The Cracked Plate

A friend of mine, an archeologist, Christy Cunniffe recently posted some small shards of broken pottery, locally known as 'chaney' that he'd come across when excavating in the bog behind an old farmhouse in the Callows, a flood plain on the river Shannon, near Clonfert, county Galway. He loved the colour and the patterns on the broken, unidentifiable pieces. Were they old? Were they cups, plates, vases or bowls? He didn't know, but he loved the idea that people living in these relative poorer homes, had some semblance of colour in their lives, a century or more ago.

I love this quote by Perry Randall, an Irish-American archeologist, based in Texas. 'In my archaeological experience (mostly early Islamic and Nabatean) there are few things that make one feel connected to the past more than holding a pottery shard. Even more than jewelry, human remains, or other precious items. There is something about the commonality of broken pottery that transcends the ages and resonates in the fingertips. I have seen two-thousand year old fingerprints on broken pieces of pottery and been amazed' Give me broken pottery anytime, eh! 

Anyway, It got me thinking, and writing.

Most 18th and 19th century Irish farm-houses had little or no pottery, and even less cutlery, and let's face it, the vast majority of us Irish fitted into that 'poorer' category, whether living in the towns or in the countryside, Ireland and the people in it were impoverished, victims of a devastating and demoralising colonial system, we were barely subsisting as a people in the 19th century. Fully 90% of Irish tenant farmers were living on less that 4 acres of land in the 1840's. There was no money for rent, not to mention any at all for fancy pottery. Whatever money we had, we needed it to send our sons and daughters away from this hell, to a better life in America, England, or anywhere.

Our mugs, if we had them, were pewter, horn or of turned, wood, and our plates were usually wooden chargers, not made of pottery at all. There may have been a tin or enamel bowl, and the lid of the big black pot served just as well, if you needed a bowl or platter. There are lots of stories of the pot of potatoes being tumbled out onto a wicker or willow basket, or 'Sciob', and it was the survival of the fittest after that.

By the late 19th century, after the devastation of 'Famine' and social improvements owing to the actions of the Land League agitation, the lot of the Irish farmer was improving. They were finally able to own their land, build proper housing and live something approaching a 'comfortable' life.

With the secure and better housing, came huge improvements in living standards and tableware became both common and desirable. Houses that previously had no 'luxuries' now had tables and chairs, and dressers laden with delph. The good delph, the plates and cups and saucers, was kept high up on the dresser's shelves, used only when visitors were expected, or for the weddings, wakes and stations., The everyday mugs, and the chipped plates, were kept lower down on the dresser, with the mixing bowl for the bread-making, handy and accessible. A cup of tea never tasted so good as when poured from the whiskey bottle into the big blue and white striped mug when the hay was made or the turf saved.

By the mid-19th century England had literally hundreds of potteries churning out dinnerware and decorative pottery for practical and even decorative purposes and the price of a cup or plate was now affordable with the mass-production that occurred in the industrial revolution. Delph was now common and expected in houses, no more scrabbling in the 'sciob' for a potato, now we used knives and forks and spoons, and plates and cups, just like the posh folk, up in the 'Big Houses'. 

The favourite colours of delph in rural Irish farmhouses were 'blue and white' and 'brown and white' delph. Amongst the.favourite patterns was the 'Willow' pattern. It was a blue and white transfer-printed composite design which brought together Buddhist imagery, pagodas, landscapes, birds and trees from Chinese porcelain. The pattern is said to be woven around a romantic story of star-crossed lovers eloping together. Imagine the scandal in the kitchens of Ireland if that got out! (See below)

The other blue and white popular pattern was the Dutch 'Delft' or 'Delftware', from the town of Delft in Holland, and from which we get the anglicised word delph. Their firing-process was borrowed from the Chinese, and the favoured patterns were typically eastern and oriental scenes, brought to Holland by the Dutch East India Trading company in the 16th century. Later on, the Dutch ceramists copied versions of Dutch masterpieces, especially the ubiquitous Dutch windmill design.

While the Delft pottery dates back to the 16th century, by the early 18th century, the new Dutch monarch in England (yes, the same King William of Orange, of the battles of the Boyne and Aughrim fame), encouraged a 'technology transfer' as it were, from Holland to England, and the previously secretive tin-glazed Dutch/Chinese earthenware 'method' and the same designs, were soon being mass produced in potteries all over England, but especially in Stoke on Trent, in Staffordshire, which became the world's greatest conglomeration of potteries in the 19th century, with nearly 150 pottery manufacturers.

The better-known brands of pottery were probably Wedgewood, Denby, Aynsley, Spode, Coalport and Royal Doulton, but they were expensive, well beyond the means and imagination of the average household in Ireland. Yet by 1920, there were many, many other companies producing affordable tableware for the masses, exporting their now 'English pottery' all across the British Empire and to America. Johnson Brothers (there were four brothers) from Stoke-on-Trent produced a huge range of tableware from the 1880's onwards and their patterns, including Willow, Windmill and English castles were very popular in Ireland.

Eventually, these very popular Willow, Windmill and Castle printed (not hand-painted) designs were knocked off by just about every pottery, in blue and white, green and white, and brown and white glazes, so that by the 1950's, we were 'glazed-over' with full sets of tea- and dinner-ware in nearly every house in the country.

Our kitchen dressers were laden down with dozens of pieces of the good and the plain delph that we used, jugs, and plates, and saucers and fine china cups, Toby jugs, and milk jugs, and stripey mugs for the tae, so much so, that there was hardly room for the copy of Old Moore's Almanac and the Sacred Heart picture, there was so much crockery. Looking back on it now, so much of the delph on display had been paid for by remittances from our emigrant sons and daughters, the trappings of their new-found wealth, and source our comfort, Thank God.

And when the cracked cup or plate finally broke, or had so many chips off it that even the dog wouldn't be found dead licking the scraps off-of it, the shards or ‘chaineys’, got chucked into the bog or the drain, or the foundations of the shed, waiting for some latter-day archeologist or treasure-hunter to unearth them, reconnect the pieces like a Grecian urn, and marvel at the lives that had touched it or eaten or drank out of it in the past.

Broken pottery to some, a relic of past glory to another! Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith, wrote about such broken crockery in 'The Deserted Village' which he wrote in 1770. When describing the village tavern, now ruined and deserted, he speaks of the fine tableware that the tavern used, and kept, even when smashed.
'While broken tea-cups, wisely kept for shew,
Ranged o'er the chimney, glistened in a row.
Vain transitory splendours! Could not all
Reprieve the tottering mansion from its fall!'

While today the younger folk favour plain pottery, or simple designs for their tableware, I'd say that there isn't a farmhouse in Ireland without at least one big platter, the family heirloom, still taking pride of place on the sideboard, or in the china cabinet, although ironically, the plates themselves are more likely to be the 20th century knock-off of the original Delft patterns, more 20th century than 19th or 18th, less valuable, but nonetheless family treasures.

The Old Willow Pattern Dish
'Two pigeons flying high.
A Chinese vessel sailing by.
A weeping willow hanging o’er
A bridge with three men, if not four.
A Chinese temple, here it stands,
Seems to cover all the land.
Apple trees with apples on,
a pretty fence to end my song.
It stood on the old kitchen dresser for years.
A silent witness to the joys and the tears.
The comings and goings of four generations,
the pain and the sadness and some celebrations.
It shared the shelves with the threshing mugs,
the dinner plates and the fancy jugs.
While a hen hatched her eggs in the cupboard below,
and the delph all shone in the firelight glow.
Big floury spuds heaped up in a mound
were on the table when the dinner came ‘round.
There was bacon and cabbage and buttermilk too,
and that old willow pattern dish gleamed white and blue..
It saw great grandmother come home as a bride,
crossing the threshold at great grandfather’s side.
It saw the joys and the laughter gay,
when the neighbours came on threshing day.
It saw the joys at weddings and births,
and witnessed the heartache at a visit from death.
It watched the day the exiles departed,
leaving those left at home so broken hearted.
Then it saw them return to visit a while,
saw grand children come with a laugh and a smile.
On house dance nights in days of yore,
it saw half sets knock sparks from that old kitchen floor.
Heard the music and rhyme ring out loud and clear.
Saw the exile’s song cause a silent tear.
It watched the turf fire burning bright
when the neighbours called to chat at night.
It saw in the rafters the ‘auld Fenian gun’,
and the hurried visits from men on the run.
At Easter ‘16, it saw men march away.
Sean didn’t return. Granny’s hair turned grey.
It was laid on the table with buttered brown bread
when the ‘Tans’ came looking for poor Uncle Ned.
They smashed all the fancy jugs on the floor,
but poor Ned had left home the evening before.
But now the old house is no more.
Gone are the people, the half sets, the floor.
No photographs hang on the old kitchen walls,
only ghosts from the past now come to call.
The dresser has long since crumbled to dust.
The old fan on the hearth is all covered in rust,
But the old dish survives in a new modern home,
a link with the past and of days that are gone.
If it only could talk, what a lot we would learn,
of an age that’s now past, and will never return'
KMCD.
*The Old Willow Pattern Dish* arranged by Kevin McDermott
(I was sent this poem by Kevin McDermott. I think captures so much of what the delph and the dresser meant to so many.over the years. Kevin McDermott recorded this poem on a CD some years ago, I am hoping to get the audio posted soon)

My favourite platters are not the perfect ones on the dresser's top shelf, but rather the one that has been cracked, perhaps through careless use, or domestic 'incident'. Voices had been raised, tears spilled, the moment of the accident never forgotten, nor the culprit found, but some time later, the pieces had been saved and the platter had been repaired by some 'tinkering tradesman', the repair done on the crack with a metal washer and some wire! There is one, a big serving platter, with a wire-repair, in O'Connors Pub in Salthill Galway, where I do my 'Fireside Tours', the shortest walking tour in Ireland. 

What's your favourite piece of delph?

Brian Nolan, Galway Walks, May 26, 2020 

Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.

I took this photograph in Galway in 1983.

I know a whole lot of you will know exactly where this is, or rather, where it was! I took this photo around 1982. The two, twin, cozy cottages always caught my eye, when I was headed out after university to thumb a lift home. I always imagined the dressers shielded by blue delph plates and hung with colourful china cups, the huge iron pots of spuds and the heavy old kettles simmering away, hanging from the soot-blacked cranes over the open hearths, the sweet scent of peat, hearkening back to the name of the townland these houses stood in, the rituals of repairing the thatch roofs every ten or fifteen years, like giving the cottage a new haircut, but never done together, one always had newer, or older thatch than the other, the regular lime-washing of the walls, perhaps for the stations, only one used too much rickets blue and the other let the ivy grow, eliminating the need for whitewashing, the half-doors, sometimes half-open or half-closed, again in tandem and out of step with the thatch, either one or the other, airing or locking the house, never in collusion, always out of kilter with one another, like an old married couple, joined at the hip, but still pulling separate ways when they could, and the old folks who lived there, all their lives I supposed, side by side for an eternity, each couple, or half of each couple, being born there in the cottages, raised there, playing in the shared street, going to school, meeting their future partners there, burying their parents in the nearby new cemetery, marrying their sweethearts, having children, repeating the circle of life, growing old, beside each other, wondering wistfully about their children, now scattered to the four winds by emigration an opportunity, or marriage, would any of them stay at home and mind them in their old age, the couples I mean, and then the relicts, and then no one did, stay at home, and no one minded the two little cottages. They are both gone now, the two couples, dead, buried with their grandparents, the two houses, dead, knocked down to make way for progress, and replaced by .... well no one and by nothing actually, just a vacant site, must be derelict twenty years or more now. What a pity, such a beautiful pair of vernacular thatched dwellings, daing back probably 200 years, gone in a flash, but in my mind's eye, they are still there, still watching over the busy Moneenageesha crossroads, a wisp of blue turf smoke from the shared chimney, and the promise of a cup of tea and a chat. So, now it's your turn. How many other thatched dwellings still remain within the city limits today? Can you tell their story? Galway Memories

Landlord, Rent, Eviction, Emigration.

This unique letter dated 1912, housed in the little museum in LetterMullen in Connemara, provides a very personal glimpse into the minutiae of our social history. Our modern society ironically resembles this early 20th century vignette, more than we might care to admit.
Today, as in 1912, renting is the norm. Back then, it was a rented house and farm, today an apartment or house. Today, so many renters are in financial difficulty, from covid19, or more likely, from an underlying social inequality, unemployment, refugee, single parent family. Our social services and charities strive to provide some support for those families, much as did this priest (and many other benevolent people), helping a family keep a roof over their head and stave off eviction.
Today it’s the banks, investors and hedge funds who are the landlord class, back in 1912, the landlord class had morphed from primarily Anglo-Irish landed estate, to a merchant and investor middle and upper class, who took advantage of the encumbered estates fire sale (think NAMA).
The old landlord system was bankrupted by the famine, tithe tax and the Land League, and were bailed out by the British Government (think NAMA). They had even less empathy and familiarity with their tenants, and the cautionary tone at the end of this letter reflects that distancing of tenant and land owner. That generational clan and community system was all washed away by 1912, with the arrival of the carpetbagger opportunist landlord and his ‘Agent’, as is the case here.
Connemara had rolling famines. Crop failure after crop failure, bad summer after worse winter. Emigration was their only escape. Most Connemara farms were in arrears. This agent had an unenviable and impossible task, which by 1921 became academic.
Lastly, the tenant's debt while small by our standards, was insurmountable by his. A ticket in third class on Titanic in 1912, the same year as this letter, was £7-10s., just shy of his overall rent arrears of £8-5s. So, I think that I will finish on a hopeful note. Sometimes the family had foregone paying rent in order to save up and pay the passage to America for one of the children.
Perhaps owing to the sacrifice of his or her family in 1910 and 1911, that young emigrant managed to save some money in Boston and paid off the family’s debt, avoiding eviction and eventually buying out the family farm in Rosmuc. Wouldn’t that have been a good end to a very sad, but not uncommon tale. Brian Nolan. Walking Tours of Galway

Order in Court

The stately Courthouse building in Galway is truly a beautiful piece of Georgian, not Victorian architecture, because it was built during the reign of King William III, he being the last king of Britain's Royal House of Hanover.

Now over two hundred years old, the Courthouse building was designed by the architect Sir Richard Morrisson, who had studied under James Gandon, designer the Customs House and Four Courts in Dublin. Gandon's architectural influence is quite evident in Morrisson's design. Our imposing building was built in 1818, as the County Courthouse, and it complemented the City Courthouse opposite it (now the Town Hall) on Courthouse Square, and the Galway prison (where the Cathedral now stands).

The Galway prison, jail or 'gaol', was built between 1807 and 1810, and the Salmon Weir bridge that connects the gaol to the courthouse, was built in in 1818.

Prisoners crossed the Salmon Weir bridge in chains, to face the judge (and sometimes a jury) and hear their fate. The jail held 68 prisoners in 1810, rising to 627 by 1847.

There were some 200 offences which merited execution by hanging if one was found guilty in 1810, though that sentence was by then uncommon, though not unheard of. One was far more likely to be sentenced to months or even years of hard labour (breaking stones), or to picking oakum, or to the treadmill, or to be whipped, or to be transported to Australia for a period of 7 - 30 years as a convict labourer, (both male and female prisoners were transported).

The photos below show the courthouse as it looked in 1923, as it stands today, a woodcut print of the courthouse with the bridge and gaol in the background (Hardiman), the gaol in 1936, a view today from Woodquay and finally the coat of arms that used sit atop the plinth above the columns at the Courthouse portico.

The massive stone coat of arms is now located in the University gardens, but the Post or Pillar box, is still in situ. It bears the insignia monogram of Queen Victoria (Victoria Regina).

Hmm .. If those grecian columns could only talk, sure we'd be here all day! These are the kind of stories I tell on my Walking Tours of Galway.

I just love a good mystery!

Mother and son. Lisdoonvarna, County Clare, Ireland Photo taken in Lisdoonvarna c. 1900.

These people, likely both of them had witnessed and survived another pandemic, the Irish Famine, where generations of whole families were swept away by starvation, typhoid and influenza. Their weather-beaten lined faces tell a story of resilience, and perhaps determination and pride. Their home-spun, bespoke clothes are not of the poorer quality, there is some money here, even for his cravat and her wool shawl. Were they in Lisdoonvarna, for the match-making festival, seeking a bride for the son, seeking health from the sulphur spa and the bracing cliff walks.

If so, why the elaborate and expensive photograph.

Look more closely. Aside from his cravat and bowler hat and bushy beard, he is holding some sort of memorial card, perhaps, or a boat-ticket, or even, a land-deed... he is holding it up very deliberately, he wanted it to be part of the photo, wanted it to pe recorded and preserved, it's definitely a message, perhaps intended for the recipient of this especially-posed photograph, not an inexpensive luxury for the time, this was taken professionally by a photographer in a studio.

For whom was the message intended?

Maybe he, or she was someone who had emigrated, to America, Canada, Australia?

Perhaps they'd paid for memorial cards, for the old lady's husband?

Or maybe, perhaps it is a travel ticket, to America, for one or both of them to reunite with the wealthier, now emigrated family member overseas?

Yes, to me this photo is an enigma, but it is a fascinating mystery? I don't have the right answer as to why they'd gone and had it taken, but using my imagination, my favourite explanation is that this is a land-deed document that he is holding, the title deed to a small farm, somewhere in county Clare.

Maybe these two had been sent money by their family overseas, to buy-out their Irish farm, perhaps from an encumbered estate, or an unwilling and previously harsh and uncaring land-lord and this was proof they'd done as requested, and had bought the family farm, or house, using the monies remitted to them from overseas.

So many people had been evicted over the previous 50 years in Ireland and in County Clare, where my dad's folks come from, evictions were commonplace and devastating.

That this is my guess, they had been evicted, with devastating consequences for the family, some of whom had emigrated, and now 50 years later, the farm is bought back, free and clear, 500 years of subjugation, brutalisation, degradation and eviction, yet, all made good by an emigrant's hard work and determination to right a wrong, to reclaim their land, their heritage and their pride.

Yes, I do love this photograph, and the quirky memories it evokes.

(Photo courtesy of Pat Herbert).

These are the stories I tell in O'Connors Bar in Salthill Galway O'Connors Bar Galway during my Fireside Tours, and on the streets of #Galway, on my Walking Tours of Galway ... hopefully all will be back to normal again soon and we can once again be walking and talking on the streets of Galway and Salthill. Stay well. Stay Safe. See you on the other side!