Basil Street Blues (39 page)

*

The Shaws made no secret of being aristocrats. No Shaw could form a social acquaintance with a Roman Catholic or tradesman. They lifted up
their powerful Wellingtonian noses and spoke of themselves, however querulously, in a collective spirit (as people mentioning the Bourbons or Habsburgs) using the third person: ‘the Shaws’.

The family had come from Scotland, then moved to England. In 1689 Captain William Shaw slipped from Hampshire into Ireland to fight in the Battle of the Boyne. He was rewarded with a large grant of land in Kilkenny. There, as landed gentry, the Shaws hunted, shot and fished.

Most successful was Robert Shaw, who entered the Irish Parliament, founded the Royal Bank and in 1821 was made a baronet. His cousin Bernard (grandfather of G.B.S.) also seemed set for success. On 1 April 1802, aged thirty, he married the daughter of a clergyman, Frances Carr, who over the next twenty-three years gave birth to fifteen children. As High Sheriff of Kilkenny, Bernard spent much of his time in the country and neglected his Dublin business, with the result that his partner absconded with his money. Bernard woke up to find himself penniless, collapsed, and died in his sleep. His widow had to apply for help to Sir Robert. The banker-baronet was a wealthy man. ‘Unlike the typical Shaw, he was plumpish and had the appearance somewhat of a truculent bear disturbed out of a doze.’ He was hopelessly in love with Frances who, though disdaining his offers of marriage, accepted rent free ‘a quaint cottage, with Gothically pointed windows’ at Terenure. From here she launched her sons and daughters on the world ‘in an unshaken and unshakeable consciousness of their own aristocracy’.

Like most large families, these Shaws were not exclusively teetotallers. We see them through the eyes of G.B.S. Of his four aunts, Cecilia (Aunt Sis), the eldest, was a temperate maiden lady. She had been pronounced dead when a child and placed in a coffin; but, climbing out, lived on into her nineties, ‘a big, rather imposing woman, with the family pride written all over her’. Aunt Frances, a gently nurtured lady, drank secretly over many years before, submitting to it openly, she passed away. Charlotte Jane (‘Aunt Shah’) married an irreproachable man connected with a cemetery. Aunt Emily, exceeding in nothing but snuff, married a scholastic clergyman, William George Carroll, who, but for his temper (it was said), would have been a bishop.

‘I know as much about drink as anybody outside a hospital of inebriates,’ G.B.S. later wrote. His knowledge had come largely from his father and some uncles. Two of his uncles were unknown to him, having emigrated to the Antipodes and ‘like Mr Micawber, made history there’. A third, Robert, was blinded in his youth and ‘never had an opportunity of drinking’. Uncle Henry was the rich man of the family, able to afford two wives and fifteen children. But he invested his money in a collapsing coal mine and before his death became mentally unstable.

The other three brothers, including Shaw’s father, were alcoholics. Uncle Barney (William Bernard) and Uncle Fred (Richard Frederick) both died in the family mental retreat, Dr Eustace’s in the north of Dublin. The youngest, Uncle Fred, didn’t drink until he married a girl named Waters. His drinking bouts then grew excessive but he gave up alcohol altogether once his wife left him to live in London. He was reputed to be ungenerous (he worked in the Valuation Office) and, in retirement, ‘harmlessly dotty’.

Uncle Barney was an inordinate smoker as well as a drunkard. He lived a largely fuddled life until he was past fifty. Then, relinquishing alcohol and tobacco simultaneously, he passed the next ten years of his life as a teetotaller, playing an obsolete wind instrument called an ophicleide. Towards the end of this period, renouncing the ophicleide, he married a lady of great piety, and fell completely silent. He was carried off to the family asylum where, ‘impatient for heaven’, he discovered an absolutely original method of committing suicide. It was irresistibly amusing and no human being had yet thought of it, involving as it did an empty carpet bag. However, in the act of placing this bag on his head, Uncle Barney jammed the mechanism of his heart in a paroxysm of laughter – which the merest recollection of his suicidal technique never failed to provoke among the Shaws – and the result was that he died a second before he succeeded in killing himself. The coroner’s court described his death as being ‘from natural causes’.

‘Drink is the biggest skeleton in the family cupboard,’ G.B.S. told one of his cousins. But he did not leave this skeleton in its cupboard. He had a choice of making the Shaw drunkenness into ‘either a family tragedy or a family joke’, and he chose the joke. So, in the bookshop window of his works, we may see a cabaret of Shavian aunts and uncles with a chorus of inebriate cousins, and at the centre, a wonderfully hopeless chap, second cousin to a baronet, George Carr Shaw, G.B.S.’s father.

Fortunately I have a heart of stone: else my relations would have broken it long ago.

Shaw to Rachel Mahaffy (6 June 1939)

The story of George Carr Shaw’s life was simple. He would tell you it
had evolved as the retribution for an injury he had once done a cat. He had found this cat, brought it home with him, fed it. But next day he had let his dog chase it and kill it. In his imagination this cat now had its revenge, seeing to it that he would have neither luck nor money. He was unsuccessful because of this cat; unskilled, unsober, and unserious too.

Between the ages of twenty-three and thirty he had been a clerk at a Dublin ironworks, but in 1845 he lost this job. By means of family influence he landed up with a perfectly superfluous post at the Four Courts, a job without duties or responsibilities. Unfortunately, it was one of the first of such positions to be abolished in the legal reforms of the early 1850s, for which ‘outrage’ George Shaw received a pension of £44 a year. There were opportunities in Dublin for a wholesale corn-merchant (retail trade was impossible for a Shaw). But George Shaw needed capital. Until now he had walked by himself, a gentleman who was no gentleman, and all places were alike to him. He was in his thirty-eighth year and had recently come in contact with a twenty-one-year-old girl, Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly, called ‘Bessie’. She was short, thin-lipped, with the jaw of a prize-fighter and a head like a football; but she had an attractive inheritance. George Carr Shaw felt drawn to her. ‘It was at this moment,’ G.B.S. records, ‘that some devil, perhaps commissioned by the Life Force to bring me into the world, prompted my father to propose marriage to Miss Bessie Gurly.’

*

The master-spirit among Bessie’s forebears had been her maternal grandfather, a country gentleman of imposing presence whose origin was so obscure that he was understood to have had no legal parents. But he lived en grand seigneur on his property of over two thousand acres in Kilkenny and at a place called Whitechurch to the south of Dublin. Each week he would drive in to a little pawnshop in Winetavern Street, one of the poorest quarters of the city. The name on the door was Cullen, an employee, under cover of whose identity John Whitcroft made his money.

The squire-pawnbroker wanted respectability by blood. On 29 December 1829 his daughter Lucinda married a ginger-whiskered squire from Carlow named Walter Bagnall Gurly, who was then living nearby at Rathfarnham. ‘He was a wiry, tight, smallish handknit open-air man,’ G.B.S. remembered, able to make his own boats and to ride the most ungovernable horses; an ingenious carpenter, dead shot, indefatigable fisherman: in short, ‘able to do anything except manage his affairs, keep his estate from slipping through his fingers’.

In ten years of marriage they had one daughter and a son. Then, on 14 January 1839, Mrs Gurly died. Bessie was nine. She was placed under
the care of her great-aunt, Ellen Whitcroft, a terrible hump-backed lady. This spidery creature taught her how to dress correctly, to sit motionless and straight; how to breathe, pronounce French, convey orders to servants. She was schooled in harmony and counterpoint, playing the piano ‘with various coins of the realm on the backs of my hands, also with my hair which I wore in two long plaits down my back, tied to the back of my chair, also with a square of pasteboard hung on my neck by a string pretty much as pictures are hung... in order to prevent me looking at my hands’.

By a programme of constraints and browbeatings, she was ‘educated up to the highest standard of Irish “carriage ladies”’. She never said anything coarse, loved flowers more than human beings and walked through the streets seeing nobody. Her aunt intended a great destiny for her – something that because of her deformity she had never achieved herself: marriage into the nobility. With these superior expectations, Bessie was floated into Dublin Society where she encountered the sinking George Carr Shaw.

Secretly Bessie detested her aunt and everything that, masquerading as education and religion, had made her childhood miserable. It was now that George Carr Shaw drifted forward to make his bid for Aunt Ellen’s property by proposing marriage to her niece.

He was not a romantic figure. Almost twice her age, he had a weak mouth, one squinting eye and a number of epileptic ways. ‘If any unpleasant reflection occurred to him, he, if in a room, rubbed his hands rapidly together and ground his teeth. If in a street, he took a short run.’ He was an unconvivial man, with little interest in women. Drink and money were his world.

But Bessie, who had fallen out with her father, overlooked the squinting eyes, the grinding teeth, and took stock only of George Carr Shaw’s social position and the prospects such a proposal offered of a better life. Yet this was to be a marriage of two blind people, each treating the other as guide dog. ‘Money in marriage is the first and, frequently, the only passion,’ wrote St John Ervine of nineteenth-century Irish marriages. G.B.S.’s parents married for money and were to live impecuniously ever after.

Aunt Ellen had tolerated George Carr Shaw as Bessie’s chaperon because of his well-connected harmlessness. To be with Shaw was an alibi for almost anything; never before had he been known to take an initiative. So now Aunt Ellen declared the marriage impossible. Then, when none of her objections prevailed, she revealed that Shaw was a known drunkard – in any event it was notorious in the family. Bessie knew how to deal with this. She went round to Shaw and asked him; and he confessed that
all his life he had been a bigoted teetotaller. But he did not tell her that he was a teetotaller who drank.

So the marriage went ahead. Aunt Ellen had one more card to play: she disinherited her niece. This was undeniably a serious blow to Shaw. Needing money to take advantage of a business opportunity from his brother Henry, he sold his pension for £500 and used this capital to buy a partnership in a corn-merchant business with his brother’s ex-partner, George Clibborn. It was a start – to be supported after his marriage by his wife’s own money and whatever could be regained of Aunt Ellen’s inheritance. It could have been worse.

This was a good summer for Walter Bagnall Gurly. On 25 May 1852 he married his second wife who, two months before, had given birth to their first daughter; and twenty-three days later, at the same church, St Peter’s in Aungier Street, he attended the wedding of his daughter and George Carr Shaw. As a wedding gift, Aunt Ellen had sent the couple a bundle of IOUs signed by Gurly – which he seized and burnt. Better still was the marriage settlement he had insisted on their signing a few hours before the ceremony. Bessie’s personal assets were listed as ‘one thousand two hundred and fifty-six pounds Nine shillings and two pence Government three and a quarter per cent Stock’. All this, together with income to be derived from her father’s first marriage settlement and from the will of her pawnbroker grandfather, was transferred by deed to two trustees. The effect of this was to ensure that the inheritance would remain Gurly-money, never the Shaw-money it would otherwise have become. So George Carr Shaw had gained a wife and lost a fortune.

When they drove off after the wedding, George Carr Shaw turned to kiss his bride. She felt so disgusted that she was still protesting more than thirty years later. ‘The rebuff must have opened his eyes a little too late,’ their son judged, ‘to her want of any really mately feeling for him.’

William Morris used to say that it is very difficult to judge who are the best people to take charge of children, but it is certain that the parents are the very worst.

Shaw to Nancy Astor (21 August 1943)

They had chosen Liverpool for their honeymoon, and here their first child was conceived. It was nearly the end of their marriage. Years later,
Mrs Shaw told her son that, opening her husband’s wardrobe, she had ‘found it full of empty bottles’. The truth had tumbled out. ‘I leave you to imagine,’ wrote G.B.S., ‘the hell into which my mother descended when she found out what shabby-genteel poverty with a drunken husband is like.’

They returned to Dublin and moved into ‘an awful little kennel with “primitive sanitary arrangements”’, 3 Upper Synge Street – a road of eleven small squat houses which runs round the corner from Harrington Street. Here their three children were born: Lucinda Frances, called Lucy, on 26 March 1853, Elinor Agnes, nicknamed ‘Yuppy’, two years later; and, on 26 July 1856, their son George Bernard, ‘fifty years too soon’, he calculated.

It was a difficult delivery, a vaginal breech birth that was carried out at Upper Synge Street by Dr John Ringland, Master of the Combe Lying-in Hospital, who had been called in by Bessie’s general practitioner.

In his nursery days he was called Bob; by the time he had grown into his holland tunic and knickerbockers he had become ‘Sonny’; it was not until he was reborn the child of his own writings in England that he developed the plumage of ‘G.B.S.’

We first see Bob at the age of one. ‘The young beggar is getting quite outrageous,’ his father writes proudly to Bessie who was staying with her family. ‘I left him this morning roaring and tearing like a bull.’ He could eat his hat, vomit up currants, annoy his teeth and make a jigsaw of unread newspapers. But his chief accomplishment was to go off on marvellous walking expeditions from Papa to Nurse (who was threatening a breakdown) and back again. From his bed he plunged head-first onto the floor; and from the kitchen table he cascaded through a pane of glass without ‘even a pane in his head’.