Town Major Sirr
Published in 18th–19th - Century History, Issue 4 (Winter 2003), Letters, Letters, Volume 11Sir,—Pat Marshall’s interesting piece on Major Sirr in your last issue (HI 11.3, Autumn 2003) neglected one aspect of Sirr’s later career: his interest in the Irish language. (Viewers of Pat Murphy’s film Anne Devlin will recall that Sirr is the only major character who speaks Irish on-screen, when talking to an informer.) It extended to strong support for missionary societies that hoped to convert Irish Catholics to Protestantism through Irish-language preaching. One of his sons, Revd Darcy Sirr, was the official biographer of Power Le Poer Trench, last Church of Ireland archbishop of Tuam, whose role in launching the ‘Protestant crusade in Ireland’ is outlined by Desmond Bowen. (A grandson of the Major, William Sirr, was still writing to London literary weeklies from a Surrey address at the beginning of the twentieth century protesting at unfavourable literary portrayals of his grandfather.)
An interesting portrait of the aged Sirr and his antiquarian pursuits can be found in the 1838 volume Letters from Ireland by the evangelical writer Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, whose attitudes were shaped by several years’ residence in Kilkenny at the height of the Rockite movement in the early 1820s. Tonna had landed in the south-east and was stopping off in Dublin on her way to Belfast (where she visited her friend Revd Henry Cooke) and Derry. She had previously made a pilgrimage to Vinegar Hill, which she regarded as a site of Protestant martyrdom, and met an elderly widow whose husband had been piked before her eyes in 1798. This influences Tonna’s idealised view of
Sirr’s exploits:
Another pleasant evening we passed at the Castle—not, I assure you, with Lords Mulgrave or Morpeth [Whig lord lieutenant and chief secretary], but with that loyal old Protestant soldier, Major Sirr, whose fine museum of antiquities, and every description of rarities, far exceeded my expectation, highly as it was raised. Among the most interesting natural curiosities were some exquisite specimens of the rocks in Achill, transparent amethysts they seemed, of some feet in circumference. It was sweet to think that the island, which had long been spiritually afflicted, tossed with tempests and not comforted, was now having her stones laid with fair colours, and her foundations with sapphires. (Isai. liv. 11) [Tonna refers to Edward Nangle’s Achill Mission.] Many relics I saw of the earliest days of Ireland’s history, both martial and regal, some exquisitely wrought, others remarkable only for the weight of the precious metal that composed them. Nothing, however, led me back so completely to those olden days as the frame of an Irish war-harp, such as the minstrels bore to the battlefield. This was of oak, almost black with age, rude, but perfect in form, and about two or three feet high. I should have liked to have borrowed it for a day, to muse over the recollections that it could not fail to excite. It was to me very touching to see the owner of these treasures, in the enjoyment of a healthy and vigorous ripeness of years, moving tranquilly among his stores, pointing out and explaining, with all the bland courtesy of a better era of manners, what was worthy of remark; and to remember through what fearful struggles he had passed, manfully braving the forefront of danger, in defence of that very castle, and of the Protestant faith and name, forty years ago. I found the Major keenly alive to the importance of the Irish language, as a means of achieving what the sword can never effect among this people; and I left the vice-regal edifice, more than ever convinced that Ireland has never yet been conquered, never will be, till the sword of the Spirit be deeply buried in her bosom.
One wonders what Anne Devlin would have thought of this tête-à-tête.
—Yours etc.,
PATRICK MAUME,
Queen’s University,
Belfast.
PS: In reference to Seamus Shortall’s query in your last issue—the bearded figure in Ernest Kavanagh’s 1914 cartoon, shown with John Redmond as members of a press-gang shanghaiing Irish Volunteers into the British army, is not Pierce O’Mahony but William O’Brien, leader of the smaller of the two Irish Parliamentary Party factions which existed in 1914.
Personal Histories
On this Day
April 24
- 1951 Enda Kenny, TD for Mayo West (1975–97) and Mayo (1997–2020), leader of Fine Gael (2002–17) and taoiseach (2011–17), born in Derrycoosh, Islandeady, near Castlebar, Co. Mayo.
- 1945
Above: The steamship Monmouth Coast—torpedoed by a German U-boat near Tory Island on 24 April 1945. (Paul Johnson Collection)
During the last week of the Second World War, the Monmouth Coast, an unescorted steamship en route from Sligo to Liverpool with a cargo of barytes ore from the mines of Ben Bulben, was torpedoed by a German U-boat some seven miles north-east of Tory Island. The captain and fifteen crewmen (including two Irishmen) lost their lives, but one managed to survive, thanks to two locals from Arranmore. Two days later, whilst beachcombing on the north-eastern coast of the island, they spotted a life-raft floating in a remote sandy inlet; they rowed out to it and lifted the tarpaulin, to discover a wide-eyed teenager, Derek Cragg (17) from Liverpool, the mess-room boy from the Monmouth Coast. He explained that the ship had gone down very quickly and that those of the crew who managed to leap clear were sucked down after it. He, too, was dragged down but somehow managed to make it back to the surface, where he spotted the life-raft and clambered on board. He was given every assistance by the islanders and safely repatriated, but had the north-easterly wind that drove him 25 miles blown him into the adjoining inlet, his raft would have been smashed to pieces. Over 30,000 Allied merchant seamen, of every nationality, lost their lives during the war. Despite our neutrality, Irish Shipping lost two ships. The Irish Pine was torpedoed off Greenland in November 1942 with the loss of all 33 on board, and the Irish Oak was sunk in the North Atlantic in May 1943, though her entire crew was rescued by a sister-ship, the Irish Plane.
- 1912 Justin McCarthy (82), Home Rule politician, leader of the anti-Parnellite faction (1891–6), historian and novelist, died.
- 1916 The Easter Rising began.Sir Ernest Shackleton and five of his crew set out on their epic 720-nautical-mile rescue mission in the James Caird, from Elephant Island to South Georgia.
- 1974 The Electricity Supply Board (ESB) announced that Carnsore Point, Co. Wexford, would be the site of its planned nuclear power station.
May 19
- 1935
Above: ‘Lawrence of Arabia’—his father was in fact Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath.
T.E.—Thomas Edward—Lawrence (46), the legendary ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, died as a result of a motorcycle accident in Dorset. For much of his adult life Lawrence was a troubled man. Though his key role in the British-inspired Arab revolt (1916) against Ottoman Turkish rule earned him international celebrity, he was torn by guilt over Britain’s post-war betrayal of the Arabs with the implementation at Versailles of the notorious Sykes–Picot Agreement. Then there was the issue of identity. At the tender age of ten he discovered that his parents were not married, meaning that he and his four brothers were illegitimate. Later he was to learn that ‘Mr Lawrence’, his father, was, in fact, Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath, who, though married with four daughters, had fled with their governess, Sarah Lawrence, first to Wales—where ‘Ned’ was born—and finally to London. He was eventually to find himself increasingly drawn to his father’s homeland. A close friend of George Bernard Shaw and his wife Charlotte—GBS had helped him to edit his major work, Seven pillars of wisdom (1926)—he mentioned his desire in his surviving letters to visit Ireland and often referred to the works of Seán O’Casey, James Joyce and J.M. Synge. Indeed, he hoped to write a biography of Sir Roger Casement. It seems that he never did try to make contact with his half-sisters. In 1954, almost twenty years after his death, some of his old friends visited the two surviving ones, who were living at 39 Northumberland Road, Dublin. They told them that they had followed their half-brother’s career with great interest but likewise had made no attempt to contact him.
- 1870 The Home Government Association of Ireland was founded by Isaac Butt with the aim of establishing a federal system for the United Kingdom, which would grant Ireland a parliament responsible for national affairs. Succeeded by the Home Rule League (1873).
- 1868 Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, son of Arthur Guinness (1725–1803), brewer and writer who restored St Patrick’s Cathedral (1860), died.