month, as we’ve seen, his parents were married in the parish church of Templeudigan, County Wexford (St Peter’s), where the officiating vicar no doubt averted his gaze from the bride’s protuberance. The witnesses were an Annesley Kavanagh and an Annie McClintock (about whom I know nothing whatever). The bridegroom’s place of residence is down as ‘New Ross’. His occupation is ‘coachman’. The fathers of bride and groom are both described as farmers. (Why do I think my great-grandfather Craig was at one point in his career a policeman on the Lisburn Road in Belfast? Either it’s a genealogical fallacy – and a few of those will creep in from time to time – or there’s an explanation for the change of occupation which I may find later.) Once married, the errant couple hasten to Scotland, where as far as anyone knows they’ve been man and wife for years. In a short time Robert Stanley comes into the world (was the ‘Robert’ in honour of Burns? Again, I have no way of knowing). Did my grandfather obtain employment as a coachman? It would have been something to do with horses anyway, he worked with horses all his life.
A Twisted Root Page 18