Have just read “SEVENTY YEARS YOUNG” the memoirs of Elizabeth (“Daisy”) Countess of Fingall née Burke born in Moycullen, County Galway in 1866 into a rather ‘stately’ Roman Catholic family and married at the age of 17 to a man of 24, whose passion was hunting in County Meath. I enjoyed it for lots of reasons. She lived through some of most turbulent times of the modern Irish Nation and was acquainted with many of its most important historical figures. She was vivacious and perceptive and just a few clips will illustrate better what I mean than any analysis by me.
p45. “I had never seen Mr. Parnell then. But … had a schoolgirl already heard or felt something of his fascination? His picture had been in all the papers. He was no wild Irishman, no stage Irishman for the English to mock at. He was, like many Irish leaders, far more English than Irish in temperament. (Perhaps the love that Ireland wins from the stranger has some greater strength and magic than that which she wins from her own sons. There is enchantment in it, like the wonder of love at first sight that can never be touched by a slow falling in love, however good that may be.)”
p79. “Hunting, he learnt to know the country, the mystery and wisdom of it as it must be learnt in boyhood or girlhood if it is ever to be fully possessed.”
p120. “There is – I repeat it, as I have often repeated it – no better test of the man you consider as a husband than to spend a day hunting with him. The other alternative (less easy) is to go on a journey with him. For, after all, what is life, but a journey?”
p123. “There were two Percies, both of whom the King liked: Percy Chubb, the American, and Percy La Touche, the Irishman. ‘The two old men,’ he called them, and would ask for them to be included in the Jamesons’ party at Stowlangtoft when he was going there. Percy’s stories took ages to tell. There were long and inimitable conversations, told with a sly look in the teller’s eye. No one would listen to Percy now. He said one or two very witty things, which I have always remembered. Once we must have been discussing marriage, for he said: ‘It doesn’t much matter who you marry, my lady, for at the end of a week you will find you have married someone else.’ And on another occasion he assured me: ‘Believe me, little lady, you’ll find out some day that the pain of regret is far worse than that of remorse, for though you may be sorry for what you have done, you can never get back what you have missed.’
p148. “He (Horace Plunkett) loved slogans and presently he found one for Ireland. ‘Better farming, better business, better living.’ Another saying of his was: ‘The more business there is in politics and the less politics there is in business, the better for both.’ And another wise one, ‘Irish history is for all England to remember and all Ireland to forget.’
p152. “I loved my tower and the security of soul that it gave me. I think every one needs some such fortress of their own into which no one else may enter. The French have a saying that most of our troubles come from not being sufficiently alone. They can come from being too much alone, of course, also. But my tower-room gave me the sense of isolation and security that one may derive from the secret and impregnable places of one’s soul.
p190. “‘This place must be lovely in the spring,’ I said to Lady Zetland. ‘Oh, my dear,’ she said, ‘I am sure it is. But we never see it in the spring. We have to be in London then. And then in the summer, Scotland, and in winter South for the shooting. We only get just this glimpse of Aske.’ Poor prisoners of their many possessions! There were many people like them then, who were never free, and never saw their country houses at the loveliest time.”
p206. “‘I’ll be there, Miss, when the night kisses the dawn,’ he answered.
p211. Once, going to Mount Stewart, I travelled to the North, via Carlingford Lough and Newry, and as I drove through the town I noticed the great number of churches in it, and said to the jarvey: “What a religious people they must be here!”“God bless your soul, ma’am,” he answered. “Sure, it’s not religion at all—it’s shpite!”
p225. It was a very hot summer, even in Meath—the only cool place being the house, within its thick walls. I lay on the sofa in the library, with Fingall and the dogs running in and out. And how glad I was, at evening, to slip into my big four-post bed, and lie there, listening to the lovely sound of silence, broken now and again by the bleating of the sheep and the cawing of the rooks.
p231. Unlike other Englishmen and Scotsmen who came to Ireland in one capacity or other, Arthur and Gerald Balfour never fell in love with Ireland. Fortunate and wise men! They kept their heads and their hearts and their vision clear, where men in love lose all these faculties. Gerald did not give his heart to Ireland. He gave his brain instead and he left her, for his service, more I believe, than any other Chief Secretary.
p271. But he (George Wyndham) was a wonderful welcomer, and a welcome is as precious a thing as love or friendship. It is of the spirit and not to be made with hands. It is there or not there, and you could never imagine it, or light its fire in the cold, empty place where it had not been.
p289. But it is not beauty that makes success, even with men, although they may think that it is so. I think the chief reason for my success was that I liked every one and enjoyed everything so much. I loved life and do still. Which is why, but for the years, I should not know that I had grown old. And, of course, I could talk. Like all Irish people, I was a spendthrift with myself, giving out everything. I often envied the more stolid English who could sit in silence, taking in and not giving out and so hoarding their strength and vitality.
p294. “You should not,”the proverb says wisely, “choose women or linen by candlelight.”
p348. Kitchener never liked or trusted the Irish and I always believe that but for him, Ireland would have been wholeheartedly in the War, and that there would have been no rebellion. When John Redmond made his famous offer at the outbreak of War, Kitchener refused to take the Irish on their own terms—that they should fight together, in an Irish Brigade, under their own flag. Geraldine Mayo’s School of Art had been busy embroidering that flag, but alas! it was returned to us. Questions were asked in the House about that incredibly stupid and hurtful gesture. The enthusiasm was allowed to cool. The Irish were distrusted and knew it. They distrusted in their turn. There was no Irish Brigade; although thousands of Irishmen joined the Irish regiments, while their brothers, who might have gone with them, joined the Volunteers, to fight eventually against England in 1916 and the troubled years that followed. And John Redmond, who had trusted those who would not trust him, was broken by it.
p350. He said at once: “Oh, yes. Let’s sell it.” I was horrified. “Oliver,” I protested, “you can’t sell a place where your ancestors are buried and which has been in your family for eight hundred years, as you would a Waterbury watch or a pound of tea!” This made him thoughtful. “Oh,” he said slowly. “Have we had it all that time, Mother?”“Yes,” I told him. “Nearly eight hundred years.”“Well,” he said. “Surely if we have had it all that time, it’s somebody else’s turn now!”
p358. We heard how, on the way back to barracks, the military were stoned by the Dublin crowd, and the rearguard lost its head and fired, killing an old woman, a man and a boy on Bachelor’s Walk, and injuring several more. Those three deaths in Ireland, and the assassination of the Austrian Archduke, lit a torch that set fire to Europe. Our eyes had been turned West to Ireland those last days of that incredible Season of 1914, when we were all riding madly towards the gulf, and had nearly reached it. From another quarter, as a thunderbolt, came the War.
p360. “The lights are going out all over Europe,”he said. “We shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”That saying of his is now as famous as his speech. He spoke the truth, alas, for all of us. We returned to Killeen. In Ireland we had forgotten Bachelor’s Walk, and remembered only Redmond’s dramatic offer of his Irish Volunteers. The Irish leader, being a gentleman, put his cards on the table and did not try to bargain with England in her hour of need. In spite of Kitchener’s fatal mistake in refusing the Irish Brigade, the Irish regiments formed new battalions, asked for recruits and got them. The 10th Division emptied Dublin of young men and was cut to pieces on the grim rocks of Suvla Bay in 1915. But that is history. My War story concerns only my personal memories.
p366. Colonel House was then the power behind Wilson and they say that Wilson broke away from him at Versailles and that if he had not done so, but had listened to House, European history would have been different.
p368. Then he (Lord Northcliffe) talked about France and his great admiration for the bourgeois and peasant women of France. He spoke of how the indemnity to Germany was paid after 1870, from the stockings of the peasant women—those hard-earned, hard-saved little fortunes, wrung from the earth, and brought out to clear French earth of the enemy.
p375. It was all over in a week or so. The end of the Rebellion left the greater part of the country still unstirred; and once again England blundered. Sir John Maxwell had been sent over as Commander-in-Chief—a soldier used to dealing with such situations, according to his ideas, in Egypt and India. The Rebels were tried by court-martial with scrupulous justice, each case given full trial on its merits, although there was no plea for the prisoner and no doubt ever of the verdict. Then there were the slow executions. So many each morning. Sixteen in all. A small number in men’s minds in that time of war, with daily casualties of thousands. But death in action is another matter. To the Irish people, being told of these executions in barrack yards, it was, as someone wrote: “As though they watched a stream of blood coming from beneath closed door.”
p439. And Fingall woke up and listened and was unbelieving. “You should not give the Irish anything that they do not ask for.” That was what the English were always doing; and now they had given them what they had once asked for—too late—when they no longer wanted it, but something else, and we were paying for that. And Kilteragh was in ashes. And they were on their way to burn Killeen…. But Oliver had said: “If we have had it all that time, it’s somebody else’s turn now.”
So it is a book that I enjoyed. I would have liked to have got to know the authoress a bit better because she only gives snippets of her own life and her own feelings. It is in that sense a book of memoirs and not much of an autobiography. It is mostly written with a light, even modern, touch but also using some outmoded words like gay and fey quite often.
She certainly knew and mixed with a wide circle of influential people – particularly in Dublin and in London and one of the reasons it took me some time to finish was that I was constantly having to Google people and places that were mentioned. It has been a good revision of Victorian and Edwardian Irish History.
She obviously loved an Ireland where ghosts and fairies still were to be found and that I myself remember from my own childhood in the days before rural electrification. The bitterness and strife and treacheries involved in the transition of Ireland from within a United Kingdom with England to a Republic was great indeed and it is pointless now to say maybe there could have been a better way.
Daniel O’Connell of course predated Daisy having died in 1847 nineteen years before she was born. He of course was the great fighter for Catholic emancipation and later wanted the 1800 Act of Union to be repealed. He, like Daisy, was a Catholic but in reading this book it is remarkable just how many Anglo-Irish protestants played crucial roles in the road to Irish independence. Not without any pain of course. I am reminded of Daniel O’Connell’s famous remark: “The Altar of Liberty totters when it is cemented only with blood.”
Postscript.
Horace Plunkett often features in the book. He was a close friend and almost certainly in love with Daisy. In later years she stated that she had never slept with either him or the Prince of Wales. Horace was apolitical in his work as a pioneer of the agricultural co-operatives and also what was to become the Department of Agriculture and the Marine. It is true that he would have been an advocate of Home Rule and would liked to have seen a united Ireland. The cooperatives were a really great success and legacy. For me, the effective dissolution of most, if not all, of the rural cooperative creameries (sold out by the farmer shareholders to big companies with multinational association) about 20 years ago was a mistake. Admittedly farming has changed and the common agricultural policy has had huge impacts as well but there was a structure still in place for real cooperation and self help. Look at the milk industry today, the milk price controlled by the multinationals selling it off as a loss leader in supermarkets. Look at the insipid homogenized product on sale. Look at the milk farmers struggling to survive with quotas gone and the need to keep huge herds of cows to remain profitable. The loss of these businesses as a focus for integration and discourse has, in my opinion, had the effect of making the countryside poorer both socially and economically. I say this without nostalgia even though I remember, with affection, the queues of horses and donkeys waiting to have have their carts offloaded of their milk and to then to return home with the skim. I wonder if Horace Plunkett rests peacefully in his grave.
Irish co-operatives from creameries at the crossroads to multinationals
The social cultural and political connections of Elizabeth Fingall