Saint Patrick, Downpatrick and Glastonbury

(It's an entanglement of faith, religion, legend, opportunism, church and state collaboration, tradition and tourism... it's hard to separate the truth from the not-so-true... . Patrick's proven writings are terrific, showing that he was highly educated on Biblical texts, his grasp of theology is crystal clear. I have also gathered up a huge amount of the Scottish traditions about him, stored away and waiting to be written up some time when I get the headspace).

I've been in Downpatrick a few times recently, it's not far from me as the crow flies but there's a ferry ride in between and so I don't head down that way as often as I otherwise might. Around 100 years ago back in the time of the old Rural District Councils in Northern Ireland, the bottom part of the Ards Peninsula was administered from Downpatrick (see the boundary in the map below, running across Strangford Lough and then skirting below Kircubbin and Portavogie).

It's one of the towns which has that culturally meaningful triple-confluence of English Street, Irish Street and Scotch Street. A place where three cultural traditions met, long before two-tribes politics became our predominant framework – now endlessly, unhealthily, reinforced.

Downpatrick also has a terrific museum that I really need to re-visit.

• The Lovely Bones
Driving into Downpatrick, I remembered something I have posted about here before – the amazing coincidence which befell Ireland's new Anglo-Norman overlords. They had arrived in / invaded Ireland in 1169, and under John de Courcy marched north in 1177 and took the town of Dún Dá Leathghlas, establishing their Earldom of Ulster.

Just seven years later, in 1184, their 'rule' benefitted from the remarkable good fortune of discovering the long-lost grave of the island's national icon and patron saint St Patrick – and as a double icing on the cake, also the graves of St Brigid and St Columba. The three were reportedly found buried together, with Patrick in the middle.

Back in England, the French-born (and later French-buried) King Henry II was delighted by the discovery – his son John made his first expedition to Ireland the following year, from April to December 1185 (Wikipedia here).  De Courcy had 'the relics translated' to a new burial location nearby, commissioned by Pope Urban III, overseen by Cardinal Vivian, all with great pomp and ceremony, the Archbishop of Armagh and about 40 bishops.

It must have been around this time that Dún Dá Leathghlas was renamed Downpatrick. The Anglo-Normans may also have given the surrounding district of County Down its name - Lecale - on old maps and documents it is sometimes spelled 'Le Cayle' or 'Le Caile'.

• The Glastonbury Dimension - King Arthur, Queen Guinevere... and Patrick too?!
I visited the famous, mystical, historic English town of Glastonbury about 10 years ago - not for the music festival, just as a sightseer. When there, I learned that also in 1184, the very same year of the Downpatrick discoveries, Glastonbury Abbey was destroyed by fire. Lo and behold just five years later, the reputed graves of English national icons King Arthur and Queen Guinevere were found there, as a result of archaeological excavations guided by a story that the late King Henry II had conveniently heard from an elderly bard. The pilgrims flocked back to Glastonbury and the abbey's coffers rang once again.

There's even a tradition that Patrick had himself actually been to Glastonbury in the year 430, as claimed by the document The Charter of St Patrick, but which is said to have first appeared in 1220 (link here). That linked article brilliantly refers to stories 'which have come down to modern readers through the industry of Glastonbury's twelfth-century press agent William of Malmesbury'. Patrick's name appears here and there around Glastonbury still today.

• 1874 article in the Downpatrick Recorder
Thanks to the wonder of the online British Newspaper Archive, I've found that the Downpatrick Recorder of 21 November 1874 (page 2, right hand column) published a long article about the then dire condition of the reputed burial site of St Patrick, and of the locally-popular traditions and superstitions.

The article is pretty detailed and recounts the traditions of the reputed finding of the three remains, noting that the chronicler Gerald of Wales was the first to write down this discovery, in his Topographia Hibernia in 1188 (Wikipedia link here), describing it as 'this threefold treasure discovered by Divine revelation'.

But was the site of the re-interment later somehow forgotten? Because the Recorder article said that some time in the 1770s Samuel Hall (sexton of the Cathedral) and John Neill relocated an old stone cross from elsewhere in the town into the Cathedral graveyard and then –

'in a fit of pleasurable excitement, asserted that this was St Patrick's grave, and, as Hall was the sexton or keeper of the graveyard, he repeated the same to all visitors, and thus the story was spread and established until it acquired a species of sanctity'.

Renewed tradition took hold through repetition. The 1874 article was published following a visit to Downpatrick by Mr Mulholland MP (Lord Dunleath) who assured concerned locals that a suitable monument - 'national and non-sectarian' - should be erected at the reputed, neglected, burial site.

• 1900: Francis Joseph Bigger's memorial stone installed
It was 26 years later in 1900 when the antiquarian Francis Joseph Bigger (1863–1926) had the large inscribed boulder that we see today installed at the site, in time for St Patrick's Day on 17th March. That's it pictured at the top of this post. For all of the great scholarly work that Bigger did to preserve Ulster's heritage, he also had a theatrical imagination and a gift for the memorable. To his credit, he, and private subscriptions, achieved something at the dawn of the new century which has stood the test of time.

• 1900: Queen Victoria and the Shamrock
It was that same year when Queen Victoria approved soldiers from Ireland serving in the British army to wear a sprig of shamrock on St Patrick's Day. An unnamed woman from Downpatrick sent a spray of shamrock, said to have been gathered near the grave site, and sent it to London for the Queen to wear.

..............

Patrick's life, mission and writings are enormously important, and should be remembered and honoured. None of the above takes away from his core purpose – but it's interesting to unpick the industry that has developed around him, many centuries after his time.

PS - Bassett's County Down Guide and Directory (1886; page 193) includes some information about the grave site, which was then 'the object of incessant care' by Robert Henry Bell, the verger and sexton, who had been appointed in 1862.

Ulster-Scots language in east Ulster - the 1911 Census and the 1960 Gregg Survey maps compared

Regular readers here will be aware of previous posts on the anecdotally-notorious unreliability of the language question on the 1911 census, for east Ulster in particular. The niggling concerns of many were confirmed in technicolour by Barry Griffin's mapping which was published just earlier this year. I'll not rehearse all of the issues, you can read the previous posts. (just search for 'census' in the box in the left hand column).

Just this week, as a result of an Ulster-Scots community language workshop session I attended in Ballywalter, I got the famous 1960s Gregg languages survey map out and then decided to compare it with Barry's excellent mapping work which shows the supposed 'Irish' language speaking area of east Ulster as had been self-recorded by households in the 1911 census. As you know, many of us have thought for some time that the folk who completed those forms as 'Irish' had done so in error, because the only two options on the forms were 'English' and 'Irish', and they knew full well that they didn't speak English.

Despite multiple variations in the data compilation – ie a 50 year gap, the self-understanding and self-completion v professional linguist, the vast scale of the census v the individual research of Gregg, as well as all of the linguistic 'erosion' that Ulster-Scots has undergone during the 20th century, the two areas are remarkably similar.


So, I am ever-more convinced that those 'Irish' speakers who filled in their own census forms were in fact Ulster-Scots speakers, but they had no mechanism to record that accurately. The only other possibility is an unthinkably massive east Ulster language population displacement, and then replacement, within just two generations. There are zero records of that ever happening.

It is time that our increasingly bilingual bureaucracy acknowledged our trilingual society. Perhaps the next census, which is scheduled for 21 March 2021, will address that properly. I am glad to see recent moves in Scotland towards a proper trilingual understanding there too (link here).

(PS - in The Laggan district of east Donegal, the census appears to have been pretty accurately completed - and it aligns almost perfectly with Gregg. I expect that this is because Ulster-Scots people there knew what Irish language was, and also knew that whilst their nearby neighbours spoke it, they themselves didn't.)

• There's a lot of enthusiasm, energy and activism around the Irish language these days. It's become fashionable and is part of the new 'progressive' package of values and interests here. I wish Ulster-Scots had a fraction of that. But there is also desire to airbrush the embarrassment and inconvenience of Ulster-Scots away. A proper understanding of the census results for the language traditions of east Ulster – given the vast scale and geography revealed by Barry's mapping – will bring any honest observer to Ulster-Scots as the natural conclusion.

The Scots-Irish in Missouri: The People of Our Place

This interesting resource was published online by the Bolivar Herald-Free Press of Missouri just yesterday. Link here.  On our side of the Atlantic, the Ozark mountains don't get as much coverage as the Appalachians do - lots of potential here for research, study and connections to be made.

Father James Dalrymple's 'Historie of Scotland' in the Scots language, 1596

The Benedictine abbey of Regensburg or Ratisbon in Bavaria, in south-east Germany, had been founded by Irish monks led by Marianus in the 11th century. After the Scottish Reformation of the mid 1500s it was transferred by the then Pope to host expatriated Lowland Scottish monks. The Scots Monastery of St James or Schottenkirche continued until the 1860s; the building still stands today (Wikipedia here).

So just as parts of Martin Luther’s 1520s Germany had been a refuge for early Scottish Reformers fleeing persecution and the martyrs’ burning stake, this part of 1570s Germany was the destination for some Scottish Catholic clergy after John Knox’s Scotland had become almost fully Reformed.

John Knox's opponent Ninian Winzet was one of those monks who left Scotland for 16th century Regensburg, becoming Abbot there from 1577–92. Winzet would later boast in a letter to Knox that he had not -

'forzhet our auld plane Scottis, quhilk zour mother lerit zou'

Another to settle there was Father James Dalrymple, who may have been from either Stirling or possibly Alloway in Ayrshire. In 1578, their fellow Scot Bishop John Leslie had published a ten volume anti-Reformation / pro-Catholic Latin epic entitled De origine, moribus, ac rebus gestis Scotiae libri decem, usually abbreviated in English to Historie of Scotland. Some images of it are shown here, reproduced from the British Library website.

In 1596, James Dalrymple translated the whole thing into Scots (online here). A few pages are shown below from a later published and typeset edition of Dalrymple's translation (edited by Rev Father E G Cody of the Order of St Benedict, completed after Cody's death by William Murison of Beith in Ayrshire, and published by the Scottish Text Society in 1888), telling the story of King Fergus and his shipwreck at Carrickfergus.

The map detail below shows 'St Ninianus Quhithorn' - ie St Ninian's Whithorn - as well as the Mull of Galloway, Corswell Point, Glenluce – and an interesting distinction between 'Hultonia' and 'Hibernia', ie Ulster and Ireland, which are separated by 'Boandus Flumen', ie the Boyne River, with Ulster dominated by 'Armacana Metrop', ie Armagh city.

Ulster-Scots and global finance – Thomas Jackson (1841–1915) of Crossmaglen, and giant of HSBC bank

Hong Kong is in the news constantly just now. Back when it was being established, it was Thomas Jackson (1841–1915) who was responsible for financing the development of the then colony. There is a statue to him in Hong Kong still today, in Statue Square. This photo above shows some the recent protestors trying to put a police helmet on his head.

• Family and ancestry
His parents were David and Elizabeth Jackson. He was born in Carrigallen in Co Leitrim, just a few miles from the border with County Cavan – but the Jackson family were all Crossmaglen folk and he grew up there at the family's tenant farmstead of Urker Lodge, where they had lived since around 1829. It still stands today, but is in a ruinous condition.

His mother, her maiden name Elizabeth Oliver, was said to have been a 'strict Covenant Presbyterian'. The family was well networked with others in the area. A maternal ancestor was William Donaldson of Freeduff, said to have been a leading United Irishman in the 1798 Rebellion. (Freeduff Presbyterian Church had been burned down in an infamous and probably sectarian arson attack in 1743; link here. It was rebuilt and in January 1867 Thomas's sister Bessie Jackson married Thompson Brown there – the meeting house still stands today; Flickr image here).

Elizabeth's sister Margaret was the wife of Rev Daniel Gunn Brown, the Presbyterian minister of Newtownhamilton, who had conducted that 1867 wedding because he was the groom's uncle. Rev Brown was active in the Tenant Right and Land Reform movements. Rev Brown's daughter Elizabeth Sarah married Thomas's brother James Jackson in Blackrock in October 1886. A confusing mesh of interconnections!

Thomas's father, David Jackson, was said to have been an Orangeman who also supported Tenant Right for all - Catholics and Protestants alike.

• Education and Career
Thomas was educated at Morgan School in Castleknock, Dublin. Aged 19, his first job was with the Belfast branch of the Bank of Ireland. He moved to Hong Kong in 1864, becoming Chief Manager of HSBC in 1876, aged just 35 – he most senior executive in the Bank, effectively its CEO, until 1902, establishing it as the premier bank in Asia. He was called the bank's 'Great Architect' and his intuition brought him the nickname 'Lucky Jackson'. He was awarded a baronetcy in 1902, and his statue was unveiled in 1906.

He died at his home in London aged 74 and was buried at Stansted. Three of his sons, and three of his sons-in-law, were killed in battle during the Great War.

There is a very big story here just waiting to be uncovered... 

• Further information is online here from Creggan Historical Society

• This magnificent blog by Canada-based researcher Sharon Noddie Brown gives some further biographical background, as does her earlier website here.

"Made In Ulster - Mountain Dew" - 1946 Poteen for the future Queen

When Princess Elizabeth - as she then was - visited Ulster in March 1946 her itinerary included Enniskillen where the local RUC Head Constable David Murray presented her with an unusual gift - as the caption above says it was "a bottle labelled mountain dew after her inspection of an illicit still in operation at a police depot in Enniskillen". One of the articles below says it was in a special box labelled "Made In Ulster - Mountain Dew". 

At first glance I thought this meant that a rogue remote police station was distilling its own spirits, but a visit to the British Newspaper Archive showed that "in a corner of the depot the police had constructed a typical hideout of heather, gorse, moss and turf to give the Royal visitor an idea of the kind of place in which illicit stills were concealed" (The Scotsman, 22 March 1946).

The report also said that, to add a bit of drama to the occasion, some policemen had dressed up as "mountain bandits".

The Blue Rhythmaires from Ballymena

I picked up this old dance card recently, for the annual dance of Ballykeel LOL No 472 at the Protestant Hall in Ballymena. Two years after World War 2 you can see signs of the world changing - I am pretty sure that the band 'The Blue Rhythmaires' weren't playing fiddles and accordions for traditional country dancing! More likely to have been Glenn Miller style 'big band' sound with jazz, blues and ragtime influences.

A dig through the British Newspaper Archive shows that they were kept very busy in the late 1940s, at Ahoghill Orange Hall and Craigywarren Orange Hall - with the dancing from 9pm till 2am! I wonder how that was regarded in conservative mid Antrim in that era?

According to the Ballymena Observer report of the event - a week later on 28 March - "so large was the attendance that at the traditional opening there was scarcely enough room for the participating members". The band leader of The Blue Rhythmaires was a Wilson Gordon and "dancing continued to a late hour and the ball was voted one of the best this season".

Temperance, bagpipes, fifes and drums - John Edgar (1798–1866)

John Edgar (1798–1866) was born somewhere around the Saintfield and Ballynahinch area of County Down in the historic year of 1798 – on the cusp of the famed rebellion, and in between two of the renowned battle sites of that rebellion.

His father was the Secession minister of a congregation at Ballynahinch and also ran a school, an 'academy', where a local youth called James Thomson assisted him. Thomson's son William would become world famous as Lord Kelvin. John Edgar's life story is told in this Memoir by WD Killen, published in 1869 (online here). A short bio can be found on the Dictionary of Ulster Biography here.

Edgar was theologically orthodox, a member of the Reformation Society, also strongly supportive of the Irish language and of evangelism across the entire island. He was also famous as a pioneer of Temperance in Europe, beginning what is thought to have been the very first such campaign on the entire continent, in 1829. It held its first meeting at 5pm on Sunday 4th October 1829 in Donegall Square Methodist Church in Belfast, the building too small to hold the crowd who has gathered. Edgar is said to have 'delivered an impressive discourse ... an energetic appeal to all the feelings of duty'. There were even centenary celebrations in 1929.

Yet Edgar is not well-known today, in contrast to his Catholic counterpart Father Theobald Matthew (1790–1856) who founded the Cork Total Abstinence Society in 1838, and to whom there are statues in various towns in Ireland.

The pages below describe a large pro-Temperance rally in 1837 in Clones in County Monaghan, cross-community in nature, and with bagpipes, fifes and drums.

A Quare Tongue with Damian Gorman

I enjoyed talking with Damian Gorman by phone around a year ago, and eventually we met up for a chat in person with a crew from Tern Television recording it. I haven't seen the programme yet but I am sure it's going to be of high quality. Tune in on Sunday evening or catch it on iPlayer for 30 days afterwards.

When "fight the power" becomes "shoot the neighbours"

[This post isn't a balanced or authoritative history, it's just a mop-up of things I have happened upon over the last while.]

I try to keep things positive and constructive here. But of late I've been stumbling into some very dark stuff, but it is material which needs to be owned up to and acknowledged. Over recent months, in the Brexit context, and a potential 'border poll' in the years ahead, there has been much talk of a 'new Ireland'. So, almost exactly 100 years on from 'partition' - when the border was created - it is instructive to look back and see what happened then. But I've been pretty shocked at what has unexpectedly landed into my awareness over the past while. It is a period I previously knew little or nothing about.

Back in December 1912, the minister of St Enoch's Presbyterian Church in Belfast (which was Ireland's largest Presbyterian congregation) Glasgow-born Rev John Pollock, visited Canada. He addressed a large audience in an Orange Hall in North James Street in Hamilton in Ontario. He confessed that he had changed his mind twice on the 'Home Rule' for Ireland issue. He said he was a

'Home Ruler on principle ... I have no objection to a free Parliament on College Green, but I do object to Italian rule ... Home Rule would be the end of liberalism and progress. I have nothing against the religion of St Peter, but I protest against the politics of the Vatican ... if Home Rule becomes law, persecution in its most insidious form could not be prevented'.

He was not wrong in his prediction...




The booklet 'Lest We Forget - an Irish Record of One Year' came up for sale online over the summer. I had never heard of it before. It is a pretty horrific contemporary diary of some events from June 1920 – July 1921, cataloguing a range of political and sectarian murders which were carried out in many parts of the south of Ireland, which would become the Irish Free State in 1922. For example the murder of a 79 year old retired Church of Ireland rector James Finlay who was dragged from his home at Bawnboy in County Cavan in the middle of the night by a crowd of up to 50 armed and masked men, was shot dead in the road, his head smashed in, and the house burned to the ground. A different house stands there today and is listed on the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, having been built in 1923.

In my time in Cork recently I came across this image from December 1920 which makes the city look like Dresden in WW2 - an event called the Burning of Cork (Wikipedia here), carried out by the British Army forces known as the 'Black and Tans'. How on earth that was sanctioned and enacted is beyond me, and its aftermath was in many ways inevitable. But 'fight the power' too easily became 'shoot the neighbours' - the Protestant neighbours.




The vicious, discriminatory, sectarianisation of both parts of this island was in so many ways institutionalised on both sides of the new border. It is wrong to pretend this only happened on one side or the other. Over the summer, yet another friend told me of his own grandparents having to flee 1920s south of Ireland for refuge in Northern Ireland, just because they were Protestants. I know many families who have told me of similar experiences.

James Craig became the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland in June 1921, and whatever his achievements may have been during his life in modern times he is - dare I say it - inextricably linked to remarks he made in 1934 about Stormont being "a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State" (see previous post here). Newspaper reports as late as 1937 show the Presbyterian moderator and also Thomas Joseph Campbell taking Craig to task for these words. As an exact mirror image Eamon De Valera's speech from St Patrick's Day in 1935 said that "Ireland has been a Christian and Catholic nation ... she remains a Catholic nation, and her people will accept no system which denies or imperils that destiny". The 1937 constitution was supposedly developed jointly between church and state.

Earlier this year I saw a memorial plaque which included an Alexander Reid, who had been killed on 30 November 1921. A bit of research uncovered his story - he was a 50 year old shipyard worker, shot dead on his way to work simply because his assassins (correctly) assumed he was a Protestant. He lived at 33 Silvergrove Street just off the Donegall Pass - he was passing the corner of Catherine Street and Cromac Street at 7:20am when he was killed, leaving a widow and seven children. A William Burns was attacked in the same manner, on his way to work in the yard, as he passed the corner of Russell Street and Alfred Street also at 7:20am. Four shots were fired but he escaped and survived.

As I've posted here recently, both jurisdictions on the island are more or less fully secular nowadays. There are new gods. A truly 'new Ireland' must acknowledge, honestly and even-handedly, the full extent of the wrongs which have been carried out on people on both sides of the border.

We are very familiar with Northern Ireland relentlessly being cast as a 'sectarian statelet' and – let's be honest – there is plenty of evidence of that being true. But in Cork, as recently as 2012, another Church of Ireland clergyman Canon George Salter, then in his 90s, bravely gave an account in Irish of his own family's experiences in Cork in a documentary entitled An Tost Fada (The Long Silence). See review here. This 2017 article shows some of the reaction to the film. The film's producer compared this to a 'deep denial' he had encountered in eastern Europe when making a film about the ethnic cleansing of Jews (see article here).



During our most recent and enjoyable trip to County Cork, my 16 year old son and I had a friendly conversation with a middle class couple in a restaurant near where we were staying. I went to the bar to pay the bill, leaving him in their company; they continued talking, but they left before I returned to the table. In my absence they had told him in no uncertain terms that he didn't live in Northern Ireland, he lived in the north of Ireland.

I can understand an instinct to 'fight the power'. But maybe sometimes that is merely a disguise to hide or legitimise the radicalised bloodlust of 'shoot the neighbours', whether those neighbours live in the same townland, the same city, or the same island - and whatever their religious tradition or political persuasion might be.

I hope to go back to Cork again later this year. We met some really lovely people and saw fascinating places. There are more fish to catch, and there are some stories to uncover. There are always things to learn.

• Robin Bury's 2017 book 'Buried Lives, the Protestants of Southern Ireland' (review here) has been added to the pile I need to get round to reading, as has Gerard Murphy's 2010 book 'The Year of Disappearances: Political Killings in Cork, 1920–21'.

Ideas are big

Bigger than nationality, bigger than ethnicity, bigger than gender, bigger than class. The sharing of ideas is the biggest tool the human race has. Some photos here of Cork Baptist Church, built in 1892 – I've spent a bit of time in Cork this year and have learned a lot. Some posts may follow. Evangelical reformed faith is not 'owned' by a subculture or tribe in Northern Ireland. Ideas are bigger than borders. 'For God so loved the world...'

This wasn't the first Baptist place of worship in Cork, but it's a pretty quirky building and it has a good chippy next door which is a bonus.

M'Connell's Whisky - Belfast and Stromness, Orkney

J&J McConnell Limited was founded in 1776, the year of the American Revolution. Based at the Cromac Distillery in Belfast, one of their brands was abbreviated as Old Cro' Irish Whisky. This is yet another Ulster whisky brand with a meaningful connection into Scotland – but this time not to the big cities in the mainland but, ironically, to the Orkney island which is itself called 'Mainland'. The firm was in liquidation in August 1931, but bottled products were still being sold for some years after. The Stromness distillery had closed around 1928 and the building was later demolished. However, the McConnell's brand is due to be revived in Belfast in the near future.

Companies do things for commercial reasons – but surely the geographical proximity with Scotland, and potentially the cultural connections and similarities – were additional factors in so many Ulster distilleries looking west for new business ventures.

BBC Scotland - 'The Last Explorers', David Livingstone - presented by Neil Oliver

This BBC Scotland documentary about the Scottish missionary/explorer Dr David Livingstone is brilliant, his is one of those names I grew up with, in Sunday School and from many books we had around home. Tremendous insight into the challenges he encountered in trying to end slavery in east Africa. Presented by Neil Oliver and on iPlayer now.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b017hzw2