Unlikely Rebels

by Anne Clare

  Suitably attired, the two young ladies walked sedately to their pew, hat elastic under chin, under their mother’s watchful eye. As the service progressed, however, the elastic became increasingly uncomfortable and was quietly hitched up under their noses to ease the pressure so that the breath and prayers of these two young Christians wound their way heavenwards past a twin pair of elastic bands.

  The reluctant boater-wearers waited for their chance, which came with the annual holiday in Greystones. They walked down to the breakwater, where the sea was deep, and whirled the hated hats into the water, as far as they could, gleefully watching the little boats riding the waves till they were so sopping with water that they sank. They decided to accuse the blameless wind as the culprit which had ‘unfortunately’ snatched their hats from them, elastic and all.

  Isabella tended to dress the children in pairs, by gender and in order of age, as can be seen not only in the story of the boaters but also in a charming studio portrait of Grace and Sidney, taken in R. Forbes’ studio in Grafton Street, which shows two beautifully dressed little girls. Her own portraits show an artistic awareness in her personal dress, including in one picture a row of tiny bows placed perpendicularly to give herself height, and, in another, a lovely hand-crocheted over-bodice, probably made by herself. Her daughters seemed to display Isabella’s good taste, even in their financially leaner years.

  The portrait of Grace and Sidney

  Isabella had very decided ideas about how any job should be done and was not shy when airing her opinions nor when seeing that they were carried out according to her instructions. It was her custom to sit in the bay window of her bedroom each afternoon reading the Bible. One extremely hot summer’s day, as she read, she watched with interest the construction of houses on the other side of Temple Villas. Tradesmen in those days generally dressed formally, wearing suits and sometimes black bowler hats. This, it was said, distinguished them from the unskilled. The workmen Isabella observed from her window were so dressed, despite the heat of the day. At last she could stand their assumed discomfort no longer and dispatched one of her sons into the city to buy straw hats for the men. When he came back, she sent a very embarrassed boy over to the builders with the hats and with the message that they were to ‘put them on there and then’.[19] When the boy had delivered this peremptory order, he rushed away as quickly as he could, as the female, self-appointed Foreman of Works up in the bay window kept watch over some fumbling (and doubtless choice language) among the men, who eventually put on the hats – perhaps gratefully. It seemingly never entered Isabella’s head that what she had done was unusually bossy.

  It was from this window seat also that Isabella did the purchasing of the perishable foods for the household. She was regarded as ‘a good handsel’ by the dealer women, a superstition that if she was their first customer they would have luck for that day. So they brought their laden baskets, on foot, all the way from the city markets – huge wicker baskets with two handles, balanced on the head on a roll of cotton worn like a crown. The servants interviewed the dealer women first, in the basement kitchen, and then carried up plates containing samples of the fish, fruit and vegetables for sale. The three flights of stairs up to the adjudicator, Isabella, were often negotiated more than once before the judge in the bay window pronounced her decision as to the quality and price. So heavy were the great baskets that the good-natured Gifford servants used to help the dealers ‘load up’ on departure.[20]

  Despite Isabella’s criticism of her uncle, Sir Frederick Burton, for jilting Margaret Stokes, when he died his obituary notices lauded his distinguished career and this pleased Isabella. Lest her neighbours were unaware of the close connection between the artistic knight and the Temple Villas Giffords, on Sir Frederick’s death Isabella dressed the children in black. It gave her the opportunity to explain, when questioned on their cause of mourning, that her uncle, Sir Frederick, the well-known artist, had died. She had to keep her end up in this well-heeled suburb, and if mournful garb for an uncle she hardly knew was the price to pay, then so be it. Perhaps, too, she remembered gratefully that it was his money that had reared her and her siblings after her heroic father had died.

  Notes

  [1] NGDPs.

  [2] In conversation with Nellie’s daughter Maeve Donnelly in the early 1990s.

  [3] NGDPs.

  [4] W. F. Butler, Sir William Butler: Autobiography, London: Scribner’s, 1911; National Library (IR 92 B 303).

  [5] This was when Parnell (Home Ruler), Michael Davitt (agrarian socialist) and John Devoy (ex-insurrectionist) united.

  [6] Details from Simon Kelliher, BL.

  [7] NGDPs.

  [8] Gifford-Czira, The Years Flew By, p. 4.

  [9] NGDPs.

  [10]Ibid.

  [11]Ibid.

  [12]Ibid.

  [13]Ibid.

  [14] In conversation with Maeve Donnelly in the early 1990s.

  [15] Baptismal records of Sandford parish church, Holy Trinity, Rathmines; St Philips, Milltown, Donnybrook Church and Church of the Three Patrons, Rathgar.

  [16] NGDPs.

  [17]Ibid.

  [18]Ibid.

  [19]Ibid.

  [20]Ibid.

  3 - Victorian Childhood

  Frederick and Isabella did not, on their marriage, settle down in the residence where they spent the rest of their lives. They first set up home in Castle Avenue, Donnybrook, where Claude Frederick was born in 1874, their first child having died at birth. Catherine Anna, Liebert and Gerald Vere were also born at the same address. On their birth certificates Frederick was variously described as ‘Solicitor’s Apprentice’, ‘Land Agent’ and ‘Law Agent’.

  The family’s next move was to Cabra Road, where both Gabriel and Helen Ruth (always called ‘Nellie’) were born. In his career as a commercial artist, Gabriel was to use the nom de plume ‘Brabazon’, which took the last syllable of Cabra as its first syllable. On all the older children’s birth certificates there was a column for who was present at the birth, and it had been filled in each case by the midwife’s name but, in an oddly modern way, in Gabriel’s case the words ‘Father present at birth’ were entered. There is a reference, in the detailed notes Nellie made, of the accommodation at Cabra being so cramped that two of the boys had to bed down in a nearby house, to reach which they ran across a field. Another move was obviously desirable, and the next home was on Palmerston Road. Ada Gertrude and Frederick Ernest were born there, but in 1884 Muriel Enid’s place of birth is entered as Cowper Road. However, the twins, Grace Evelyn and Edward Cecil, were born in 1888 in the recollected childhood home of all of them, followed a year and a half later by the baby, Sidney. That home was at Temple Villas, Palmerston Road, Rathmines, a large house built to their specification.[1]

  It is strange that in all Isabella’s brood of twelve children not a single one of them was named for her mother, her father or any of her brothers or sisters, although there was both a Catherine and a Grace way back along the line. Furthermore, there is no indication of correspondence with, or exchanged visits between, Isabella and her sisters in England. It is mentioned that her brothers took degrees in Trinity College and entered professions, one in law and the others in medicine. Cousins do not float in and out of the remembered Gifford household scenes. In fact, the only cousins mentioned were two – both unnamed – who took part in the Boer War. One was killed in that conflict. His brother told Nellie about some of his duties. Normally a pleasant young man, who had been at school with her brothers, he told her they had been ordered to shoot down a defenceless, frightened old woman found in a farmhouse. Nellie was appalled.

  To get a perspective of the social status of the Giffords and their standard of living in Temple Villas, the general living conditions in Dublin at the turn of the century must be recalled: they were wretched. There are many descriptions and statistics to support the dreadful picture: the death rate was higher than that of Calcutta. Fifteen thousand tenements in the fetid slums had bee
n condemned, and two of them, four storeys high, collapsed, wounding and, in some cases, killing the occupants. Twenty thousand families lived in one-roomed accommodation, with sometimes four families living in the same room. For the human beings in these warrens, there was one water tap and one toilet in the yard of each house. A diet of milkless tea, bread and offal brought to the children a high incidence of rickets through lack of calcium, sore eyes through lack of vitamin C and stunted growth through inadequate food of any kind. Even the harshest winter could see them with no shoes and threadbare clothing. Sewage disposal and refuse collection were hopelessly poor; unpaved pathways were full of potholes. Tuberculosis was rampant, and so was despair.

  Dublin employers of the unskilled gave another turn to the screw with unbelievably poor wages. While English immigrants such as Gerard Manley Hopkins were incredulous at the horror of it all, the Westminster Parliament was as concerned about the well-being of the conquered Irish race in Dublin as the Americans were of the native peoples in their country. The land situation in rural Ireland was slowly improving because of the Land Acts, but, from the Act of Union on, the capital city had deteriorated so much that it had not far to sink before reaching the nadir of 1913. To the wretched occupants of the tenements, the Gifford ten-roomed residence would have seemed a mansion.[2]

  The house in Temple Villas had five bedrooms, a breakfast room – which doubled as a study for the school-goers, a dining room for the parents and a drawing room, strictly for visitors. At the top of the house was the nursery and a big bathroom, and in the red-tiled basement were the kitchen and scullery and a huge coalhouse. There was a system of bells for summoning the domestic staff.

  The nursery under the rafters was where the nursemaid reigned supreme. She was, for most of the Giffords’ childhood, Bridget Hamill from County Wexford, described lovingly and faithfully by Nellie in her later years. Bridget’s stockings are worth recording. Their exuberance of colour might well have put Isabella off employing her, but, well aware of her nursery’s numerical problem, Isabella chose to ignore her hosiery’s riot of colour. Two pairs of Bridget’s stockings are described by Nellie: one was knitted in half-inch bands of yellow, red and green; the second had a rainbow of bands in five different colours. Though Bridget was said to have eventually acquired a husband, a redcoat soldier from her home place, it is most unlikely that she intended, or indeed that the bizarre stockings effected, a military conquest. More likely she made a virtue of necessity and used the odds and ends of wool left over after knitting various gansies, deciding she might as well make use of the bits and pieces and knit them up, hotch-potch, as they came to hand. In any case, on a wage of ten shillings a week, ‘all found’, she could not afford to be wasteful.

  The rest of Bridget’s clothing was conventional, comprising a tight-fitted bodice buttoned down the front and an ankle-length dark skirt with a bustle at the back the size of a small pillow, on which her young charges liked to flop when they got the chance. The stockings were seen only when Bridget hitched her skirt while negotiating steps or when she sat at the nursery fire behind its mesh grid, toasting herself on cold days.

  She is described as small, comfortable and blue-eyed, with a cheerful rosy face and her hair piled neatly on top of her head. She was also, unlike the desired feminine silhouette of the day, rather plump. So, on her ‘day’ off (the servants got one evening off every week and every Sunday after midday dinner), Bridget needed help in tightening her corset before ‘walking out’ with her redcoat soldier. The cords of her corset were put over the knob of her bedpost, and she strained till she had acquired the desired waist, watched by interested children.

  Lest that ritual imply any laxness in discipline, it must be stated that this nursemaid extraordinaire was a born general, demanding strict obedience. The nursery grooming was meticulous. She made a game of their ablutions, three boys in the bath or two girls, or whatever combination of the under-eights she had in the nursery at any one time. Each became a vegetable – carrot, turnip or whatever – and as she scrubbed them briskly with soap and ‘rinsed’ them, she called them her ‘Irish stew’. It was more difficult to make fun of hair-combing, especially for the long-haired girls, whose tangles she controlled with a ‘rack’, asking frequently as she combed the hair forward, working from the back: ‘Is it forninst your forehead?’ They were put, eldest first, sitting on the baize-covered nursery table for this operation. Eight of the children had red hair, three of the boys and all the girls except the baby, Sidney, a fact which mortified them and led street urchins to jeeringly call:

  Red head, curly nob,

  Put the kettle on the hob.

  Despite the rough edges of their mother’s personality, and despite her avowed dislike of babies, there is no doubt at all that if she considered that any of her daughters needed support, then she supported them 100 per cent. Thus, on hearing of the jibes about her children’s red hair, she replied indignantly, ‘Our Lord had red hair.’ This biblical deduction may have been based on her perception of the great painters of the Renaissance, but the maid to whom she offered this defence of her children’s russet locks was more scandalised than impressed. ‘God forgive ye, ma’am,’ she burst out, feeling it a sort of insult to the Son of God that He be declared a redhead.

  ‘General Hamill’, however, leading her little company, instructed them never to answer back, to walk with their ‘toes out’, two by two, except when they needed to make room for passers-by, when they formed a single file. On such outings, the custom was that the local nursemaids took the surname of their employer, so that the children from Temple Villas were led by ‘Bridget Gifford’.

  If Bridget brought the children to Palmerston Park, they happily climbed trees, ate edible berries and ‘helped’ the gardener. Palmerston Park was just down the road from home, enclosed by a tall wooden paling. It was mostly left to nature, but the gardener, a wily old war pensioner, said the ‘best children’, as a treat, would be allowed to collect the debris in the park for him to burn. There was great competition for this job.

  Another, more interesting, destination was Portobello Barracks, where Bridget had her admirer and where the children were carried round on the shoulders of the ‘chummies’, as the redcoat soldiers were called, eye level with the gleaming helmets and weaponry hanging on the wall. Moreover, the soldiers gave them sweets.

  There was a path beaten to the door of this barracks by young nursemaids wheeling bassinets. Incredibly, these young girls paid for the company of the soldiers – not for sexual favours but to be taught ‘proper English’. They were from all parts of Ireland and were very likely frequently corrected by their employers, who spoke with the Rathmines’ drawl. So the soldiers who were Irish were ignored and the girls sought their linguistic education from those born in Britain. They would have had Brummie, Yorkshire, Glaswegian, cockney and various other kinds of accents and idioms. It is an intriguing concept. Was a girl with lilting Cork cadences taught to say ‘eeh bah gum’, or was a girl from Derry initiated into the costermongers’ dialect? However, from all the mingled (and mangled) consonants and vowels, even if the spoken English was not improved, little romances eventuated here and there, despite the fact that if a girl was caught ‘keeping company’ with a redcoat she stood a good chance of being dismissed ‘on moral grounds’.

  So, although the children were quite remote from their parents, being allowed only one at a time, once a week, to join them for dinner, they never lacked loving adult companionship. In 1963, when she was eighty-eight years of age, Nellie wrote, ‘Whenever I am tired I close my eyes and rest my head in imagination, on the cosy, soft breast of the nurse of my childhood – Bridget … sitting in the most comfortable lap in the world.’[3]

  Bridget was not a Victorian slave. Her word was law in the nursery, the little eyrie facing the back garden, and she was all things to all those in her care. She gave them the warmth, physical and psychological, that young children need to put down sound roots and to flourish. Apart from t
he bathing and hair-grooming, she fed them and put them to bed after they had knelt on the oilcloth floor, in their calico nightwear, to say their prayers.

  There were three beds in the nursery: her own, one for the boys and one for the girls, as well as a cot for the baby. Bridget was comforter, disciplinarian and guardian and, on the side, sang rebel songs about ‘Bold Robert Emmet’ and Owen Roe O’Neill, as well as ‘Those Eastern Waves’, a song with innumerable verses. Her other cultural offering was a rich fund of stories. In their telling, unaware that she was doing so, Bridget used little Gaelic phrases and Irish ways of speaking English, frowned on by Isabella. Her particular bugbear was the past-perfect tense (for example, ‘I was after …’). Just as Maud Gonne’s French governess unconsciously taught anti-British sentiment to her young charges, so did Bridget, and some of the other Gifford servants, without realising it, passed on the deep resentments of a race never completely conquered, even after 700 years.

  The servants, and Bridget in particular, gave the children little presents each Christmas out of their meagre means, ‘unbeknownst to the misthress [sic]’.[4] One such present to Nellie, probably from Bridget, and remembered in detail over a lifetime, was a large yellow handkerchief. In the four corners were printed respectively a question, its answer and two curses:

  Did they dare, did they dare to slay Owen Roe O’Neill?

  Yes they slew him with poison whom they feared to meet with steel.

  May God wither up their hearts!

  May their blood cease to flow.

  Finally, in the centre, were the words:

  May they walk in living hell who murdered Owen Roe.