Noises Off - Frank McNally on opera, snoring, and vintage tractors

Following a mention here recently of the composer William Vincent Wallace, a reader sent me the story – almost operatic - of how he acquired his middle name.

It starts in Thurles, circa 1830, where the 18-year-old Wallace, already a virtuoso, was appointed organist in the “Big Chapel”: a forerunner to the Catholic cathedral. This was despite him being born Protestant, as was his simultaneous appointment as professor of music at the local Ursuline convent, where he taught both pupils and novice nuns.

Among the latter were two sisters of the family variety, Isabella and Jane Kelly, who on becoming sisters of the other kind took the names Paul and Vincent (a distracting curiosity heightened for the diarist by the fact that “Paul & Vincent” is also the name of a long-established animal feed company from which, when I was a child, my father used to buy calf nuts).

Sister Paul’s duties included ringing the convent bell for vespers. And it is said that while standing on the bridge nearby one evening, listening, Wallace formed the idea for what became, “Alas! Those chimes so sweetly stealing”, the classic song from his greatest opera, Maritana.

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But the novice bell-ringer also chimed with him in more personal ways. In short, they fell in love and Isabella left the novitiate, to her sister’s great distress, in no way lessened when Wallace converted to Catholicism and, apparently to appease her, took “Vincent” as a middle name.

The lovers married, then emigrated to Australia along with another of Isabella’s sisters. Alas, even before they landed there, romance had taken another twist. In opera terms, the dashing Don Vincente turned into the evil Don Vincenzo. He fell in love with the sister-in-law instead.

Husband and wife separated soon after arrival, whereupon poor (and pregnant, as it later emerged) Isabella returned to Ireland. Her son, also William Vincent, never saw his father, and mother and child went on to live impoverished lives in Dublin.

The sad tale was told in a 1969 RTÉ documentary “Alas! Those Chimes”. The programme also included the poignantly operatic detail that, while she lay dying, Isabella heard a street organ below her window playing another popular tune from Maritana. That one was called “In Happy Moments.”

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Sometimes, as the “Paul & Vincent” thing illustrates, you can know too much for your own good. A vast store of otherwise useless information, agricultural and general, has occasionally stood to me in table quizzes. But it’s more often a nuisance, as I was reminded of late while reading Ardal O’Hanlon’s new novel.

The book has a humorous sub-theme in which the leading character’s wife snores. Being a loving husband, he tolerates this as best he can. Hence his “little joke” that their nights together are like “like sleeping with a Massey-Ferguson 125″.

His wife fails to appreciate the analogy, despite his explanation that the 125 is a “smallish tractor” and so, by implication, lady-like (although of course in Ireland, all tractors – and farm machinery in general, especially if it cuts things – are female).

And I agree with O’Hanlon’s character that it’s a perfectly reasonable joke. But my immediate reaction on reading it was that he had the wrong Massey Ferguson. Surely, I thought, he means the 135?

Where I grew up, in a similar place and time to the novel’s characters, there were only two options Massey Ferguson-wise. Neither was big, by modern tractor standards. But the 135 was the smaller, with a 45.5 horsepower engine that could plausibly lend to itself as a diplomatic simile for snoring.

The 165, by contrast, was a substantially bigger animal – 58 horsepower. My father bought one when trading up from a Fordson Dexta, and it looked enormous by comparison. You definitely wouldn’t compare a loved one’s snoring to a 165, certainly not as a joke.

As for the 125, I had never heard of such a thing in my Monaghan childhood. Nor did it feature anywhere in the latest issue of Classic Massey magazine, which in attempts to resolve the mystery, I paid €7.40 for last month, and which has a vintage 135 on the cover.

But as I now know, thanks to the internet, the old MF 100 series of which the 135 and 165 were a part did indeed also include a 125. It had, as the name implies, a mere 25 horsepower. So on the plus side, it does lend itself as a humorously polite description of snoring. On the other hand, it was produced under licence by Mitsubishi for a “niche market”, in Japan exclusively. And although I can only admire the level of research that goes into writing novels these days, that seems a very long way to go for a joke.