Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (74 page)

Twentieth Century

Downton Abbey and the Fight for Irish Freedom

by Tim Vicary

I
n the marvelous TV series,
Downton Abbey
, one theme that will surely develop further is the relationship between the youngest daughter of the house, Lady Sybil, and Tom Branson, the Irish chauffeur. Despite the strong disapproval of her parents the young couple fall in love and elope to Dublin to get married. This marriage is a very shocking and traumatic event for Lady Sybil’s parents, the Earl and Countess of Grantham, and it is clear that Sybil’s married life with her husband is going to be far from easy.

There are three major problems which the young couple will have to face: class, religion, and nationality. Class is the biggest: as the youngest daughter of wealthy English aristocrats, Lady Sybil has committed a colossal social blunder. There is no way that she and her new husband can possibly be accepted in the social world in which she has grown up; she may occasionally meet her sister and parents, but otherwise she has surely cut herself off forever. Her father has settled a little money on her, but she will still have to accustom herself to managing on that and her new husband’s wages—much, much less than she has previously taken for granted. Let’s hope their love is strong; it will need to be.

When my wife, then aged nineteen, agreed to marry me, a graduate with no obvious prospects, her grandmother had similar misgivings. “
When money comes in the door, love flies out the window
,” she wrote, in a forceful letter that could easily have come from the Dowager Countess of Grantham!

Since I was twenty-one and unemployed at the time, the old lady had a point! But at least my wife and I were both English, of a similar religion. Sybil’s new husband is a Catholic Irishman, at a time when religion and ethnicity are of crucial significance. In 1919, they elope to Dublin, straight into a cauldron of terrorism, murder, and police repression, a two-year campaign of violence which will result, after many deaths, in the creation of the Irish Free State.

So what, exactly, is going on? Her husband will understand it, but to Sybil all this may come as a nasty shock. Few English people know much Irish history, and she is surely no different. Well, here is a little of what she will need to learn.

When the First World War began, thousands of Irishmen, both Protestant and Catholic, joined the British Army, just like many men from Downton. There was no conscription; they were all volunteers. Like the men Sybil nursed at Downton, many of these Irish soldiers suffered horrific, life-changing injuries while fighting for what they still considered to be their country.

But not all Irishmen saw it like this. Some Irishmen, taking the view that “
England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity
”, decided that their real enemy was not Germany at all, but England. So they tried (unsuccessfully) to get guns from Germany and rose up in armed rebellion. On Easter Monday 1916, on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin, Padraig Pearse read out a declaration of Irish independence. Ireland, he said, was no longer part of the United Kingdom; it was now a sovereign, independent state. Behind him, several hundred armed Republicans raised the flag of an Irish Republic.

They had no chance of success. The British government was recovering from the disaster at Gallipoli and planning for the Battle of the Somme; it had no sympathy for Irish rebels who had tried to get guns from the enemy. A week later, after a battle in which 450 people were killed, mostly by soldiers of the Royal Irish Regiment, the rebels surrendered. Pearse and thirteen other leaders were convicted of treason and executed. Their followers were imprisoned in North Wales for six months and then released.

Pearse’s death made him a martyr. As the poet W.B. Yeats wrote,
“a terrible beauty is born.”
In the general election of 1918, Sinn Fein, the party of Pearse’s supporters, won 73 out of 105 seats in Ireland. One of these was won by the first ever woman MP, Constance Markeiwicz. But instead of going to Westminster, the Sinn Fein MPs declared themselves the new Parliament of Ireland, Dail Eireann. A state of war existed, they said, between England and Ireland.

Thus, when Lady Sybil arrives in Dublin with her new husband, she will find herself in the middle of a civil war. Ireland in 1919 was blessed—if that is the right word—with two governments, each of which had politicians, soldiers, and tax collectors. The new Irish Republic had its own army, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) led by Michael Collins. His men began to kill policemen, particularly intelligence officers. They were very good at it. Not surprisingly, the British government disliked this. As far as they were concerned, men like Michael Collins were terrorists. They wanted to capture him, dead or alive. But it was not easy. No one knew where Collins lived, or even what he looked like.

From what we know of Sybil’s husband, Tom Branson, it seems likely that he will be more in sympathy with the IRA than the British Army. Sybil’s father, the Earl of Grantham, and her sister’s new husband, Matthew Crawley, will surely have no sympathy for this. Matthew was fighting in the trenches while men like Michael Collins were skulking at home, conspiring to get arms from the Germans. So what will happen if Tom Branson joins the IRA and kills some British policemen or soldiers? Lady Sybil will have a hard time explaining that to her family!

She will need new friends in Dublin, and given her social background, she may well come across another strong-minded young woman of her own age, Lady Catherine Maeve O’Connell-Gort. Lady Catherine, like Lady Sybil, is a fictional character, the heroine of my novel,
The Blood Upon the Rose
. Like Sybil, Catherine is torn between two worlds; both of her brothers have been killed in the war, and her father is a British Army Colonel in charge of Military Intelligence. It is his job to kill or capture Michael Collins. But his daughter Catherine—just like Lady Sybil—is in love with a young Irishman who is fighting for Irish freedom. Not surprisingly, her father, just like the Earl of Grantham, is appalled.

I think the two young women should meet! Catherine has grown up in Ireland, so she understands the background much better than Sybil; but the pair would certainly have a great deal to talk about!

I wonder if it will happen?

You can read more about Catherine O’Connell-Gort in The
Blood Upon the Rose,
available in Kindle. In case you’re wondering, it was first published by Simon & Schuster UK in 1992, long before
Downton Abbey
hit the screens.

The Lost Houses of England

by Maggi Andersen

T
he BBC series
Downton Abbey
featured an aristocratic family struggling to survive through the First World War and chronicled the changes to society that war caused. Because I write about houses such as these in my novels, I was interested to find out more about the fate of England’s great houses.

The past hundred years have seen the loss of many historical houses due to the government’s taxing laws, death duties, fire, and the pervasive bombing during the Second World War. The consequence of social changes such as divorce took its toll too, making it impossible for many families to continue the upkeep of these expensive estates. War time requisitioning left many houses in need of costly repair. With the end of the First World War, British society changed irrevocably when the people who staffed the big houses chose a different life than one in service.

Magnificent houses have been broken up, their contents dispersed, and their structures demolished. Underlying the destruction of many, was the fading perception that the continued existence of a specific landed family in a country house was still important to British society.

The only hope for many of these houses, unable to be sustained by family fortunes, was to hand them over to the National Trust.

From 1759, Weald Hall, Essex had been the property of the Tower family who also owned Huntsmoor Park, Buckinghamshire. Robert Adam remodeled the dining room for Christopher Tower in 1778. The core of the Weald Hall was a Tudor block, probably built by Sir Anthony Browne who bought the property from the Crown. It was remodeled around 1720, possibly by the architect Giacomo Leoni.

Neither Huntsmoor Park nor Weald Hall was large. In 1883 Weald Hall estate was 2,481 acres and brought in an income of 4,092 pounds.

Passing down from son to son, Weald Hall was transferred to Christopher Cecil Tower on his marriage in 1913. But Christopher Tower’s enjoyment was brief. He was killed in action in 1915 and the Hall was never lived in again. The Hall’s situation between Romford and Brentwood made it unappealing for a home, and it was placed in the hands of caretakers and a shooting syndicate.

During the Second World War, the park was used for military purposes and the house badly damaged by fire. In 1946, the 2,000 acre Weald Hall estate was sold by its owner, Captain C.T. Tower, who was going abroad. In 1951 the house was demolished. Its former park is now a public recreation area.

The 1950s were years of crisis for country houses. At least forty-eight were demolished in 1950 alone. The country houses seemed irrelevant, white elephants threatening to drag families down. Many were handed over to the National Trust, others found an institutional use for their houses, but many were pulled down. Ancient medieval seats and great piles created by wealthy Victorian industrialists were demolished with impunity.

The demolition of country houses continued steadily throughout the first half of the 1960s, but their tragic history was brought to the public’s attention by
The Destruction of the Country House
exhibits at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1974. Since then, the battle for preservation has focused on houses that have been abandoned for many years, particularly those where speculators were hoping to profit by letting the houses they owned fall into decay so that they could be pulled down.

It is now legally impossible to demolish a country house of any significance. Today the main risk to country houses is, once again, fire.

For more details on the history behind the loss of these enormous and often breathtakingly beautiful houses, I recommend
England’s Lost Houses: From the Archives of Country Life
by Giles Worsley (Aurum Press Limited, 2011).

Ellis Island and British Immigrants to the USA

by Vincent Parrillo

M
ost people do not think of British immigrants in connection with Ellis Island. In fact, most historical photographs of the place depict southern, central, and eastern Europeans, easily recognizable by their kerchiefs, folk costumes, or dark-haired, dark-complexioned countenances. In fact, in my own public television (PBS) documentary,
Ellis Island: Gateway to America
, I utilized many of those same images.

However, many British immigrants also went through Ellis Island. For example, in the 1890s—the period in which my historical novel,
Guardians of the Gate,
begins its tale of the people and events occurring there—nearly 329,000 emigrants left the United Kingdom for the United States. Some were first and second-class passengers and therefore processed on board ship and not at Ellis Island.

Most, though, were the lower and working classes traveling in steerage, and their first steps on American soil were on the Island. (Included in my novel, for example, is the true incident of the deportation of a Scottish family.)

Earlier, between 1870 and 1889, about 1.3 million British immigrants arrived. Ellis Island did not exist then, so they were processed at a state-run immigration station called Castle Garden, which previously had been a concert hall, and its walls still stand in Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan.

That impressive number was lessened somewhat by the hundreds of thousands of British subjects who left, disenchanted with what they had found in America. Perhaps, as Charles Dickens complained after his visit in 1842, they found Americans too rude, arrogant, anti-intellectual, prone to be violent, and hypocritical.

His was a harsh judgment, indeed, but it didn’t stop other Brits from coming. Between 1900 and 1929, another 1.2 million British migrated to the United States. Again, most were first processed at Ellis Island to gain clearance for entry.

Just because they were British didn’t ensure these immigrants would breeze through Ellis Island. For example, among my weekly blogs that relate true immigrant stories is the firsthand account of a Scottish teenager arriving in 1921 with her family, showing the hunger and other tribulations they experienced there. Another blog gives the account of an English minister, whose 1911 detention on Ellis Island so disgusted him that he testified before a Congressional committee on the abysmal conditions he encountered.

Ellis Island was also a transit stop for several notorious or otherwise prominent British subjects. In 1903, anarchist John Turner was detained at Ellis Island and then deported to England because of his political opinions. Her political views kept English suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst detained on the Island in 1913 until she was also ordered deported by a Board of Special Inquiry on the grounds of “moral turpitude.” A public outcry prompted President Woodrow Wilson to reverse that decision two days later.

Sir Auckland Geddes, British ambassador to the United States, inspected Ellis Island in 1922, and his report criticized its lack of cleanliness, its inefficiency in handling appeals, and the smells and wire cages. The controversial report strained relations between the two countries for a while.

Among some of the well-known British immigrants arriving in the Port of New York (although not all went through Ellis Island) were writer Rudyard Kipling (1892), comedian Henny Youngman (1906), comedian Bob Hope (1908), comedian Stan Laurel (1912), conductor Leopold Stokowski (1912), actor Cary Grant (1920), actor Leslie Howard (1921), and author Joseph Conrad (1923).

Born in London to an English-born cabinet maker of Polish heritage and an Irish-born mother, Stokowski presented what an Ellis Island inspector thought was a good opportunity. He told the future conductor that his name was “foreign” and he would give him a new name.
“Thank you very much,”
said Stokowski,
“but my name is Stokowski.”
His voice rising more and more, he added,
“It was my father’s name, and his father’s before him, and it will stay my name!”
The inspector, accustomed to intimidating immigrants by his presence, was taken aback and quickly withdrew the offer.

Other prominent British expatriates who settled in the United States include model and actress Mischa Barton, musician Peter Frampton, labor leader Samuel Gompers, movie director Sir Alfred Hitchcock, actor Anthony Hopkins, actor Peter Lawford, and preservationist John Muir.

On average, about 17,000 British immigrants continue to arrive annually in the United States. These not-so-famous arrivals—mostly known only to their family, friends, and co-workers—settle in many states, but Southern California, particularly the Santa Monica region, has become the permanent home of several hundred thousand first-generation British Americans, who maintain their pubs and traditions among the surfers and rollerbladers.