In 1901 local tailors the O'Connors lived in the Ballyvaughan house now owned by Fintan O'Toole– it is thought of fondly in the area, though not everyone from that era is as well remembered
WHEN WE went into the cottage just outside the Burren village of Ballyvaughan for the first time, we found, in the dank gloom of the empty rooms, a pair of spectacles, rosary beads and a badly rusted old tailor’s iron. There was a battered and leaky range in “the room” that would have served as kitchen, dining room, lounge and perhaps at times as a tailor’s workshop.
The other three rooms – a small but decent bedroom and two box rooms – were empty. There was no separate kitchen, no bathroom, indeed no running water. Behind the house, on what had originally been a one-acre plot but was now half an acre, there was a lean-to and a toilet.
The 1911 census categorises the house as being of the third class. It also had a “cow house”, a “fowl house” and a “workshop” – presumably a shed used for the tailoring business that was carried on there. What is striking, though, is that within the tiny space, enclosed by its thick roughcast walls, this cottage in the parish of Drumcreehy on the Co Clare side of Galway Bay housed 13 people on census night.
There was the head of household, Patrick O’Connor (then 55), and his wife Kate (48). There were their nine children, ranging in age from Martin (27) and Michael (24) to “Charless” (the name presumably spelt as it was pronounced), who was eight. And there was a one-year-old grandchild, Mary Jane Sheily.
Rural cottages aren’t always easy to identify in the census – O’Connor is a common name and Drumcreehy was a fairly extensive area. What makes it certain that this is the right family are the entries for “occupation” after the names of Patrick, Martin and Michael. It is “tailor”. The O’Connors who owned the cottage we bought in 2001 were well known as the local tailors.
Michael O’Connor, who was the last of the family to occupy the cottage, was known, apart from his gentleness and good humour, for his love of a good suit. Bernadette Monks, who ran the famous Monks pub in Ballyvaughan with her husband Michael, recalls in a new book, Burren Villages (edited by Guardian columnist Sarah Poyntz), that “he always wore a dark suit, charcoal grey or black, sometimes with a faint pinstripe (a loud pinstripe he’d consider vulgar). Michael had been a tailor in his working days, so he kept a very fine crease in his trousers, a crease you ‘could sharpen stainless steel knives on’.”
He always bought his suits in Nagel’s of Kilfenora. If the fit wasn’t quite right, he’d say, “That’s all right, I’ll fix it myself.” That it was possible for three members of the household to make their living as tailors in 1911 is a mark of how local the economy was then, and how rich in trades and skills.
In other houses around Ballyvaughan, the census shows three blacksmiths (the O’Loughlens), a shoemaker (Peter Donovan), a knitter (Norah Tully), at least four dressmakers (three Murphys and Bridget Timmins), and a nurse (Margaret Morrissey), as well as the usual farmers and labourers. The social structure is much more complex than it later became. Even in the 1940s the village of Ballyvaughan had a blacksmith (the marvellously named Gundy O’Loghlen), a butcher, a carpenter, five dressmakers, a tailor and a midwife.
When we arrived, the house had been vacant for a few years after Michael’s death, but it was plain that people missed it and him. It had been a happy house, everyone said, a place they were always dropping in to as children. There were roses in the front that people would ask for cuttings from, partly because they were lovely, but mostly, it seemed, because they wanted some memory of the place that lingered in their scent.
It has been a house of music and laughter, and even when there was just Michael left on his own, he was happy to put chat on people. There are pictures of him and his friend and next-door neighbour Mick Carrucan with pints in their hands and glints in their eyes, like young bucks contemplating devilment. Pictures, too, of Michael with what was perhaps his fondest companion, the big old black Raleigh bike of which he had one of the last specimens in captivity.
Mick Carrucan still lives next door, with his wife Chris. The 1911 census has the Carrucans living around the coast in Fanore: Mary, the 80-year-old widowed head of the family, with her sons Denis (48) and James (38) and her niece Kate Kearns.
In Sarah Poyntz’s book, Mick recalls the strong tradition of house dances in Ballyvaughan on Sundays. “There were four of us, the three brothers and myself. We always went to the dances together. No sooner would we arrive than someone would shout ‘Clear the floor for the Carrucan brothers’.”
I wonder did Michael O’Connor ever miss the racket that there must have been in the cottage once. I’m not sure how crowded it was in his childhood, but the thought of 13 people living there in 1911 is a reminder of how profoundly life has changed. Five of the inhabitants were older than 20. From the ages of her children, Kate O’Connor had first given birth when she was 21, and had her last child at the age of 40.
(She may have had 11 children in all – the grand-daughter who was in the house on census night is listed as having been born in Co Cork, suggesting that her mother or father may have been living there.) Presumably, most of the younger children were born in the cottage itself. Our contemporary notions of privacy, of personal space, simply do not function in this context.
The other thing that’s notable in the census form is that each of the 13 family members – apart, obviously, from the one-year-old girl – is literate and can speak both Irish and English. The literacy is striking – all the children under 17 list occupation as “scholar”, suggesting they are continuing with some form of formal education.
And since the parents as well as the scholars speak Irish, it seems likely that they were native speakers. Much of this part of the Clare coast, which had strong trading connections with the Aran islands, was bilingual until emigration and mass communications eroded the Gaelic-speaking population in the early years of the State.
The census tells the story of a place that was vibrant, socially and culturally complex and reasonably densely populated. After the population dwindled through emigration, that vibrancy must have generated a nostalgic glow. And yet the census also contains a warning against too much nostalgia.
If you look for the O’Connors’ neighbours, you come across people with strangely truncated names: HB, ML, AQ, MMC, MW, and so on, all in the same house. You look at the copy of the original form and find that it is not the usual one, but a special version for “Return of Paupers in Workhouses (Lunatics and Idiots Excepted)”. Another form is headed “Return of Lunatics and Idiots”, and lists five people, three described as having “dementia”, one as “feeble-minded” and one, tragically, with “epilepsy”. In each case the cause of the condition is listed simply as “hereditary”.
In the midst of the beauty and conviviality of this Burren village, there was a workhouse. The sheer number of residents is astonishing in such a small place – 66 by my count. The youngest is an infant girl, KA, who seems to be less than a year old. The oldest is a 94-year-old man, MMC. The age range is skewed towards the elderly, but it includes women and men in their 20s and 30s. Half a dozen of the residents are listed as blind or lame.
Most have no stated affliction and presumably were simply destitute. In almost all cases, the occupation is either “domestic servant” or “labourer”. These were the unwanted, anonymous poor, whose very names have disappeared from the record.
