A Twisted Root

by Patricia Craig

  Ghosts. I have a whole restive company of these shadowy presences at my back, eager to communicate approval or disapproval, some reproachful about wrong motives attributed, or crucial details mislaid; others livid about traits they’ve been lumbered with, on scant evidence. (‘The dead can’t talk,’ Douglas Dunn wrote,19 ‘or appear on your doorstep / Or be discovered turning to you from / Beautiful landscapes, wearing smiles of courtship, / Perusals of what you’ve written about them.’) Some may harbour a modicum of assent; but more, I suspect, would vehemently wish to set the record straight, to detach their after-image from lunatic surmise. To these I can only reply that I’ve done my best to fit each of them into a pattern not outrageously at variance with actualities of the day (their day), and to flesh out just a little – as we’ve seen – the bare Jacobean, or eighteenth-century, or mid-Victorian bones. Most of these people had to grapple, in one way or another, with forces beyond their control, political, economic, puritanical, above all sectarian forces. ... My own personal ghosts, and others connected to me by a skimpier thread: these were born into wildly differing circumstances, and inherited concomitant stances. All, or most of them, lived according to their lights, and in ways dictated by the times, and I’ve no argument with them, except to point out a certain blindness in the face of variegation. There were more elements to their identities than some of them recognised.

  Skimming through the preceding chapters, I find they embody a kind of edgeways or idiosyncratic approach to aspects of Northern Irish history. Northern Irish – so the title of at least one chapter, ‘Scullabogue’, is (again) making an ironic point about inclusiveness, and also about invalidating persistent preconceptions.

  In May 2010 I was invited to deliver the annual Irish Pages lecture as part of the Cathedral Quarter Festival in Belfast. Because A Twisted Root was very much on my mind at the time, I decided to talk a bit about the book, mentioning the reasons why I felt impelled to write it, and including a few indications of what it might consist of. A short time later, a friend was attending a social gathering and chanced to overhear a conversation between two men whom she didn’t know. One was telling the other that he’d recently attended an interesting talk ‘by a republican woman from the Falls Road who discovered that all her ancestors were Protestants’.

  Well! I was never a ‘republican woman’; during the height of the Troubles I was not to be found anywhere near the Falls Road; and the largest ‘Protestant’ element in my background I didn’t ‘discover’, having known about it all along. However, the person who summarised my lecture so cavalierly was at least right about the gist of it. The pasts of all of us in this small corner of the world are repositories of apparently shattering, but actually (if you think about it) unifying truths. As another friend put it, considering the events of the seventeenth century and their implications, if the native Irish had been white and the Planters black, our complexions would all by now be a uniform shade.

  NOTES: Introduction

  1 – T.J. Campbell, Fifty Years of Ulster 1890 –1940.

  2 – Note the name.

  3 – In his novel of 1907,The Unpardonable Sin.

  4 – Portrait of a Rebel Father.

  5 – All right, I admit I’m prone to favour this mode as a narrative strategy.

  6 – The Speckled People.

  7 – R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600 –1972.

  8 – I’m indebted to Douglas Carson for this information.

  NOTES: Chapter 1

  1 – Shakespeare’s Wife, Bloomsbury 2007.

  2 – The ancient name for a part of south-east Ulster.

  3 – I’ll enlarge on this subject in Chapter Eight.

  4 – At the top of the Cave Hill in Belfast.

  5 – Pen name of the poet and editor Anna Johnston McManus (1866 –1902).

  6 – Only published for the first time in the Victorian era.

  NOTES: Chapter 2

  1 – Robert M.Young, Belfast and the Province of Ulster in the 20th Century, Brighton, 1909.

  2 – ‘The Oul’ Orange Flute’.

  3 – It is possible that the liberal Brownlows of Lurgan favoured Bryan O’Neill because neither he nor his father Hugh had been implicated in violence against the Planter community.

  NOTES: Chapter 3

  1 – Since writing this, I’ve come across evidence suggesting that ‘The first Lett in Ireland was a Captain in Cromwell’s army’. Ah me. And it seems he came from Warwickshire, which loosely ties him in with the Tippings.

  2 – With one or two exceptions.

  3 – A fluent-Irish-speaking friend tells me it’s more likely to be an adaptation of Scealbog, which means, among other things, ‘a detached layer of rock’.

  4 – His grandfather was Charles Lett (they are all called Charles or Stephen or Thomas or William …).

  5 – Reports following the suppression of the Rebellion claimed that insurgents on the way to slaughter Protestant prisoners at Wexford Bridge carried a black flag emblazoned with a white cross, and the letters mws – Murder Without Sin – written across it.

  6 – A biographical note on Barbara Lett which appears in John D. Beatty’s Protestant Women’s Narratives of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 claims that Joshua Lett was her father-in-law. But this information is flatly contradicted by Katherine Lucy Lett in her History of the Lett Family, written for private circulation in 1925. Barbara’s father-in-law was Charles Lett (another one!), says Katherine Lucy. Since she was the family historian, I’m inclined to go along with her version.

  7 – The third of a trio of brothers alongside William (father of Benjamin) and Charles (subject of the Reverend Henry Lett’s biographical account). Whew!

  8 – I have to add a note about William. Despite his Orange credentials, says the Reverend Henry, William in later life ‘became a pervert to the Church of Rome’ (his outraged capitals). He suggests that expediency, not conviction, was behind it. But here at last is a ‘Catholic’ Lett to underscore my point about denominational interchangeability.

  9 – Actually, I can discard this possibility; see note 17.

  10 – According to Katherine Lucy Lett, the Charles who joined the yeomanry in 1798 did have a son named Thomas by his second wife, whose dates would fit. But alas, no information about this Thomas exists. (It may have been lost when the Four Courts was burnt.) And, since I can’t find any reference to Clonleigh or my grandmother’s ancestors in any Lett family documents, I think it’s possible that my branch of the family stemmed from some illegitimate offshoot, now undiscoverable.

  11 – ‘By all accounts, lower-class Protestants were the original aggressors.’ Marianne Elliott, 2000.

  12 – Blacker Diaries.

  13 – So called because of his campaign against cruelty to animals. He was the principal founder of the rspca.

  14 – Tim Robinson, Connemara: Listening to the Wind.

  15 – Seamus Heaney, ‘Station Island’, Canto 11.

  16 – May God have mercy on them all.

  17 – Another irony: the Irish rebel later joined the British Navy (and died at seventeen).

  NOTES: Chapter 4

  1 – Contemplations on the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, Belfast, 1843.

  2 – Given William Blacker’s much publicised attitude to the Catholic church, it’s hard to understand why these were present; but they were.

  3 – Not only do we have James and John incessantly recurring as family names, but they’re attached to the streets and terraces they live in too.

  NOTES: Chapter 5

  1 – Not to be confused with Henry’s father Matthew.

  2 – He was educated at Foyle College, Derry, before going on to Shrewsbury School and Magdalen College, Cambridge. His mother was Elizabeth Sinclair of Fort William, Belfast.

  3 – Changes and Chances of a Soldier’s Life, London, 1925.

  4 – Rimbaud, Le Bateau Ivre.

  5 – I’m aware that Olivia May was dead at this point, but some female relative would doubtless
have taken over the management of domestic affairs, at least until Charlotte Olivia, the eldest daughter and Marie Heller’s exact contemporary, was in a position to do it.

  NOTES: Chapter 6

  1 – A History of the Town of Belfast (1880).

  2 – Basically, revival.

  3 – See Marnie Hay, Bulmer Hobson and the Nationalist Movement in Twentieth-Century Ireland.

  4 – George Buchanan, Green Seacoast.

  5 – The Reverend T.L.F. Stack, quoted in James Winder Good, Ulster and Ireland.

  6 – Both descended from a long line of Brookes and Chichesters.

  7 – He may not have been in the country at the time.

  8 – I have to be careful here, since my own name suggests an affiliation I’m far from embracing. I’m pointing this out myself before someone else does, and presenting it, moreover, as a corroborating, not an undermining, factor in my basic thesis.

  9 – Rea is joking, of course, while Whitman wasn’t; but underlying the jocular tone is a refusal to concede superiority or unquestionable rectitude to one political persuasion over another.

  10 – See Len Graham, Joe Holmes: Here I Am Amongst You.

  11 – In the 1940s or ’50s, she conducted a correspondence with Bishop Mageean on the subject of his ban on married women teachers, to which she was opposed.

  12 – I think Catherine inherited these aunts after her husband’s death, since my mother in old age occasionally mentioned three old women who lived upstairs in her grandmother’s house, and whose identity puzzled her.

  13 – Stevie Smith, ‘It was a cynical babe. Reader, before you condemn, pause / It was a cynical babe, / Not without cause.’

  14 – W.B. Yeats, ‘Easter 1916’.

  15 – Third son of Henry and Mary Anne.

  16 – Forward the Rifles, 2009.

  17 – From a cousin. No one who’d experienced it ever spoke to me of Lily’s death. I barely knew that an aunt Lily was missing from the roster of my relations.

  18 – I think by Christmas they had moved from Edward Street to North Street, perhaps to get away from the setting of the tragedy.

  19 – It bothered some of the latter, like Francis Ledwidge, ‘To be called a British soldier while my country / Has no place among the nations...’. (Quoted by Seamus Heaney.)

  NOTES: Chapter 7

  1 – The term ‘Irish Volunteers’ soon gave way to ‘ira’ - Irish Republican Army.

  2 – Once I understand that the Barracks is a former Georgian house, I feel my conservationist hackles begin to rise in protest. But before the incident is over, police and military have burned and wrecked half the village. In the destruction stakes, the forces of law and order win hands down.

  3 – Then joint Hon. Secretary of Sinn Féin. He committed suicide in 1925.

  4 – The Tipping referred to is Jimmy.

  5 – Probably the Mater, where Dr Moore, father of the future novelist Brian Moore, had recently been appointed senior surgeon.

  6 – Well, for practical purposes. You could say it begins with the Plantation of Ulster, if you wanted.

  7 – One of Jim McDermott’s sources for his book Northern Divisions, from which I’m quoting.

  8 – See Lawlor,The Burnings.

  9 – One of these young men later became a commandant in the Free State army, while the other was executed by the Free State government in December 1922.

  10 – Only one of the subsequent accounts of the shooting mentions ric men on the heels of the getaway car, with the mishap calling to mind the doings of the Keystone Cops.

  11 – I’m indebted to Glenn Patterson’s book for this information.

  12 – He is tried and condemned to death, though the sentence is later commuted to twelve years’ imprisonment.

  13 – On Another Man’s Wound.

  14 – I’m quoting from Northern Divisions by Jim McDermott. This valuable book provides a day-to-day account of ira active service units and their operations during this period.

  15 – Only the second son John, a married man with domestic responsibilities, stayed away from active involvement.

  16 – Note the name, and think of long-ago Katherine Rose uprooted from Warwickshire and planted in the ‘boiling’ Ulster countryside.

  17 – He’d been elected to a County Armagh constituency in addition to Cork in the Provisional Government, Dáil Éireann.

  18 – Thirty-year-old Collins has less than a year to live. The shock occasioned by news of his assassination, in August 1922, would have been complicated, for the Tippings, by their position vis-à-vis the Treaty. They were among the northern republicans who opposed it, while others were willing to regard it as a means to an end.

  19 – Indicating active and armed service. In total 15,224 medals with bar were issued, and 47,644 without.

  20 – Appointed Divisional Signaller, 4th Northern Division, in 1921.

  21 – In the words of an official at the Ministry of Home Affairs.

  22 – A slogan of the reconstituted, late-twentieth-century ira. At least Gerry has it in English, not the bad Irish in which it was framed later.

  23 – There is, of course, quite a large irony here as far as the Tipping family is concerned.

  24 – On a recent visit to the Tower of London, my cousin Jerome Tipping was intrigued to find the name ‘John Tipping’ inscribed on the wall of a prison cell.

  25 – From an anonymous verse written in the nineteenth century.

  NOTES: Chapter 8

  1 – There wasn’t much talk of my father’s alma mater the Charley Memorial, or his later Lisburn Tech, but that circumstance hadn’t particularly struck me either.

  2 – Asking for Trouble, 2007.

  3 – Oxford University Press, 1924.

  4 – Two daughters of Henry and Mary Anne’s son John Tipping were pupils at the school in the 1930s.

  5 – No relation. Neither, I am sorry to say, is the more obscure poet Julius McCullough Leckey Craig, author of the lines, ‘On Carrick shore I stood, I stood,/And gaped across at Holywood;/And as I gaped I saw afar/My love upon the Kinnegar.’

  6 – At least, only Catholics availed themselves of it.

  7 – Elliott, op cit.

  8 – One, I would say, rather jolly in a Margaret Rutherford kind of way, the other a bit fluttery and timid (I’m going by their photographs).

  9 – I’m quoting from an article on Beechmount in his Rushlight magazine.

  10 – I am doubtful about its authenticity, since no one, as far as I know, has actually come up with documentary evidence in relation to the excluding clause.

  11 – A literal translation of Beechmount.

  12 – Their niece had married her uncle.

  13 – Robert Johnston, letter in the Ulster Echo, October 1891.

  14 – I’d like to think that ‘Drennan’ and ‘Thornberry’ were different versions of the same name, both derived from the Irish Ua Dhroighnean: one translated, the other transliterated. (The Thornberrys, you remember, were Lurgan republican associates of the Tippings.) And Duffin – like Duff – comes from the Irish word for black.

  15 – John Swanwick Drennan was Ruth Duffin’s grandfather.

  16 – Northern Voices, 1975.

  17 – The district, not the house.

  18 – Air Raid Precautions.

  19 – See Stephen Douds, The Belfast Blitz.

  20 – Counties of Contention.

  21 – The other two had married and gone elsewhere.

  22 – In Belfast Confetti (1989).

  NOTES: Chapter 9

  1 – Paul Muldoon, ‘The Biddy Boys’.

  2 – It arrived later in Northern Ireland than it did in Great Britain.

  3 – Tom Paulin.

  4 – Hanged in Greyabbey in 1797.

  5 – It wasn’t the only route to success. People who failed the eleven-plus or equivalent examination should take heart from the story of eleven-plus failure Martin McGuinness who, in the course of his upward progress, held the post of M
inister of Education, in an inspiriting instance of the ‘reversal-of-fortune’ parable.

  6 – Eamonn McCann, War and an Irish Town.

  7 – See A Place Apart (1978).

  8 – Not her real name, but it’s as suitable for present purposes as it was then.

  9 – This was a common observation and it contributed greatly to Catholic disaffection.

  10 – Time in Armagh (1993).

  11 – The original architect was Thomas Cooley.

  12 – I should stress that I’m not opposed to prison as a punishment for those who have committed crimes.

  13 – No Mate for the Magpie, Virago, 1985.

  14 – A residual family loyalty, or embarrassment, may have kept him out of it.

  15 – But the history of Irish republicanism and nationalism is filled with Protestants, as I’ve stressed throughout.

  16 – Lost Lives.

  17 – Interesting to find the same surnames shared by marchers and attackers: Moore, McGuinness, for example.