Each nest was individually numbered and consisted of a rough shelter measuring some nine feet by seven feet and about four and a half feet from the ground.
You had to crouch down and crawl inside as a beast would have to crouch for cover and there was no standing upright once you were inside. He described them as big, rude birds’ nests, compacted with harsh branches and turned topsy-turvy on the ground. There was no chimney, not even a hole in the roof, which generally sloped forward. The smoke from the fire, which burned on the floor of the hut, had to pass through the door when the wind was right, otherwise it reeked slowly through the crannied walls. In some of these nests there were as many as eight women. In them they slept, cooked and ate. If they were sick, they would just lie there and there they would die.
The nests were in various levels of decay and disrepair. Greenwood was taken in by nest Number 5. Outside he saw a beautiful girl, neatly dressed in a clean, starched cotton gown, bright white cotton stockings and well-fitting boots. She was washed and her hair was combed. Squatting outside were two dishevelled-looking wretches, wearing filthy frieze petticoats, thrown loosely over their backs. Their hair was tangled and dirty and straggled over their naked shoulders and unwashed faces. One of the women was holding a small infant to her breast and was making very strong looks at Jimmy the car-man.
The pretty girl addressed, saying in perfectly good English, ‘Good day Sir, and will you walk into our little house?’ At the same moment the girl who was holding the child, squatting by the front of nest rose up and attacked Jimmy, using terrible language and obscenities. It seemed that Jimmy had known this girl previously and this matter proved to raise some questions.
Greenwood went inside the nest, leaving Jimmy to deal with the young woman who was determined to verbally attack him and rightly so if this was the predicament that he had left the poor girl and child in. Inside he saw a shelf to hold a teapot, crockery, a candle, and a box in which the women kept their few possessions. Upturned saucepans were used as stools, and the musty straw for bedding was pushed to one side during the day. At night the fire within the shelter was covered with a perforated pot, and the women undressed to sleep in the straw. In summertime the nests gave some shelter, but in winter the wind whistled through them.
When Greenwood crawled out of the nest, the attractive young girl said she hoped that he would come again when they were less occupied with domestic cares. She had introduced herself as Miss Clancy. Jimmy was still being attacked and when he saw he could now leave, he hopped up on the car without any hesitation and turned to Greenwood, exclaiming, ‘Did anyone iver hear the like ov them divils? It’s disgusting entirely!’ Greenwood being a gentleman of principle and standing, realised it was a sceptical situation and did not indulge in any of Jimmy’s fanciful talk and quickly ordered him to drive on.
Although Jimmy wanted to race the Scottish Queen out of the place, Greenwood insisted that he trot slowly through the camp so he could get a good look at what was going on around him and speak to the women there.
He found out that all the women were Irish and came from different parts of the country. They were seen as fallen women and outcasts of what was considered respectable society. Some of them had followed a soldier from another station, others came to seek a former lover, while the majority had come because of necessity or desperation. Some were women who became pregnant out of wedlock and followed their estranged lover to the camp and lost them there, or were admonished with blows and told to go away. Some in the same condition were banished by a lord or master who had his way with them and now saw them as an embarrassment and nuisance.
The women lived, received their families, gave birth and died in the ‘nests’. Their clothing consisted of a frieze skirt with nothing on top except another frieze around the shoulders. In the evenings when the younger women went to meet the soldiers in the uninhabited gorse patches, they dressed up in crinolines, petticoats and shoes and stockings.
The older women remained behind to mind the children. Greenwood counted four older women altogether, and they also prepared food.
It must have been heartbreaking to see children and babies living in such conditions, but they seemed to be well looked after and were given priority when it came to milk and fresh nourishment. Greenwood stated that the babies were seen as prized possessions by the wrens in the various nests and seemed to give a nest with a baby in it a sense of higher status. If a child became sick it was taken to the workhouse as the doctor would not go to the bush. And the women that lived in the bush hated the thought of the workhouse as the conditions there were worse than the furze bushes of the Curragh.
All the takings of a nest were pooled, and the diet of potatoes, bread and milk was purchased on the few days when the women were allowed to attend the market in the camp. Otherwise it was out-of-bounds, but an army water-wagon brought them in a regular supply. Water was considered a luxury and every pint had to be paid for. The alternative was to drink the foul water collected on the plain. A wren named Mary Burns died through exposure and drinking the fetid water. Other luxuries were tea, tobacco and sugar.
Booze was popular too, especially whiskey and at night many of the wrens became heavily intoxicated and wild. Greenwood, being a conservative Victorian gentleman, was very distressed by this and was even quite frightened.
Following his visit to Kildare, Greenwood published a disturbing description of the condition of the women and, in the following year, when the Curragh of Kildare Act was passed it enabled the authorities to take action to regulate the use of the plains.
The gentleman at the Pall Mall Gazette decided that, contrary to popular belief, the women did not live in the furze because they were low-life creatures who revelled in debauchery. They were there because it was well known that those who were forced to seek refuge in the workhouse at Naas lived in even worse conditions, with rats, rampant disease and dangerous conditions. The poor souls who ended up there were treated horrifically by the brutal establishment who ran that cursed hellhole.
Those poor souls had no mercy shown to them by the authorities and especially the clergy. In November 1864, an article sometime attributed to Charles Dickens called ‘Stoning the Desolate’ appeared in his famous literary magazine All the Year Round (issue no. 292, 26 November 1864). The article narrated this powerful and damning story about a wren who was beaten by a priest. The account was given by an anonymous army officer, who had spent time at the Curragh. Dickens felt compelled to tell his tale as follows:
There are, in certain parts of Ireland and especially upon the Curragh of Kildare, hundreds of women, many of them brought up respectably, a few perhaps luxuriously, now living day-after-day, week-after-week, and month-after-month, in a state of solid heavy wretchedness, that no mere act of imagination can conceive. Exposed to sun and frost, to rain and snow, to the tempestuous east winds, and the bitter blast of the north, whether it be June or January, they live in the open air, with no covering but the wide vault of heaven, with so little clothing that even the blanket sent down out of heaven in a heavy fall of snow is eagerly welcomed by these miserable outcasts.
The misery that abounds round our large camps in England is a load heavy enough for us to bear, but it is not at all to be compared to what can be seen daily in Ireland. If one of these poor wretches were to ask but for a drop of water to her parched lips, or a crust of bread to keep her from starving, Christians would refuse it; were she dying in a ditch, they would not go near to speak to her of human sympathy, and of Christian hope in her last moments.
Yet, their priests preach peace on earth, good will among men, while almost in the same breath they denounce from their altars intolerant persecution against those who have, in many cases, been more sinned against than sinning. This is not a thing of yesterday. It has been going on for years, probably fifty, perhaps a hundred.
… Twenty years ago, in eighteen forty-four, I remember the priests coming into the barracks at Newbridge, with a request that the command
ing officer would grant him a fatigue party of soldiers to go outside and pull down a few booths which these poor creatures had raised against the barrack wall. The priest, I am sorry to say, had his request granted, and at the head of the soldiers, on a cold winter’s day, he went out and burned down the shelter these unfortunates had built. At this time it was quite common for the priest, when he met one of them, to seize her and cut her hair off close. But this was not all. In the summer of forty-five, a priest, meeting one of the women in the main street of Newbridge, there threw her down, tearing from off her back the thin shawl and gown that covered it, and with his heavy riding-whip so flogged her over the bare shoulders that the blood actually spirited over his boots. She all the time never resisted, but was only crying piteously for mercy.
Of the crowd that formed round the scene, not a man or a woman interfered by word or action. When it was over, not one said of the miserable soul, ‘God help her.’ Five days afterwards I saw this girl, and her back then was still so raw that she could not bear to wear a frock over it. Yet when she told me how it was done, and who did it, she never uttered a hard word against the ruffian who had treated her so brutally.
The author stated that if any person attacked an animal as savagely back in England, as the priest had beaten that poor girl, the strong arm of the law would have been stretched out between him and his victim.
He was disgusted that in Newbridge there was no one, man enough to take the law in his own hands, by seizing the whip from the priest and giving him on his own skin a lesson of mercy.
He felt that in Ireland, inhumanity of this sort was indeed encouraged; where shopkeepers and food suppliers considered it a part of religion not to supply these outcasts with the common necessaries of life; where the man who would dare allow one of them to crawl into his barn or cowshed to lie down and die, would be denounced from the altar, and be ordered to do penance for his charity. These were the author’s words on the matter: ‘I need not say, what is the result of this refusal of all Christian help and pity to the fallen’.
It seems that the officer who had passed on this account was aware of the corruption and darkness that enshrouded the Church long before anyone had the courage to challenge it, and it is only in recent years now that it has indeed been exposed.
NELLIE CLIFDEN
One particular Curragh wren, called Nellie Clifden, brought the British aristocracy into great disrepute.
From the seventeenth century, the Curragh Camp was a centre point for large numbers of military forces, including those serving during the Napoleonic wars. The first permanent buildings were erected there in 1855 in preparation for the Crimean War. It is still used to this day as a training ground for the Irish Army. In the mid-nineteenth century there were many soldiers living there and the Curragh Camp had developed a great reputation by then as a fine place to straighten out a young man, especially if he were showing signs of a wayward nature. There was a strict regime of routine and discipline and status did not mean one would get off lightly.
In 1861 it seemed like the perfect place to send the roughish nineteen-year-old Prince Albert (or more commonly known as Bertie to his friends) with the hope of knocking him into shape and maybe making a decent king out of him some day. He was sent for training with the Second Battalion of the Grenadier Guards (the most elite infantry regiment in the British Army), and his training was to last for ten weeks in total. He began his duties in July of that year and it was suggested that he would be promoted every two weeks so that when his mother, Queen Victoria, came to visit she could witness her son commanding a battalion. It was hoped that this would give her some comfort and confidence in her wayward boy. The Illustrated London News tirelessly reported on the Prince as he went through the motions and promotions in fine detail.
On 24 August 1861, Victoria and Albert made a day trip to the Curragh Camp to see how their son was getting on. It was a fine day and the proud parents saw their son command his troops and watched as they carried out various battle formations, both on foot and on horseback, and displayed the loud and indeed frightening artillery. Albert even wrote to King William I of Prussia stating that Bertie did his part at the Curragh very well.
Unfortunately, what they did not take into consideration was the well hidden and secret sorority of wrens based in the plains of the Curragh. These fallen women were a major part of army extracurricular life. The stories have it that Bertie was no stranger to the wrens and indeed one wren in particular: Nellie Clifden.
Some said Nellie had been an actress and was well connected but had got herself into some sort of trouble and had sadly found herself among the sorority of lost souls known as the Curragh Wrens. One story stated that she had become pregnant by a soldier and had followed him to the Curragh only to be told by him that he wanted nothing more to do with her. She had no choice but to become one of the wrens. Nellie was a good-humoured and good-natured girl and the officers considered her the best of the wrens.
In gentlemen’s clubs and stately mansions across Ireland and Britain, Nellie Clifden was about to become an extremely well-known name. Indeed, Nellie was to be brought before what was to be her most esteemed client – none other that Prince Albert, the Prince of Wales.
Nellie clearly impressed Bertie greatly, who became totally infatuated with her. Three nights later, she was summoned back for a second visit. And the following night, the young prince excitedly wrote ‘NC, third time’ in his diary.
But it was not long before word of the affair was to get out and jokes were starting to be told around the gentlemen’s clubs about Nellie Clifden, ‘The Princess of Wales’. Prince Albert’s father was devastated by this news. His greatest fear was that the Irish girl would become pregnant and file a paternity suit against the prince, thereby destroying his son’s chances of securing a wealthy European princess bride.
When Albert broke the news to Victoria, he spared her the ‘disgusting details’. The couple agreed that, first and foremost, an early marriage was now essential or the prince would be ‘lost’. Within three weeks of ‘NC third time’, Bertie was plucked from the Curragh and shipped to Germany where he was introduced to Princess Alexandra of Denmark. Albert and Victoria had determined she should be his future wife. Bertie was then enrolled at Cambridge University and placed under constant surveillance.
The entire affair might have blown over, but for Albert’s decision to visit his rakish son in Cambridge. ‘Bin recht elend’ (I feel miserable)’ Bertie complained to his diary the day before they met. It was an emotional rain-swept encounter in which Albert forgave his son but warned that ‘forgiveness could not restore the state of innocence and purity which (you have) lost forever’.
Three weeks later, on 14 December, Albert died. His death was said to be caused by typhoid fever. Later it was believed to be stomach cancer. However, for the grief-stricken Queen Victoria, it was quite clear that her beloved husband had died because of his shock at the carnal night, or nights, their son had spent with an Irish harlot. ‘I never can or shall look at him without a shudder,’ she wrote of Bertie. For the next forty years, Victoria openly and repeatedly treated her son and heir with utter contempt and did all she could to frustrate his ambitions. It is also believed that as a result of all this, Bertie was sent on many foreign expeditions, which were to become the royal tours that we know of today.
As for Nellie, her fate still remains anonymous. It was not known if she was paid off by the royal family, or worse, carefully dispatched under their orders. She may have changed her name and gone on to do greater things in the field of theatre and the arts. Or did the poor girl simply return to the grim furze bushes of the Curragh and lived out what was left of her life at the mercy of the soldiers. Apart from a popular racing mare cheekily named ‘Miss Clifden’ by one of Bertie’s friends, Nellie’s name and life story vanished from the archives. But the impact of her meeting with Bertie over 150 years ago would send ripples through the royal family long after her death.
Whatev
er the fate of Nellie Clifen and her fellow wrens, their memory lives on, and on a cold windy day in the middle of the Curragh plains if you listen very carefully you can still hear the mournful, lamenting sighs of the spirits of the Curragh wrens.
Nellie Clifden, what ever happened to you?
Vanquished, vilified, vanished
For you knew too much of what was true
Did they make you disappear,
Another victim of the great Royal fear?
Does your ghost still wander the Curragh Plain
Trapped in an eternal realm of shame?
A starving child clings to your breast
As you shelter inside a wild wren’s nest,
Hiding from the terrible gale,
The howling winds
And the eternal rain,
Your body spent, exhausted and frail
As the night closes in around you.
Nellie Clifden what ever happened to you?
You came into this life
Your heart was pure and true.
Wide-eyed little girl, innocent and beautiful
Now your innocence has been taken away
And you would sell yourself for a penny
So that you might make it through the day.
Nellie when the prince took you in his arms
Did you fall for all his whispered charms?
Did you think this might be your chance
To laugh again, to sing and dance?
Did he promise to take you
From this terrible place
That robbed the smile from your face?
But fairy-tales are only make-believe
Sooner than later, they must take leave.
With only memories left to grieve,
Did you return to a wild wren’s nest
And take your child back to your breast
Comforting her with a solemn lullaby
Nellie, did anyone ever answer your cries?
Kildare Folk Tales Page 10