It Occurs To Me: Grim workhouses…great inspiration

Anthony Begley needs no introduction as a writer and historian in his native Ballyshannon and beyond. I had occasion to mention him to a lovely community group in Omagh recently, where I’m facilitating a number of sessions on the history of the Ulster Workhouses, with a particular look at Omagh.

We intend visiting the site of the Ballyshannon Workhouse sometime in July, and I recalled a visit and interviews in September 2014, where Pam Barker, a great great grandchild of one of the 19 orphans who left Ballyshannon for Sydney in 1848 visited the memorial to remember her relative Mary Ann McDermott who had left for Australia with her sister Sally.

Both sisters were from Belleek and were inmates of Ballyshannon workhouse.

All 19 girls are commemorated at the memorial and on the day of Pam’s visit roses were laid by local women for each of the 19 girls as part of a moving ceremony.

Despite being held the day before the All-Ireland football final, with Donegal participating, there was a great crowd to welcome her back to her homeland and Pam and her husband Peter fully appreciated the interest shown.

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Joy O’ Neill, a great great grandchild of another orphan Jane Carberry, also visited the Orphan Girls’ Memorial in 2014 and a number of other descendants of the orphan girls came from Australia in 2015. I will be forever grateful to Anthony for stirring my amateur interest in workhouse history.

Passing the massive Bawnboy Workhouse which looms over the town, as I visited my father’s hometown of Killeshandra over the years, was also a factor in my curiosity.

The Irish Workhouse history is well documented so - as part of my demonstration - I looked at how workhouses had played a significant part in the careers of Charles Dickens, Charlie Chaplin and Padraig Colum.

Born in December 1881 in Longford Union Workhouse, where his father was the Master, Colum got to know many of the inmates, many of whom were elderly and had many stories to tell. He absorbed all of it, and was equally fascinated by local folklore.

His experiences in Longford Workhouse inspired some of his later works, like his play Thomas Muskerry, which is about a workhouse master who eventually becomes an inmate.

In his classic poem , An Old Woman Of The Roads, you can clearly hear the anguished voices of some of those he listened to as a youngster:

“Och! but I'm weary of mist and dark,

And roads where there's never a house nor bush,

And tired I am of bog and road,

And the crying wind and the lonesome hush!

And I am praying to God on high,

And I am praying Him night and day,

For a little house - a house of my own

Out of the wind's and the rain's way.”

In one of Charles Dickens’ childhood London addresses, he could not have missed Cleveland Street Workhouse, just a few doors down the road. In fact, he wrote ‘Oliver Twist ‘ partly in protest at workhouse conditions. The tough punishments handed out to Oliver for asking ‘Please Sir, may I have some more?’ were real – the system favoured punishment rather than nourishment. Dickens begins Oliver Twist with a young woman’s death, in childbirth, in a workhouse.

“She was brought here last night,” replied the old woman, “by the overseer’s order. She was found lying in the street; - she had walked some distance, for her shoes were worn to pieces; but where she came from, or where she was going to, nobody knows.”

The surgeon leant over the body, and raised the left hand. “The old story,” he said, shaking his head: “no wedding ring, I see. Ah! Goodnight.”

In 1850 he wrote ‘A Walk in a Workhouse’ for his journal’ Household Worlds ‘which ends with Dickens looking into the eyes of a child and imagining him asking ‘for a little more liberty – and a little more bread.’

As for Charlie Chaplin, 60 years after Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, seven-year-old Charlie was admitted to Newington workhouse in London with his mother and brother. The children were separated from their mother, given uniforms and had their hair cut short.

After three weeks Charlie and Sydney were transferred to the Central London District School at Hanwell in rural Ealing.

The school was a version of the workhouse, intended solely for destitute children.

His brother Sydney was eventually sent to the naval training ship Exmouth but Charlie – still too young – was dragged between Hanwell school, his mother, the workhouse and his alcoholic father. Like Padraig Colum, Charlie’s future was mapped out by his encounters with the poor.

Chaplin’s Hollywood depiction of the Tramp was born in London. Chaplin recalled that the Tramp’s distinctive outsized trousers and flat-footed walk were inspired by a man called Rummy Binks, who he watched as a child from the streets of Lambeth: “He had a bulbous nose, a crippled up rheumatic body, a swollen and distorted pair of feet and the most extraordinary pair of trousers I ever saw. He must have got the trousers from a giant and he was a little man.

“When I saw Rummy shuffle his way across the pavement to hold a cabman's horse for a penny tip, I was fascinated. The walk was so funny to me that I imitated it.”

Welker eviscerates the misogynist

Trump didn’t so much throw his toys out of the pram, rather he threw pram and bottle out in one of his most childish acts to date…and he has had many. Kristen Welker of NBC deserves a journalistic prize of some sort for hanging in and fact-checking his multitude of lies.

Boys, but he despises women, his obvious misogyny bloated by his narcissism and inability to adhere to any modicum of truth.

As far as he was concerned, election officials in California are “crooked,” as are Kristen and her media colleagues.

“They’re crooked, just like you’re crooked, your press is crooked. And Meet the Press is crooked,” Trump hissed.

She responded, “To be fair. I’m not crooked,” and tried to move the interview along. She also stressed that there is no evidence that the California primary or the 2020 presidential election was rigged.

“You’re either crooked or you’re stupid,” Trump ranted. “You play right into their hands with this crap. You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged.”

“Your elections are crooked, and you’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked.”

“And so is ABC and CBS and CNN.” He then called NBC News a “one-sided crooked network.”

“Sorry. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time,” the big wean thundered, before Yanking off his microphone and tossing it to the ground beside his soother.

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If Kristen Welker was a black female journalist, God knows what abuse she might have been subjected to? The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.

On May 31, 1927, his daddy, Fred Trump, was arrested at a rally of the Ku Klux Klan in Queens, New York. He was initially arrested for "refusing to disperse" along with six other people after the rally descended into disorder.

The Long Island Daily Press reported that all seven arrestees were wearing Klan robes. After Donald Trump was endorsed by David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Trump was questioned about his father's arrest.

Donald claimed to journalist Jason Horowitz that "it never happened", despite it being reported in several newspapers.

When Horowitz asked Trump if the address reported for his father in the newspapers, 175-24 Devonshire Rd, was accurate, Donald dismissed it as "totally false".

However, Fred Trump's wedding announcement in the Daily Press listed his address at 175-24 Devonshire Rd.

Fred Trump was subjected to legal action by the Justice Department on multiple occasions for racist behaviour as a landlord, and one of his former tenants, folk singer Woody Guthrie once wrote in a song mentioning Trump: "I suppose / Old Man Trump knows / Just how much / racial hate / He stirred up".

As we say in Donegal….some outfit!

Oops!

Last week, I thought I’d quoted the late Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) but by some combination of gremlins and the headstaggers, I managed to quote the ‘Greed is good’ lines from the Wall Street movie by Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas)! In any event, this is actually what Eco said: “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”