Dame Ninette de Valois, the Gaiety Theatre, Stanley Holloway, Eamon de Valera, Willie Redmond, the old workhouse in Mullingar and Kemel Chateau Cemetery in Northern France - they are all linked together. For history casts a skein which unites us in unseen ways; and only a particular cast of light, an angle of the setting sun, allows us to glimpse the connecting gossamer which might otherwise remain invisible.
Dame Ninette de Valois OM, the mother and guardian of English dance who died last week, was, like Eamon de Valera, a confection, a creature of her own devising. Just as Dev took the humble Limerick clay of Eddie Collis and moulded it into the fiction of Eamon de Valera, Edris Stannus of Co Wicklow wove an imaginative fabric to create Ninette de Valois, the greatest ever figure of dance in English life.
Irish jig
But she was always her own person, even if that person was invented. In childhood, she resisted her governess's attempts to get her to anglicise her speech, and defiantly spoke with an Irish accent. At one of the gentry parties of the time, before the Great War, she watched her friends perform their little dances, and then, with typical iconoclasm, performed a perfect Irish jig. What propelled her life even more emphatically towards dance was a visit to the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, where she saw Sleeping Beauty. She was enslaved by dance, and over the coming century brought thousands of others into a common captivity across the English-speaking world.
Stanley Holloway, the English comedian, also had a long career, and a celebrated one too - though now he is remembered largely for television re-runs of Ealing comedies from the 1950s, and for his role in the film version of My Fair Lady, in which he played Eliza Doolittle's father. Like all actors, he too was an invented person, and his life was also changed by the Gaiety, for he was performing music hall there when the Great War broke out and he enlisted in Dublin.
James Patrick Roche, a clerk in Manchester, but originally from Cahirciveen, via Monasterevin, was making a similar decision, when he enlisted in the Lancashire Fusiliers in October 1914. Twenty-six years of age, five-foot six, nearly 13 stone in weight, he was a presumably a tubby little fellow, but a clever one, and a very witty one too. In height and humour, he was probably a match for Willie Redmond MP, who was making the same fatal decision, though he was a full quarter-of-a-century older than Roche.
16th Irish Division
All three men - Holloway, Roche and Redmond - found themselves serving in the 16th Irish Division together, Holloway in the Connaught Rangers, Redmond in the Royal Irish Regiment, and Roche as brigade trench mortar officer with the Royal Artillery. One of the regular officers in the Division, serving with the Leinster Regiment, was Thomas Robert Alexander Stannus, father of the young dancer in Wicklow, the one who insisted on speaking with an Irish accent and dancing an Irish jig.
One night in June 1917, on the eve of the Battle of Messines, the men of the 16th Irish Division had a dinner to which officers of the 36th Ulster Division were invited. Three officers of the 16th gave speeches - Major Willie Redmond, who prayed for consummation of peace between North and South, Major Thomas Stannus, DSO, and Captain James Roche, MC. "The speech of Major Redmond was one of the best, and I never heard such broadminded speeches ever," wrote Major Jourdain. "Everyone was proud of the Old Country."
History doesn't relate anything of the Stannus or Roche speeches, but one can imagine that Stannus's was soldierly, and Roche's was funny, for a colleague regarded him as "one of the wittiest raconteurs I have ever met, and as brave and ready a soldier as I have ever seen. As brigade trench mortar officer, he was a genius."
The battle of Messines was one of the few outright victories of the war, with relatively few casualties for the Irish Division. But a shell landed in brigade headquarters, killing James Patrick Roche and Thomas Stannus, father of the future Ninette de Valois. Crossing the battlefield at about the same time, Willie Redmond too was fatally injured. By evil mischance, all three of the speakers at the divisional dinner had been killed on a day when casualties were light.
Eamon de Valera won Willie Redmond's old seat in a by-election, ushering Ireland in an entirely different direction, and one opposed in no uncertain manner by Stanley Holloway, who served in the RIC Auxiliaries, doing God knows what. Young Roche is buried in Kemmel Chateau Cemetery, along with scores of other Irishmen, not far from where three years ago the old Mullingar Workhouse was reconstructed as the Messines Memorial Tower.
Determined woman
And who can say how the death of her father shaped Ninette de Valois? Possibly not at all, for she was a hugely determined woman, and she had just passed her 19th birthday when he was killed. Over the coming four score years, she was the power and the glory of English dance, spreading her influence across the globe.
She would not have known of the lives which intersected with hers one day in June 1917, upon a field in Flanders, and either perished there or passed on to other unseen and unseeable destinies. In those intersections, we can see a microcosm of the vast web of contact and consequence which shapes all our lives, and of which we are for the most part entirely ignorant.