Unlikely Rebels

by Anne Clare

It was definitely not a handkerchief for either Christmas or for a cold in the head. Nellie was in awe of it and had no way of knowing that the words were from a poem written by one of her own Protestant Ascendancy class, Thomas Davis, a leader of the Young Irelanders’ abortive rebellion of the 1840s against England; neither did Nellie know that Owen Roe was the nephew of the Great O’Neill, hero of the Nine Years’ War against Elizabeth I, who had given religious intolerance as a reason for his flight from Ireland in 1607.

  William E. H. Lecky, in his A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, describes what he called ‘the arrogance of a dominant minority’ who, in the eighteenth century, not only excluded Catholics from a seat in parliament but even barred them from the public gallery, who flaunted the victories of the Boyne and Derry in tapestry and statuary, including a bust of the conquering King William, bearing an insulting diptych on Catholics (four-fifths of the citizenry) and whose toast on all occasions was ‘to the glorious and immortal memory of William’.[5] They even celebrated, in Dublin, the discovery of the English gunpowder plot.

  Most of all, however, they recalled, in triumphalist style, the memory of Owen Roe’s rebellion of 1641, or, more particularly, its defeat: for the yearly commemoration, the lord lieutenant paraded to Christ Church in full state regalia where a sermon was preached on the defeat of the rebellion, at noon the great guns of Dublin Castle were fired, church bells were rung, and the day concluded with bonfires and illuminations. Though the official elaborate ceremony to celebrate his defeat no longer took place after the Irish parliament was abolished under the Act of Union, examples of the yellow handkerchief still fluttered defiantly here and there, around Ireland, or were folded reverently with the inherent promise ‘next time, Owen Roe, or the next time again, or the time after that, we will win.’ Bridget’s rebellious piece of cotton was symbolic of latent resentment, biding its time. Meanwhile, Nellie, this little daughter of a unionist household, carefully put away her folded Christmas gift.

  Tidiness and cleanliness were absolute musts in Bridget’s nursery. The older children were trained to sweep the floor and to wash the babies’ bottles. There was a bag of farthings from which one was extracted each week to reward the best child. There were certainly no expensive toys given to the children, but they made their own fun, typically placing each other, one at a time, in the centre of the tablecloth, which was then removed, its happy passenger carried noisily round the room until it was someone else’s turn.

  Isabella may have disliked Bridget’s little Irish words and idioms, but there was no complaint about the training in etiquette. When the chosen child dined at the weekly dinner, one of the inflexible rules was that some dessert had to be left on one’s plate, uneaten, for ‘good manners’. Apparently the splitting of the atom can be compared to the efforts of the Gifford offspring to leave no more than a crumb on the plate. But it was left. ‘General’ Hamill had trained her soldiers well. To be so loved in recollection, as this paragon nursemaid was even after eighty years, was an achievement which few generals, if any, can have attained.

  Another resident maid was Mary McKenna, a tall, limber girl with dark hair, very blue eyes and a friendly smile. She was the favourite daughter of a Howth fisherman. One Monday morning, clothes-washing day, Isabella came down, as usual, to see that everything was going well and to lend a hand. The clothes, which had already been washed in the scullery trough and boiled in a galvanised bath on the red-hot range, were then put in a primitive washing machine, a huge wooden tub on an iron stand, the door clamped tight to keep the suds from the floor. Normally Mary and the cook, Essie, who had to hand-turn this contraption for forty minutes, would be laughing and joking when Isabella arrived to give a few turns herself, but this particular morning Mary was helpless with crying. She shared a bedroom with Essie, and at 4 a.m. she had awoken from a dream that three strange men and one she knew had taken her dead father from the sea. Isabella tried to ‘talk sense’ to her gently but had to swallow her words a few hours later when Mary’s mother came to report her husband’s drowning exactly as dreamt.

  John B. Yeats and his sons heard this story during one of their visits to the Gifford residence and, always attracted by the paranormal, were very interested in the realisation of Mary’s dream. Of course there is nothing abnormal about a fisherman’s family having subconscious, as well as conscious, fears about drowning, but the Yeats family’s maid in London was a sister of Mary, and she also, they claimed, had this power.

  Mary was very popular with the Gifford children, as was her mother, a handsome woman who wore a heavy black shawl. Under that shawl she always brought for them, all the way from Howth, a big soda cake packed with currants.

  Essie was the third of the resident servants. She came from the outskirts of a large demesne in County Longford, and her details are listed in the 1901 census: ‘Esther Connell, servant, born in Longford. Roman Catholic, aged 40, cannot read or write. Rank in household – cook and domestic servant.’ To assess Essie’s prowess as a cook one may turn to the ‘Grace before Meals’ said by Frederick Gifford in advance of an evening meal in the dining room of Temple Villas. He carved the joint while the housemaid stood waiting to take her and the cook’s share down to the kitchen. Before she left, he said his ‘Grace’:

  For what we are about to receive, the Lord make us thankful.

  The Lord sent the meat but the Devil sent the Cook.

  The housemaid suppressed her smile because Isabella patently disapproved. Essie had seventeen people to cater for, as well as casual staff. Though Isabella did the buying, it was Essie who prepared and cooked huge quantities of food. Six large white baker’s loaves filled, each day, the crock in the scullery, which was the size of a porter barrel. The milkman came daily to Essie’s kitchen too, and when he had filled a big jug for general use, a small jug was filled for the servants, free of charge: it was called ‘the cat’s tilly’. When a side of bacon was delivered, Essie would bone it herself and cut off rashers as required. As well as that, Essie helped with the housework and supervised the blending of the home-made polish in earthenware jars on the range – a mixture of beeswax and turpentine.

  To illustrate the relative remoteness of the children’s mother and the closeness they felt to the domestic staff, when young Gabriel took in the post one morning, seeing a letter addressed to ‘The Lady of the House’, he innocently asked if the letter was for Essie. She may not have been the world’s greatest cook but, considering Isabella could only bake cakes and make desserts, it can be argued that Essie reared them all to healthy adulthood and, indeed, laid their physique for ripe old age.

  The fact that Essie was illiterate, unlike the other servants, meant that the weekly magazine they all looked forward to, The Princess Novelette, a kind of Mills & Boon of Victoriana, had to be read to her. Essie was not shown in the 1911 census, the family by that time having largely dispersed.

  More unusual than any of the resident servants, Ann, the charlady, came only at times such as Christmas, when the house needed a thorough cleaning. She took quiet pride in her work, and on each floor left a little square uncleaned, the size of a postage stamp – her hallmark to show, by contrast, the effectiveness of her labours. However, Ann was particularly ‘fond of the bottle’. One day, when she was very drunk indeed, Isabella came down to the kitchen to find an amazing sight: one of the two oven doors was open, and the very intoxicated Ann was kneeling before it, rosary beads in hand, apparently confessing her sins, fortunately rather incoherently, to what she may have thought was the aperture of the confessional – or did she feel it was the fiery gate of hell?

  Lastly there was Tom Coyne, the shoe-cleaner. He came each evening to clean fourteen pairs of shoes and was a particular favourite with the children, though sometimes they showed Bridget that he had not cleaned the backs of their shoes. Bridget would reply, ‘A good soldier never looks behind.’ Tom was shabby – ‘threadbare’ was the word used in Nellie’s notes to describe his clothing – but kept himself
scrupulously clean. This old man, still with the heart to sing despite a failing voice, made the long journey each night to Rathmines, in fair weather and foul, so he must have badly needed his lowly paid job.

  Tom’s one-time occupation had been music-hall artist, and he would regale them all with excerpts from the operas, including his favourite, ‘The Heart Bowed Down by Weight of Woe’. There were three fingers missing from his right hand, but this did not prevent one of his singing mannerisms, to put his forefinger behind his ear as if listening to himself; another was pulling down his lips, as if to reach the low notes. This last trick sent the maids into fits of giggles, except Bridget, who was so impressed that she tried it, unsuccessfully, in singing her repertoire.

  The Temple Villas servants gave credence to the old proverbial wisdom about the hand that rocks the cradle ruling the world. There was very little rocking done by either Isabella or Frederick. The servants and children lived in complete harmony with each other. In the nursery, there was much remembered laughter and few tears. The harshest discipline the children knew was an admonition by their nursemaid: ‘Now then, none of your Andhrew Martins.’[6] Bridget had the gift – the dream of both teachers and parents alike – of moulding them with a perfect balance of love and discipline, and she held them effortlessly in the palm of her kindly, capable hands. It was severe competition for any mother, but especially for Isabella. In any event, in neither kitchen nor nursery was there heard anything unfit for children’s ears from these daughters of the ‘peasantry’ – excepting perhaps the yellow handkerchief and the direful curses on the enemies of Owen Roe, and no one could ignore the fact that the past-perfect tense in English is not best expressed by ‘I was after doin’ it’, even though this is a direct translation from the Gaelic Bhios tar éis é a dhéanamh.

  It is clear why the Gifford children had happy memories of the servants in their home during their formative early years. It also seems clear that their mother, conscientious and well-meaning though her approach to rearing children may have been, missed out almost completely in capturing their hearts when they were small and vulnerable and most needed her love.

  As described above, Nellie, the fifth child, has left us a marvellous description of her childhood which gives an insight into a typical Dublin household of the Ascendancy Protestant class in Victorian times. Her sister Sidney, who was to take the pen-name ‘John Brennan’ and who was always referred to thereafter as ‘John’, has also left her own account of that upbringing in her memoir, The Years Flew By. It is to Nellie’s observant eye and excellent memory that we owe the mosaic of their early years; however, ‘John’ had the gift of analysis, and her description of the district in which they grew up is worth recording:

  Our family home in Dublin was on the south side, in what was called a ‘good residential district’, which meant, in those days, a stronghold of British Imperialism. More than anything else the district resembled a waxworks museum. The people who surrounded us were lifelike but inanimate models of distinguished English people. It was a deadly atmosphere, in which any originality of thought or independence of action was regarded as eccentricity or lawlessness.[7] You have guessed it! This was Rathmines, butt of local humour for a couple of generations because its residents seemed to typify the flunky Irishman: with their strange, synthetic English accent, their snobbery and their half-hearted desire to be a ruling caste. Rathmines was a phenomenon. It was not a racial group nor a political stronghold but a state of mind. Its people were castaways, wrecked by mischance on this island called Ireland and ever scanning the horizon for a ship that would take them and their families away to some of the other British colonies.

  Sometimes Isabella’s concern was ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, and such, in part at least, was the annual holiday in Greystones. This was considered so socially necessary in Rathmines that those who could not afford to go would pull down their blinds as camouflage and live in the back of the house during the summer months.

  Greystones was largely owned by the Huguenot La Touche family, who shared the extremely evangelical inclination of another summer resident of Greystones, the mother of John Millington Synge.[8] Then a small fishing village, Greystones was slowly developing after the opening of the railway line from Dublin in 1850. There emerged a sort of unwritten law in Dublin which observed geographical distributions of holiday areas for Protestants, Catholics and Jews. The Protestants gravitated towards Greystones, partly because of the influence of the La Touche family and partly also because Wicklow (the ‘Garden’ of Ireland) was almost exclusively in the hands of Protestant landowners. Greystones was, as it were, one of their marine suburbs. Catholics, on the other hand – that is the few Catholics who could afford to go anywhere – tended to holiday in the marine townlands of north Dublin, especially Skerries, where the majority of the population was Catholic. Jews, who had already started to settle in houses near such areas as Clanbrassil Street and the South Circular Road, following escape from European pogroms, chose Bray as their holiday resort, as did some Catholics who lived south of the Liffey. Of course, the Dublin poor, which is to say the vast majority of its citizenry, had to be content with day trips to Dollymount or Merrion Strands, partly spent picking and eating winkles as the protein to go with their unbuttered bread and bottles of cold tea.

  Not so the Giffords. Though this summer migration was a very low-key version of her grandmother equipping the ship for Australia, one could never accuse Isabella of doing anything half-heartedly. A less sturdy being might have considered the transport of some seventeen people, with all their accoutrements, too daunting a plan. There is a description in Nellie’s memoirs of their setting off for the yearly Greystones summer holidays: the little blonde Officer Commanding is standing at the top of the steps in Temple Villas, directing her troops. Her husband, her sons and the maids stagger down the steps with huge baskets laden with crockery, household utensils, clothes, bedding and food. The maids hated the holidays, and it is easy to see that even the going and the coming back were heavy chores; nevertheless, their shrewd young charges noted that when the coastguards started to call at the kitchen in the rented house at Greystones, the extra drudgery was forgotten as a bit of flirtation lightened the scene.

  By accident rather than by design, the children were brought a little closer to their parents through the enforced proximity of a holiday by the sea. One could not fairly impute Isabella with a foisting off of their companionship by her appointment of Ellen as their ‘bathing woman’, who alternately coaxed and spurred even the most nervous to swim in the little cove where she, her sister and her son had bathing boxes. Ellen was queen of that cove and decided, first, if the sea was sufficiently calm for a child’s limited strength. She observed the then popular theory that if you did not first ‘wet your head’ then the minute you stepped into the sea something fatal might happen – described as a ‘contraction’ or ‘the blood rushin’ to your head’.[9] So the bathers waded out till the water was waist-high, when they would pinch their nostrils to exclude the water and then dunk their heads. It was considered safest to dunk three times, and, though the children often objected loudly, Ellen was adamant. After this dunking ceremony, all but the strongest swimmers were given a lifebelt for deep water.

  These belts were on ropes, which Ellen played out till she thought the wearers were in far enough. Their stay in the water depended on her mood. With two or three ropes in her hands, she ran up and down on the beach shouting directions to the pupils, who were sometimes out of hearing (or pretended to be) at the other end of the ropes. When she considered someone had been long enough in the water, that swimmer was dragged in ignominiously, despite protest. ‘You’ve been in too long, so you have,’ she would say when there were others waiting, because she did not encourage selfishness – or perhaps it was a ploy for more customers. The rope removed, it was back to the box to have the substantial bathing dress removed. The girls wore woollen bathing dresses, sometimes even stockings, and their long hair was held
up by hairpins, three or four inches long, and squeezed into an elasticised waterproof cap. Properly dressed again, they emerged from their boxes, and the male watchers, young and old, stood at the cliff wall as the hair-combing began, calculating with much masculine humour how much of the ‘bun’ – the hair normally seen on the Sunday parade – was, in fact, genuine. Ellen, a sort of prototype of today’s lifeguards, was very committed to the prowess of her swimmers, some of whom were second-generation customers, and she freely gave advice though, ironically, she could not swim herself. The Gifford girls graduated from her academy as strong swimmers. Mixed bathing was not allowed, but Frederick had his own way of teaching his sons to swim, like many a father before and after him. Ellen’s rope was all right for the girls, but the boys were dunked unceremoniously by their father into the sea and had to swim, as if by second nature, but under his watchful eye.[10]

  ‘The swimmin’ woman’ Ellen (and her boxes and ropes) were part of a departing nineteenth century, but the singing minstrels’ show, which came from England, was looking towards the 1900s. The company erected a covered stage and introduced to the Greystones holidaymakers a new syncopated rhythm which preceded jazz.

  Not the least of the Greystones delights for the children were the establishments that hired out horse-drawn vehicles by the hour, a half day or a full day. These ‘chariots’ ranged from the old-fashioned vis-à-vis (largely for the older generation who sat decorously opposite each other under parasols) to the wagonette, which could hold a fairly big picnic party. The favourite conveyance for the Gifford children, however, was a pony and trap which they were allowed to drive themselves. The ‘pony’ could be either a donkey or a jennet, and their favourite haunt was the Glen of the Downs.

  For the Gifford children, these holidays were times of freedom and wandering over the countryside, finding fraocháns and wild strawberries in the fields about the house where they were staying, picking blackberries to make jam which was consumed while it was still warm, getting up at dawn in the chill air to pick mushrooms and then running back home to put them on the hob upside down, with a knob of butter, before eating them. There were days in the cove with Ellen, days taking turns at driving the trap, and days when they stood and listened to the strange new music coming from America via England.[11]