At 700 plus pages, Guy Beiner's book is not for the faint-hearted. Nor can it be easily dipped into, for it is tightly structured according to theories of social memory and forgetting, and their various sub-divisions. While the broader outlines of social or collective memory are now mainstream in historical studies, the various sub-divisions used to structure the book (pre-forgetting, regenerated forgetting, pre-memory, disremembrance, decommemorating and many more) I initially found a bit forced and repetitive. But ultimately I was impressed by such an organisational feat. Indeed, this book is awe-inspiring in its range, its depth and its sheer imagination.
Encompassing a formidable array of sources on the 1798 rebellion in Antrim and Down, Beiner takes us through over two centuries of remembrance and forgetting (official and otherwise) to challenge how we have conceived the rebellion to date. We have always known about the fear of speaking of ’98 afterwards, but Beiner details how widespread was the memory that continued underground, re-emerging in all manner of forms, including children's recollections of older people's conversations. Intriguingly these include the famous Brontë children, whose father and grandfather had been Presbyterian radicals in County Down and whose uncle had fought at the Battle of Ballynahinch. Even the victors did not openly talk about the events. The intimacy of the violence and continuing reprisals emerges bleakly from the kind of personal sources mined so effectively here. Even the M.P. for County Antrim ‘put away from the eyes of man for a generation’ a memoir detailing his visit to the rebel camp near Glenarm and there identifying the local Presbyterian minister ‘in the full regimentals’ of a rebel commander.
Through the lens of ‘social forgetting’ or ‘what happens behind the scenes when communities try … to forget discomfiting historical episodes, but actually retain muted recollections’, the author shows how the loyalist/unionist takeover of public discourse disguised a rich vernacular tradition. Foremost here is the belief that Presbyterians who were out in 1798 turned against the Catholics after revelations about Scullabogue (where Wexford rebels burnt a barn with 184 inside, all but ten or 15 of whom were Protestant). Alike with the 1641 massacre of Protestants, this incident was used repeatedly to depict Catholics as murderously untrustworthy and to keep Protestants in their fold. Much of the misinformation can be traced to Richard Musgrave, who played down the Ulster rising, particularly the fact that it was largely a Presbyterian one, and although told that ‘few or none of the Papists appeared in arms’ at the Battle of Antrim, he chose to make it up anyway.
But the reality was not forgotten, even if it was the conservative brand of Presbyterianism which came to dominate the public sphere. From personal experience and upbringing in Counties Down and Antrim, I can confirm the author's overall finding that popular pride and local knowledge of the 1798 ‘turn-out’ in Ulster crossed the religious ‘divide’. It still does. It became part of the Montgomery-Cooke battle for the future of Presbyterianism in the mid-nineteenth century. Henry Montgomery's brothers had fought at the Battle of Antrim, the nearby family home had been looted and burnt down by yeomen and he urged: ‘the truth ought not to be concealed: the Rebellion, at the close of the last century was, in its origin and almost to its end, an Ulster rebellion and a Presbyterian rebellion … to attain a right end’ even if ‘by wrong means’.
Beiner tracks Presbyterian historiography through the nineteenth century, and finds memories, even in conservative accounts, beneath the social forgetting. Foremost here is the very influential conservative Presbyterian antiquarian Samuel McSkimin, whose own ‘conflicted memories’ did not make it into his very influential writings, but whose ‘tirelessly’ collected local memories of ’98 are preserved in his papers. He was particularly haunted by his regiment's destruction of the Doagh book club of which he had once been a member.
Annoyance at the loyalist slant in his published writings produced an outpouring of recollections in the 1840s aimed at setting the record straight, among them Henry Joy McCracken's ever impressive sister Mary Ann. She became R. R. Madden's main informant on the Ulster rising in his counter narrative and introduced him to the eighty-two year old Jemmy Hope. Hope had survived both ’98 in Antrim and the Ulster side of Emmet's rebellion in 1803. Mary Anne McCracken was ninety six when she died in 1866 and had helped preserve a network of mutual support among former United Irishmen, providing for the dependants of executed rebels in defiance of loyalist intimidation and propaganda.
Beiner also singles out a number of legendary ’98 figures. These were the ones most talked about in my childhood home. The story of Betsy Gray – the young women killed along with her brother and lover by yeomen as they fled the Battle of Ballynahinch – was a particular favourite. Betsy Gray or the hearts of Down, the much reprinted 1888 book by W. G. Lyttle, graced many a bookshelf. Even so, I have learnt so much more from Forgetful remembrance about the local social memory on which Lyttle's novel drew and about the local families whose recollections fed into the story. Rather than ‘the invention of tradition’ in Eric Hobsbawm's classic analysis, the process is explained here as ‘reinvention’ or ‘the repackaging of oral traditions in literary forms’. The point is well made about the use of genuine local traditions raising this booklet above the normal run of historical fiction.
Although Lyttle's book may largely have been a local phenomenon, it was one of the works taken up by Gladstone in his search to understand Ulster, and inspired his appeal for Ulster unionists to remember that their ancestors had fought in 1798. In so doing ‘Gladstone misjudged the dynamics of social forgetting’, and only succeeded in further antagonising them. Indeed, it prompted them to see an advantage in adapting their ancestral rebel spirit to oppose home rule. Our ancestors may have been out in 1798 but today they would be unionists, was the argument. Such adaptation is an example of ‘forgetful remembrance’, permitting sympathy for the rebels of ’98 without endorsing their ideals.
The key point here is that the sympathy is reserved for local heroes and heroines. The lead into the 1798 centenary witnessed an upsurge in efforts to finally mark their graves. Foremost was the campaign to erect a monument for Betsy Gray, a direct consequence of the ‘phenomenal success’ of Lyttle's book. The nationalist press ran articles on ‘Ireland's Joan of Arc’. The local hotelier sniffed a commercial opportunity and started a subscription fund. A monument was erected in 1896 and thereafter nationalists regularly visited, placing ‘seditious emblems and mottoes’, and desecrating the Protestant sabbath – an ‘attempt to introduce a Southern Sunday into our quiet Northern district’, as the Belfast Weekly Telegraph protested in 1898. After a number of clashes, the monument was smashed to pieces by loyalists. In accounts of this iconoclasm – including my own – it is depicted as a straightforward politically sectarian act. But as Beiner demonstrates so convincingly, things are never so simple on the ground. Local Protestants did not abandon their pride in Betsy Gray. This was rather an ‘outburst of commemorative possessiveness and commemorative envy’, an expression of local outrage at ‘outsiders’ taking over their heroine.
Guy Beiner takes his study of memory and forgetting up to the present, with particularly interesting chapters on Northern Ireland after partition. Here ‘restored forgetting’ once again wrote ’98 out of official publications, yet local pride and ‘memory’ continued. Lyttle's book on Betsy Gray was serialised in a local unionist paper in 1960, prompting many local Protestants to dust down and display the ’98 artefacts long treasured in their homes. The author's exploration of music and local dramatics adds another layer of understanding of popular memory. I can confirm the enthusiastic reception of ’98 plays by Jack Loudan and Tommy Carnduff, since my father acted in them. I also discovered from this book that another local hero of popular ballad fame, Roddy McCorley ‘who goes to die on the bridge of Toome today’, was more an outlaw than a ’98 rebel, one of a group of army deserters in the Antrim area, who was indeed hanged on the bridge in 1800. But it was only with the ballad written by Ethna Carbery for the centenary in 1898 that the Roddy McCorley of legend was created. It is unlikely that Bobby Sands knew much about the real person when he lionised the McCorley of the ballad as native-Irish rather than the Ulster-Scot Presbyterian that he was in reality.
It is ever the case that unionist interest in Irish history declines in equal measure as nationalism's increases. ‘In the polarized sectarian politics of Ulster,’ comments Guy Beiner, ‘reaction to partisan remembrance was a powerful stimulant for social forgetting’. Christopher Woods's book found similar processes at work. Bodenstown revisited focuses on one grave, that of Theobald Wolfe Tone, arguably the most important figure in the origin-myth of Irish republican nationalism. This book is about commemoration rather than memory. I devoted a short closing chapter to the making of the Tone cult in my biography of Tone, but it has now been totally superseded by this comprehensive account of how Tone's grave was utilised, not so much to commemorate or celebrate his life and ideas, but to validate violent ‘physical force’ nationalism. There was the same reluctance to speak about ’98 afterwards as Guy Beiner was finding, but this changed rapidly after Thomas Davis discovered the unmarked grave in 1843 and composed his poem ‘Tone's grave’, which became a popular ballad.
At this time Tone's widow, Matilda, intervened, fulfilling a similar role to that of Mary Anne McCracken. Indeed, it is certain that Tone would never have acquired the stature he has in Irish nationalism had his memoirs not been published by Matilda and her son in 1826. There was already a headstone to other members of the Tone family, but not one to Tone himself, permission to bury him in November 1798 having been granted on condition it was done most privately. In 1843 Matilda appealed for such a stone to be laid. The following year her wish was implemented by Davis and the newspaper editor John Gray. Though a modest flat slab, the inscription that he ‘died for Ireland’ broke the ‘taboo’ on open commemoration. This was a Young Ireland deed and it was through them that the cult of Tone entered Fenianism, which in turn initiated the tradition of regular pilgrimages and firmly identified them with ‘physical force’ republicanism. In time Tone himself became rather irrelevant to the annual ceremonies, Woods argues, the speeches much like those in Soviet Russia – always mentioning Lenin, but not always knowing much about him and quickly moving on.
The book takes us through the successive pilgrimages, in the build-up to the 1916 Easter Rising. Most of its leaders had given orations, most famously Patrick Pearse in his influential ‘holiest place in Ireland’ speech. Tom Clarke, one of those executed in 1916, had already initiated pilgrimages to Matilda Tone's grave in New York, later in Ireland became President of the Wolfe Tone Memorial Committee, ‘a cover for the IRB’. By 1914 the pilgrimages had ‘taken on a quasi-military character’, contingents of Irish Volunteers and other groupings marching in military formation to the site, accompanied by marching bands.
Through the twentieth century the Bodenstown event reflected successive political divisions, the book charting the ‘constitutional’ transformation of de Valera and Fianna Fáil, as well as the progressive takeover by the I.R.A. – in 1972 the Provisionals staged the largest gathering in the entire history of the pilgrimages to Tone's grave. Proceedings reflected the way republicanism had become very Catholic, notwithstanding the Catholic church's traditional denunciation of militant republicanism. The result was that socialists and particularly communists were most unwelcome. Peadar O'Donnell's socialist Republican Congress had some success with Belfast Protestants, a contingent travelling to the event in June 1934, having already visited the grave of James Connolly in Dublin. But their flags were torn down by the I.R.A. and this rare appearance of Ulster Protestants was not repeated. Ulster hardly figures at all in the pilgrimages, nor indeed in the speeches, until I.R.A. operations in the north, Operation Harvest (1956–62) and then the Troubles saw a takeover of the main date (Tone's birthday 20 June) by the Provisional I.R.A.
Bodenstown revisited also looks at the pilgrimages as cultural and social events. Numbers attending increased as means of travel became easier; Thomas Cook's special excursion trains in the 1890s, while bicycles becoming the norm in the 1940s, as numbers reduced due to the internment of I.R.A. members during the Emergency and wartime shortage of petrol. The presence of women and children (increasingly in uniform in the twentieth century) is also explored, particularly that of female ‘Republican royalty’: Margaret Pearse, Maud Gonne and Countess Markievicz addressed the crowds in 1917; Mary MacSwiney was prominent in a largely female crowd of republicans in 1922; Cumann na gCailíní (republican girl scouts), formed in 1910, were still attending in 1971.
Given the size of the crowds, the inflammatory speeches, the drilling and arming, and increasingly the presence of armed security forces in the surrounding fields, I wondered why there were no local protests. Indeed, such protest as there was did not come until the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland when the U.V.F. blew up the tombstone in 1969 and tried to set explosives on the railway line in 1975, killing a local man who disturbed them. Perhaps it was because, unlike Betsy Gray's grave, Tone's was sited in a public graveyard, overseen by various local public bodies from 1869 until taken over by the highly politicised National Graves Association, though Dr Woods was unable to establish the legal basis for its re-appropriation ‘of a family grave … in a public cemetery’. The U.V.F. explosion in 1969, in damaging the most recent gravestone (that erected in 1873) facilitated the construction of what Christopher Woods rightly calls ‘a gigantic and jarring limestone platform’ in 1971, totally covering the Tone family grave, the eighteenth-century headstone telling their story, in shattered pieces, the ‘archaeological evidence’ destroyed. The ‘Tone's Grave’ of Davis's evocative ballad had been replaced by an ‘arena used for grandstanding, airing grievances of Ulster Catholics … and blackguarding rivals’.
It is difficult tracing the afterlife of historical figures who bequeathed their own legends to the future, as little changes except the contexts. I found myself becoming bored by the sameness of the legend of Robert Emmet when I was writing about it. There is a danger of repetition and there is an element of this in Bodenstown revisited, particularly in the later chapters. Otherwise the author has done a very fine job indeed.
I loved both these books. Even though they covered ground that I have researched and written about for many decades, I learnt so much that was new from them. They are a historian's dream in their wealth of detail, their reach into multiple-biography of the menu peuple, their extensive and informative footnotes and cleverly chosen illustrations. They have shown triumphantly that there is always more to learn from re-visiting history that we thought we knew.
