Unlikely Rebels (8 page)

Well, there were two old Lynch brothers, Pat and Farrell. Farrell was a process server. Pat was a good old character but he died and didn't she get around Michael Dunne and Dan to bring her to the wake – they were going to the wake and she would go with them. She went in, so she did, and she heard the songs, cut the tobacco … Mrs Dunne wasn't to have heard anything about it because at that time, do you see, it was a terrible crime for a young one to go to a wake. No women were allowed at wakes, only the immediate friends. Well, it reached Fr Clavin's ears and didn't he go up the next day and got on to Mrs Dunne about her and, sure Mrs Dunne didn't know anything about her going to the wake. What kind of a character would she be that would go out at that time of night? With the result that Mrs Dunne got rid of her. She had [another] sister who got married to Tom MacDonagh. Her son is a district justice.
[13]

Nellie not only attended a wake and learned the local ballads during her ‘cookin' woman' career, but she also had several ballads written about herself, her charm and her beauty. She liked Limerick least of her venues and most enjoyed County Meath. On one train journey, she carried a Persian kitten Isabella had given her for one of her Meath friends who particularly wanted a ‘Dublin' cat. It was closeted in a basket, and the fear was that the ticket collector would deem it against the by-laws and banish it to the luggage compartment. An animated discussion ensued. Dogs were forbidden but did this cover cats too? The consensus was that the less these officials knew, the better, and since the kitten at this stage was heaving in the basket and causing it to creak, as well as emitting a faint
miaow
, the whole carriage collaborated, and when the collector arrived they fussed and carried out various acoustic diversionary tactics – coughing, laughing and talking – and all this put him off the scent. When he had safely departed, and when all the windows and doors had been closed, it was thought that the Persian needed air and exercise, and the released kitten happily spent the rest of the journey wandering across the laps and shoulders of the passengers and even perched on top of a man's hat until Nellie's station meant necessary captivity in the basket once again. Before that, in her chat with a fellow passenger, when Nellie asked who was minding her children at home, the answer was that they were being looked after by ‘the boy' (the hired help) and that she had every confidence in him: ‘That fella,' she said ‘could mind mice at a crossroads.'
[14]

It was usual to have a helping woman who gave a hand with cleaning the demonstration venues and setting up the equipment. One of these helpers came to Nellie with a tale of woe: her son had broken the ‘weddin' present' – a pot oven. This was a major loss in a cottage household, and Nellie promised to replace it on her next trip to Dublin. The helper would have been ‘touchy' at any hint of charity, to use Nellie's expression, and so she was asked to do something in return, to keep the balance even – a mini cooperative as it were.

Grace often went to Broadstone Station in Dublin to ‘see Nellie off', and on this occasion went with her on her, so far, fruitless search for the required pot oven, which, she was told, was out of date and, if there was one in Dublin, she would most likely get it in Moore Street. When they arrived there, Nellie left her bags with Grace and went off to the recommended shop. On her return, complete with pot oven, she found Grace in conversation with an elderly lady. It was Nora Dryhurst. They had never met her before but she had simply walked over to Grace and said, ‘You must be Ernest Gifford's sister Grace. He showed me sketches of you in London.'
[15]

By 1911, all the boys had left Temple Villas, but not all the girls. Nellie was surprised, on one of her early visits home from Meath, to find that her sisters were actually receiving pocket money, something she had never enjoyed, despite her housekeeping role. Grace showed a definite artistic flair which had motivated her parents to arrange for her to study at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin and, later, on the advice of Sir William Orpen, at the Slade in London, where she was a pupil of his. It was there, in 1907, when she was nineteen years of age, that she sat for him for the portrait, a copy of which was shown by Ernest to Nora Dryhurst and which Orpen had called, somewhat prophetically,
The Spirit of Young Ireland
. He seemed to have supplied some of the jewellery she wears in the picture – she referred afterwards, jocosely, to her ‘necklace of rosary beads'. Grace spent a year at the Slade before returning to Dublin in 1908. Meanwhile,
Muriel had tried nursing but found the actuality far more demanding than her idealised concept of it had been and she had not, as yet, replaced it with anything else.
‘John' was beginning to make her way, not very lucratively, in the field of freelance journalism. Ada was experiencing a little friction with her mother, and, just as Kate had initiated Nellie into her career as rural instructress, so too Nellie now supplied the money for the fare to America where Ada wanted to exploit her undoubted artistic talent as a way of living. By the end of that year Ada had made the move to America. She kept in touch intermittently, but never returned to Ireland.

That left only Kate and, in the Victorian Age, the eldest almost automatically became her mother's household aide-de-camp and, in the case of large families, a surrogate mother to the younger ones. Such was the case with Kate Gifford. Gabriel, Nellie and Ada, the trio in the middle of the family, and only half a dozen years or so Kate's junior, sometimes saw her on a seniority pinnacle, remote from their childhood and their world. This sense of otherness most probably evolved from the fact that Bridget Hamill, in her nursery eyrie under the roof, had only a clutter of juniors at a time. Kate had well left babyhood by the time they were weaned, and she had graduated to dining full-time with their parents, not just once a week. Another factor which, perhaps, also set her apart was that she was the best-educated girl of the family. Some time after her graduation from the Royal University in 1898, she went to Germany and taught English, recalling later a noticeboard in the hall of the establishment where she taught. It set out the names and nationalities of the language teachers: there was just one odd one out. The French, Spanish and Italian teachers all hailed from a town in the country whose language they taught, but for the teaching of English, where one might expect an English name and city, there appeared instead ‘Miss Kate Gifford, Dublin, Ireland'. Her German students had no problem with this.
[16]

Kate was never considered beautiful. Apart from her strong features, dark-haired Irish beauties were the conceived stereotype of Irish good looks in her youth. Fairly tall, the blue-eyed Kate had the most uncompromising red hair of them all – her brothers called it ‘carroty' – and she had a high colour, which did not help. Despite all this, there is evidence that in Germany her hair received much admiration.

In 1957, six months before she died at the age of eighty-two, Kate went over all her papers. She decided to destroy a great bundle of correspondence consisting largely of letters from her parents during the German sojourn of their eldest daughter. The letters must have been a comfort to the young teacher in a Germany that was very different from that of today. There were no shoals of Irish students doing sabbaticals or taking summer jobs, no Irish bars for fraternisation. Kate had only the loving letters from Temple Villas, starting with the familiar salutation ‘My dear Kate' and ending with a parental benediction. Who else would keep a bundle of letters for sixty years right through all that lay before her: a return from Germany, an insurrection, a civil war and imprisonment in Kilmainham Gaol?

Frederick and Isabella have been seen as somewhat distant from their sons and daughters in their childhood years, but they must have worried when Kate was away, and how that worry, which is another name for love, must have been read by Kate between the lines of that bundle of letters, treasured over the long, long years.
[17]

Notes

The Gifford daughters still living in Ireland, Nellie, Grace, Kate, Muriel and ‘
John', were becoming increasingly part of a social metamorphosis, an extraordinary phenomenon. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, coming from several spheres of interest, from all walks of life and from everywhere in Ireland, there was a hankering after and a groping towards things Irish. The ‘hidden Ireland' of the writer Daniel Corkery was being revealed, and Dark Rosaleen (
Róisín Dubh
) of the poet James Clarence Mangan was awakening from her slumbers. The folk memory held many appalling images in its
béal oidis
(oral tradition), ballads, poems and even on its yellow handkerchiefs – not figments of the imagination but facts, corroborated by annals and reputable historians down the years. In fact, Pádraig Pearse was to declare Ireland's independence ‘In the name of God and of the
dead generations.
'

Though the movement to which the Giffords became committed was essentially a twentieth-century phenomenon, there had been repeated movements, armed and unarmed, to rescue Gaelic Ireland from the cultural extinction envisaged by her conquerors. ‘
John' was the first of Isabella's daughters to engage in this Irish Ireland, though the threads from which were woven the fabric of Gifford republicanism were there long before the Irish Ireland movement impinged on their adult lives. There were Bridget's ballads and poems, the knowledge that their grandfather, the Rev. Robert Nathaniel Burton, had died helping famine victims, their father's stories of harrowing evictions during the Land War and their fraternisation with the servants who were anti-British. In fact many anti-British hands were rocking many cradles all over the Empire – because the servants were nearly always members of the conquered races. Then, too, there was the Gifford friendship with intellectuals such as Æ and James Stephens, as well as a questioning reaction to their mother's determined stand regarding England's superiority. Lastly, there was a distinctive withdrawal, recorded by ‘
John' and Nellie, but quite probably felt by their sisters too, from a voracious empire whose militant colonialism engorged greedily the lives of many of their brothers' young classmates, leaving their womenfolk without fathers, brothers, husbands and sons.

It was curious that not one of the Gifford boys was even remotely touched by Irish patriotism. Their sister ‘
John' described them as a mixture of Fabian socialists and half-hearted unionists who remained so perhaps because they knew that those who did not conform to this political belief would be ostracised in the tennis club. There was also the further danger of career exclusion. Anyway, the three who went off to the wars were excluded geographically as well as ideologically, while Gerald Vere lay buried in Mount Jerome and Ernest showed no interest whatever in the national movement; nor did Gabriel, even when he went to America where the Gaelic movement was almost a
sine qua non
for mixing in Irish-American society and even though Ada, with whom he had always been close, was very much involved with her compatriots there. Gabriel contributed one curious little offering to Irish history, however. He did a sketch, pencil on paper, of his brother-in-law, Thomas MacDonagh, on 27 July 1912.

The Gifford sisters made up for this lack of interest. They were in the thick of the new phenomenon. Their father Frederick expressed the disbelief of fathers everywhere when, if one or other of them stayed at home in the evening, he asked bemusedly whether they were ill or if anything was the matter.

On a not-untypical day, the poet Seumas O'Sullivan invited them to the Martello Tower at Sandycove where he, Oliver St John Gogarty and Arthur Griffith were having a holiday. Griffith, normally shy and even asocial, was relaxed and happy as he rowed the lady guests around Scotsman's Bay. In return, when they were staying in a farmhouse in Avoca, County Wicklow, they invited O'Sullivan and Griffith down for a visit. Griffith was delighted with the ten-year-old son of the farm because he knew so much Irish history, and, on his return to Dublin, he sent the boy a copy of John Mitchel's
Jail Journal
, one of the great classics of Irish republicanism.
[1]

Evenings might be spent at céilís or at the Abbey Theatre. ‘
John's' description of the Abbey in those early days makes it sound like a village hall. They knew many in the audience: the Yeats family, those they had met in District Justice Reddin's home and the home of Æ, and those who were becoming known to them through ‘
John's' political writings. In fact, if a non-acquaintance arrived, it was unusual. They bought seats in the cheaper ‘pit', but if they wanted to talk during the interval to someone who had a seat in the grander stalls, they simply lifted the dividing rope and settled down beside the friend.

‘John' was contributing to an Ireland which had already, for some time, been seeking its cultural roots. Douglas Hyde, who was later to become the first
uachtarán
(president) of the twenty-six-county Free State, found a deep interest in the Irish language; Bunting and Joyce rescued the old Irish music; the interest of Petrie, Stokes, Wilde and Burton lay in the archaeological stone treasures of Ireland's ancient past; Lady Augusta Gregory, excited by the resurrected tales of Celtic mythology, wanted to immortalise them in a national theatre, while W. B. Yeats' aim was to enshrine them in his plays and verse. This was all going on while the china teacups tinkled delicately during afternoon ‘at homes' such as those of Isabella Gifford. Anglo-Irish ladies still basked in the belief that they had a civilising influence on a conquered race close enough to barbarism and at best fit only to be their servants. But other descendants of those who had ruthlessly created the Anglo-Irish Protestant state were questioning the superiority theory on which their arrogance and domination had been based. The people whom their forebears had savagely conquered had a language with both the clarity of inflected speech and an embarrassment of riches in descriptive vocabulary, as any student of Gaelic literature will know.

As well as the Anglo-Irish devotees (who also included Edward Martyn, George Moore and Æ), native scholars such as Eugene O'Curry, Father Peadar Ó Laoghaire and Father Dineen were also painstakingly conserving, in grammatical and dictionary form, the old language – the vessel of all that had been Ireland, good and bad, before the predatory invasions. John O'Donovan's
Grammar of the Irish Language
and
Annals of the Four Masters
were milestones. Eugene O'Curry, a native Irish speaker from County Clare, with no formal education, had inspired Petrie, Stokes, Todd and others with his extraordinary knowledge of ancient Irish civilisation. The newly established Catholic University of Dublin appointed him to the Chair of Archaeology and Irish Literature. His essays on Tara and on Irish round towers were world acclaimed, and he opened doors to the study of the history, literature and laws of his people.

A list of ‘Celtic' societies which were established during the nineteenth century will give some idea of the depth and scope of interest of the time's Gaelic reawakening: the Ossianic Society, the Iberno-Celtic Society, the Gaelic Union, the Ulster Gaelic Society, the Gaelic League, the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language. The Gaelic League increased from forty-three branches in 1897 to 600 in 1904, with a membership of 50,000. Some of the other organisations could be seen as dilettante groups, interested in old language treasures and lost artefacts, but as the century progressed the aims shifted towards language rehabilitation, and entwined inextricably with these newer groups were political as well as linguistic yearnings, despite the misgivings of a few.

Added to all this, at a non-scholarly level, young people were joining the Gaelic Athletic Association to play Gaelic football and hurling. They no longer needed to subject themselves to the almost inevitable racial blackballing at local tennis clubs by the Planter classes. Céilís were held in church halls, at crossroads and in kitchens, with jigs, reels, the ‘High Caul Cap' and ‘The Walls of Limerick'.

The Gifford sisters were very much part of this Celtic buzz. Nellie Gifford has left her own description of the movement:

Nothing distinctively Irish was too small or too vast for the sweeping enthusiasm of the Gaels of this period. Funds were raised by Irish concerts, and songs written to sing at them. Many of these were comic songs with a sting in them for the anti-Irish men or women. Learning Gaelic was stiff going, especially to scholars who had been working all day, so these night classes generally finished with an Irish dance … Irish girls induced sometimes reluctant boyfriends to these dances, hoping by easy stages to coax them to learn the language. Everyone was anxious to teach any visitor the various Irish dance steps …

An Englishman visiting Ireland about twenty-five years ago found a great, an almost feverish, activity all over the country for forwarding the use of Gaelic. Those pioneers for the language realised that, after all, it was the great poverty of the Irish that was the first greatest stumbling block to putting the Gaelic language back in Ireland. And so with an enthusiasm and amount of self-sacrifice they shouldered, not merely the language question, but the whole structure of Irish life which was at that time a badly-copied form of an out-of-date English model.
[2]

As well as all this, the dancing Celtic feet were not only active at the céilí. On the sports fields too they were happily used in the national games of hurling, football, rounders, camogie and handball under the aegis of the Gaelic Athletic Association, which flourished and spread its activities to every parish in Ireland. With that native-games ethos came also its language, music, song, ‘Buy Irish' campaign and, above all, political independence.
[3]

Maud Clare, who was a member of Cumann na mBan (the Women's Association), described the enthusiasm:

You would get up in the morning and think ‘what will I do for Ireland today? Will they ask me to carry a dispatch? Will I go to the Irish class tonight?
'
It was exciting – a dream we all had about a free Ireland and an Irish Ireland – our own again.
[4]

‘John' Gifford described The O'Rahilly, head of his old Kerry clan and later a founding member of the Irish Volunteers, when he returned from America a wealthy man:

The O'Rahilly made himself the employee of his country and no wage-earner ever served a master so diligently and incessantly as this head of a kingdom … He was well-known in every part of Ireland for driving his own
gluaisteán
, as he called his car … on behalf of the Gaelic League, Sinn Féin and the Irish Industrial Revival.
[5]

Other descriptions of this gradual change in ordinary Irish society, as well as in some pockets of the intellectual Anglo-Irish class, cover such phenomena as the street meetings to educate the people as to what was going on and also the encouragement of Irish industry, which found chief expression in
Aonach na Nollaig
, a Christmas fair held in the Rotunda in Dublin, at which goods of Irish manufacture only were sold. The language classes, debating societies, concerts and distribution of pamphlets were all directed towards an Ireland increasingly aware of its past and planning its future.

A very human reflection on the Irish Ireland movement, after it had developed an armed faction and spilled over into the War of Independence, came from one member of Cumann na mBan when describing how she came to be involved. Eileen Walsh's eldest brother, Phillip, who had bought her first piano for his young sister, was in the IRA, and an English sniper's bullet was to cost him his life in Dublin's North King Street during the 1916 Rising. Eileen was only sixteen when it happened, but she joined Cumann na mBan so that she could carry guns for ‘the boys'. ‘We did that to help the movement,' she said, ‘and in my case to remember Phillip. We used to go to céilís too, but that was to meet the fellas.'
[6]
And who would deny that tentative courtships and romantic attachments, as well as military alliances, have their place in the future of an embryonic nation, even though that nation was, as yet, still a dream in Irish minds.

Notes