Unlikely Rebels

by Anne Clare

  One of Emily’s daughters, named after her, married Rev. Robert Nathaniel Burton, and they settled in Ireland. Their daughter Isabella mothered the six Gifford girls, all of whom, from this United Empire Loyalist background, played a determined part in Ireland’s War of Independence, completely in contrast to the non-involvement of their brothers.

  Isabella remained true to her upbringing, and, despite Frederick’s Catholicism, she ignored the Catholic baptisms of the Gifford sons in accordance with the Palatine Pact, and reared their whole family, boys and girls, as Protestants. [5] The two parents still shared their political unionism, and, thanks to Nellie Gifford’s notes and correspondence and detailed descriptions by ‘John’ Gifford, we get a very full picture of what it was like to grow up in Dublin in a privileged unionist household at the end of the nineteenth century.[6] But why were only the girls involved in the fight for Irish independence? The answer may have an economic element: to get a decent job in their day, being a Protestant unionist was a definite help; in fact it was almost obligatory. Even membership of a tennis club required a Protestant ‘passport’ at the time.

  Notes

  [1] Irish Records kept at Irish Family History Centre (Mormon), Finglas Road, Dublin.

  [2] Nellie Gifford-Donnelly’s papers, hereinafter called NGDPs (private collection).

  [3] Church of Ireland Records, Dublin, under heading ‘Vicars, Nineteenth Century’.

  [4] NGDPs.

  [5] This strange pact, introduced to accommodate ‘mixed’ marriages between Catholics and Protestants, decreed that the boys of the union would follow their father’s religion and the girls that of their mother. It had no papal approval, and, in fact, Pope Leo XIII vetoed it.

  [6] NGDPs; Sidney Gifford-Czira, The Years Flew By, 2nd edn, Galway: Arlen House, 2000.

  2 - The Gifford Parents

  There is no picture in the Gifford family papers of the head of the family, Frederick. As one gets to know Isabella, one cannot imagine her lending herself to the popular photographic pose of the time: the husband sitting and the dutiful wife standing, hand on his shoulder, flanked by an aspidistra. Called the ‘Guvnor’ by the servants of the house, a more appropriate name for Frederick might have been ‘The mistress’s husband’. He seems to have been portly, at least in later years, and with an agreeable personality that made him an easy mixer. Nellie was his favourite child, and when she was a little girl he occasionally brought her with him about the country on his legal work – even as far as Donegal town, where they stayed in Hamilton’s Hotel.[1]

  Yet there was a certain remoteness in his relationship with his family. One Sunday morning he left his umbrella behind in church. One of the boys was sent to fetch it, but after a long time he came back, with no umbrella. Asked why he had been so long, he named the Protestant churches he had tried in the locality. He knew his father did not worship at St Philip’s Church of Ireland with the rest of the family, but had no idea that it was mass in Rathmines parish church that he attended.[2]

  Although this indicates a distance between Frederick and his children, he was close to them in other ways. When one of them was put to bed for a misdemeanour, he would try to sneak up to the culprit with a piece of cake or some other delicacy, by way of consolation. Even so, though he was the more liked of the parents, Nellie was the only one who loved him unconditionally. The children tended to blame their mother, in fact, for any distancing they felt from their father.

  Frederick never practised criminal law, which was considered not quite gentlemanly in those days. The two maternal Catholic aunts who reared him when his parents died, apprenticed their young nephew to a solicitor on the Liffey quays, James Swazy, whose offices were over Twigg & Brett, wine importers. He was working as an articled clerk when he married Isabella, but later changed to an office in the more prestigious Dawson Street.[3]

  A lawyer in Ireland, particularly a land agent, could not have started at a more propitious time than the late nineteenth century. The big word in Ireland was ‘land’, and, in orbit around it, its various satellites bore the ugly names of ‘rack rents’, ‘absentee landlords’, ‘potato blight’, ‘famine’, ‘starvation’, ‘cholera’, ‘emigration’ and ‘death’. Sir William Butler, one-time general in the British army, gives what may be presumed an unbiased account of an eviction he had seen: ‘The thatched roofs were torn down and the earthen walls were battered in by crowbars: the screaming women, the half-naked children, the paralysed grandmother, the tottering grandfather, were hauled out.’[4]

  After the Famine years, in 1879, with the memories of the Great Hunger still very much alive, Michael Davitt joined forces with Charles Stewart Parnell, the Home Ruler, to found the Land League. So effective was this leadership that within the working life of Frederick Gifford a huge upheaval of landownership took place in Ireland. Despite Frederick’s distaste for eviction, his unionism precluded his support of republicanism. Gladstone’s disestablishment of the Anglican Church in 1869 must have pleased Frederick, the Catholic. In the following year, Gladstone’s first Land Act attempted, in a feeble way, to give some stability to tenants-at-will, by trying to give them some protection from unfair eviction, allowing them to borrow two-thirds of the cost of buying their land from the government and curbing exorbitant rents. Then there was the advent of Joseph Gillis Biggar, the grocer from the north of Ireland who, as an Irish nationalist MP, used obstructionism as a parliamentary weapon to delay the business of parliament in an attempt to force the British government to negotiate with the Irish nationalist MPs. He gummed up the ‘mother of all parliaments’ by deliberately droning on, even through the night, until, in 1881, the parliament was obliged to introduce ‘closure of debate’. Never again was the Irish Parliamentary Party ignored, most especially when Parnell, their new leader, embraced more aggressive tactics.

  The New Departure policy, which sought an amalgamation of parliamentary action and physical force to pursue the common ideals of land reform and self-government, was best expressed by Parnell’s famous seven words to a tenant demonstration in Mayo in June 1880: ‘Keep a firm grip on your homesteads.’[5] Huge crowds, menacingly quiet, gathered at evictions. Boulders were dropped from heights to hinder the approaching Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). Then Parnell introduced another weapon – a psychological one – in his fight for the tenants, and the word ‘boycott’ entered English dictionaries: it meant ‘to shun’. Captain Boycott, agent to Lord Erne, refused to acknowledge the bad harvests which made the tenants unable to pay rent and he evicted them. Parnell organised the total ostracising of Boycott by all. The land agent had to employ harvesters from the north of the country whose fees crippled him. Defeated, he fled.

  Lawyers had particularly difficult transactions. The scope can be gauged by the £10 million authorised for tenant purchase under the Land Purchases Acts of 1885 and 1888. The legal professionals, including Frederick Gifford, were hands-on interpreters of the many Land Acts during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. There were added problems with all the statutes on land tenure. In the course of land sale and purchase, the conveyancing would have entailed scrutinising the title deeds, checking for squatter’s title and fragmentation of property and noting rights of way, turbary rights and water rights. The late nineteenth-century land and law agent, however, had the additional headaches of acquiring knowledge of the many statutes passed on the subject of Irish land tenure down to the Redemption of Rent Act of 1891, the sixteen Land Acts passed between 1830 and 1891, the Supreme Court Rules of 1891 and the County Court Rules of 1890. Rules were issued under the Land Purchase Act of 1891, both in the Supreme Court and in the Land Commission; there were more rules pertaining to appeals to the Land Commission and from the Land Commission to the Courts of Appeal. Finally, there were also the rules under the Acts of 1860 and 1870.[6]

  Nellie Gifford mentions her father’s repeated visits to the Land Commission, but there are only a few glimpses seen of him at home with his family.
He drew ‘well enough’, said Nellie, and sometimes ‘broke out in cartoons’ – as would his daughter Grace. He also made a small hobby of ‘silverpoint’, in which artistic discipline the artist used a silver pen on specially prepared paper. He was a fan of the then current musical success of Gilbert and Sullivan, and he sometimes used the adjective ‘Gilbertian’. He could read the score of the comic operas and could play them on a six-sided or seven-sided concertina.

  Frederick enjoyed an easy friendship with John B. Yeats, with whom he had in common not only art but also the law. Unlike his wife, he also enjoyed Sundays when the servants departed and he could go to the kitchen to warm his feet on the fender of the big range. He had a sense of fun and would, for instance, throw his handkerchief up at a cobweb on the high ceiling, to disapproving comments from Isabella. She was queen of the kitchen domain and resented his intrusion; the children confessed distaste for the kitchen when there were no servants there.

  Frederick took an interest in gardening, bringing some plants over from England. One particular return from their two-month annual summer stay in Greystones, County Wicklow, was recalled by Nellie, because on their arrival home not only had the grass grown almost knee-high but the plants her father had put down before leaving were ‘climbing and sprawling’, and, most curious of all, low-growing, very red apples were in fruit. On biting the apples, the children discovered they were a new ‘fruit’ which they had never encountered before and which they were told were called ‘tomatoes’.[7]

  Frederick’s daughter Sidney has left us a description of the smoking regalia of her father’s bachelor days. A gentleman of that time would not smoke in the presence of ladies, so when he needed the solace of his tobacco Frederick would retire to another room and put on his smoking jacket. His outfit comprised not only the velvet embroidered jacket but also a velvet embroidered cap. His smoke finished, he discarded the allegedly polluted garments and put on his ordinary clothes to rejoin his womenfolk.[8] Nellie evocatively summed up her father as she saw him: ‘He bore the vague, average hallmarks of what were called “the gentry” in Victorian times.’[9]

  Isabella was six stone in weight when she married: a small, pretty, blonde, twenty-nine-year-old member of a strongly unionist and strongly Protestant Carlow family.[10] Her golden hair was pinned up but curled about the ears. Her portraits show attractive features, but there is little animation there. Her eyes look at the camera uncompromisingly, and her well-formed mouth is set in composure, not disclosing her reputedly excellent teeth.

  There is no way a pen picture may be drawn to suggest that Isabella was a ‘mumsie’ type of mother. Phrases about her have survived to suggest instead that cuddles and kind words were in short supply but, it must be conceded, the social mores of Victorian upper-class Dublin might have regarded demonstrative motherly love as ‘not quite the thing’. Perhaps it would be fairest to register first the pejoratives attached to her name, lingering long after her death, and then mention her undoubted virtues:

  Mother was not a port in a storm;

  rather she was a storm in a port.[11]

  This antithetical summing-up by Isabella’s daughter Nellie suggests a personality which might be called ‘fractious’ or ‘difficult’. It was also observed that she was ‘always carping’ and ‘easily ruffled’.[12] Most damning, perhaps, was her likely response to a childish query: the enquirer would be told not to ask stupid questions, or a reference would be made to ‘hopeless ignorance’:

  There was a pyrotechnic quality in her family that flared up at any ignorance or clumsiness which left us afraid to ask any questions. Though she seldom used many of her talents she was skilful in many arts. She could contrive a hat without effort, though she had never been taught anything but the elegancies of her times; a little French, Italian and German, water-colour painting. Her poetic fancy ran on the lines of Tennyson, a man of blameless character according to her information, and her sonnets had earned her the name of Sappho among her brothers.[13]

  Artists, according to Isabella, came ready-made and instinctive, and anyone who kept steadily at a job, especially an artist, she termed, in a contemptuous voice, a slogger. It was observed that Isabella had little sense of humour, and even her grandchildren, though she never spoke crossly to them, saw her as She Who Must Be Obeyed.[14] One day this mother of twelve surviving children told one of her daughters, ‘I never liked babies’ – but they knew that without her telling them. When their nursemaid, Bridget Hamill, departed for her ‘day off’ after Sunday dinner, their mother had a distressed look because she would be burdened with them for the rest of the day. As to every other day, the norm was that they went out after breakfast with Bridget and went out again after a simple lunch of bread and butter, provided with bags of raisins and biscuits.

  Isabella had defended Bridget Hamill when she was interviewing her as a nursemaid for the junior members of the family. Bridget’s then employer, a publican, made disparaging remarks about her, but neither his trade nor his attitude pleased Isabella, so when he had finished his tirade she turned to Bridget and said, ‘Call to Temple Villas and we will hear your side of the story.’ Bridget obviously impressed her, and, happily for all of them, the girl became a loved employee and godmother of the youngest Gifford son, Edward.

  Frederick and Isabella had met when they attended the College of Art in Kildare Street, then called the College of Design. Encouraging this artistic streak in her children, Isabella brought them each year to the Royal Hibernian Academy Opening Day and also took them (probably on the Bridget-less Sunday afternoons) to the National Gallery, the museum, concerts, any worthwhile art exhibition that was on, the circus and Dublin Zoo. She had sold some of her artistic work before her marriage and on one occasion felt confident enough to point out to John B. Yeats what she considered to be a flaw in one of his paintings.

  Isabella did have her soft spots, and one of them was her Huguenot maternal grandmother, Emily Bisset, who chartered the ship for Australia. She appeared also to be close to Kate, her eldest daughter, and to have had a special liking for her second son, Liebert, though he seemed to be the least talented of her six boys.

  As to the power structure in this family, a glance at their observance of the Palatine Pact shows who was the boss. This pact proposed that in ‘mixed’ marriages the boys follow their father’s religion and the girls that of their mother. So the Gifford girls were all promptly baptised in Protestant churches with chosen godparents, but although the first three boys were baptised within a fortnight of birth, in Donnybrook Catholic church, there was a ragged pattern thereafter. Frederick Ernest was not baptised for almost a year and Edward Cecil for almost six months, with the very unusual situation of the officiating priest being his godfather and his nursemaid, Bridget Hamill, being his godmother. Anyhow Isabella brought them up from infancy, boys and girls, in her own faith. In fact, the census return of 1901 shows the whole house to have been Protestant, with the exceptions of Frederick and the servants. Isabella Gifford simply ignored her sons’ Catholic baptisms. The Palatine Pact was eventually turned on its head in the Gifford household, with the boys remaining Protestant, true to their upbringing, but untrue to their baptisms, and four of the girls later choosing to convert to the faith of their father, in spite of their Protestant baptisms.[15]

  Regarding their religious training, this daughter of a Church of Ireland vicar had a rigid procedure for Sunday devotions: each Sunday by 10.15 a.m. they had donned what the servants called ‘church, chapel, go-to-meetin’ clothes’. They were then marched to Sunday School, held in a hall built in the church grounds in Rathmines. The children sat in circles, according to age, girls on one side of the hall, boys on the other. Their teacher was described as thin, pale and elderly, dressed in voluminous black, with a heavy, beaded dolman. Her piety was old world and lacked appeal for the children. Like Isabella’s three sisters, she was unmarried, the men they might have wed having been slain in pushing forward or defending the frontiers of the Empire to which
they gave their loyalty.[16]

  After Sunday School, which lasted for about an hour, they were sent to church, just as their mother and grown-up sisters and brothers were arriving. The Gifford pew was halfway up the aisle. The rector was an old army doctor, and the young Giffords, finding his sermons too long, had to be frequently poked into attention by their mother or by Kate. Church ended at 1 p.m. and one selected youngster went to dine with the parents (this changed each week).

  The best clothes were worn to church, but the children’s view of what was best often differed greatly from their mother’s. This was especially true of Ada, who appears to have had a strong, youthful will. The children found Isabella’s ideas of suitable headgear particularly unacceptable. On one occasion she bought Gabriel and Gerald what looked like postmen’s caps. One winter, Nellie and Ada, the two girls closest in age, needed new hats, and Isabella decided to provide them with that year’s fashion: ‘boat hats’, called familiarly ‘boaters’, which had an upturned brim and a delve in the crown going from fore to aft. Isabella considered them ‘ladylike’, but Ada, rated the most competent artist, drew a caricature of what they would look like in these ‘nasty little Homburgs’.[17] An agonised ‘confab’ between the two intended martyrs sent Nellie to plead their case before their mother set out to make the purchase. She said she would make no promises. That was the voice of doom, and Isabella duly came back with a bag containing two of the hated hats – in fawn, which seemed to add insult to injury. Their red hair had been cut ‘like boys’, and she pulled the hats down on their heads with what was described as ‘an antagonistic tug’.[18]