Dr Caitriona Clear (Respondent

Respondent

Dr Caitriona Clear, NUI Galway Everyday Working Life in the Revolutionary Era: Two Case Studies

Dr Caitriona Clear

An Dr Caitriona Clear

Margaret O’Callaghan has pointed out in her keynote address that people living a hundred years ago in Ireland did not know what was to come after, and that we cannot evaluate their experiences as if they had this knowledge.

But neither did they look backwards and see themselves as inhabiting a gloomy ‘postFamine Ireland’. The people who came of age in Ireland in the years 1891 to 1921 experienced dramatic transformations in all aspects of everyday life. The numbers of men and women working in shops, offices, factories, workshops, transport and communication, schools and hospitals increased by thousands, at a time when population was falling. For example, there were over 7,000 more clerks and over 10,000 more teachers in Ireland in 1911 than there had been in 1891, and over 16,000 workers in the new field of telecommunications in 1911, and numbers in these sectors continued to grow. All these workers and others like them had to present themselves for public view every day; their need for respectable and hard-wearing clothing and footwear created countrywide demand for dressmakers, tailors, seamstresses and drapery shops, which in turn created more jobs. And however poor their working conditions, waged and salaried workers had set time off, so clerks and shop assistants, factory workers and railway guards, teachers and nurses learned Irish, first aid or other skills, rowed on rivers, kicked football, made novenas, played in bands, and of course as we know well, joined trade unions and political organizations in their thousands. Irish people were still on the move out of Ireland – emigration figures remained high – but within Ireland the young and the single of both sexes were in a state of perpetual motion too.

By 1900 almost the entire country was crisscrossed by railway lines, which enabled people to cover not only long but comparatively short everyday distances for work and for leisure, all over Leinster, Munster, Ulster and in eastern and southern Connacht. Gaps in transport provision were made up by the bicycle, increasingly affordable on the hire purchase to people of all social classes.1 Because imagination is partly what we are talking about today, the two people whose lives I am going to use to illustrate the social changes of this period were writers: the novelist Annie M. P. Smithson (1873-1948) and the poet Francis Ledwidge (1887-1917). They were different from each other in almost every way – age, gender, religious background, social class, occupation, geographical origin, even length of years – Smithson lived into old age, Ledwidge died young. But both were active adults in the decade of war and revolution, both were nationalists, both were trade unionists and crucially, both had the confidence to express themselves creatively. I am not here today to make literary judgments on either of them, although I thoroughly enjoy the work of both. I am interested in them as exemplars of the times they lived in. Annie Smithson was the older of the two, born in 1873 in Dublin, into a middle-class Protestant family which gradually fell on hard times. By the age of 21 she was that familiar figure, the non-earning daughter helping her overwhelmed mother to rear a young family. A sympathetic aunt spirited her away to train as a nurse in London and Edinburgh. Smithson returned to Ireland in 1900 to became a Jubilee nurse, one of those key apostles of public health, and over the next three decades she worked ‘on the district’ in Down, Clare, Offaly, Donegal, Mayo, Waterford and Dublin city. She became a Catholic around 1907, and around 1916 became an Irish nationalist, joining Cumann na mBan later, during the War for Independence. Her first best-selling novel, Her Irish Heritage, was published by Talbot Press in Dublin in 1917 and it was directly about the female revolutionary experience. Smithson went on to write 19 more best-selling novels, all with strong women as their central characters. Always a fighter for nurses’ working rights, in 1929 she became Secretary of the Irish Nurses’ Union (later the Irish Nurses’ Organization), and she more than quadrupled the membership by the time she stepped down in 1942. She died in 1948.2 Francis Ledwidge was born in Slane, Co. Meath in 1887, the eighth of nine children. His father, an agricultural labourer, died when Francis was 5, and all through Francis’s childhood his mother Anne worked as an agricultural labourer; sometimes the fatherless family lived through hardship so severe that as Ledwidge later put it: ‘It was as though God forgot us.’ Francis left school at 14, and held various jobs until he became a road-mender employed by the county council, eventually rising to the position of ganger. From his schooldays he was always writing, and his first poem was published in 1910 in the Drogheda Independent. After publishing some more poems he came to the attention of Lord Dunsany (1878-1957), a writer and poet whose help was of great significance. Ledwidge’s first book of poems Songs of the Fields was published in 1914. As well as being involved in various cultural organizations, Ledwidge founded the Slane branch of the Meath Labour Union and in 1913 he got a clerical job as secretary of this union. A founder member of the Irish Volunteers in Slane, Ledwidge chose to follow John Redmond and the National Volunteers and joined the British Army, serving in the Balkans and all over Europe. He continued to write and to publish until his death at Ypres in Belgium in 1917. 3 These were two very different people, but both of their lives illustrate the changing times. Nursing and road-mending were responsibilities which had been taken on by the public authorities by the beginning of the twentieth century. Both were extremely demanding jobs physically – the demands of road-mending are obvious, but nursing at that stage involved a lot of pulling and dragging, not to mention the ever-present risk of infection. (Smithson contracted tuberculosis in 1912-13, but she recovered).

1 C. Clear, ‘Social Conditions 1880-1914’ in T. Bartlett (ed.) The Cambridge History of Ireland Vol IV (Cambridge University Press 2018), pp.145-67; Brian Griffin, Cycling in Victorian Ireland (Dublin: Nonsuch 2006). 2 Annie M. P. Smithson, Myself- and Others (Dublin: Talbot Press 1944). Also https://www.dib.ie/biography/smithson-annie-marypatricia-a8160. Contributed by Laurence W. White. 3 Alice Curtayne, Francis Ledwidge: a life of the poet (London: Martin, Brian and O’Keeffe 1972: Dublin: New Island Books 1998). Also https://www.dib.ie/ledwidge-francis-edward-a4753. Contributed by Donal Lowry.

District nursing involved travel to and from patients, on a bicycle in all weathers, on call seven days a week. The bicycle was crucial to Ledwidge too – at one stage he was covering 40 miles a day going to and from work. It might seem perverse, therefore, to claim that both Smithson and Ledwidge were lucky, but comparatively speaking they were, because both had jobs which were relatively secure and permanent. And in other ways both writers benefitted from substantial improvements in social provision in late nineteenth and earlytwentieth-century Ireland. The Ledwidges, poor though they were, had moved into a solid three-bedroomed brick house built by the Rural District Council in Janeville, Slane, when Francis was a baby. So at least they had that comfort and dignity, and they were not exceptional; the Irish rural labouring class was the best-housed rural labouring class in Europe on the eve of the First World War.4 And although Ledwidge left school at 14 he had, up to then, the advantage not only of free National schooling (compulsory since 1892) and but also, of a teacher famed far and wide for his learning and dedication – Master Thomas Madden. After a very patchy and irregular early education Annie Smithson finally got to school in Bray, Co. Wicklow in her early teens, and gained honours in her Junior Grade Intermediate Certificate. These state exams, introduced in 1878, were open to girls as well as boys from the very beginning. 5 However, Ledwidge had to leave school at 14 to give his ageing mother a break from back-breaking agricultural toil, and Smithson had to leave school at 16 to help her mother with a new baby. For working-class boys and girls, and for girls of all social classes, family needs came before individual fulfilment. Smithson felt guilty all her life at having seized her independence when it was offered to her. Neither of these writers married. Ledwidge probably would have, had he survived the war. Although his first love went on to marry another man, he recovered in time and had plenty of girlfriends in a lively social circle. Besides, working men who were active in organizations and other activities needed women to cook, clean and wash clothes for them, as they couldn’t afford servants. For working women who couldn’t afford servants, however – and Smithson fell into this category – a husband meant both additional life-maintenance work and a loss of financial independence. Smithson fell in love with a married man in the early years of the century; she gave him up, and does not document any other men in her life.6 Like many other working women in Ireland in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s who chose a single life, she probably valued her independence too much to surrender it. 7 Margaret O’Callaghan has said that workingclass men and women in general, ‘lost the peace’ – were cast adrift somewhat in independent Ireland, and this is true. But some of their voices remained strong. Ledwidge’s poems went into several editions over the succeeding decades and were regularly anthologised, and taught in schools; Irish people obviously appreciated these reflections on human nature which evoked the rural scene in a fresh and vivid way. Smithson’s best-selling novels were republished regularly by Talbot Press up to the 1950s and new editions appeared from Mercier in the 1980s; her recurring theme of strong women working out their destinies must have appealed to many Irish people. Smithson was only one of many popular Irish female writers – novelists, biographers, travel writers, essayists – in the first four decades of independence. But that is a story for another day. Today, we are trying to stand in 1921 and to see what Smithson saw, and what Ledwidge, had he survived the war, would have seen – a world that each of them firmly believed was theirs to evoke, to record and, indeed, to shape and to define. That confidence was brought to fruition, in part, by the significant state-supported improvements in education, public health, accommodation and transport of the previous forty years.

4 Murray Fraser, John Bull’s Other Homes: state housing and British policy in Ireland 1883-1922 (Liverpool University Press 1996). 5 Caitriona Clear, Social Change and Everyday Life in Ireland 1850-1922 (Manchester University Press 2007), pp.42-56. 6 There may well have been other men in her life that she did not choose to document. A forthcoming biography of Smithson by Marie Bashford-Synnott to be published by Arlen House, will shed light on this question. 7 C. Clear, ‘Women in Ireland in the 1930s and ‘40s’ in A. Hayes (ed.) Hilda Tweedy and the Irish Housewives Association (Dublin: Arlen House 2012), pp.59-68.