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CHAPTER FIVE

Fractured

In following this story it has been difficult to uncover narratives of individual experiences among the Achill people through the years of the colony. It is as if the personal narratives are merged into the collective of a community struggling with day-to-day, season-to-season survival, leaving few records of individual lives. But we do have the chronicle of Bridget Lavelle, a young woman who reached out to grasp a better life and, in the process, ended up wounded and isolated.

It is not surprising that Bridget Lavelle would have longed for an existence superior to her peasant life. The Achill Mission beckoned, offering literacy, clothing, cleanliness and intellectual improvement – in short, refinement. She had the opportunity to move to a better place but wrestled with her conscience and with the conflicting dogmas presented by the priests and the proselytisers. Bridget sought out the truth but ended up a pawn in a patriarchal sectarian power play that broke her spirit and her health.

In late 1835, as the hours of winter darkness stretched, the Nangle family was seated around the fire in the parlour of their home in Dugort. They were pleased with the work of Bridget Lavelle, the children’s maid who had joined them earlier in the year. Aged twenty-one, she had shown an interest in the Bible, had taken religious instruction, ‘openly declared herself a Protestant’ and moved to the colony, causing much unhappiness to her parents and the island’s Catholic clergy.1

There was a knock at the parlour door and Bridget entered, clearly upset. Her mother, she reported, was in the kitchen and had brought bad news: Bridget’s eldest sister had been seized with a sudden illness, was close to death and wished to see Bridget before she died. Edward was immediately suspicious since the new rabble-rouser parish priest, Father Connolly, had been in the village during the day hearing confessions and he suspected the priest’s hand in the Lavelle story. Bridget was adamant that her mother would not put on such a show of grief if the story were untrue and left to accompany her mother to their home.

Afterwards, Bridget described what had happened. On reaching her parents’ cabin, she found her sister by the fire in perfect health and then the tall figure of Father Connolly appeared: ‘So, my lady, we have you at last.’ The priest had come down heavy on the family, refusing to hear their confessions until they removed their daughter from the Achill Mission and brought her back to her own religion.

In a deposition before a magistrate some weeks later Bridget gave her story. She testified that:

she was living peaceably and happily as a servant in the house of Rev Edward Nangle, Protestant Minister in Achill, where she enjoyed the fullest liberty of conscience, being permitted to go to whatever place of worship she pleased. That she became truly convinced that the Roman Catholic religion is false, and that the Protestant religion is the true, ancient faith. That in consequence of becoming a Protestant she was exposed to much persecution.

Bridget was caught between two worlds: two sets of competing dogmas on the one hand, the attractions of life at the colony versus the pull of her own family and community on the other. Her distress is palpable in the words of the deposition:

that she could no longer use the prayers which she had learned in the Church of Rome, as she believed it wrong to pray to the Virgin … she never could [return to mass] with peace of conscience being persuaded that the worship of a consecrated wafer is the great sin of idolatry against which the wrath of Almighty God is threatened in Holy Scripture.

She described how she was forcibly restrained in her parents’ house and prevented from returning to service in the colony until, one day, she found an opportunity to communicate with Edward Nangle and expressed her desire to get the protection of the law to worship God in accordance with the dictates of her conscience. Edward arranged to meet her at William Stoney’s house in Newport, from where she made her way to Dublin to the house of Neason and Isabella Adams who obtained employment for her in a house twenty miles outside the city.

Living in unfamiliar surroundings, away from the places and people she knew, Bridget now endured a different type of suffering – that of loneliness, home sickness and distress at the rumours that were being put around about her. Within a few months she was writing plaintively to her family: ‘Dear Father and Mother, don’t you know it is not the case, and why do you let it torment you.’2 She was referring to the rumours which, she believed, were put out by the priests in Achill that Bridget had left the island because she had misconducted herself and had given birth to an illegitimate child in Dublin. She was anxious to hear from home and asked plaintively why her mother had not answered her letter when she had sent her a pound.

An unhappy marriage, poor health and an early death followed. Bridget Lavelle’s was a fractured life, a microcosm of the distress caused by the collision of opposing dogmas and an innocent victim of sectarian warfare. Bridget’s story is compelling in its very human desire to seek out a perceived better life which results in a rupturing of the ties of family and community and ends in isolation and tragedy. The individual and family stories of ‘going over’ to the Achill Mission would haunt an island people for generations to come.

***

In the depths of that same winter, a strange scene took place in Dugort when an Atlantic gale appeared as if it would drive the waves to the height of Slievemore itself. If Edward Nangle had relied largely, up to this stage, on scriptural schooling and preaching as the principal tools of his missionary work, he was now about to add another weapon to his armoury, signalled by the arrival of a novel cargo on the shores of north Achill. A printing press was safely delivered ashore, despite the lack of a local pier, and Achill witnessed the incongruous sight of children carrying parts of the equipment from shore to colony. Edward described the scenes in his journal.

Tuesday:

The hooker, with our printing press on board, came into the bay. It blew so hard that we could not land the cargo. The men on board the boat had much difficulty in mooring her: having secured her as best they could, they took to the small boat and, at the peril of their lives made for the shore, leaving the hooker to the mercy of the wind and waves. We expected that she would have broken from her moorings; however, her cable held fast, and towards evening the gale subsided, so that they were able to bring her out of the bay into harbour.

A few days after the boat again came into the bay, and her cargo was safely landed. It was an interesting sight to the children of some of the converts carrying the lighter parts of the printing press up to the Settlement, where they were to be used for the emancipation of others from the ignorance and bondage from which they had been delivered. We were indebted for this gift to some friends in London and York.3

The printing press enabled Edward Nangle to publish a monthly journal, the Achill Missionary Herald and Western Witness, which, arguably, was his most important instrument in sustaining his Achill enterprise by promulgating the narrative around the colony and eliciting financial support from benefactors, largely in mainland Britain.4 At a time when mass communications had not yet exploded, Edward had the technology and tools to drive a propaganda machine to propagate the message of a reforming west-of-Ireland mission. It could be compared in its impact to that of the internet, enabling the story of a bold Atlantic-island endeavour to go viral in its reach and become spectacular in its haul of financial support. The outlet of the monthly publication would whip up Edward Nangle’s frenetic outpourings against Catholicism and its doctrines. Intriguingly, the acts of writing and editing in voluminous quantities may, arguably, have had a calming effect on his turbulent personality.

***

That winter saw Neason Adams and his wife, Isabella, move to Achill in December 1835, ahead of plan due to a Nangle family crisis, before their colony home was yet ready for occupation. While Neason brought crucial medical and administrative skills, Isabella brought a lightness of being and humour to their new colony home.

On their first day on the island, Isabella cast a rueful eye over her new surroundings and her husband’s makeshift surgery as she sat writing a letter to a friend, close to an open window to allow the escape of smoke from a hearth filled with wet sods. It was pointless to dust as everywhere was immediately covered with a film of ashes. Dr Adams’ medical supplies were gathered in a window recess on the small stairs and a little press was ‘full of medicine, which was sent as a present from one of the Medical Halls in Dublin’.

A new assistant missionary, Mr Baylee, was expected to arrive shortly with his wife and children and Isabella mischievously wondered how the Baylee family could be occupied in a house which already accommodated many other needs. Two of the rooms had been converted into a printing office, two of the scripture readers used the house as their home, as did the Lendrum family. Isabella described the situation with a mix of giddiness and hilarity: ‘I asked the other morning if two sorrowful-looking sheep, which I saw at the door, had been in the garden all night.’

She was told that they were in Mr Baylee’s parlour.

‘Where were the oats threshed?’

In Mr Baylee’s parlour.

‘Where is the old grey mare kept? And the pet eagle?’

In Mr Baylee’s parlour.

‘Where is the Sunday-school held?’

In Mr Baylee’s parlour.5

It was a far cry from their comfortable home and surgery at St Stephen’s Green in Dublin and a dramatic change in their personal situation. The circumstances that caused the doctor and his wife to rush to Achill in the dead of night provides an insight into the emerging instability within the Nangle family.

It was December and a pregnant Eliza was at Dugort with their three daughters while Edward was travelling in England on preaching and fundraising work. One of the children fell ill, an illness which, Edward later condescendingly wrote, ‘a mother’s anxiety exaggerated into a dangerous one’. As the nearest medical services were in Castlebar, over thirty miles away, a distraught Eliza wrote to Dr Adams in Dublin describing the child’s symptoms and pleading for medicine and advice by return post. A messenger was dispatched and asked to remain in Newport until the return mail car brought Dr Adams’ reply. Four days elapsed before the messenger returned with the news that the doctor and his wife were travelling by mail coach from Dublin to Westport, a journey of eighteen hours, and would soon reach the colony.

‘I have often heard my dear wife say that she felt ashamed for having brought her friends on so long a journey by giving expression to what proved to be a groundless apprehension’, wrote Edward many years later.6 His words reveal little sympathy or patience with his wife’s anxieties and little appreciation of the difficulties for a mother and her young family experiencing winter hardship in a wild, isolated place amid a hostile community.

Edward’s absence from home on speaking and fundraising engagements in the winter months, often over the Christmas period, became a regular occurrence. The reasons for this pattern of travel are unclear. Perhaps he judged it to be the optimum time for raising much-needed funds for his mission across England. Perhaps the severe Achill conditions in the dead of winter aggravated his own fragile state in a form of seasonal affective disorder. Perhaps he could not cope with Eliza’s own anxiety and deepening distress and needed to escape.

Eliza’s agitated message to Neason and Isabella Adams was a cry for help and the couple responded with compassion and alacrity. On seeing conditions on the island, and possibly observing Eliza’s worried state and the pressures on the family, Dr Adams returned to Dublin, disposed of his house and medical practice at St Stephen’s Green and settled permanently with his wife at Dugort. Neason and Isabella Adams were then in their late fifties and, for the remainder of their lives, they would dedicate themselves to supporting the Nangle family and ministering to the needs of the Achill people. Their light shone most brightly when the Great Famine hit and the islanders would speak of their charity and humanity: ‘Dr Adams was a good man.’7 Chatty, chirpy Isabella would have to give up her work at the infant school in later years when paralysis took away her powers of speech. On her death she shared, for a period, a mountain grave at Slievemore with the Nangle dead.

Eliza Nangle may well have faced into the New Year, 1836, with an improved disposition given the welcome company and support of her Adams friends. The January storms that unroofed some houses at the colony soon passed. Spring days followed with new plantings at the Dugort farm and house gardens, and she looked forward to the arrival of a new child.

On 11 July 1836, a baby boy was born. He was named Edward Neason Nangle after his father and Dr Adams. The baby was fragile and lived for just six weeks. Which was the harder? To lose a baby at birth before it uttered a cry, or to watch a delicate infant for forty days grow steadily weaker until finally it breathed its last? Was the pain lessened by holding an infant close hour after hour and day after day? Both experiences were traumatic and the latest tragedy brought a deterioration in Eliza’s wellbeing. Edward Neason Nangle died on 23 August 1836 and was buried next to his infant brother in the mountain earth.

It was two years into Edward Nangle’s Achill ministry and there was a growing unease about his tactics within the Protestant establishment. In the summer of 1836, an evangelical English clergyman touring Ireland raised his concerns about the Achill enterprise. Like Jane Franklin, he believed that Edward Nangle was mistaken to treat the beliefs of his Catholic fellowmen with contempt, arguing that there was nothing to be gained by outraging the feelings of Catholics through ridicule. He was unimpressed with Nangle’s abusive language and terms of contempt for Catholic practices, urging that it was far better to treat one’s adversaries with kindness, gravity and respect. The touring clergyman could see that Edward Nangle was grappling in a robust way with a stronghold of superstition and with an aggressive Catholic clergy led by John MacHale, but he urged that a vigorous ministry was best combined with a Christian benevolence.8

Sometime afterwards, another Protestant clergyman would address the issue of Edward Nangle’s controversial methods, asking – on a visit to the colony – whether a gentler and less offensive approach to the superstitions and doctrines of Catholicism might be preferable.9 The response from a member of the colony was that the Achill Mission’s pugnacious approach was justified given the coarseness of the people among whom they ministered and their idolatrous practices. The mission, the argument went, would lose all claim to a religious and proselytising establishment if they treated their task with mildness. Rather, the mission could be compared to a nettle: if touched lightly, it stung the hand severely but, if grasped lustily, it could be plucked and destroyed without injury. The robust and aggressive energy which defined Edward Nangle’s mission and raised concerns among commentators could be put down to a forceful personality, an impassioned hatred of everything associated with Catholicism and a lack of sympathy with the sincerely held beliefs and indigenous culture of the people. He drove his mission with gusto; he did, indeed, grasp the nettle with lust.