Part 6 - FINAL WORDS
Two good friends, Tom Longworth and Frank Hemstead.
The Longworth Estate was a bit like Clonmacnoise (Clonmacnois) in that it overshadowed the history of Clonbonny. The Longworths were the landlords and they had 13,000 acres which extended nearly all the way to Athlone. I mentioned earlier that my mother and father could have met at a dance in the Longworth Hall and that my mother's people were evicted from the Longworth Estate. The original Longworth was Peter Longworth, a captain in Cromwell's army, and the "big house" was Creggan House. It was three storeys high and it had two square towers, one at each end. An old fellow told me the other day that they were ice towers for preserving meat - the nearest thing to the fridge of today. The house itself was burnt but the towers can still be seen off the main Dublin-Galway road. Shay and Johnny McDermott's grandfather, John Connell, worked there and one day one of the auld Dames-Longworths asked him to put down a "lock" of daffodil bulbs. When he asked what sort of pattern he should follow he was told, "John, my good man, put them down as though they fell from the sky." Those daffodils are still in the grounds of Creggan House.
The other principal
Longworth residence was Glynwood House which was built about 1860. The old house
is now in ruins but the Nash family live in large adjoining property which was
part of the demesne. Other members of the Longworth family built houses in Glynwood,
Bunahinly, Auburn and Clonbonny. Then they scattered all over and the whole
line of them married women with land. They had land down in Milltown beyond
Taughmaconnell, Oatfield in Ballinasloe and somewhere in Laois or Offaly. It
was all gained through marriage.
The male end
of the family died out and they're all gone from here now. John Longworth married
a Miss Dames from somewhere up around Kildare and he had a daughter who called
herself Dames-Longworth. Anyway, Dames-Longworth came down and took over the
place for a while. The last of the Dames-Longworth family was a father and son
who were around here shortly after the 1914-18 war; however, both father and
son died in controversial circumstances.
My old shooting
partner Tom Longworth, the owner of Longworth's pub in Ballinahowen, has no
direct association with the more recent landlords but he's from the same stock
way back in history. He's a member of a branch of the family which turned Catholic.
People often
ask me did I hear any more about my father after I was taken from him, in Shoreditch,
as a babe in arms. It seems he was happy enough to give me up, though my people
told me he was a nice, respectable fellow. After all, he was a young man and
I suppose he was figuring out that he'd marry again. I never heard any more
about him though I searched for him in the 1940s when the war was on. I could
get no trace of him but then it was the wrong time to look for him.
I haven't thought
much about him or his possible second family in recent years. However, about
four or five years ago I met a fortuneteller who was different from any fortuneteller
I met before and he kind of rattled me. He said to me, "You're a healer." "Well
I am," said I. Then he said, "Well, I can see things ahead and I can see a sister
of yours in England who is very anxious to meet you." "I have no sister," I
said. "I was an only child and I was brought from England and reared up in Clonbonny."
Then he said, "Don't contradict me! I can see this woman who is your sister
and she's very anxious to meet you." I said again, "She's not my sister." "She
is your sister," he said, and he was getting a kind of cranky. So I decided
to pacify him as best I could and I said, "Possibly she could be a step-sister."
And he said, "Well sister or half-sister, it doesn't make a differ, I can see
her and she's very anxious to meet you."
In any case
I didn't do anything about it and that was the last time I thought about my
father until a few years ago.
One day I was
out in the shed and didn't I come across a small disc, a round piece of metal
with a hole in the top of it. At first I didn't pass any remarks on it and then
I noticed there was something engraved round the edge. On closer inspection
I made out the following words: "10459 F J HEMSTEAD," going one way, and what
looked like "R FRA" going the other way. In the middle was "R C". This was obviously
my father's identity disk when he was in the British army. He must have left
it behind him after he was demobbed - one day he was out here courtin' my mother!
Well, the "R C" meant he was a Catholic. I don't know what the "R FRA" stands
for. So that's it, as far as my father goes; but I was thinking, if this little
booklet ever gets printed and a copy finds its way to London, some fellow there
might follow up the history of my father after he went back to England. Perhaps
a step-brother or step-sister, or more likely a step-niece or step-nephew, might
like to know about the Hemstead who was nearly a Cockney but who turned out
to be a countryman from Clonbonny.
I have great
faith in my Catholic religion, the religion taught to me by my granny Mary Nally,
my aunts and uncles, and by Miss Ghent at Clonbonny National School. Now I know
that you're not supposed to believe in reincarnation but I have these strange
dreams about twice every year. In the first dream I see a meandering stream
and a bridge. Today this same stream is straight because of work carried out
on it during the famine years, when landlords were supposed to give work to
their tenants to keep them alive. In the dream I'm standing on that bridge and
there are six nice trout in the water which go back under the bridge each time
I appear. Now I have a notion that I was in that area at some time in a previous
life, before the stream was straightened.
In my second
dream I'm addressing a huge crowd of men in a dark hall, they are dressed in
big long coats with white collars, and they have long hair. I hear them using
a language which I can read but which I can't speak now. It's the sort of language
that was used by the like of Sir Robert Walpole, first lord of the Treasury
and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and all those auld lads in the early part of
the 1700s. I have a feeling it's the House of Commons and that I was there in
some previous existence.
In my youth
there was very little use bringing a wife into this house to live with me and
my two auld uncles. In any case I don't know if any woman would have come in
with us. However, when my uncles died I started searching around; after a while
I got "great" with a very good widow woman who lived out the road a bit. She
was originally Elizabeth Wogan from Coolnahiley, outside Clara, and she had
three grown children. Her husband, Joe Byrne, unfortunately collapsed in the
path of a bog fire, God rest his soul. He had been preparing the spread bank
to cut turf when he decided to set it on fire to clear off a heavy growth of
heather. The fire got out of hand and it started going in the direction of a
neighbour's house. Joe tried all he could to quench it but sadly it passed over
the poor man. One of his sons lives up the road a bit, another lives in Willow
Park and Jimmy is in Galway. They're all married now and they have families
of their own.
In any event
Elizabeth and I eventually got married. I was in my 50s by then and sadly we
were only 12 years together before she died, God rest her soul. My 12 years
of marriage were the happiest years of my life.
It makes me
sad to think of the "bold peasantry" which lived in this riverside settlement
and which was wiped out; especially because I leave the cause of their destruction
on our native government. Where the landlords weren't able to get rid of the
peasantry our native government succeeded. First of all they gave control of
the Shannon to the ESB when they were building Ardnacrusha and they banned eel
fishing. It was a terrible thing to stop people catching eels when they had
been setting eel lines for generations. Eels provided a valuable source of nourishment,
especially for anyone rearing a large family.
The next disaster
to strike was the formation of Bord Na Móna by Eamon de Valera in 1946
and the production of machine turf. Before that all the little midland towns
which border on the bog were supplied with turf by the local farmers. And thirdly
there was the failure of the seed potato which I mentioned earlier. I don't
know where the eelworm came from. I have a feeling that it came down from Donegal
with the seed which the people were obliged to purchase. I have a suspicion
that it was all engineered. When I look at the piles of stones now in Lower
Clonbonny, it makes me very, very sad and I think of Oliver Goldsmith's Deserted
Village and the following lines:
Ill fares
the land to hastening ill a prey
Where wealth
accumulates and men decay
Princes
and Lords may flourish or may fade
A breath
can make them as a breath has made
But a bold
peasantry, a country's pride
When once
destroyed can never be supplied.
Well, here
I am today in my thatched cottage looking out at hillocks of blue clay. I have
a reduced pension of £38 a week; that's all they give me because I have
20 acres - that's what a bit of ground does for you. Of course they don't realise
that as people get older they're not able to work their ground like before.
When you have a bit of land they think you're in God's pocket. But I'm able
to keep going by keeping a couple of cows and suckling a few calves. Of course
I have to pay for mowing the grass and having it turned, baled and brought in.
By the time you pay for all that half the price of your cattle has gone.
I used to chance
setting an eel line but I have no one to give me a hand now. I still go up and
down the river now and then and I love to troll for a pike of a summer's evening.
As I pass along I think over life and the sudden decline in all forms of wildlife.
In the Spring, at turf cutting, I used to hear the skylark but haven't heard
him sing this twenty year or more. From March and April on, when they started
breeding, you'd hear them up above singing and see them dropping down again.
There isn't a coot left along this part of the Shannon, a bird that has very
few predators. I blame his decline on some of our famous young sportsmen who,
coming home from a day's duck shooting give it to the poor auld coot scrambling
out along the water. These young lads have very little idea what they're doing,
they just shoot and leave the coot after them.
In the old
days there were scores of yellowhammer in the oats. When we shook a grain of
oats on the ground at threshing time, flocks of the green linnet, or greenfinch,
surrounded us. I remember as a young fellow going to Athlone in a horse and
car with my granny and watching the greenfinch swooping every time our horse
made a dung. He was fed on oats and the greenfinch used to pick the grains out
of it. Of course, when we got near town the townswomen were as bad as the finches
because they came out to collect the dung for their gardens.
Not so long
ago you'd hear dozens of corncrakes creaking in the callows when their females
were hatching in the hay meadows. I read in the paper the other day that half
the corncrakes recorded in Ireland this summer, 65 calling males, were on the
Shannon Callows. Isn't it a terrible thing to think that they have almost wiped
out the corncrake in Ireland. Fellows are trying to get more and more out of
their land and cutting meadows earlier and destroying the corncrake nests. There
was a late flood in June last year and this did further damage. They finally
realised what's happening and they have what they call the Corncrake Grant Scheme.
They're paying fellows in certain areas along the callows, between Athlone and
Banagher, £100 per hectare to delay mowing their hay until the end of August.
The cuckoo
too, like the corncrake, is nearly a thing of the past. Then there's the curlew,
that old screecher of old, who used to frighten the geese on me - though he
was a nuisance then, I'm very sorry to see him declining. The grouse are gone
and the partridge are gone; and whose fault is that only Bord na Móna's.
And all the peat has gone into the Shannon, washed down from their drains. Can
they deny that? Sure they can't.
Yeoman farming has all but gone; now there's no one sowing a spud or growing corn or anything else. They find it's cheaper to buy everything; but at no time was it cheaper to buy than to grow in my day. Nowadays they charge their time at so much an hour and when they're finished work they don't know what to do.
END OF PART 6