The Abbey actress and the pacifist poet: a tragic Easter Rising love story

Easter is over for another century. Memories of armoured cars and kilted men trundling past the GPO have melted faster than a Lidl Easter egg on a tank radiator. The Irish public has gorged itself on rebellion and blood sacrifice, and is now feeling a little ill.

It was to be expected. Saturation point was probably reached well before Christmas with the slew of books examining the Rising from every possible angle: dead children, widowed women, rebel actors…

For some of us, however, 1916/2016 is not over. Like the gift of a puppy at Christmas, a Rising is not just for Easter. The relatives of those who did the groundwork for our current state of independence will continue to keep 1916s embers warm.

My father, Ted Kenny, was one of those thousands of keepers of the Easter flame. He was steeped in 1916 and, in particular, the dramatic movement that led up to it. It was in his blood: he was raised by three 1916 veterans.

Ted’s aunt, Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh, led the Cumann na mBan contingent in Jacob’s. Her husband, Major General Eamon “Bob” Price was on the Green and later rose to Director of Organisation IRA GHQ during the war. His widowed mother, Gipsy, attempted to get into the GPO but was turned away by her friend Joe Plunkett on the grounds that they had enough “girls”. She carried despatches instead.

Her 69-year-old grandfather, Matthew Walker, was more successful at getting into the GPO. He printed the War News for Pearse during Easter week, assisted by granduncle Charlie and his son-in-law, Joe Stanley. He also delivered the rebel chief’s farewell letter to his mum.

For the record, Ted detested the Provos and the Shinners. He was a journalist and, in 1955, published a book called The Splendid Years. It is not a 1916 book. It is Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh's uniquely entertaining and insightful personal memoir of the Irish literary revival from 1900 to 1916. Dad had collected her memories at the fireside in Laytown where he lived with widowed Gipsy. Maire and Bob lived close by and, together, they formed a family unit. Maire was one of the founder/actors of the Abbey Theatre (along with her brother Frank). She was also its first leading lady on its opening night in December 1904. She played Kathleen Ni Houlihan, Frank was the young man in On Baile's Strand, Gipsy and another sister, Annie (both actresses), sold programmes in the auditorium, and my great-grandmother was wardrobe mistress. The Abbey was a Walker (Nic Shiubhlaigh) affair.

The Splendid Years sparks and crackles with anecdotes about Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, Pearse, AE, McDonagh, Plunkett, James Joyce… Only the final section recalls Maire's time in the Jacob's garrison. Again, it's not a 1916 book.

Shortly after its publication, Dad took it out of print. He was unhappy with the way it had been published. He never reissued it and was working on a book about the greater Walker family story up until his death.

For 60 years, the original corrected MS of The Splendid Years languished in my mother’s attic until I dusted it off, made his corrections (and my own) and wrote a long introduction outlining the Walker family’s incredible story.

New Island published it late last month and it’s been getting five-star reviews. I can boast about this because it’s not my book. It’s Ted’s, and I wish he was still around to take a bow. He passed away in 1999 after a decade of bad health, without realising he had written a classic.

Ted and I had a typically fraught Irish father/son relationship and it’s only in the past few years that I have to come to discover what an incredible family story he had. One part of that story is haunting me. It won’t let go. It is about my grandmother, Gipsy.

Her role in Irish history has been forgotten. On Easter Monday, I sat in the auditorium of the Abbey during the unveiling of the new plaque to its rebel actors and staff. Maire’s name was there, as before. Gipsy’s name was not. This wasn’t the Abbey’s fault. Gip didn’t leave any official record of her activities in 1916.

She was an Abbey actress and a famous folk singer and had played a small role in 1916 – although she had volunteered to place her life on the line. Being turned away from the GPO must have really annoyed her. She was good friends with Joe Plunkett, Tom McDonagh and Pearse from her work in the Abbey, the Theatre of Ireland and at St Enda’s. Pearse thought so highly of her that he wrote the role of Sighle for her in his last play, The Singer, which they had only just rehearsed and would never be staged in his lifetime.

This omission was not the first time Gip has been overlooked. The original Abbey plaque was unveiled in 1966. She wasn’t asked to its unveiling. Dad – who was then theatre critic with RTÉ – had to shame the Abbey into inviting her. There is a photo of her standing beside Helena Moloney looking uncomfortable and sad. She died a few months later.

The current Abbey crew – who have been brilliant – are still working on her inclusion and hopefully she will make it up on the wall some day beside her sister. She deserves to be remembered, not only for her nationalism, but because of the awful price she paid for our freedom.

Gipsy suffered an unbearable tragedy during Easter week. One that is not widely known. Over the years, I have sketched its outline to a few historians, but never painted the full picture.

Last month, I decided to novelise the story of her love affair with the pacifist poet, James Crawford Neil. I had just started writing a general “publisher’s pitch” when my email pinged. It was a message from a stranger, Eric Porter, about Crawford Neil. The mail made me – a 49-year-old veteran hack – blub for half an hour.

It was so timely that I am convinced Gipsy and Crawford are asking me to tell their story. Be as cynical as you like about that. I believe it. Every time I turn my back on them to earn my daily living, something odd – like the arrival of that email – happens. They smack me in the back of the head and say, “We’re still here. Get writing.” Here is their story.

Gipsy’s poet

Memories merge when I dream about my father. They wheel and clash like magician’s rings, intersecting, passing through each other, becoming linked together. Remote moments of our lives join up. Old age and youth, fights and truces, all loop and link where they should not. Places, times and faces are confused.

Sometimes when I dream of Ted, I see us sitting in Connolly’s barbers in Glasthule. It’s the mid-’70s, I am 10 and he is old and near death. His hair and fingernails are long. He is wearing pyjamas. We don’t speak. Men never speak to each other in a barber’s queue. It’s one of The Rules. The barber’s voice is the only one allowed to play at full volume. The sheepish client waiting to be shorn answers questions at half volume. Irish men don’t like to be overheard. They don’t want to make gobshites of themselves.

Old man Connolly nods at me. I sit on a board on his chair. He chats and chops, winks and gives me two pence ‘hidden’ in a hanky. Dad watches me in the mirror. His dying eyes are wild, terrified.

Memories merge again. I am in my 30s. It’s February 1999. A dying decade is wheezing through its penultimate winter. My father too is breathing uneasily. He holds an oxygen mask to his face. He is in a nursing home, but he is the Ted Kenny of my childhood. He is wearing the face he should have worn in the barbers. He is young again and trying to tell me a story he has repeated many times before. How his mother met her lover. I listen, but only half-listen. Recently, I pieced the story together, gluing shards of memory and hard evidence...

James Crawford Neil slipped into the drawing room of No 3, Wharton Terrace, Rathmines. He was young, handsome in a Protestant sort of way, and always immaculately dressed. Almost always. Today, August 20th, 1911, the elbows of his tweed jacket and his shirt-cuffs were soiled. He mumbled a few “hellos” and tried to pick his way lightly through the earnest young artists – in that self-conscious way drunk people do. You know how it goes: the more you try to hide your drunkenness, the more pissed you look to others.

He stumbled past Countess Marcievicz, who was bayoneting the air with a Sweet Afton, recounting her protest at the Lord Lieutenant’s Ball: “Then I leaned down and scooped up a handful of ashes from the grate, and …” (she paused for dramatic effect), “…smeared it all down the front of my ball gown.” Applause.

Crawford Neil spotted a gap by the open window and lurched towards it, hoping the draught would dilute his whiskey-soured breath. His shoulder glanced off a figure standing by the curtain.

“Oh for God’s sake. Look what you’ve done to my dress.” The figure emerged from the curtain folds. She was holding an empty coffee cup. A beige stain spread across her gown. Crawford Neil rooted for a handkerchief, stumbling back into the curtain, as he turned his pockets inside out. Abbey actress Patricia Walker waved him away and stamped out of the room.

The story should have ended there. Crawford Neil should have continued to drink himself to death and Patricia to build a career on the stage. However, Fate – like Patricia – had stepped out from behind the curtain. Crawford Neil was in love. He had toppled into the famous, deep-dark eyes that had earned Patricia the pet name “Gipsy”.

Gipsy, on the other hand, was most definitely not in love. She knew Crawford Neil to see. He worked at the National Library and attended the same literary evenings as she and her sisters. Neil was as famous for being a drunk as he was for his potential to be a great poet. She despised the pathetic sot that had spilt her coffee and ruined her evening.

It had taken her four days to make that dress. She never wanted to see him again. Fate took note of her wish and filed it away under “Revisit in Five Years’ Time”.

*****

Gipsy and Crawford Neil’s first meeting may not have happened exactly like that. Marcievicz may not have been there, but the story about her protest is true. Gipsy often told my father about how she was present when the countess rubbed ashes into her dress. I found a postcard, dated Christmas 1915, among Dad’s papers. It was from Marcievicz to my grandmother. They were good friends, it seems.

All the other elements about that disastrous meeting are accurate: the coffee, the drunkenness, Gipsy’s anger.

Ted told me the story so often that I absorbed it by aural osmosis. I wasn’t aware that I was absorbing it. I spent most of our life only half-listening to him. That’s the tragedy of most Irish father/son relationships: we speak to each other but we never talk. My father died in 1999, on March 10th – Gipsy’s birthday. Since his death, I’ve tried to flesh out the skeletal memories he left me of his family.

Gipsy’s actor/rebel family were Ascendancy Protestants who went native in the 19th century, eventually Gaelicising their name to Nic Shiubhlaigh around 1900. Her older sister, Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh, was the Abbey’s first leading lady. The seeds of the theatre were sown in the Nic Shiubhlaigh kitchen on High Street. The same kitchen in which Wolfe Tone had been waked in 1798. On the Abbey’s opening night, there were five members of the family working on-stage and behind it.

Maire also led Cumann na mBan in Jacob’s in 1916. In 1955, Ted wrote up her memories of the Literary Revival and the Rising in a book called The Splendid Years. I read it for the first time after he died. It made me think of all the stories I had missed while only half-listening when he was alive.

There were tales of how my great-grandfather, Matthew, was a close friend of Parnell and how he had lost all his money defending him in his newspaper, The Carlow Vindicator. There was also the story of how Matthew (then 69) printed The Irish War News – under fire – for Padraig Pearse in 1916.

Matt, who had corns on his feet, dressed up in his three-quarter hat and winged collar and walked from Glasthule into the GPO. A Tommy attempted to bar his way as he entered Sackville Street, but he faced him down. The soldier probably thought the old duffer in the top hat couldn’t do any harm, so he let him through. Matt marched into the thick of the action and presented himself to fellow IRB man Pearse for active service.

Pearse, who was a regular visitor to the Walker home, politely declined his offer on the grounds that Matt was “too old to fight”, but promised to take note of it. Matt wouldn’t budge and insisted he be given something to do. That “something” was to find a printer’s works outside of the immediate area to print the War News for Pearse.

They discussed taking over the Independent offices, which Connolly was against for tactical reasons. (I love the idea of Matt taking over the Indo. I took over the Irish Press offices during a dispute in the 1990s.)

Matt, his son-in-law Joe Stanley and son Charlie, found a place on Halston Street and, using supplies from their own Gaelic Press, printed the first communiques of the new republic. Matt even went out fly postering and, singlehandedly, put out a fire at the Gaelic Press offices, singing his beard and hair.

After the Rising, Matt, who knew the Pearse family well, delivered Padraig’s farewell letter to his mother.

There were other tales of 1916 and the War of Independence. Ted’s uncle, Major General Eamonn ‘Bob’ Price, organised the surrender at Jacob’s for Tom McDonagh (who was also a close friend of the Walkers). Bob was a huge admirer of Collins, whom he knew through the IRB. It was reciprocated as Bob was a hugely popular figure among the Volunteers and his fellow Fenians. He even beat Collins in the election for “centre” of the IRB’s Fintan Lalor circle.

The pair grew closer in Frongoch and Bob was tasked with the job of setting up a new GHQ on his return from internment. He rose to the rank of IRA Director of Organisation during the Anglo Irish war.

When Dad died, I began to uncover snippets and clues to his family’s past. A personally inscribed copy of Tom Barry’s Guerilla Days in Ireland (it turns out that Bob was his brother-in-law)... a heartbreaking letter from Eamonn Ceannt’s son, Ronán, to Maire… and a lot more besides. Each piece of ephemera is worthy of its own story. However, the one story that intrigued me the most was the impossibly romantic love story I half-heard over and over again. The story of Crawford Neil and Gipsy.

I wanted to know how much of it was embellishment. The Kenny/Walkers were preternaturally modest people, but they were still actors. Actors like to embellish things.

In 2010, the National Archives put the 1901 census online. With its help, I began to uncover the foundation of Ted’s tales. I typed in “Matthew Walker”. Within minutes I was looking at my great-grandfather’s handwriting on a census form.

My father said Matthew’s Fenian family lived in the house that Wolfe Tone had been waked in – No 65 High Street/Merchant’s Quay. In Census 1901, Matthew has written either No 66 or 56. It’s close enough to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The form also says Matthew was born in Carlow and was a master printer. I have since found copies of his Parnellite paper. He definitely was a friend of the Chief’s. I have also discovered that he held his top hat in front of Parnell’s face during the infamous lime attack at Castlecomer.

The more morsels I uncovered, the hungrier I became for more information about Gipsy. I went to Census 1911. The family had moved to Rathgar, but Gip was missing. I vaguely recalled talk of a shop in Dún Laoghaire. A few more clicks and Gip popped up at 111 Lower George’s Street – beside Michael’s Hospital. She was listed as a shop assistant.

I already knew that Matthew Walker, who owned the Tower Press and the Gaelic Press, was the IRB’s go-to printer. Dad had told me he also owned two tobacconist’s shops. I found one in the Liberties and now another in my home town of Dún Laoghaire. Like Tom Clarke’s shop, Matt’s were fronts for his Fenian activities. They also provided an income for his actress daughters who, in line with the nationalist ethos of the day, were strictly amateur.

I had finally pinpointed Gip to somewhere I have passed thousands of times. I was born in St Michael’s Hospital’s nursing home. I could almost feel her physical presence.

I went looking for Crawford Neil and found him in Census 1901, living with his Presbyterian family on Merchant’s Quay – near the Walkers on High Street. Ten years later, according to Census 1911, he had moved to Drumcondra with his now-widowed mother, while the Walkers had moved south of the river. Crawford Neil was living on the northside while Gipsy was on the southside. This scrap of information is critical to their story.

If only the Liffey hadn’t come between them…

I went to the attic and searched through my father’s papers, finding a bundle of faded letters. They were addressed to Gipsy from Crawford. I opened one. It pulsed with longing. In it, my grandmother, the sad old woman I never knew, is a beautiful, yet “fickle and faithless” girl of 20. She is the dusky “dear soul” who haunts his verse.

The curtain slowly rose to reveal the young actress and the poet standing centre-stage once again. Literally. As their love deepened, they acted together in plays by Pearse and McDonagh at the Theatre of Ireland.

In 1911, the day after he spilled coffee over Gipsy, Crawford Neil woke “as usual, half dead with a horrible taste” in his mouth. Slowly, as his hangover cleared, he realised that something momentous had happened the previous evening. As he shaved in the wash stand beside his bed, he saw himself for the first time in years. The mirror reflected a man of 40, not 29. His eyes were sunken, black-ringed and haunted-looking. Like the fool in Pearse’s poem, he had “squandered the splendid years of his youth”.

Today, Crawford Neil – poet, librarian and pacifist – would resolve to quit drinking for good, convert to Catholicism and wage a war of attrition on Gipsy’s heart. They would become engaged. To achieve one of these ambitions would have been a laudable feat. Remarkably, Crawford achieved all three.

His letters show his struggle with alcoholism. “Dearest soul … some days I don’t feel it is worth getting out of bed… Unhappiness is the price I pay for being good.”

They describe Gip as the “perfect singer of his songs”. A rummage through my father’s papers turned up a book of music notation. Untrained Crawford would play notes on the piano and Gip would write his music down. It was the perfect excuse to be alone together.

They fought like wildcats too. Crawford constantly reprimands himself for being jealous. “Some voice – is it God’s? – has called upon me to give my life and all its strength to make Gip happy …”

There was physical passion. Gip would “crush yourself into me” when they embraced. When she fed him rabbit stew, he playfully asked: “rabbits have the largest families in the beast world – and they have the smallest brains. What are you trying to tell me?”

My father used these letters, and Crawford’s poems, to create a musical which he hoped harpist Mary O’Hara would star in. Her voice reminded him of his mother’s. She turned him down (very kindly) and he was quietly devastated. He never spoke of the musical again, but still treasured the letters.

In one, the following line stands out. “Give my affectionate regard to all for a happy, unshadowed Easter and remember that I am always, only yours...”.

Easter 1916 was not “unshadowed”. Two days later, Matt Walker walked into town to publish the War News and Maire entered Jacobs. Gip followed them but couldn’t get into a garrison. Instead she carried despatches for her friend “Charlie Burgess” – Cathal Brugha, and cycled around Dublin watching the action unfold.

Crawford Neil was a pacifist and didn’t take part in the fighting. On Tuesday morning, April 25th, he walked out to Glasthule where Gip was resting up. That evening, she begged him not to cross the city. He refused, saying he was concerned about his mother. Gipsy fetched her bicycle and walked with him to Blackrock. They embraced and she “crushed herself into him” again. She didn’t sleep that night.

James wanted to avoid the violence near Liberty Hall and crossed along the quays to Liffey Street, not far from where Matthew and his sons were printing the War News. Across the Liffey, Maire was taking cocoa to a sniper on the roof of Jacob’s.

Dad’s version of what happened next is as follows: Crawford spotted a group of children looting a sporting goods shop. He loved kids. His first children’s book, Happy Island Poems, was due to be published that year. I have a rare copy of that book here beside me.

He stopped to warn the youngsters of the danger they were in. One of them was holding an air rifle. It went off, a pellet lodged in James’ back and he was left for dead on the pavement. Word that he was missing reached Gip the following evening. She searched the city centre, fearing the worst. To her relief, she found him in good spirits in Jervis Street Hospital. She didn’t realise that the good humour was just to keep her spirits up...

I have been trying to corroborate this version of events since Ted’s death. Last month, the definitive version landed, unheralded, in my inbox.

A gentleman named Eric Porter, who had been researching the activities of civil servants during 1916, came across a transcript of Crawford’s last, official words. The document took my breath away. I am not exaggerating. I had difficulty breathing.

Here, for the first time, is Crawford’s own description of the events that changed Gipsy’s

Jervis Street Hospital, 4th May, 1916

“On Tuesday the 25th, I was returning from spending the holiday with my friends the Walkers in Glasthule. I had reason to walk in the whole way. However, I skirted quietly into town, as I had heard that something like martial law had been proclaimed.

In my endeavour to avoid the neighbourhood of Liberty Hall I made down the Quays and entered into Liffey Street. This was at 9.30 to 10pm. I then entered Henry Street [and encountered] a looter who was stealing clocks and firing off revolver shots.

One of the shots struck me in the neighbourhood of the spine and has left me since in a paralysed and physically broken condition.

I am not a member of the Volunteers or any political organisation and my principles [he was a pacifist] preclude me from being so…

The circumstances of my trouble make it impossible for me to go into the matter in further detail, but questions will be welcomed and answered in full.”

On May 9th, the young poet and Gipsy summoned the hospital chaplain and asked him to marry them. The priest refused. He, coldly, said he would not perform a wedding “where the bride would be a widow within a matter of hours”.

Gip never forgot those words. On May 10th, Crawford Neil died in the arms of his “dear soul”.

His contemporaries spoke of a sweet-natured man with the potential to be a great poet. History has forgotten him now. Gipsy never forgot. She hoarded his words. After she was gone, my father hoarded them.

In 1925, Gipsy married my granddad, another sweet-natured man called Eddie Kenny. They moved, with the rest of the Walkers, to Co Louth and then Meath. She was never destined to have a happy ending, though. Nine years later, Eddie died of TB. Heartbroken, Gipsy never married again. My father, her only child, became her life and she faded into him.

No-one remembers her now. She was forgotten in her own lifetime, despite being a muse for Padraig Pearse. She wasn’t even invited to the unveiling of the Abbey plaque that should have borne her name.

I’m the last of our branch of the Kenny/Walkers. I don’t have kids of my own to carry our family story forward. If I hadn’t decided to edit The Splendid Years, Gipsy and James might have stayed lost in an attic. I might not have found them again, or another letter that brought me back to my youth.

It was from Crawford to Gipsy and was addressed to 70 Glasthule Road. I’ve lived in Dún Laoghaire for 40 years and until I found this letter I had never known the exact location of the Walkers’ home during the Rising. Here was the address from which they set out do their duty for Ireland in 1916. Here was the last warm hearth James sat beside before meeting his fate.

It’s now a barber’s shop. The barber shop where Dad and I used to get our hair cut. Where old man Connolly used to slip me two pence in a hanky. It’s across the road from where I went to school and next to the church where I was confirmed. I never knew I was so close to my father’s people.

I don’t know if Dad knew either. I’m fairly sure he didn’t. He never mentioned it. If he did, I was only half-listening at the time.

Dave Kenny is a journalist, broadcaster and bestselling author. His recent books include The Press Gang: Tales from the Glory Days of Irish Newspapers and The Splendid Years. He will be talking about Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh, the early days of the Abbey and Dun Laoghaire/Glasthule's forgotten links with 1916 at DLR Lexicon library this Thursday (April 28) at 7pm. Free in, no booking necessary.