Unlikely Rebels (29 page)

Readers who used to take delight in the clever cartoons that sometimes adorned the numbers of
The Irish Review
signed
Grace Gifford
will welcome a handsome quarto just issued by Mr William Tempest of the Dundealgan Press, Dundalk, at the price of half a crown … The likeness in many is well caught, the drawing is excellent, but the whole spirit of the work is too satirical.
[15]

Grace's satire was, in fact, variously described as gentle, impish or even ‘mischievous'. In any event, it had made her a little money. The impishness surfaced in recent years in one of Grace's cartoons at Taylor de Vere's gallery in Kildare Street: it was called irreverently
On Board the HMS Hi You
!
[16]
Another signed, pen-and-ink cartoon,
The Abbey Players
, sold at Adam's in 1996.
[17]

In complete contrast had been Grace's cartoons of the Simon Enquiry into the murder of Francis Sheehy Skeffington during Easter Week 1916. These had reflected the artist's contempt for that enquiry. For some, her most interesting piece of work was a page of sketches, a sort of potted Irish history, to counteract conscription for the First World War. These were not money-spinners, but she did derive a small income from commercial advertising of such commodities as soap, Clarke's shoes, the Irish Sweepstakes, biscuits and Gaeltacht industries. Grace was very businesslike in her approach and made out a schedule of deadlines for the various publications and the exact space she would require.

Between them,
Irish Life
and
Irish Fun
published over eighty of Grace's cartoons, and other publications which used her work included some still known, others long since gone:

Bystander Irish Radio Journal
Catholic Pictorial Irish Sketch
Éire Irish Women's Weekly
Herald Punch
Honesty Sunday Independent
Ideal Irish Homes Tatler & Sketch
Irish Independent The Studio

It is estimated that her cartoon output was in the hundreds, possibly a thousand pieces. None of her work looked as if it were ‘dashed off'. There is sometimes not only the mischievous element and the clever likenesses but also a delicacy of colour, never crude – particularly the use of a soft mauve, not usually associated with the more strident colours of many cartoons.

Colm Ó Lochlainn had worked with Joseph Plunkett before Easter Week in the disclosure of
the Castle Document
.
Now his publishing firm, The Sign of the Three Candles, published a series of Grace's cartoons of Abbey actors and actresses in a book called
Doctors Recommend It
. Its 200 subscribers had backed a winner. It was, deservedly, very well received, but Grace decided against a second edition in favour of another set of cartoons, equally successful. The editions were called respectively
Twelve Nights at the Abbey Theatre
and
An Abbey Tonic in Twelve Doses.
Drama
, an English journal, republished the first of these two in 1949.
[18]

Grace dabbled in poetry, more successfully, it has to be said, than Nellie. Her love for and admiration of her niece Maeve is immortalised in verse, and Joseph would have admired the poem she published on the humble animal who bore Christ to his Passion:

‘
The Entry into Jerusalem
'
Pace slow in mournful tread of humble beast.
Heed not the shouts of joy, the palm-strewn road.
Reluctant move, suffer the stinging goad,
lest you should speed the horror in the East.
Lest you should see, beneath the rising sun
the knout, the crown of thorns, the awful tree:
Oh humble beast, forever honoured be
for on your back there rides the Holy One.
[19]

She signed herself ‘Grace Plunkett' on this occasion but she also sometimes used Gráinne Uí Phluncéid, Grace Gifford-Plunkett and Grace Vandeleur Gifford Plunkett, still proud of her kinsman's name, Vandeleur, because of his nineteenth-century association with the founding of the Ralahine Commune experiment in County Clare, where there was thought for the tenantry as well as for the landlord's profit – not the more usual exploitation and indifference. It was another Plunkett, Horace, who initiated the cooperative movement in Ireland. So the juxtaposition of the two names in Grace's signature – Vandeleur and Plunkett – however coincidental their closeness, forms an odd linking up of two of the landlord class who cared.

A shared prayer with Joseph was the ‘bookmark' of St Teresa of Ávila, found among Grace's memorabilia:

Let nothing disturb thee;
Let nothing affright thee.
All things pass away;
God only is changeless.
Patience wins all things.
To him who possesses God
nothing is wanting.
God only sufficeth.

It is written on the back of her poem ‘The Entry into Jerusalem' in her own handwriting, and the first letter of the word ‘patience' is written with her distinctive P – a hallmark of her work, like a circle with an upright sword through it, a sort of pictorial representation of the title of Joseph's book of poems.

During the 1920s and 1930s we get brief glimpses of Grace about Dublin, sketching, attending meetings of the Old Dublin Society, visiting friends – the Kellys on the North Circular Road and the Burkes in Rathgar, calling on her sisters, especially Nellie in Drumcondra, and visiting the cinema.

Lest there be any doubt as to Grace's political leanings during this time, there is no better way to show her being a ‘sea-green incorruptible' than the recollections of her niece Maeve during her late childhood and early adolescent years. Grace often brought Maeve on visits to the cinema or theatre. In those days the National Anthem was played after every social event, and the audience all stood silently and respectfully during its performance – honouring their hard-won freedom: all except one member of the audience that is, because Grace Plunkett refused to stand for a state for which her husband did not die – a truncated twenty-six counties. Maeve recalled that she enjoyed the outings but dreaded the finale when she stood with everyone else for ‘Amhrán na bhFiann', while her aunt remained determinedly seated, an embarrassment to self-conscious adolescence.
[20]

Notes

The Gifford daughters had been involved with all the major episodes of Ireland's twentieth-century bid for freedom: the catalytic strike of 1913, the anti-
conscription campaign, the insurrection of Easter Week, the War of Independence and the Civil War. The shambolic Boundary Commission ended with the signing away of the six northern counties by W. T. Cosgrave, Kevin O'Higgins, Ernest Blythe and John O'Byrne, leaving the nationalists in the north of Ireland still socially imprisoned, without votes and often without houses or jobs.
[1]
After the Civil War, Kate, Nellie and Grace stopped being hands-on involved with any turbulent rejection of the Treaty: only ‘
John' remained an active republican, partly through her writing but partly also because her friends were not only from the ‘arty' stratum of Dublin society but also from the more persistently republican elements. In fact, Maeve Donnelly recalled a visit she and her mother made to Wicklow town where ‘
John' was acting as substitute editor to
An Phoblacht
, its editor, Frank Ryan, having gone to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
[2]
This would have been in the mid-1930s, when de Valera was coming down heavily on extremists.

The Treaty ended only armed conflict with Britain: the Economic War started with de Valera's refusal to pay any more land annuities. Britain retaliated by rejecting Irish cattle; de Valera replied by rejecting British coal, leaving Irish householders with the doubtful joy of sodden turf. The Economic War ended with Ireland paying, in full and final settlement, £10 million for land annuities. The Irish ports, still held by Britain under the Anglo-Irish Treaty, were given back to Ireland. The return of these crucial ports enabled de Valera to opt out of the Second World War, when Britain declared war on Germany on 1 September 1939. Britain's use of these ports would have made Irish neutrality impossible.

There is no mention anywhere during these years of Ernest Gifford, but the four sisters living in Ireland – Kate, Nellie, Grace and ‘John' – kept in touch with him. They were now coping with the strictures of the Emergency. Nellie has left a pencilled note jotting down home details of her stringent day-to-day living during this time: Grace, obviously not as economically restricted as she had been before receiving her state pension, tried, on her visits to Nellie and Maeve, to bring food that would then have been rationed. A note records that Kate took them to a Local Defence Force concert and a show called
Signal Fires.
Mention is made of helping out ‘John' with a rent problem. A footnote to the pencilled jotting gives a brief look at what the family were engaged in:

Summary, 1943

Kate at Hospitals Commission.

John at Views and News (Roleograph)

Finian mending films at Paramount Reuters' Office, Middle Abbey Street.

Maeve advanced at last … to pen and ink illustration.
[3]

There is a further note which lists prize money Maeve had won for artistic endeavours, one in Belfast on 9 February and two on 21 July – one first prize and another ‘special prize'. She was now illustrating books and obviously doing well.
[4]

Muriel's son and daughter, Donagh and Barbara, were also leading contented lives, as was Eric, Claude's son, and ‘John's' son, Finian. In fact, all the children of the Temple Villas Giffords were making their way in the world. In contrast to the twelve offspring of Frederick and Isabella and the twenty-three children of Isabella's grandmother, Emily, these
Irish
grandchildren numbered only six. Claude's son, Eric was the eldest grandchild. He had been born in 1906 and spent some time living with his grandmother, Isabella. He also remained in contact with his Aunts Kate and Nellie over the years. Some time after Claude's death Kate visited Eric and his mother in London. Ernest simply fades out of the family news. It is very interesting, however, to see family traits carried on down the generations: the old ability in art keeps cropping up, and also the love of animals. The following excerpt from the
Cork Weekly Examiner
, accompanying a picture of Eric, publicised his London exhibition of paintings:

Thirty-one-year-old Dubliner, Eric Gifford, nephew of Mrs Gifford-Wilson, Secretary of the 1932 Tailteann Games, and of Dublin artist, Grace Plunkett, whose first ‘one-man' show of paintings is now at the Wertheim Gallery, London.

Mr Gifford spent six years in the Near East and most of his pictures were painted in Greece and Cyprus. He has vivid memories of Easter Week, 1916; a sniper was killed on the roof of his parents' Baggot Street house. He left Ireland in 1920 to study in Rome.

He was in Madrid and Barcelona when Alfonso was driven from Spain in 1931. When he arrived in Cyprus the following year he witnessed the rebellion there, when the government house, occupied by Sir Ronald Storrs, the governor and commander-in-chief, was burned. He was at Athens at the time of the Venezilist revolt a few years later, and was in Spanish Morocco when last summer's Franco revolt began. He just managed to escape through Tangier with his mother, but many of his paintings had to be left behind, as well as his personal belongings.
[5]

Eric's work in Morocco was originally as a civil engineer, but in 1957 he wrote to his Aunt Nellie to tell her that, though the newspaper he had been working for had closed down, its editor had recommended him to Radio Africa, and a new career took him to South Africa. It was part of the Radio Andorra/Madrid/Lisbon chain of commercial radio stations, and Eric was the only English speaker. He was stationed in Tangier, where he had a circle of friends, and liked it there, so he resisted an official inclination to place him in Casablanca. Eric's droll description of his lifestyle is worth recording: ‘where there's a revolution, I'm there!'
[6]
Five revolutions, beginning in Ireland and ending in Morocco, support his claim.

The second Gifford grandson (Muriel's son Donagh), who remembered May 1916 only vaguely, when his father was executed in Kilmainham Gaol, grew up to be a judge, a poet (like his father) and also a playwright: his
Happy as Larry
production was very successful. Although the MacDonagh family effectively abducted him from his Aunt Kate's home in Philipsburgh Avenue, there seemed never to have been any animosity or ill-feeling as far as he was concerned between the two families. He became a district justice, but we get an insight into the man who was Muriel's firstborn from his verse on the card sent one Christmas from him and his wife Nuala. It must be one of the most arresting word pictures of the Annunciation:

In no rich robes of Babylonian stuff the maiden walks the simple garden dreaming of quiet marriage to her Carpenter. From her still beauty tree flower and gilded bee borrow new loveliness and the courtly fountain mirrors her grace; tuned to her steps, the music of all nature is grown sweet until from the magnificent heaven falls a shining Messenger dazzling the earth, announcing tidings more terrible than ever brazen trumpet sounded in peace or war. The maiden bows in obedience to that awful word and in the garden spring light is blasted and the air is rank with smoky torches; dim with presage of a Saviour betrayed.
[7]

Donagh remained in touch with his mother's family. He was a special favourite of his Aunt Grace, and that affection was obviously reciprocated in the way he looked out for her when her health failed.
[8]
Grace and Kate had been the surrogate mothers of Donagh and Barbara in the immediate aftermath of their mother's death.

The only other Gifford grandson was Finian, whose artistic bent lay in photography, which materialised into cinematic reproductions, and he not only cared for Reuter's newsreels at Paramount's Abbey Street office but was also a cinema projectionist. His love of animals is reflected in numerous snapshots of his dog, but he had a more practical view of the more mundane aspects of daily living than his mother: it was his practicality that steered their domestic ship through economic storms with which the captain, ‘John', was less able to cope.

Barbara, Donagh's young sister, was the oldest granddaughter. Her marriage to Liam Redmond, the Abbey actor, was a happy one, and they had three children. Their home welcomed Muriel's sisters, and Kate was a particularly welcome visitor always – a great favourite of Liam.

The second granddaughter, Maeve, grew to be a lady of great charm and integrity, twinning the genetic characteristics of art and love of animals. Even in her senior years she was beautiful, yet there was almost a complete dearth of photographs of her. In correspondence, Nellie described, nonchalantly, that Maeve got up at 6.30 a.m. so that she could walk the dogs. There is a word picture left by the late Frances White, who was Secretary to the North Dublin Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
[9]
Frances said it was ‘something to see' this beautiful young woman with long, curly hair, walking a bevy of small dogs along Carlingford Road in Drumcondra in the earlier hours of the morning, before going to work. Maeve became Assistant Secretary of Arks Advertising Agency. She took part in amateur dramatics and had her share of admirers. Animals were a particular love of hers, and she gave her services unstintingly to the North Dublin SPCA for most of her adult life. She was its treasurer for more than twenty years and its representative on the Dublin SPCA Committee. I can vouch for her unfailing and punctual attendance at their meetings. She listened to the points made in any relevant discussion, said very little, but cast her vote decisively. At one meeting, however, a matter arose concerning bloodsports which touched a nerve, and this quiet lady vehemently made known her abhorrence of such activities. Her words were concise, forceful and fruitful. She was also Honorary Secretary of the Shetland Sheepdog Club and, later, of the Japanese Chins Club, of which breed she had four – Alannah, Joy, Serena and Suki – as well as a grey parrot called Rocky who lived to be forty-three. Apart from art and love of animals, Maeve Donnelly had a third, very charming, genetic characteristic: like her Aunt Kate she had a most musical speaking voice and sang very sweetly.

The youngest Gifford granddaughter, Geraldine, was born in the USA to Gabriel and his wife Mary. She was said to resemble Maeve in her good looks. She pursued a successful professional career and married a chemist named John Topliss from Nottingham, England, in 1958.

In 1949, ‘John' published a series of articles called ‘Dublin Fifty Years Ago', in the
Irish Weekly Independent.
They were directed at Irish emigrants and brought Gabriel, on his reading them, in touch with ‘John' again. In 1950 he and Nellie started writing to one another after Ada's death. Nellie retained copies of her correspondence, and from these letters can be traced the receding tides of the lives of the children who had played in the top storey of the house in Temple Villas and the incoming tides of the next generation: the normal ebb and flow of family life.
[10]

Notes