Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (25 page)

Law Life Assurance, a faceless, distant abstraction, has left no trace in Connemara lore that I know of, and its representative in oral history is its land-agent, George Robinson. George came to Connemara in about 1857. He had previously been employed as a civil engineer at Shannonbridge, where he had married Rebecca, daughter of the Protestant minister of Aughrim and a descendant of the Martins and Wood-Martins of Sligo. The former Martin residence, which is now the almost glamorous Ballynahinch Castle Hotel, was then a plain two-storey house looking down through a few trees to a lake; as a surveyor a few years earlier had reported,

Although the Law Life Society furnished the house with
battlements
in about 1858, cannyness still outweighed romantic
sentiments
in prospective purchasers’ minds, and the estate remained on their hands until a London brewer, Richard Berridge, bought it in 1872. Thus the Robinsons occupied the Castle up to that date, and probably until 1885 when they built a fine bay-windowed mansion near Roundstone, for George became agent to the
Berridges, who themselves did not opt for residence in those increasingly dangerous times.

The society the family grew up in was as bleak as its setting. Two photographs by the well-known William Lawrence of Upper Sackville Street, Dublin, have been preserved by the Robinsons’ descendants (whom I have got to know on the strength of our common name). One shows the Protestant chapel a mile or so away from Ballynahinch on the Galway to Clifden road. Not a tree or shrub mediates between the pretty little Gothic-revival building and the windswept boglands around it. The occasion is surely the inauguration of the chapel in 1865, for about seventy people line the drive up to the chapel, facing the eye of the future, and behind them a long stretch of the road is occupied by waiting horse-cars and carriages. All the beleaguered gentry of the
Roundstone
and Clifden area would have mustered for this show of
solidarity
, for Connemara had been racked by sectarian strife ever since the Reverend Alexander Dallas had been blown in from England by the ill wind of the Famine to fight the priests for the souls of the hungry. One needs a lens to individuate the tiny figures: the minister in his shovel hat and cassock, the ladies
pyramidal
in poke bonnets, mantles and crinolines, the gentlemen all stiffly vertical and extended upwards by tall top hats, the Robinsons’ butler Old Burke bringing up the rear with one of his young masters, and three men dressed with propriety but
immediately
identifiable as ‘natives’ by the way they sprawl against the gable of the chapel, near the bellrope they have probably just
finished
pulling. These last remind me of the contemptuous
nickname
the Catholics of Kingstown near Clifden had for their
neighbour
who performed the same office for the little Protestant chapel there: ‘bell-slasher’.

The other photograph, perhaps taken on the same day, shows the Robinson family posed on a slope which one can deduce is that now occupied by balustraded garden steps and hydrangea beds opposite the front door of Ballynahinch Castle. No such charms existed then; patches of stone show through the poor, strawlike grass, and the only other vegetation is a gaunt tussock of hazel scrub farther up the slope. George is on the left, Rebecca on the right, and the nine children between them, despite the formality of their grouping, seem to have started from their father’s loins in a
disconcerting rush. George’s body looks undersized, angular, his trouser-leg strained by one acutely bent knee, the other leg doubled uncomfortably beneath him. His top hat has been put aside; one can see his receding hairline and anxious eyebrows and drawn cheeks. His longish beard is frosted. Rebecca seems more settled, matron-formed in her striped blouse and vast dark draperies of skirt, but her face is set and unsmiling. The three teenage daughters – known as the Rose, the Lily and the Ivy, says family lore – are artistically displayed, straw hats in their laps, each with her face at a different angle to the camera. Only the middle one seems happy with her looks, though (and she did become a beauty, as later portraits of her witness, including one by Oscar Wilde’s friend Frank Miles, who thought she excelled another of his sitters, the Jersey Lily herself). The light tones of the girls’ dresses are set off by the dark formality of the two male youngsters behind them. One of them, hand in pocket, manages to lean back in an almost raffish pose despite his tightly buttoned waistcoat and the sharp upward stabs of his collar-points. The other, Henry, who will succeed his father as Resident Magistrate and agent to the Berridges, already mirrors him in attitude and expression, but is as yet unmarked by his cares. And set into this composition here and there are the three younger children and the baby, all glancing askance at the camera in apparent foreboding and mistrust. Despite their
architectonic
grouping, the family looks fragmented, forlorn. Too much of the surrounding vacancy is shown. The top of Benlettery Mountain rears behind them, as bare as a skull.

Were it not for these images, I would have little idea of George Robinson as a person, rather than as that figment of ideological history, the wicked land-agent, for the only view I have of him from the side of the oppressed is of some absurd, semi-mechanical creature. In his autobiography
Mise,
the nationalist and
revolutionary
Colm Ó Gaora describes the journey he made by foot when he was young, from his native Ros Muc to Tourmakeady in Mayo.
11
Passing through the lonely valley of Mám Trasna, he thinks of the gruesome and mysterious slaughter of the Joyce family there in 1882, and quickens his steps to Paire an Doire, where another memory disturbs him:

Robinson’s own view of the job that exposed him to such dangers is clear from a letter he wrote in 1875 to Dublin Castle, concerning ‘an outrage which has been perpetrated on this Estate, near Oughterard’. Certain leases having fallen in, on the tenants’ deaths, Robinson had it in mind to ‘readjust and square the lands’, that is, to put higgledy-piggledy smallholdings together into viable orderly farms. The obstacle to such improvement was the usual one of there being undertenants in possession. Young Henry Robinson had called on them with the sheriff to offer them an arrangement by which they could become temporary caretakers of their farms until new agreements should be drawn up, but their parish priest had refused to let them agree to this proposal, saying that both Isaac Butt, the nationalist
MP
, and Archbishop McHale of Tuam had advised tenants not to sign such agreements. So the sheriff had evicted them, but did not put out their furniture, and in one case, ‘moved with compassion’, did not remove an infant in a cradle. That night the families all broke into their homes again, and George was advised that, as legal possession had not been obtained (had young Henry been insufficiently forceful in not putting out the furniture?), it would have to be taken again. So George himself called on the undertenants, accompanied by the sheriff and the local Justice of the Peace:

The verdict of an inquest, to which Robinson and his
colleagues
were not called as witnesses, was that John Sullivan had died as a result of rough handling in being put out of his house. Robinson claims that this finding was contrary to fact, and calls on the authorities to hold a sworn investigation into the whole
transaction
. What the outcome was I do not know, but such incidents must have been part and parcel of George’s professional life in those dreadful years of class and sectarian strife.

By the time of the Land War, when the peasantry’s sporadic and pathetic acts of terrorism were being co-ordinated into a
political
campaign by the Land League, agents and bailiffs had to go about their business with large escorts. In 1880, when ejectment notices were served on a number of Roundstone tenants, forty police confronted a crowd of three hundred armed with pitchforks, the Riot Act was read, and eighteen arrests were made.
12
A couple of years later, when thirty-two Roundstone families were evicted for arrears of rent, the echo of cannonfire from gunboats in the bay underlined the gravitas of the proceedings.
13
But if the Robinsons were
plátáilte
their property was vulnerable; on the night of 27 November 1879 three of their bullocks were driven over a cliff into the sea near Roundstone, and seventy-six sheep and two rams were killed or injured.
14

Evictions on the Berridge estate continued until at least 1894, and as Henry Robinson was also agent for the Digbys who owned the Aran Islands, he would have ordered the eviction that J.M. Synge witnessed there as late as 1898. Nevertheless, with the passing of the Land Acts leading to large reductions in rent from the mid-1880s, and the developmental work of the Congested Districts Board from 1891, the worst of times were over. George, who died in 1890, hardly saw them, but Henry is remembered in ways that suggest the good old days rather than the bad, probably because he outlasted the Berridges and became agent to the Land
Commission when the estate was bought out in 1914. The
plantation
of beeches and pines he wrapped around Letterdyfe House, his home just north of Roundstone, has prospered, shadowing the house too darkly but mellowing the stern magnificence of the village’s famous outlook. In the harsh terrain of Connemara, mature woodland is historically synonymous with landlordism, and those trees are still ‘Robinson’s Wood’. Henry’s sheep, on the
hillside
behind the house, used to be watched over by one Mattie O’Donnell, and Mattie’s grandson, himself a shepherd, has told me a story that shows Henry in benevolent mood. One day Mattie was attending the Clifden cattle fair, and Robinson offered him a lift back to Roundstone in his pony-car. As they were rattling along the track that winds across the immense bog between Clifden and Roundstone (a labyrinth of lakes and streams that only the shepherds know), O’Donnell said, ‘Let me down here and I’ll go and get a hare for my dinner.’ Robinson was amazed, and said, ‘How will you kill a hare, with no gun and no dog?’ O’Donnell replied, ‘If I don’t get him on the run, I’ll get him some other way.’ Robinson was sceptical; he said, ‘Well, if you can meet me at Lydon’s Bridge (which is on the road into Roundstone) with a hare, I’ll give you five pounds.’ Of course five pounds would have been a fortune to O’Donnell, who had, as they say, a long weak family to support. So off he went into the bog, and he crept up to a place where he knew a hare would be lying in its form (a hare makes a hollow in the heather for itself, into which it fits exactly and invisibly, called its form), and he tiptoed up and grabbed the hare, and carried it in his two hands across the bog until he came out on the road again just as Robinson was coming round the
corner
in his pony-car. Robinson looked at him and said, ‘If that’s not Mattie O’Donnell it must be his ghost!’, and true to his word, next time he was at the bank, he got Mattie the five pounds.

So, the Robinsons are not totally locked into their historical roles as ogres; something of their whims and oddities is preserved. In one of their eminent namesake Sir Henry Robinson’s books of reminiscences I found this: