Remembering Ledwidge
Introduction by John Donohoe at Navan Shamrock Festival
Remembering Francis Ledwidge event, St Mary's Church, Navan
Wednesday 15th March 2017
For the last number of years here in St Mary’s Church, as part of the Shamrock Festival, we have marked the centenaries of the outbreak of World War I, and the Easter Rising of 1916.
This year we are commemorating a man who links both of those momentous events, a poet and trade unionist who fought and died on the battlefields of Europe, while his fellow writers and activists were engaged in the Dublin rebellion that led to their deaths at the hands of the same army that he was fighting with.
July 31st next marks the centenary of the death of Slane native Francis Ledwidge while road building near the town of Ypres with the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, and tonight marks the beginning of a large number of events both locally and nationally, and indeed internationally, to mark the anniversary. These include the issuing of a stamp by An Post, and the planned erection of a statue in Slane.
So as we begin this year of commemoration, let us take a short look back over the all too brief life of the ‘poet of the blackbird’, or ‘the peasant poet’ as described by his mentor, Lord Dunsany.
He was the eighth child of Patrick and Anne Ledwidge of Janeville, Slane, and was born on 19th August 1887. A ninth child, Joe, was to arrive four years later, followed three months later by the death of their father, leaving Anne Ledwidge to eek out a living as a labourer on local farmers’ fields, and knitting, washing and sewing. There was further tragedy when the eldest, Patrick, the breadwinner, died of tuberculosis.
When he was 15, Anne secured a job for young Francis as a grocer's apprentice in Daly’s of Rathfarnham. However, he was homesick for Slane and the Boyne Valley, and penned his first poem, ‘Behind the Closed Eye’ reminiscing about walking 'the old frequented ways that wind around the tangled braes' of his native place. It was the first taste of what was to come. He decided he would walk those ways again, and leaving Rathfarnham under cover of darkness, walked back to Slane.
Over the next six years he was employed locally as a groom, a farmhand, and roadworker with the council, before being taken on at the newly opened Beauparc Copper Mine. Here, the conditions were dangerous, and Frank organised a strike. He was sacked.
He returned to the council, becoming Kells District Foreman. In 1912, he became secretary of the Meath Labour Union, with an office in Navan. He was elected a member of Navan Rural Council.
Frank was continuing to write poetry, mainly influenced by nature and the countryside, and his work was published in the Drogheda Independent, delivered by his love interest, Ellie Vaughey, who worked in the town. The Slane sculptor, John Cassidy, suggest that Ledwidge send his work to the 18th Lord Dunsany, a writer and playwright.
Dunsany took Ledwidge under his wing, and introduced him to the literary set in Dublin, and the publishing houses in London.
Meanwhile, Ledwidge, along with his brother, Joe, were among the founders of the Slane Corp of the Irish Volunteers. When World War I broke out in 1914, Volunteers leader John Redmond called for support of England in the ‘fight to defend small nations’, and Navan Rural Council, of which Ledwidge was a member, supported this. Ledwidge disagreed, and said Home Rule was as far away as ever. He was laughed at and told he was pro-German. The motion was passed, with only he opposing it.
He was consistently anti-Redmond in his contributions to meetings, so it was a great surprise when on 24th October 1914, he enlisted in Dunsany’s Royal Inniskilling Fusileers in Richmond Barracks in Dublin.
He wrote: I joined the British Army because she stood between Ireland and an enemy common to our civilisation, and I would not have her say that she defended us while we did nothing at home but pass resolutions.”
Lord Dunsany was so annoyed that Ledwidge had joined the army that he almost refused to have anything more to do with him. But he continued to work with the poet, leading to the publication of the ‘Songs of the Fields’ collection when Ledwidge was with the army in Serbia.
1915 also saw the death after childbirth of Ellie Vaughey, now married and living in Manchester. Ledwidge experienced the horrors of Gallipoli before marching through Serbia, and on to Salonika, collapsing with back pain and an inflamed gall bladder. He was hospitalised in Salonika, and later Cairo, before being transferred back to Manchester.
He arrived in England five days before the Easter Rising of 1916. It was here he heard of the deaths of Pearse, McDonagh and Clarke, and wrote that poem for his friend that we all learned at school, ‘Lament for Thomas McDonagh’.
A week later, he was back in Ireland, and after an exchange with a superior in Richmond Barracks about the Rising, when he said that when he fought on two battlefronts, he had been fighting for Ireland’s freedom, he was courtmartialled in Derry. Dunsany was also in Derry, and they worked on another book, Songs of Peace.
In December 1916, he was ordered to fight in France. He had been drafted into B Company, 1st Battalion of the 29th division. They advanced across France into Flanders Fields, and were in Belgium by July. At the end of that month, close to Ypres, Ledwidge and colleagues were repairing a road. In the afternoon, while they were on tea break, a shell exploded beside them, killing one officer and five enlisted men, including Ledwidge. Initially they were buried where they fell, later reinterred in nearby Artillery Wood Military Cemetery.
A separate monument now stands at the place where he and his comrades were killed.
There is a connection between my own place of work, the Meath Chronicle, and Ledwidge's death. His best friend, Matty McGoona, worked in the Chronicle printworks (then the Irish Peasant newspaper), and when locking up one evening saw his friend Frank at the gate. By the time he got to the gate, Frank was gone. He was puzzled. What had happened? Was Frank home? Nobody knew. Next morning came the news of Ledwidge's death in Belgium.
- John Donohoe, News Editor, Meath Chronicle
Schedule
Remembrance and Prayers for Peace - An Ecumenical and Inter-faith Service of Prayer, with Fr Declan Hurley Adm and Canon John Clarke
Sean Lynch – Last Post - Minute Silence - Reveille.
Welcome by Cllr Noel French to members of ONE, chairperson of Navan Shamrock Festival, Mayor Francis Deane and local attendees.
John Donohoe - “Francis Ledwidge”
Colm Yore - The House of Gold
Gary O’Hare - Blackbird of Slane
Bob Lee - The Dead Kings
Comhaltas Musicians - Two Airs/Marches
Paul Murphy - Soliloquy
John Doyle - Passchendaele
Tony Brady - Down by a lone long river
Michael Connaughton - The Maid of Rosnaree
Danny Cusack - Seamus Heaney’s In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge
Paddy Pryle - Green Fields of France
Bill Slattery - June followed by a short air