Unlikely bedfellows brought together by love of poetry and nature

The relationship between Slane poet, Francis Ledwidge and his patron, Lord Dunsany

A new collection of work by Francis Ledwidge, simply entitled ‘Poems’, including some previously unpublished from the Dunsany Castle Archive, was launched by Gallery Press and the Ledwidge Cottage Committee in Slane Castle this year. The following is the talk given by Meath Chronicle news editor, John Donohoe, at the launch on Ledwidge Day in August.

Before I begin, I would like to dedicate my talk here today to my late Godfather, Michael Smith from Dunsany, whose funeral took place on Christmas Eve last.

Michael was a local historian in the area who had also a family connection to the Ledwidge-Plunkett story as both his grandparents worked for the late Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron, and had memories of Ledwidge, while he himself following his retirement from Tara Mines, worked with Randal Plunkett, current Lord Dunsany, and his late mother, Marie Alice. We remember all of those today.

My own earliest realisation of the close connection between Ledwidge and Dunsany was while at the small primary school in Dunsany, where in the corner of the classroom, in an old glass fronted press typical of those national schools, was kept a very precious copy of Alice Curtayne’s biography of the Slane poet, only taken out on very special occasions.

Handwritten by the headmaster, Seamus Conroy, in coloured marker on a large white sheet of glossy paper on the back of the classroom door was Ledwidge's elegy, ‘Thomas McDonagh’ which we all learned by heart - one of the very few poems I can still recite fully.

It is fitting as we come to the end of the Decade of Commemorations that we are looking back at the lives of two men who were involved in those tumultuous events of around a century ago – two unlikely bedfellows brought together not just by a love of words and writing – but also by a love of nature, the outdoors, an appreciation of the flora and fauna of the countryside around them.

Ledwidge grew up and knew every blade, leaf and stream of the Boyne Valley here in Slane and surrounds, while Dunsany’s ancestral home in the shadow of the Hill of Tara was surrounded by woodlands and scenic landscapes, a castle where his many associates in the literary world often came to spend time, from WB Yeats to Lady Gregory, Oliver St John Gogarty to HG Wells, and where in a later era, Paddy Kavanagh brought Hilda Moriarty for a walk in the bluebell wood in an unsuccessful attempt to woo her, with his ‘Bluebells for Love’ and ‘On Raglan Road’.

This all sounds very romantic, but the period we are looking at was a troubled time, with a World War and a War of Independence causing people to take sides, and a story with a great deal of contradictions and unlikely relationships.

Who was this lord of the manor who saw the potential and talent of the young county council road worker and trade unionist from Slane, on the other side of the Boyne Valley?

Edward John Morton Drax Plunkett was the son of Admiral Lord Dunsany, Edward Plunkett, and Lady Dunsany, who lived at her home, Dunstall Priory near Shoreham in Kent, England. He was born at Park Square, near Regent's Park in London, and his father returned to Ireland on succeeding the title, while his mother remained at Dunstall, a place Dunsany was to love all his life, and where he is buried.

His early education was at a local school in Kent, and he then attended his father's school, Cream, where he learned the Greek language and the mythology that he emulated in so many of his works. He also became acquainted with Grimm's and Anderson's fairy tales, the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and the strategies of tournament chess.

From Cheam he went to Eton, and then to a crammer in Dublin, later qualifying for Sandhurst, from which he graduated with a military education. He joined the Coldstream Guards and was transferred to Gibraltar.

There he developed his fascination for the Near East in the settings that he was to later use in his tales. With the beginning of the Boer War, Dunsany transferred to South Africa, where he saw extensive combat and met Rudyard Kipling, who became a lifelong friend.

After the war, he returned to Meath and the duties of his estate. He inherited the title in 1899. In 1904, he married Lady Beatrice Villiers, daughter of the Earl of Jersey who became his most devoted reader, his sometime secretary, and his honest critic.

Despite being a prolific writer, with more than 55 published volumes and hundreds of plays, articles and introductions, he hadn’t been an overnight success, and perhaps his attention to Ledwidge was because when he was starting out, he had spent months waiting on replies to letters and work he had sent to established British writers of the time.

At the time Ledwidge wrote to him, his play, ‘The Gods of the Mountain’, was having a very successful run at the Haymarket Theatre, London. Ledwidge had written to him as Slane native sculptor John Cassidy had suggested he contact a well-known writer who could advise him in his work, and Dunsany’s name was most prominent at the time.

But Dunsany, a big game shooter, international chess player, and renowned cricketer, wasn’t in Dunsany, but had spent the spring of 1912 in Cannes, before ‘wasting June’ in London, when the package of poetry from the castle eventually reached him. He was impressed, and immediately wrote back to Ledwidge, as Alice Curtayne says: “warmly greeting him as a true poet.”

When he arrived home in the summer of 1912, he invited Ledwidge to Dunsany, where he gave him the freedom of the castle to read or borrow books. Alice Curtayne wrote that Lady Dunsany recalled Ledwidge’s natural good manners at the table, and said he showed no embarrassing shyness, but I will come back to that later.

In a letter to Dunsany some years later, Ledwidge recalled how much he had been encouraged by those early sessions: “I often think on the beautiful afternoons we used to spend at Dunsany Castle, I listening enraptured to your latest, or wondering whether a comma, or a semi-colon, was the proper stop at some of my lines which you were soon to see. The long ride home, with beautiful memories of your appreciation, reciting my latest all the miles with the pedals of my bicycle turned to the rhythm of the piece, delaying me often, for you know I love slow rhythm and short words.”

Dunsany later wrote that when Ledwidge first brought his work to him: “I gave him a very little advice, which he immediately profited by, as people do not usually profit by advice. The best thing I did for him was to lend him a copy of Keats; and the great speed which he seemed to absorb it, and slightly to flavour his work with it, gave me some insight into his enormous powers, which were unhappily never developed.”

We must remember that there wasn’t a huge age difference between the two men – because Plunkett lived to be 79, later memories of him are of an elder gentleman, but he was born in 1878, just nine years before Ledwidge, they were young men in their 20s and 30s when they were contemporaries, which meant that when war broke out, they were all capable of becoming soldiers, unfortunately for the Slane man.

It was an extraordinary relationship, with Dunsany promoting Ledwidge’s work amongst the London publishers, and the Dublin literary set, often with mixed results. He introduced Ledwidge to Gogarty, McDonagh, Katherine Tynan, whose daughter Pamela Hickson was to become Lady Fingall’s ghost writer on ‘Seventy Years Young’, and James Stephens, who considered him promising but unsure as to whether he would live up to the promise.

At one stage, Ledwidge was even promoting Dunsany’s work to the editor of the Drogheda Independent, Michael A Casey.

Ledwidge had been amazed previously to hear from John Cassidy that writers were able to earn a living from writing – after all, the local newspapers that he had been submitting his work to never paid for poetry. Plus ca change!

Ledwidge had a proof-reader in the shape of Skryne national school principal, Master Malin. On his way from Slane to Dunsany on his trusted bicycle, Pegasus, and wishing to have his work perfect for his patron, he would call in to Master Malin’s home at Corbalton, Tara, and the Malin children would have to make themselves scarce when the new poetry was poured over. Master Malin was great grandfather of another writer, the sports journalist and All-Ireland winning Meath footballer, Liam Hayes, and his brother was principal of the national school in Dunsany.

In another slight connection, a later principal at Dunsany National School was Lucy Smyth, who took up residence in a Plunkett house at Dunsany Cross with her husband, Gerry, the Dunshaughlin National School principal. Gerry was nephew to Vincent Smyth, who had sent violets to Lizzie Healy as a romantic gesture on Valentine’s Day 1914. Lizzie thought they were from Ledwidge, who she was corresponding with, and thanked him.

When the Slane to Dunsany Ledwidge centenary cycle took place in 2017, both Margaret Hayes, granddaughter of Master Malin, and Gerard Smyth, son of Gerry, read works of Ledwidge en route, as did Jimmy McCumiskey, president of the Ledwidge Committee here.

I mentioned earlier my Godfather, Michael Smith. His grandmother, Kate Flynn, whom I knew, worked at Dunsany Castle and recalled Francis Ledwidge arriving in his knickerbocker style at the time, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. However, she also recalled, despite Lady Dunsany’s positive view of his table manners, the lady didn’t allow him into the dining room, and insisted he eat in the lower quarters.

She recalled that Dunsany could go off to a tower in the castle to write, demanding total silence. Lady Dunsany would have the dogs brought for walks, and at one stage it was attempted to have the bell in the Salesian College Church at Warrenstown College silenced. Dunsany had an artificial island built on the boating lake on the River Skane and spent long hours writing in a small wooden hut on this island. He enjoyed jackdaw’s eggs for breakfast and would send some of the estate workers searching for them.

He enjoyed hunting snipe across the midlands bogs, and my father can remember him coming to our farm asking my grandfather’s permission to go shooting snipe in the bottoms. Snipe rises in a zig zag fashion, so it takes a good marksman to shoot one. We of course have seen a complete turnaround now at the castle, where Randal has established a wildlife reserve as we face a different environmental era.

Another story which will make Randal smile is that his great grandfather often stopped the train as it was passing through the estate, and the drivers allowed him to drive it into Kilmessan and back again from the turntable there.

Dunsany wrote the preface for Ledwidge’s first volume of poems, ‘Songs of the Fields’ which Peter Fallon and Gallery reproduce here in this collection, and which Herbert Jenkins of London had agreed to publish.

Trade union activist Ledwidge was now a member of Navan Urban Council, and active in the Slane Corp of the volunteers. But war clouds were gathering, and when England declared war on Germany, Dunsany signed up to the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in Richmond Barracks, and Jenkins put the publication on hold.

Navan Rural District Council proposed to support James Redmond’s call for the Volunteers to join the war effort, and the poet was laughed at when he disagreed, saying Home Rule was as far away as ever. He was told he was pro-German. The resolution was passed, with only Ledwidge dissenting.

In another great contradiction, on 24th October 1914, Ledwidge enlisted in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers at Richmond Barracks, Dublin.

He wrote: “Some of the people who know me least imagine that I joined the Army because I knew men were struggling for higher ideals and great emprises, and I could not sit idle to watch them make for me a more beautiful world. They are mistaken. I joined the British Army because she stood between Ireland and an enemy common to our civilisation and I would have her say that she defended us while we did nothing at home but pass resolutions.”

Dunsany was angry when the poet joined the army, but as an officer in the Royal Inniskillings was able to arrange clerical work for him and rooms to write in. That only lasted for a period, until training became more intense, and on 27th April 1915, the Fusiliers marched from barracks to Dublin Bay, and war. The 10th Division set up camp at Basingstoke in Hampshire. Here, Frank and his close comrade Bob Christie became friendly with the Carter family, and the Lord and Lady Dunsany also had a house nearby where he could write.

On 10th July, the company set sail for Gallipoli, arriving almost a month later to the slaughter taking place there. There were constant bombardments and attacks by Turkish snipers, one of whom Ledwidge shot dead while on watch duty. Then, after two weeks rest, they marched through Serbia, where a parcel finally reached him. It was newly published ‘Songs of the Fields’.

The company marched on to Salonica, where Ledwidge collapsed with back pain and an inflamed gall bladder. He was hospitalised in Salonica, and later Cairo, before being transferred back to Manchester.

He arrived back in England five days before the Easter Rising of 1916. It was here he heard of the deaths of Padraig Pearse, Tomas McDonagh and Thomas Clarke. 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 to Derry.

Lord Dunsany, meanwhile, had gone to Dublin to see what he could do to quell the rebellion, and in an incident near Amiens Street, his chauffeur, Cudlipp, had a finger shot off. The Dunsany chauffeurs were not a lucky lot – Kate Flynn’s husband Michael had been chauffeur, but had injured his hand in a grinding accident and was transferred to second chauffeur.

Dunsany also spent time in Derry, and he and Ledwidge worked on another book, ‘Songs of Peace’, published three months after his death.

In December 1916, Ledwidge 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 of the following year.

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, adding to the 50,000 who died in that needless conflict.

I am going to leap forward to the middle of the second World War, and the encouragement by Plunkett of another Meath writer, the widowed Mary Lavin.

Writing a preface in her ‘Tales from Bective Bridge’ he said: “I have had the good fortune to have many stories and poems sent to me by young writers. In nearly all of them, the ardours of youth showed flashes, some rarely, some frequently, but only in two of them have I felt sure that I was reading the work of a master. And these two great writers, as I believe them to be, both wrote to me from the same bank of the same river, the left bank of the Boyne. One of these writers was Francis Ledwidge, who unhappily lived too short a time to do much more than do promise of the great bulk of fine work of which I’m sure he was capable. But although he has not had a very large number of readers, that early promise of his has received recognition by lovers of poetry, both in his own country and at the ends of the earth.”

Dunsany’s ability to spot talent was clearly excellent – Mary Lavin was awarded the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Tales from Bective Bridge.

In the early days of his own career, Dunsany struggled to have his work seen beyond his title and background, and when he decided that a writer like the ‘peasant poet’ deserved to become a star, then that person’s background and social standing was of no consequence.

As he wrote in the Introduction of ‘Songs for the Fields’: ‘I hope that not too many will be attracted to this book on account of the author being a peasant, lest he come to be praised by the how-interesting! school; for know that neither in any class, nor in any country, nor in any age, shall you predict the footfall of Pegasus, who touches the earth where he pleaseth and is bridled by whom he will.”

*Since this event, the death occurred on 12th December of Jimmy McComeskey, president of the Slane Cottage Committee. We extend deepest sympathy to his family and friends.