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CHAPTER FOUR

Scriptural Education

It is hard to grasp, almost two centuries later, the phenomenon which was the Achill Mission colony and the disruptive chaos which it unleashed. What if an independent international adventurer stumbled upon the Achill scene and left behind a third-party account? As it happens, we have precisely such a report from Jane Franklin, described as the most travelled woman of her time, who visited every continent in the world except Antarctica in her lifetime.

In late summer 1835, Jane arrived at the Achill Mission colony in Dugort, just a year after the Nangles had taken up residence there. She confronted an impressive spectacle: a row of slated two-storey houses on the side of a mountain, ten acres of cultivated land producing potatoes and other crops, eight cabins under construction for colony converts – an oasis of development in the midst of the prevailing deprivation and squalor across the island. It was an impressive sight indeed to a visitor who passionately valued improvement and education.

She had spent several months the previous year separated from her husband and travelling on the Nile with a Prussian missionary, Johann Lieder, giving rise to innuendo of a romantic affair. On returning to England, she was unwell, perhaps pining for her exotic Nile travelling companion, and a trip to Ireland may have been a welcome diversion. In contrast to her middle-aged, stout, balding, explorer husband Sir John, Jane Franklin, then in her early forties, exuded the vibrant energy of youth. She was slim, graceful and elegant, amiable and charming, her expressive face framed by curly hair. But she was also sturdy and adventurous, strong and practical, one who described herself as a low-church, ‘no-frills Protestant’.1

On their way to Achill the visitors received a favourable report about Edward Nangle’s mission from an unlikely source. Father Lyons, Catholic dean of Killala, County Mayo, told them: ‘He is an excellent man and he is doing a great deal of good to the poor people of Achill.’ The difficult journey to the island would likely have excited the adventurous Jane: ‘At Ballycroy we were detained four days by a hurricane, living all this time in the coastguard watch-house and the cottage of the chief boatman’, before crossing by galley across dangerous waters to Achill’s Bullsmouth.

Edward, Eliza and Grace Warner hosted Jane and her husband at their Dugort home where they dined on vegetables and potatoes from the Nangle kitchen garden. While the single decanter of wine disappeared quickly from the table at the end of the meal, Edward apologised for the deficiency and produced a bottle of whiskey for the guests. Jane could see how harsh the year had been for Eliza: her first son, the child she had carried in her womb through a harsh and difficult Achill winter, had died in April before her milk came in, surviving for just two days. Edward, she learned, had buried the infant with his own hands in the small enclosed cemetery behind the mission buildings on the mountain slope. In the years ahead, it would become a communal Nangle burial place.

What impression did Edward Nangle make? To Jane, he was a tall, thin, pale, dark man with finely formed features, wearing such a mild pensive expression ‘that you would think he could not utter a harsh word, or raise his voice beyond the breathings of a prayer’. However, she could detect that he was driven by an overwhelming force, willing to persevere in his mission through fatigue, ill health, persecution and calumny in pursuit of his goals. He clearly believed that thousands of his deluded countrymen were perishing around him in their sins and errors and that it was his God-given duty to bring the true faith to these people.

‘Like another Luther is Mr Nangle in Achill,’ she observed, instinctively supportive of the mission’s work in opposing the ‘spiritual tyranny’ of Catholicism. ‘I have seen missionaries in many countries but never one so pure and high-minded as Mr Nangle.’

Jane sympathised with the position of Eliza and her sister: in her view, two excellent, gentle and zealous women who had renounced the luxuries to which they had been accustomed and devoted their energies to the island mission, while understandably apprehensive at the violence being directed at the colony. She heard that, during Edward’s absences, the chief officer of the coastguard, Francis Reynolds, came to the colony each night ‘to sit up with Mr Nangle’s family and be in readiness to protect them in case of attack or insult’.2 Grace Warner appeared to be in awe of her brother-in-law, telling Jane that, despite suffering poor health, Edward was scrupulous in economising the mission’s funds, seeking few comforts for himself.

In a remarkable coincidence, Jane Franklin’s group arrived in Achill just days after a triumphal visit to the island by John MacHale, his first as archbishop. What might the adventurer Lady Jane have made of the robed prelate, had they come to face-to-face, with their diametrically opposed nineteenth-century outlooks?

Dressed in episcopal robes, the archbishop had led a procession of thirteen priests, followed by an enthusiastic crowd waving banners emblazoned with ‘Down the Schematics’. He officiated in a splendid spectacle at a high mass in nearby Dookinella within sight of leaping Atlantic waves in an atmosphere of near hysteria.In an impressive display in the presence of their archbishop, a succession of priests addressed the crowd and denounced the colony, calling on the people to have no interaction of any sort with the Achill Mission: ‘neither borrowing nor lending, neither buying nor selling’. In a theatrical gesture that matched the striking location, a solemn curse was invoked on those who dared violate the mandate of not associating with the colony.

Soon after the episcopal visit, the Connaught Telegraph predicted the imminent demise of the Achill Mission: ‘in six months more, within the tenantless walls of the colony will be heard only the shrill whistle of the whirlwind, or the night-screech of the owl – the buildings shall stand as a lasting record of the folly and hypocrisy of their architects’.3 The prediction proved to be a delusion, while the archbishop’s visit certainly presented an image of the fiery antagonism between John MacHale and Edward Nangle and their respective belief systems.

***

Jane Franklin believed passionately in personal improvement and in the power of education and it was this aspect of Edward Nangle’s ministry that interested her most. Some months earlier, on 23 December 1834, the first Achill Mission school had opened at Slievemore village on the western flank of the mountain in a three-roomed building. Within a couple of months there were three more mission schools at Dugort, Cashel and Keel and, quickly realising the threat which these posed, the island’s parish priest Michael Connolly responded by opening three competing schools in early 1835. From a situation where there was little or no education infrastructure on the island, there were now a plethora of opposing schools.

Given that the modern Irish state has struggled to deal with issues of pluralism and multi-denominational expectations in its education system to the present day, it is intriguing to reflect on how an ambitious non-denominational primary school system became embroiled in a sectarian battle for souls in 1830s Achill.

It was just a few years since the Chief Secretary of Ireland, Edward Stanley, set out the bones of his new non-denominational state-supported universal system of elementary education for Ireland in his 1831 ‘Stanley Letter’ after decades of debate and controversy.4 Under the new system, designed to unite children of different creeds, no religious iconography would be allowed in the schools and religious instruction would take place either before or after school hours. In practice, the demarcation between general instruction and religious instruction became blurred. The schools operated under the direction of the National Board and received financial assistance, supplemented by local resources, for school buildings, teacher salaries, school books and equipment. In a reflection of the cultural imperialist policies of the time, all teaching would be through the medium of English while school texts were centrally produced. It was a revolutionary experiment in state education and secularity.

Edward Nangle and John MacHale initially opposed the national system, both arguing that secular and religious education were inseparable and should be controlled by the respective denominations. For his part, Edward railed against a scheme which, he held, aimed to ‘withhold the knowledge of God’s word from the children of Ireland’.5 He would reject the national scheme and, instead, put scripture teaching at the heart of his mission schools and operate them through privately raised funding without government support.

John MacHale was hostile to the state scheme from the beginning, opposing it on the grounds that it would be non-denominational, that the Irish language would be non-compulsory and that school texts would be British in character. However, the pragmatic archbishop, faced with the threat posed by the Achill Mission, saw an opportunity to secure state funding to establish competing island schools under the influence of his local clergy. The battle for the hearts of the Achill children was in full swing.

Jane Franklin was appalled that the national system of education, from which so much had been expected, was failing so dismally in its objectives. How could it possibly be a proper use of the national scheme to support the MacHale schools in Achill? She found it unacceptable that the National Board was providing the opportunity and means for the Catholic clergy to establish rival Achill schools which were now threatening the viability of those operated by the Achill Mission. In her view, a scheme established on a non-denominational basis had, in fact, ‘widened the separation between the catholic and protestant population’.6

Edward Nangle was rankled at the manner in which MacHale and his priests were using the national education system and took his complaints repeatedly to the National Board, complaining that the Achill schools were adhering neither to the principles nor the regulations of the national programme. His most serious objections were made against James O’Donnell, master of Dugort national school in close proximity to the colony who, he protested, had provocatively carried a flag in a welcoming procession for John MacHale. This clearly contravened the National Board policy that school masters should refrain from any activities detrimental to carrying out a common system of education. Edward had an additional grievance: that the same teacher, James O’Donnell, had, ‘with a knife in his hand threatened to take the head of one of the children attending a school under [mission] patronage’.

The National Board, through its secretary Thomas F. Kelly, took a benign view of the school master’s conduct, maintaining that ‘these are allegations of what passed amongst unlettered men, and amongst angry men’,7 and that the charges, while unwelcome, did not warrant the teacher’s dismissal.

Sometime after this dispute, Edward was called to give evidence before a parliamentary select committee of the Lords and Commons which was examining the new Irish education system, and his testimony provides a compelling and direct account of his mission’s goals and mode of operation in its early years.

Was it true, Edward was asked, that the conversion of the people of Achill was his main objective in coming to the island?

‘Most decidedly. I desired to be an instrument in the hands of God. It was perfectly understood; we never made any secret of our object.’

But did he have other objectives in Achill, like improving the destitute conditions of the people?

‘Certainly; we considered the reclaiming of them from the errors of Popery as the main object of the greatest importance, and the other as subservient to it.’

Were there any schools in Achill before the mission schools?

‘There was no school except one; a pay school attended by very few children, I understand.’

Why did he consider that the establishment of national schools by the priests would have a negative effect on the mission schools?

‘When the priest established another school then it became an act of more daring rebellion against his authority to pass by that school and to come to ours.’

Did he always address the people in the Irish language?

‘Not on all occasions; I did occasionally.’

How many families were there on the Achill Mission grounds?

‘There are thirty-four families altogether living on the mission grounds, twenty-seven of these families are persons who have been brought out of the Church of Rome; some of these came to the island with us; since we came into the island eighteen or nineteen families have been brought out of the Church of Rome.’

What conditions were applied to the people who were given ground at the colony?

‘The manner of our proceeding is simply this: we give a cottage, and we give an acre of reclaimed ground, and for this they pay us a yearly rent of £2 5s, getting constant employment from us in reclaiming the rest of the land; they are employed as our labourers in reclaiming land.’

Was it a condition of residence at the colony that the people were Protestant?

‘All the persons living on our mission ground are Protestant with the exception of one female; the place is intended as a refuge for persons wishing to be protected from the tyranny which everyone acquainted with the state of Ireland knows is practiced upon those persons who leave the Church of Rome.’

Would the colony house people who converted from Roman Catholic to Protestant?

‘Yes, and are suffering persecution.’

Were the people who became converts and were admitted to the colony in a better position than the most destitute Catholics in Achill?

‘They are in a better condition, certainly. But when we strive to better their temporal condition, it is insinuated that we attempt to induce them to change their religious profession by bribery.’8

The words were unequivocal: Edward Nangle had come to Achill to convert the Catholic people to Protestantism and all else was subsidiary to this objective. The real honey pot was the schools, for the people thirsted for education, but John MacHale and the priests sought to out manoeuvre him by setting up their own schools and the scandal for Edward was that the priests were aided and abetted by the national education system. The prizes on offer to woo the people to the colony were enticing: land and employment for any who could overcome the power of the priests and the taunts of neighbours – tantalisingly seductive if you lived a wretched life.

The explosion of new schools in 1830s Achill was remarkable. By 1837, there were almost 400 pupils, only 20 per cent of whom were female, enrolled in five national schools under the patronage of the Catholic parish priest while the Achill Mission schools, which were outside the national system, struggled to retain their earlier pupil numbers.9 The antagonism between Edward Nangle and John MacHale at least had the merit of triggering the introduction of widespread education in Achill.

***

The contrast was astonishing between the conditions of the women associated with the Achill Mission colony on the one hand, and the common drudgery of the native Achill women on the other.10 Eliza Nangle was a Protestant woman, reared in a comfortable, sheltered middle-class home and imbued with the evangelical values of the period. Like others of her contemporaries, she gave her whole-hearted support to a strong, evangelical figure, in her case her husband. From the early years of their marriage, as a pregnant woman and mother of a young daughter, she had accompanied Edward on the arduous famine relief journey to the west. She set up home with her young family in the most inhospitable conditions imaginable, sublimating the family needs to Edward’s enterprise. For a woman imbued with the virtues of orderliness, cleanliness, temperance and domestic virtue, and attempting to inculcate these qualities in her young daughters, the relocation to Achill would have been traumatic. She could not have envisaged how the family’s first year in Achill would turn out: extreme and inhospitable living conditions, her husband’s poor health, the eruption of violence against the colony and a dead infant son. Most painful of all must have been the ferocity of the opposition to the mission’s work for a woman who desired to do good for those less fortunate than herself.

Eliza had little in common with the island women who eked out an existence in one of the most remote and economically-deprived areas in Ireland. The Achill woman lived in ‘fourth-class’ houses with neither chimney nor window, had no formal schooling, could not read or write and looked after the animals and tillage when the men took on seasonal migrant work in England. The island landscape was her domain: she harvested turf and carried it home on her back; hauled seaweed from the shore to fertilise the soil; planted, weeded and harvested the potato crop; baited and gutted fish; sheaved and stacked oats and drove cattle. It was arduous physical work. The gulf between the lives of the colony women and their counterparts on the island was immense.

There was no administrative or commercial centre on the island and no middle class with the exception of the coastguard families. For over a decade, the coastguard was the most visible government agency charged with preventing smuggling, shipwreck plundering and illegal distilling. Margaret Reynolds, a Catholic woman married to the Protestant Captain Francis Reynolds of the coastguard, arrived in Achill a couple of years before the Nangles and this couple was the closest Edward and Eliza had to island friends.

Margaret’s position was tense and uncomfortable as she became embroiled in a power struggle between Edward and her husband on the one hand, and the Achill Catholic clergy on the other. While rearing her large family, she stoically tried to follow her conscience, attending Catholic services and appearing bewildered by the fractious sectarian tensions around her. She listened at Sunday mass as the parish priest, Father Connolly, harangued the public about the Achill Mission and their attitude to the devotion of Catholics to the Virgin Mary. When she reported back to her husband, he, in turn, challenged the priest to a public debate on the doctrinal issues involved. Margaret was caught in an impossible situation which would, in time, turn out to be tragic.

***

Before leaving Achill, Jane Franklin set out to experience what she could of the island, used as she was to hiking, exploring, observing and note-taking. She took to the mountains, crossing the width of Slievemore behind the Achill Mission settlement on horseback, and also traversing the magnificent Minaun on the island’s other coast. While disappointed not to find any Achill amethyst stone worth taking away, she appreciated the superior quality of Achill mutton grazed on Atlantic-splashed heather. While playing down her knowledge of the island plants, she noted ‘the miniature fern, the abundant thrift and London pride, and the pretty little tormentilla, of which the peasants made a yellow dye for their shoe-skins’. She spied an eagle and some foxes, saw rabbits swarm the Dugort sand dunes, and witnessed the abundance of snipe, woodcock, grouse and plover, a delight for the sportsman’s gun. Most delightful were the seals basking on exposed rocks in Achill Sound until they slid into the water, ‘like the crocodile of the Nile’.

What, then, was her overall assessment of the Achill Mission? On this, she was in two minds. There was so much that was positive about Edward Nangle’s project: ‘If my good wishes are with this experiment, it is in the absence of any more effectual means of rescuing Ireland from her present state of moral and spiritual debasement.’

However, there was a hesitancy that prevented her from fully endorsing the proselytising institution. It was a reluctance that resulted from the manner in which she observed Edward Nangle deploring and castigating sincerely held Catholic doctrines such as that of the Eucharist: ‘I cannot but deplore that Mr Nangle should think it right to speak as he does of a doctrine [the Eucharist] which however erroneous and, to us, incredible, is held in pious awe by many an honest Catholic.’11

While generally approving of the Achill Mission’s programme of conversion, she was apprehensive about some of the tactics used: ‘we may still regret that any weapon sharper than the voice of persuasive reasoning, any language less tender than the daily prayer which Mr Nangle fervently offers up for his deluded and deluding brethren’ should have been used in achieving those conversions. While accepting the viciousness of the Catholic backlash against the mission, she feared that Edward Nangle’s fierce, over zealous approach could prove detrimental in the long run. Jane Franklin’s reservations would be shared by others.

On the final day of Jane’s visit, Eliza Nangle and Grace Warner laid the foundation stone for a building which was to become the home of Neason Adams, the Nangles’ friend who had helped nurture Edward back to health after his Cavan collapse. The Dublin physician was about to devote his resources and medical talents to the colony with his wife. Neason and Isabella Adams would bring a compassion and humanness to the work at the Achill Mission over the coming two decades.

The following year, Jane and John Franklin boarded the ship Fairlie with a party of twenty-three en route to Tasmania, Van Dieman’s Land, where Sir John took up the post of lieutenant general while Jane swept energetically through the colony. In the coming years she would become one of the best known Victorian women of her day through her single-minded efforts in support of her husband’s reputation when he disappeared in the Arctic in the 1845 North-West Passage expedition.

Jane Franklin would explore and travel to the end of her life, driven by a desire to see all parts of the habitable globe. She would be the first woman to travel overland from Melbourne to Sydney, would climb into the crater of a volcano in Hawaii, and visit Alaska when almost eighty years old. Intolerant of injustice, she had a passion for improvement, education and civilisation. Achill Island was as glorious in its natural beauty as any of the places she would journey to, the plight of its people in their poverty and ignorance as wretched as any she would witness. The opportunity and the challenge for the Achill Mission appeared great to her, but there was an ugly sting in its methods which had left her troubled and sceptical.