Abstract
Horace Plunkett’s Kilteragh was one of two Irish big houses noted for the hospitality of their hosts that Bernard Shaw with his wife Charlotte stayed at regularly during the revolutionary period leading up to Irish independence in 1922. The other big house was Coole, at Coole Park, Co. Galway, the estate belonging to Augusta Gregory, née Persse (generally known as Lady Gregory). Both houses are indelibly associated with the early-twentieth-century Irish cultural renaissance that extended beyond the arts and agriculture to new constitutional forms as Ireland detached itself as a nation from its long association with the England. This chapter traces Bernard Shaw’s friendships with their famous hosts through frequent visits to both houses between 1910 and 1922.
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Notes
- 1.
Shaw letter of 15 August 1922 from Kelly’s Strand Hotel was written in response to the solicitor of two London IRA men, Dunn and O’Sullivan, following their execution on 12 August for the assassination (one of the sparks that ignited the Irish Civil War) on 22 June of Sir Henry Wilson, Irish Unionist and ex-British Army Chief of the Imperial General Staff. According to Whytes auction catalogue (8 November 2014): “1922 (15 August 1922). Manuscript letter written by George Bernard Shaw regarding Dunn and O’Sullivan, to their solicitor. Single octavo page of Kelly’s Rosslare Strand Hotel notepaper, written on both sides in Shaw’s own hand. Shaw had written in The Guardian and The Nation about the injustice of the trial of Dunn and O’Sullivan for the murder of Sir Henry Wilson. Here he repeats his view these men were simply lynched, though there was no difficulty in executing them legally.” He is acknowledging receipt of the men’s statements and approves of the publication of Dunn’s but not of O’Sullivan: “if it is sincere he is an egotistical imbecile.” Fascinating contribution to this intriguing and murky episode of Irish history by the Nobel Laureate.” http://www.whytes.ie/Irish-Art/i2ArchivesResult.asp?Search=Shaw+Kelly%27s+Hotel
- 2.
“Eveline,” “The Sisters,” and “After the Races,” all later revised for Dubliners , were published in The Irish Homestead under the name “Stephen Daedalus.”
- 3.
The writer’s great-grandfather, Frederick Townsend Gahan, chief inspector with the Congested Districts Board for Mayo (and incidentally a third cousin of Charlotte Shaw, née Townsend), travelled with Plunkett from Westport to “Mallaranny” that same day, Friday 18 September 1908; “The weather today was glorious,” noted Plunkett (HP).
HP in brackets here and elsewhere in the text refers to Horace Plunkett’s Diaries available on microfilm at the National Library of Ireland, which provides online transcriptions, as in this instance for the year 1908: http://www.nli.ie/pdfs/diaries_of_sir_horace_curzon_plunkett/1908_diary_of_sir_horace_curzon_plunkett.pdf
- 4.
From copy of 1949 letter from Bernard Shaw to Margaret Digby in the Plunkett Foundation, Oxford.
- 5.
W. B. Yeats: A Life: The Apprentice Mage (1865–1914), R.F. Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 429.
- 6.
SGA in brackets here and later in the text refers to Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey: A Correspondence and a Record edited by Dan H. Laurence and Nicholas Grene. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smyth, 1993.
- 7.
CFS in brackets here and elsewhere in the text refers to Charlotte Shaw’s yearly engagement diaries, held in the British Library. Much of the information on places, names, and dates in this chapter comes from this source.
- 8.
The distinguished Hugh, 1st Viscount Gough (1779–1869) may have in part inspired Col. Pearce Madigan in Shaw’s O’Flaherty V.C. (1915). Both Madigan and O’Flaherty are old Gaelic family names associated with Galway, and Persse of course, was Augusta Gregory’s maiden name; there had been earlier marriages between Perrse and Gough families!
- 9.
GBS in brackets here and elsewhere in the text refers to Bernard Shaw’s yearly engagement diaries, held in the Library of the London School of Economics. His information corroborates and supplements that found in Charlotte Shaw’s diaries.
- 10.
See Laurence, Dan H. Shaw: An Exhibit (Austin: Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, 1977), item 340.
- 11.
On 24 July 1926, Gregory wrote to Shaw: “No, you can’t have read that play in my hearing; if you had done so there is no possible chance I should have forgotten it, and I have no memory of it at all.” In fact, she had been sick in bed the evening Shaw read the play to Yeats and other guests at Coole; he may have wanted to get Yeats’s opinion of the play. The shorthand draft is misdated “Coole Park, Summer, 1909,” when it should be 1910, corrected by Laurence in CL3, 835.
- 12.
- 13.
In two letters in fact, one to Granville Barker on 31 March 1913 in The Shaw-Barker Letters, ed. C.B. Purdom (London: Phoenix, 1956), 188, and the other to Mrs. Patrick Campbell on 2 April 1913, in Bernard Shaw Collected Letters: 1911–1925 Vol. 3 edited by Dan H. Laurence (London: Max Reinhardt, 1985), 164, designated hereafter in the text as CL3.
- 14.
Trevor West, Horace Plunkett, Co-operation and Politics: An Irish Biography, (Gerrards Cross, Bucks.: Colin Smyth, 1986).
- 15.
Shaws-HP in brackets here and elsewhere refers to copies of the correspondence between Bernard Shaw, Charlotte Shaw, and Horace Plunkett courtesy of the Plunkett Foundation, Oxford.
- 16.
Their mutual dislike may have been due to shared similarities rather than differences. Gogarty with his derisive Dublin wit was an extreme manifestation of that part of his own personality Shaw was most ambivalent about, and so not predisposed to admire in a fellow Dubliner. See Peter Gahan “Bernard Shaw: Dégringolade and Derision in Dublin,” in Shaw and the City, SHAW 32: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies ed. Desmond Harding (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).
- 17.
Berg Collection, NYPL. Lady Gregory, TS n.d. [1915?] Programmes for three weeks “3 bills each week” for the Abbey Theatre: “Have drawn this up with G.B.S. AG.” [in m.s.]
1st Week: Kathleen ni Houlihan, Playboy; Minutes Wait, Maurice Harte, Workhouse; Mixed Marriage [St John Ervine, 1911], Rising [of the Moon].
2nd Week: Shanwalla [Gregory, 1915], Sovereign Love; Playboy, or Well [of the Saints]; Riders to the Sea, Mineral Workers, “[m.s.] Minister was B____s Hyacinth.”
3rd Week: [On] Baile’s Strand, Patriots [Lennox Robinson, 1912]; Playboy or Well (with Hyacinth [Halvey by Gregory]); [In the] Shadow of the Glen] (or Briary Gap), Birthright, Spreading [the News]
Matinees. Slough, Deirdre of the Sorrows
“Only one week to be announced at a time. Matinées (special) held back for the present.”
- 18.
See Gregory’s letter to Arthur Sinclair, in which she quotes Shaw’s high opinion of play and performance to persuade the actor—not as enamoured of Gregory’s play as GBS—to tour in the play. Reprinted in Holloway, Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre: a Selection from his unpublished journal: Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer, eds. Robert Hogan and Michael J. O. Neill with a preface by Harry T. Moore (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern University Press, 1967), 171.
- 19.
Originally published in Lady Gregory, Seventy Years; being the autobiography of Lady Gregory, 1852–1922, edited and with a foreword by Colin Smythe (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1974).
- 20.
In Bernard Shaw, What Shaw Really Wrote about the War, edited by J.L. Wisenthal and Daniel O’Leary (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006).
- 21.
From Gregory’s manuscript Memoirs, 7–8 May 1915, Berg.
- 22.
Bernard Shaw, What Shaw Really Wrote about the War, edited by J.L. Wisenthal and Daniel O’Leary (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 115.
- 23.
The series of three articles, “How to Settle the Irish Question,” were published simultaneously in Ireland, Britain, and the United States that November (27–29 November 1917 in the Daily Express and in several Irish papers, and in four parts in the New York American 23, 30 December 1917 and 6, 13 January 1918. The Talbot Press in Dublin (together with Constable & Company in London) issued them together as a separate pamphlet in December 1917.
- 24.
Æ had written a Swiftian letter “To the Masters of Dublin,” printed in The Irish Times , of barely restrained outrage assailing the Dublin employers for their behaviour towards the Dublin workers (7 October 1913): “It remained for the twentieth century and the capital city of Ireland to see an oligarchy of four hundred masters deciding openly upon starving one hundred thousand people, and refusing to consider any solution except that fixed by their pride.”
- 25.
For an account of the short-lived National Land Bank, which was absorbed into the Irish Land Commission in 1923, see Denis Cogan’s account at: http://www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie/reels/bmh/BMH.WS1556.pdf
- 26.
These was another possible William O’Brien, James Connolly and James Larkin’s associate William X. O’Brien—the three had founded the Irish Labour Party in 1912 as the political wing of the ITGWU.
- 27.
In an article on Robert Gregory for The Observer, Yeats wrote three weeks after his death: “Major Gregory told Bernard Shaw, who visited him in France, that the months since he joined the army had been the happiest of his life.” In Uncollected Prose of W.B. Yeats Vol. 2, eds. John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson (London: Macmillan, 1975; New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 431, qtd. in Stanley Weintraub’s Shaw’s People, 110. Weintraub also notes a BBC talk by Yeats as late as 1937, where he acknowledges that he learned from GBS that Gregory “was never happy until he began to fight.”
- 28.
See, http://landedestates.nuigalway.ie/LandedEstates/jsp/family-show.jsp?id=2811. And, http://www.thepeerage.com/p24615.htm#i246146. The novelist Elizabeth Bowen of Bowen’s Court in north Cork was connected to the Dripsey Bowen-Colthursts.
- 29.
See Peter Gahan, Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb on Poverty and Equality in the Modern World, 1905–1914, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). After their 1910 trip to Coole, Shaw had delivered a major lecture on “Irish Destitution” at the Ancient Concert Rooms, Dublin, reconstituted and edited by Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel in SHAW 33: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013).
- 30.
Shaw Review, May 1959.
- 31.
See Laurence’s notes in Letters 4, 86; and Ada Tyrrell’s recollections of the young Shaw in “The Shaws of Dublin: A Symposium,” in Shaw: Interviews and Recollections, ed. A. M. Gibbs (London: Methuen, 1990), 3–9.
- 32.
Lady Gregory, The Journals Volume 1: Books 1–29: 10 October 1916–24 February 1925, edited by Daniel J. Murphy (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1978).
- 33.
Shaw Review, May 1959: 7.
- 34.
As Lord Mayor of Cork, McSwiney had succeeded Tomas McCurtain, who had been shot dead in his family home by an RIC squad on 20 March 1920.
- 35.
As suggested in Meda Ryan Michael Collins and the Women Who Spied for Ireland (Cork: Mercier, 2006), 128ff.
- 36.
Plunkett’s practically illegible handwriting is responsible for the slightly different readings quoting Plunkett’s diary for 19 August 1922 in Margaret Digby, Horace Plunkett: an Anglo-American Irishman, 253–4, and Trevor West, Horace Plunkett: Co-operation and Politics, 1986. Kate Targett’s enormously valuable transcriptions available online at the National Library of Ireland (www.nli.ie) do not always resolve the confusion.
- 37.
Hazel: A Life of Lady Lavery 1880–1935, Sinéad McCoole (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1996), 97.
- 38.
The pamphlets (in Shaw’s possession at Ayot St. Lawrence at the time of his death) are now in the Shaw Papers collection in the British Library: Erskine Childers, Clause by Clause: a comparison between “The Treaty” and Document no. 2. Dublin: Irish Nation Committee, [1922]. Bernard Shaw’s own copy. BL: Shaw 33; Eamon De Valera, The Alternative to the “Treaty” (“Document no. 2”). Dublin: Irish Nation Committee, [1922]. BL: Shaw 21
- 39.
Thomas Spring Rice, Lord Monteagle, of Mount Trenchard in Limerick, one of the founders of the IAOS, was also present (HP). His daughter was Irish nationalist Mary Spring Rice, who had participated with Molly Childers in the Howth gun-running and had used Mount Trenchard as a safe house for the IRA during the War of Independence.
- 40.
Plunkett had dined with John McCormack (“of the build & type of Collins, but coarser”) and his wife the previous evening at the Gogartys’s house (HP).
- 41.
See facsimile of Shaw’s letter to Hazel Lavery of 7 October 1922 printed in Hazel: A Life of Lady Lavery 1880–1935, Sinéad McCoole (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1996).
- 42.
Sir John Lavery, The Life of a Painter (1940), 228.
- 43.
From Seventy Years Young, Memories of Elizabeth, Countess of Fingall told to Pamela Hinkson (London: Collins, 1937), 408–9.
- 44.
As a leading establishment figure, Plunkett was determined to attend Collins’s funeral although Collins’s history as a gunman meant his decision was not taken lightly. A conversation between Plunkett and his cousin Fingall illustrates how the old landowners in the new Irish state had the Bolshevik revolution in Russia on their minds, fearing the class-implications of the new order (Thurs. 24 August): “Fingall came up to discuss whether we should go to the funeral. He says we made ourselves conspicuous at Griffith’s funeral, & were criticised by our class. But Collins was a gunman & if he did not (as Carson asserted in the Lords he did) kill people with his own hand, he must have been privy to the assassination of the police and secret service officers in 1919–20. My view is that these things are due to be forgotten now. Collins has been highly praised by H.M. Gov’t for the way he behaved in the making of the Treaty. Certainly he is better than the Republican leaders” (HP).
- 45.
Gregory directly negotiated with the local Republicans, commenting in her journal: “I suppose they have found out the authorship of the Nation articles; and though I had not spoken of them or claimed any credit I was pleased” (Gregory, Journals 1, Book 15, 288).
- 46.
George Moore accused Gregory’s strongly evangelical Protestant Persse family of proselytizing during the 1845–50 famine, with the implication of souperism, that is, using soup as a bribe to convert starving people
Charlotte Shaw had sold Derry House, Rosscarbery, in 1915 to Sergeant A.M. Sullivan, who had so inadequately defended Roger Casement at his trial in 1916. His father had been editor of The Nation associated with the Young Ireland movement in the 1860s. However, during the Anglo-Irish War (Irish War of Independence), as a Crown appointee Sullivan led prosecutions against Irish Nationalists, earning the enmity of Republicans and making “Derry” vulnerable to attack.
- 47.
From copy of 1948 letter in the Plunkett Foundation, Oxford, from Bernard Shaw to Margaret Digby, Plunkett’s biographer.
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Gahan, P. (2020). Bernard Shaw in Two Great Irish Houses: Kilteragh and Coole. In: McNamara, A., O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, N. (eds) Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland. Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42113-7_11
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