Unlikely Rebels (30 page)

The only Irish grave of the sons of Frederick and Isabella as recorded in Nellie Gifford-Donnelly's papers is that of Gerald, with whom his mother elected to be buried, in Mount Jerome Cemetery. Edward Cecil and Liebert almost certainly lie buried in North America, Claude in London, with no record in available data of Ernest's resting place. By 1950, Gabriel seemed to have been sole survivor of the six Gifford sons, and he was still living in America.
[1]

After Muriel's tragic death in 1917 there was a gap of over thirty years before Ada, the next Gifford sister, was to die. With her death a bright, vivid light was extinguished. It would have been fitting had her coffin been draped with the Tricolour, to acknowledge the passing of Ireland's first self-appointed spy and to commemorate her joyful ride on top of the New York trolley in 1916, waving the new Irish flag. It is highly unlikely, however, that such an honour was accorded. Family papers indicate that she died in 1949 at the age of sixty-seven, and one of the fruits of her passing was renewed contact through correspondence between Gabriel and his sisters in Ireland, and in particular Nellie, these two especially drawn together by Ada's passing, the third of their nursery trio who had been like a separate family within a family.

In the exchange of letters between Gabriel and Nellie he emerges as a pleasant, loving husband and father. His comment, written on the back of a snap of himself, suggests that he inherited some of his father's humour. In his straw hat, he bears a resemblance to Winston Churchill, and this is what he has to say:

Aug 6:
Ah, here he is, not Winston as you might think at first glance. I am forbidden to send this but I am taking the law into my own hands. I meant it to be me making a sketch but they say I look more like a cop taking someone's license number. This farmer-like hat is really a smart new panama let me tell you.
[2]

In another letter he describes his meeting with Mary, who was to become his wife:

Mary, when I first met her, was acting in one of Synge's plays under the direction of J. Campbell. She was then in her late twenties, not much of an actress, but otherwise very sweet, a little woman with brown eyes and black hair. I used to take her to dinners and shows, etc. We began to like each other and got married. It has been a great success. We went through times bad enough to ruin any temper but she never was anything but cheerful, even when I wasn't. It is hard to say what it is makes a person lovable but she has it in the highest degree.
[3]

Nellie and Gabriel began to exchange gifts at Christmas and in the course of correspondence hopefully envisaged their two families making visits to America and Ireland. They recalled their nursery days and wrote of their early, haphazard education by Isabella's Mission Society friends. Gabriel lauds his St Andrew's school education and Protestant education generally in Ireland for its ‘slovenliness' and contrasts it with the rigid disciplines of Protestant education in England and Catholic education in Ireland. To support his argument, he instances great minds from Irish Protestant education: Hamilton for mathematics, Boyle for chemistry, Berkeley for philosophy, Burke for statesmanship and Wellington for military prowess. Obviously never touched, as his sisters were (and two of his brothers-in-law), by the spirit of Irish Ireland, Gabriel is dismissive of the Irish nation's determination to promote the Irish language.

His correspondence also reflects that his art became less financially rewarding than it had been, and his letters also reveal a twin interest with Nellie in their Huguenot ancestry, with his more focused historic interpretation of the purge that sent the Bissets to America. He makes a jocose claim that he should be a member of the peerage through some fault in the Cole-Hamilton Walsh line, and, though he is only four years younger than Kate, observes, ‘dear Kate. What a great old girl she is. Her handwriting is as firm as ever and her mind as clear. She is the one who should have come to America. She would have been Secretary to the President.' But he is not being patronising to someone so close to his own age because he explains how he has always seen her ‘as something like an aunt or deputy mother'. Nellie's childhood concept of Kate is even more exclusive as ‘a vague and rather terrifying elder sister distantly immersed in books in college'.
[4]

A copy of the first extant letter Nellie sent to Gabriel, dated 10 February 1950, contains a word picture of Kate. She has ‘a complexion like a rose' and her hair has faded from the old ‘carrots' to ‘golden'. Nellie asks Gabriel not to share their exchanged letters with other members of the family: ‘cut my small personality free' is how she phrases her request.
[5]

It was clear that Ada's death had brought the family closer together, but it also produced the problem of Charlie Constant, who seems to have been in a long-term relationship with her. He claimed they had been married (and that he was, therefore, entitled to her estate), but Nellie challenged this allegation. She says in her letter to Gabriel:

Ada's money, which is in the bank's care, will, I imagine, be for her brothers and sisters. But the point of the marriage must be clear. Charlie has only written the one letter to me, the one which I answered and which you saw. Could you not face Charlie, get his marriage date (if any) and verify it by a phone call to the Bureau of Marriage Licences, or whatever they call the Department. Maybe the Irish Consul could tell you the proper procedure. As the USA and Ireland both come into the picture, one end of the story must be unravelled before anything can be done with the other. Katie says she does not mean to take any steps except to cable CC and ask him again.
[6]

It is not clear what relationship there had been between this Charlie Constant and Ada Gifford but, though Gabriel and Kate show a reluctance to pursue the matter, Nellie persevered, and the Irish Consul to America finally solved the problem. Constant's claims that his birth and marriage certificates were burned were declared to be false, and Nellie referred scathingly to ‘Constant's dull tricks'.
[7]
The estate amounted to very little, and Gabriel wrote and said that his share was to go to Nellie and Maeve, for a holiday (as was decided in family conference).

Nellie shares in her letters, joyfully and nostalgically, her brother's memories of their nursery days, much to the delight of his daughter Geraldine, who loved to hear of what her respectable father was up to in his youth. He is metaphorically brought back to Rathmines via memory lane and was assured that many of the shops are still there – Lee's drapery, the Lucan Dairy and even the one ‘with the brownish red paint with no shine in it as you saw it last'.
[8]

Nellie's pride and joy in Maeve are reflected in the correspondence: her responsible post in Arks Advertising Agency, her clear soprano singing voice, her rising so early to walk her beloved dogs, her partaking in amateur dramatics, the ease with which she took to driving her first car, the fact that the two of them had never a cross word and that Nellie worried, sometimes, that she may take too much of Maeve's companionship. As against that, she mentions Maeve's ‘admirers' and the deep affection she holds for her.

Typical of those who enjoy rude health, Nellie is not wholly sympathetic about Grace's stays in nursing homes and shares her feelings with Gabriel that Grace's ill health is due to ‘too much smoking, and too little exercise'.
[9]
A greater complaint, however, shared in this correspondence with Gabriel, is reflected in her observation that the municipal libraries are prone to have books by ‘quaint Irish priests' whom she criticises for having ‘quashed' the Mother and Child Scheme proposed by Dr Noel Browne, TD.

It is obvious that Gabriel has agreed with her as she confides in him her distaste of hierocratic jurisdiction:

I am the only one of the family now who is not swamped with Ortho-dox Catholicism. It makes it a little sad for me that in my own family I have no confidence in their opinions as they are merely the opinions they are told to have … Kate offends least. Grace lays it on ‘with a shovel'.
[10]

Nellie gets really angry, however, describing how Grace started to tell her of St Jude, the saint Catholics see as the solver of lost causes. When ‘John' converts to Catholicism, Nellie expresses the hurt she felt that it had appeared in the press as a news item before Grace told her it was ‘rumoured'. There is even a little touch of Nellie's feeling about Catholicism, as she tells Gabriel in a letter written in 1958: ‘Maeve is out with the “boy” at the moment, a nice lad and nice-looking but alas of the majority.'
[11]
That ‘alas' tells it all, but may have been coloured by her own failed marriage.

Very diplomatically, Nellie observes to Gabriel in one of her letters, ‘I think from your Christmas card that your drawing has changed a lot.' Copies of his work he had sent her make it obvious that he had bowed to the Irish-American market, and his cards are much given to images of leprechauns. There is, however, in Nellie's papers, a clever sketch by him of a man looking rather like himself, battling the wind on a stormy day. There is also extant a very pleasant picture of a lady resting, with a small dog on her lap.
[12]

Asthma and heart trouble eventually took their toll on Grace. She died on 12 December 1955. Despite Nellie's impatience with her sister's small Catholic pieties, she wrote nostalgically:

I still find it hard to believe she is gone. She had many of the qualities attributed to songbirds, singing aggressively in her own patch … We miss her and will always miss her for the excited interest she took in the little things many people would not think worth a thought.

Even today a little pang went through me that I could not see her surprise at the six-inch high sweet pea in the garden. I had nursed the seed in a shed and set it out to brave the frost, which they did. Moreover, the seeds had lain in a bureau two years. She loved any young, growing things, whether children, animals, cultures or ideas … Asthma over five or more years wrecked her health.
[13]

It was obvious that Grace's affection for her favourite niece and nephew, Maeve and Donagh, was reciprocated, and there is evidence that Donagh, as well as Mr Burke, her solicitor friend, kept an eye on things for her.
[14]

Grace's death was a lonely one. Maeve left the following, brief note on what transpired:

At that time I was working in Harcourt Street so it was very convenient … Her doctor rang me to say he could not gain admission (he visited her constantly). I rang the landlord and John Burke. Landlord met us at the flat and opened the door. We found Grace (fully dressed) on the floor, slumped against the side of the bed. The gas fire was lit. Her death was clearly sudden and unexpected.
[15]

So the bride with the great, sad eyes looking into a futureless marriage would no more smoke her forbidden cigarettes, no more defiantly sit out the national anthem. There is evidence that she had become reclusive in her declining years, and even somewhat asocial. She died the poorest of the Giffords, had never owned a house and left assets of less than £200, which, even in the 1950s, was no fortune. Her generosity, ill health and a diminishing ability to practise her craft had affected her economically. Her few effects included a sewing machine, with which she made many of her clothes, a talent she no doubt inherited from her mother. In a roughly pencilled note dated 8 May 1956, Nellie has recorded, ‘Gave Fiona circle and sword ring – and loose stone cross (for Jack Plunkett). Rosary beads and Joe's confirmation prayerbook.'
[16]
So the scrapbook and bronze medal may have been deemed by Grace fit for rejection, but these other very personal items, apart from the major items on loan to museums, were carefully preserved for a period of almost forty years. Grace left also her clever, insightful sketches and some evocative poems that expressed her conviction that the troubled times, the gentle term used in Ireland to describe those difficult years, would eventually bear good fruit:

To the Leaders

Little we thought who watched your strength and power

That you would be ‘defeated
'
'neath the sod;

The flag is furled that knew your glorious hour,

Your eyes are closed now by the hand of God.

(And yet from age to age remember we

Christ did not die in vain on Calvary.)

Grace Plunkett,
Larkfield, Kimmage,
County Dublin, 1916

This had been written in Joseph's old home after his execution in 1916 and before the ensuing War of Independence. When Grace died, a healing branch was extended to her sisters by the Plunkett family, who offered a place in the family burial plot. It was Joseph's younger sister, Fiona, most close to Grace during her stay in Larkfield, who initiated this arrangement.
[17]

Archdeacon Sherwin had received Grace into the Catholic Church before her marriage, and it was he who celebrated her requiem mass in St Kevin's church, Harrington Street. It was not a huge, public funeral – Eddie Kelly said there were only about twenty members of the public there, apart from the Gifford and Plunkett families and veterans from the War of Independence, including the President Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh, Éamon de Valera, Seán MacBride, Dr James Ryan, Oscar Traynor and Harry Colley. Despite her expressed distaste for a truncated Ireland, Grace was accorded full military honours, with a firing party and a bugled last salute. The Irish newspapers gave ample coverage to the funeral. Appropriately, the comprehensive and moving obituary in
The Irish Press
was written by Anna Kelly, the name used by May Kelly, the oldest of the Kelly children, who had metaphorically jumped over the gate of Kilmainham Gaol on the back of Grace's magnified Rex. Another obituary included an observation by her nephew, Donagh MacDonagh, who had helped her look after her business affairs and her medical expenses: