Sing in the Quiet Places of my Heart: The Life and Works of WM Letts (1882-1972), by Bairbre O’Hogan (South Dublin Libraries, €20.00 / £16.99); available through Alan Hanna and other retailers.
J. Anthony Gaughan
Winifred Letts is one of those many poets of the Irish Literary Revival, once widely admired, who lead a fugitive life in anthologies, and are loved by many readers, but are never elevated to a place in “the canon of Irish literature”, those saved souls of Irish writing who are elected to be the only ones taught in our schools and colleges. This book, commissioned and produced by a public body, is the first effort at a biography and should be warmly welcomed by all for that reason.
Winfred M. Letts was born in Salford, Manchester, England, on 10 February 1882. After early schooling she attended ‘Mr Parkinson’s Academy’, near her father’s rectory at Newton Heath, Manchester. Aged nine she joined her two older sisters at St Anne’s Boarding School at Abbots Bromley, Staffordshire. Finally, she attended Alexandra College in Dublin from 1898 to 1900.
In 1904 Winfred’s father died while ministering in Bournemouth. This prompted her mother to transfer the family to Ireland to be with their extended family. They eventually settled in Blackrock, Co Dublin.
Dominated
World War I loomed large, indeed dominated the lives of Winifred and her contemporaries. Most of the young men she knew were dragged into the war with very few of them returning unscathed from the trenches. The sisters and girl-friends of those who went to war also felt compelled to contribute to the war effort. This they did by joining the ‘VADS’. These were the ‘Voluntary Aid Detachments’ who were required to provide humanitarian aid to military and naval forces at home and abroad under the aegis of the British Red Cross.
Winifred signed up with a local ‘VADS’ in June 1915. Following a short period of training at the Royal City of Dublin Hospital in Baggot Street she was posted to serve in the 2nd Western General Hospital in Manchester. She served in the hospital for more than a year and after other assignments in military hospitals and camps she returned at the end of the war to Baggot Street hospital to pursue a career as a masseuse (physiotherapist). Eight years later she married a wealthy land-agent and widower, William Henry Foster Verschoyle, on 5 May 1926.
Gift
From her earliest years it was clear that Winifred had the gift of the pen. In those early years, she was later to acknowledge she received considerable assistance and encouragement from the well-known novelist and poet, Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861-1907).
Winifred wrote incessantly, yet it was not until 1904 that her first essay and poem were published. The poem ‘The Wind’s Call’ appeared in the Westminster Gazette. A month later in January 1905 a second poem ‘Faeries’ was published in a monthly magazine Occasional Papers.
However, it was not until 1911 that Letts’s poetry became popular. From that year onwards it was to be seen in highly-regarded publications – generally the Spectator and Westminster Gazette – and copied into newspapers far and wide. Then in 1913 her first book of poetry was published.
Winifred published Hallowe’en and Poems of the War in 1916 and Spires of Oxford and Other Poems in 1917. This war poetry attracted the attention of the literati. It was distinctive. It was different from the poetry of Francis Ledwidge, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves.
More than the others she did not eschew describing the dark side of war – the loss of life, the mangled bodies, the mangled lives, the loss and the destruction of property and the grief and the sorrow.
Typically, in the ‘The Deserter’ she wrote about a young soldier who, suffering from a nervous breakdown, deserted only to be executed in the ‘grey light of dawn’. No other poet exposed such treatment meted out to such traumatised young soldiers in an era when the concept of ‘shell shock’ was still an unaccepted fact.
Dramatist
Winifred was also a dramatist of note. Her The Eyes of the Blind was staged in the Abbey Theatre in 1907, as was The Challenge in 1909. And Hamilton and Jones was presented in the Gate Theatre in 1941. Her prose writings were extensive and exceptional, spanning six decades; and was the most prolific in terms of being published.
Winifred enjoyed socialising in literary circles. She was elected a member of The United Arts Club in Dublin in 1914. She was also a member of the Women Writers Club and was elected its president in 1944.
Congratulations are due to Bairbre O’Hogan, who with this superb biography and the assistance of South Dublin Libraries will ensure that the significant contribution of Winifred M. Letts to the Irish literary tradition will not be forgotten.
Mildred Anne Butler: a quiet genius of water colour Lady of the Peacocks: The Life and Art of Mildred Anne Butler, by Tom Duffy (Wordwell, €40.00 / £33.50)
Peter Costello
Due to all the yearend activities, both in social life and on these pages, I had an opportunity to visit the exhibition of watercolours by Mildred Anne Butler mounted in the Hugh Lane Room of the National Gallery, it closed before there was a chance to notice it in these pages.
But for those who did not see that show, while waiting for another exhibition of her work, Tom Duffy’s lavish new book, the work of a man experienced, not only in art history, but in the art of mounting exhibitions, will provide a way of reaching a view of a most interesting Irish artist, a quiet but powerfully talented painter in her own way.
For those who did see the exhibition it was a memorable one. Perhaps the author of this book will be facilitated by a gallery in the artist’s native Thomastown in Kilkenny.
The Kilkenny district seems indeed to be the key to the painter’s career. Though she was trained and inspired by artists in England and France, but the materials of her vision were nearly all to be found in the gardens and fields of her family’s great house and estate.
Her work sold well in her lifetime, but she was never a prominent artist. Her work was often used as social illustrations: Going to the Levee, showing guests arriving in Dublin Castle for a Vice-Regal event, must have appeared on the cover or among the illustrations of countless books dealing with Ireland from the death of Yeats in 1891 to the founding of the Free State a century ago.
But society, people in fact, were not, it seems to me, to have been her real metier. What she really relished were birds, beasts, wild life, the corners of gardens and farms. This was all very evident in the NGI show – as it will be in any future show.
Yet her world is not one free of fear. Those black rooks and crows of some of the paintings have always disturbed me. I am well aware that this is due to an encounter an early age of a “rooks’ gallows” that then stood before the main door of Charleville Castle in near Tullamore in Offaly – a beech (I think still standing) on which the carcases of the scavengers shot by the gamekeepers, an ominous sight to stand outside a great Irish house. I shivered at them then, and still do in her paintings.
However there were pleasures too. Her images of birds of all kinds, not just the peacocks of the book’s title, but doves and other kinds of birds are simply wonderful. Then there is her way with cattle. As a painter she was talented in expressing what a medieval philosopher might have called “the cowness of cows”. In the exhibition there was shown a small photo of the artist at work a pair of calves tethered and pegs in place lying down so as to keep their pose while she worked on their portrait.
Those who share Mildred Anne Butler’s love of the birds and the beasts of God’s creation will enjoy this book.
The family tragedy that epitomises the Belfast “Pogrom” of 1920-22
Ghosts of a family: Ireland’s Most Infamous Unsolved Murder, the Outbreak of the Civil War and the Origins of the Modern Troubles, by Edward Burke
(Merrion Press, €19.99 / £16.99)
Felix M. Larkin
Perhaps the most shocking event during the period of the so-called Belfast Pogrom – July 1920 to October 1922 – was the murder of a prosperous Catholic publican, Owen McMahon, four of his sons and an employee of the family, Edward McKinney, in the early hours of March 24 1922 in the McMahon home.
It was, in the words of the author of this book, Edward Burke (a UCD history lecturer), “the original sin of Northern Ireland’s foundation”. Four of the five men in the murder party wore police uniforms. They were never brought to justice.
In popular memory, District Inspector John Nixon of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) was held to be responsible for this atrocity. Undoubtedly a controversial figure with links to loyalist organisations, he always protested his innocence.
Burke confirms his innocence, and succeeds in identifying the likely chief culprit, one David Duncan, a decorated military veteran and former member of the RIC Auxiliary Division, who at the time of the murders was a leader of a loyalist organisation known as the “Ulster Imperial Guards” – described by Burke as “the largest and most capable paramilitary organisation in Belfast”, comprised largely of ex-servicemen hardened by the experience of the Great War.
Duncan had joined the RIC Auxiliary in January 1921, but was dismissed for misconduct in the following October. Burke writes that his “military and police service was marked by paranoia and sudden acts of extreme violence”.
In the mid-1920s Duncan would serve in the French Foreign Legion, then return to Belfast and subsequently emigrate to Canada. Burke remarks that “there was … a pattern of sending dangerous loyalist murderers across the Atlantic”, and Duncan’s passage to Canada was allegedly paid for by the head of the Orange Order in Belfast, Sir Joseph Davison. He spent his final years in a psychiatric hospital in Toronto, dying in 1939 – aged forty-eight.
John Nixon, despite – or maybe because of – the mistaken belief that he was responsible for the McMahon and McKinney murders, would later have a career as a maverick unionist politician.
Nixon had transferred to the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) on its establishment in June 1922, but was dismissed in 1924 for making a political speech at an Orange Order lodge contrary to RUC regulations. In 1929 he was elected to the Northern Ireland parliament as an Independent Unionist and held the seat until his death in 1949.
On two occasions – in 1929 and 1939 – he successfully sued for libel when publically accused of the McMahon and McKinney murders. Nevertheless, Burke records that a publication by the Royal Irish Academy in 2022 identified Nixon as having “planned and executed the McMahon attack”, and a BBC Radio Ulster documentary first broadcast in 2021 suggested that Nixon had led the attack on the McMahons. In these pages Edward Burke finally sets the record straight.
His book also gives us a panorama of the dark days of the Belfast Pogrom. The popular characterisation of what occurred in Belfast between July 1920 and October 1922 as a “Pogrom” – a word that carries echoes of the systematic massacre of Jewish people in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – is somewhat melodramatic. It was rather sectarian warfare between the two communities. Catholics undoubtedly suffered disproportionately, but they were not the only victims.
There were almost 500 fatalities in total during the months in question, of which about half were Catholic civilians. About 180 Protestant civilians also died. There were some 30 IRA deaths, and 37 policemen killed. These figures are taken from an article by Kieran Glennon in History Ireland (September-October 2020).
The legacy of the Belfast Pogrom remains with us to this day. To quote Edward Burke again: “Murder was a festering infection that was seeping into the bloodstream of the city’s politics … [and would] set the conditions for more than three decades of violence in Northern Ireland – the Troubles – at the end of the twentieth century.”