Hannah Spellman

Ever since my younger brother Seamus was killed in a car accident on the Dublin road just outside Athy in November 1965, the eleventh month in which we commemorate the dead has held for me an extra special significance.  Especially so when to the long list of those who have passed through this life has been added the name of another who was near and dear. 

Last week a grand old lady passed away in her 95^th year.  She was my mother-in-law, Hannah Spellman.  I first met her 37 years ago when she was living in the heart of Connemara.  A Cork woman and proud of the fact, she first came to Connemara just four years after the founding of the Irish Free State and remained there for 46 years amongst the Gaelic speaking community of Fermoyle and the neighbouring villages of Gleanicmurrin, Seanafeistin and Knockadoo.  It was there among the rugged beauty of the Connemara countryside that she reared her family.

I remember my first trip to Connemara in a Morris Minor car which I had borrowed from my father.  Most of us, although I wasn’t at that time, are familiar with the main road out past Barna, Spiddal and Tully and on to Carraroe, but to get to Fermoyle I had to turn off at Rossaveal and wend my way another seven or eight miles deeper and deeper into the Connemara countryside.  By then the road was tarred, but just a few years previously it was nothing more than a graveled roadway.  Small cottages and bungalows were visible on the hillside, clustered together as if to protect themselves against the encroachment of the heather cloaked bog which surrounded them. 

Half way on the road to Fermoyle the one-roomed schoolhouse where the Spellman children and their scattered neighbours had attended National School was pointed out to me.  It was another three miles or more to Fermoyle Lodge and to a “townie” who had leisurely walked to his school and sprinted home at lunchbreak, it was a bit of a jolt to be told that Connemara youngsters walked three or four miles to school each day, hail, rain or snow.

My introduction to the Connemara way of life in the late 1960’s coincided with the last days of an older generation which had seen life under English rule and the emerging Irish Free State.  Stories of Black and Tans and the escapades of Johnny Broderick, a Galway I.R.A. man and a family relation, was told against the backdrop of Fermoyle Lodge which World War I General, Kincaid Smith had often used as his fishing and shooting lodge.

The Spellman house was a céili house for the locality and at night time the local men (why never the women I now ask myself) gathered in the kitchen swopping stories, local news and jollity and smoking tobacco pipes.  Every now and then somebody would get up and go to the back door and stand there looking up at the sky as if checking the weather.  Nothing would be said as the back door was closed and the weather gazer stepped out into the dark.  He always returned, apparently cheered and warmed, and it was sometime before I came to realise that the neighbours invariably brought with them a bottle of poitín which was carefully concealed in the bushes away from the house.  Poitín making was, and probably still is, a tradition in the area, but ever mindful of the need not to implicate neighbours, the potent concoction was never brought indoors.  Hence the constant toing and froing between kitchen and the garden where the treasured bottle was laid on the ground as gently as a new born babe in its first crib. 

I remember the names of some of those men, all of whom have long passed on.  The commonality of surnames in the West often required references to one’s antecedents so that identification could be properly and quickly made as conversation flowed.  So it was that a man from Connemara was seldom simply called Sean or Pat.  He invariably also bore the name of his father or grandfather, if required, as it generally was, to distinguish him from another of the same name.  Hence Joeín Paudge Séan Dan was a well known figure in Fermoyle village and all the names were needed to distinguish him from another Joeín.  Tom Máiread was a gentle quite spoken boat man whom I got to know in that part of Connemara.  Tom was the son of Máiread and Mick, the son of Pat Mór, who was known as Mike Pat Mór and his good wife was known as Máire Pat Mór. 

It was amongst the Gaelic speaking Connemara folk that Hannah Spellman, the Doneraile born Cork woman came to live.  She spoke no Irish and over the years, whether through choice or otherwise, she never lapsed into the native tongue, even when conversing with her neighbours.  They spoke Irish to her which she apparently understood and replied in English which they equally seemed to understand and both continued the conversation in different tongues without any apparent loss of meaning or understanding on either side.  The first time I witnessed this it was a mesmerizing experience but both parties seemed to regard their linguistic exchanges as perfectly normal. 

Another puzzling aspect of Connemara life for “a midlander” was the ease with which a few houses perched precariously on the side of a Connemara hillside could be referred to in conversation as “the village”.  The first time I came across this I was puzzled when Mrs. Spellman, referring to a neighbour in the village, pointed across the open expanse of Connemara bog to the far hillside where three isolated cottages could be seen.  That I learned was the village of Fermoyle, unadorned by the presence of Church, pub or post office.  Indeed these facilities were to be reached only by travelling at least eight miles down the road which led in the direction of Rossaveal.  The willingness of the Connemara folk to bestow civic status on a few isolated cottages was in a way similar to the American practice of designating anything larger than a crossroads as a city.

As befitting someone who had spent her entire adult life among the Connemara’s, Hannah Spellman was a gifted story teller.  How often I heard the stories of the poachers, pronounced “poochers”, who netted the river for salmon to the disgust of the rod-men and the local boatmen.  The dangers of the Connemara hills and bogs was recounted in the story of her husband John Spellman who was lost in freezing fog for two days but kept himself alive by continuously circling around a large rock until the fog had lifted.  She was also a great advocate of the literary works of Canon Sheehan who as Parish Priest of Doneraile had baptised her in the local Church.

To my shame, although I had talked of doing so, I had never recorded her stories of life in Connemara.  Some weeks ago I mentioned the possibility of organising an oral history project in South Kildare which would help to record experiences, stories and past happenings of this area so that future generations might better understand their past.  The response to that piece would indicate that there may be enough people interested in pursuing the idea, and hopefully arrangements can be in place in the new year to start the project.  More information about that at a later date.

Hannah Spellman was laid to rest in Bohermore Cemetery in Galway last week, a few months short of her 95^th birthday.  Her life was a long and happy one and as the cortege passed the mass grave of those who died in the K.L.M. crash off Shannon in 1954, I thought of those unfortunate men, women and children, some of whom were never identified, whose lives were cut short in such a violent way.  To live a long and happy life is a privilege which not everyone is destined to enjoy.

Hannah Spellmans 90th Birthday - Deaths of Frank Foley and 'Wexford' Foley

I was at a birthday party during the week which I enjoyed immensely. My enjoyment owed much to the sense of immortality felt when I realised that the party girl was 90 years of age. She was born in the year the old age pension was first awarded. Then you had to be over 70 years of age to get the princely sum of five shillings a week. Hannah Spellman, after a lifetime spent amongst the rugged beauty of Connemara is now a city dweller. Her proud boast is that she was baptised by Canon Sheehan of Doneraile the priests whose novels were the staple diet of Irish readers during the first half of this century. ‘Geoffrey Austin Student’, ‘The Triumph of Failure’, ‘Luke Delmege’ and ‘My New Curate’ were some of the titles which came from the pen of Canon Sheehan between 1897 and 1912. I would imagine that there was not an Irish home without one of Canon Sheehan’s books up to 40 years ago despite or perhaps because he gave his readers an insight into the quaint peasantry habits which were never far removed from our own lives.

Ninety years ago Ernest Shackleton was still on one of his Antarctic expeditions and was to come within one hundred miles of the South Pole, and the English Channel was being crossed by aeroplane for the first time. The Great War was still five years away and the ten million or so men and women who were killed in that War were still part of the largely rural communities into which they had been born.

Take a step back ninety years from the year in which the future Hannah Spellman was born and you are in 1819, twenty six years before the Irish famine broke on the Irish scene with such devastating effects. That was also the year the future Queen Victoria was born and the same year English soldiers shot and killed eleven men who were among a crowd gathered for a reform meeting at St. Peter’s field, Manchester. The Peterloo Massacre caused widespread indignation and ultimately advanced the cause of parliamentary reform.

Ninety years is a somewhat comforting length of time in which to view one’s own age and so it was that I took heart and encouragement from my mother in law’s good fortune in maintaining her health and cheerfulness for so long. Maybe there was something in the water used by Canon Sheehan in his small church in Doneraile so many years ago that encouraged longevity.

When you get to such a great age there is more than ample opportunity to look back and remember people you have met. Hannah Spellman is no different in that regard than anyone else except that she has a veritable legion of memories relating to persons who figured prominently in history. She met Bruce Ismay, the owner of The Titanic and the man who was said to have survived the sinking of that ship by dressing up as a woman and entering one of the lifeboats. That at least was the story which Connemara folk told of Ismay long after the immense liner had sunk on her maiden voyage in 1912 with the loss of nearly sixteen hundred persons. Many of the steerage passengers on that fateful voyage were from the West of Ireland and it is no wonder the people from the Connemara countryside held fast to their belief that Ismay had cheated death in this way.

Inevitably the War of Independence must hold memories for someone of ninety years of age. Hannah Spellman recalled the ambush set up outside her parents house at Kilbrack, County Cork when men of the Cork flying column positioned themselves behind the rails of the gate lodge leading to Kilbrack House. The inevitable casualties on the English side resulted in a rampage of terror for days afterwards and may have been the cause of her uncle’s subsequent killing. Tom Hannon was her mother’s brother and he died a young man of a wound sustained in a shoot out with English soldiers.

Being a Cork woman with the name Nagle the future Hannah Spellman can claim a family connection with Nano Nagle foundress of the Presentation Sisters. Indeed the Nagle family tree which was carefully compiled over the years is drawn out with justifiable pride to show that the 90 year old is the great grand niece of Nano Nagle.

“Did you ever meet Michael Collins” ? I asked, ever hopeful that perhaps even a fleeting glance as he passeed through Doneraile could be turned into a prolonged meeting with one of the great figures of twentieth century Ireland. The answer is no, for the woman had and still has no interest in politics or the people who once populated the shady environments of militarism before they succumbed to the politics of the Irish Free State.

My mother in law travelled from Galway to Athy not realising that when she set out on the long journey that she was doing so to celebrate her ninetieth birthday. She had about her on the day her extended family, many of whom travelled from abroad as well as from the extremities of the island of Ireland. The grand lady had a great day.

In the same week as her ninetieth birthday was celebrated, two local men passed away before they had reached the biblical three score and ten. Frank Foley was a class mate of mine in the Christian Brothers Primary School. “Yah” was his nickname, derived, I understand, from his great fondness of cowboy films and his habit of using the cowboys “yah” in his everyday conversation. Like so many of his contemporaries in the Athy of the 1950’s, Frank left school once the compulsory school age of fourteen years was reached. He left to join the local L&N Stores in Emily Square as a messenger boy later joining the asbestos factory. He subsequently spent some time in England as almost every working man in Athy has done before returning to work in Minch Nortons. He retired from there some years ago and was in poor health in recent years. I knew Frank quite well and remember with fondness our time together in the classrooms of St. John’s. I didn’t know “Wexford” Foley as well but nevertheless recognised him as did everyone in Athy as a congenial man who was an intrinsic part of life in the town. How the extraordinary nickname “Wexford” came to be bestowed on him I cannot say but to those who knew him he was never called anything else. Both “Yah” and “Wexford” lived in the same terrace in Dooley’s Terrace and neither had married. I presume, perhaps wrongly, that they were related to each other, being members of the extended Foley family which must be one of the oldest families in the town.

In response to those who contacted me about last week’s article on the Luggacurran evictions, I will return to that subject again in the very near future. This week, as you can see, is my opportunity to pay a small tribute to a lady who was the very opposite of the music hall version of the mother in law. The Cork woman who moved to Connemara where she lived for over fifty years before moving into Galway city is almost as good as her daughter who keeps me in line. Could I say anymore.