There’s no place like home

Pat Guerin looks to the rich and fascinating past of his family’s home place in Kilnamona

 

In 1954 the American photographer, Dorothea Lange, visited Ireland to do a photoshoot for Life Magazine. Lange is best remembered for her iconic photos taken in the US during the Great Depression of the 1930s and is often credited as being the mother of photojournalism.

 

During her time here, she spent a couple of days in Dublin and a month in Clare taking over 2,400 pictures. A small number of these photos appeared in Life in March 1955. A larger selection was subsequently published in book form as Dorothea Lange’s Ireland in 1996. The book proved a great success.

One of the photos in the book shows two men returning from the creamery in Kilnamona, with milk churn-laden carts pulled respectively by a donkey and a horse. The shorter of those two men was my uncle, James (Jimmy) Guerin.

Some of my fondest childhood memories are of our annual family holidays spent on a small farm in Shallee, Kilnamona. My late father, Michael Guerin, had left Clare as a young man to join the Irish Army during the Emergency. He later married and settled down in Dublin’s new suburbia. Not being particularly well-off, it is unlikely we would have had vacations every year if not for the small family homestead in Shallee.

In the 1960s, our holidays involved travelling by train to Ennis and on by bus to Kilnamona. Later, our journeys were by car. The expression – ‘Are we there yet?’ – accurately captures the excitement felt by my brother, two sisters and me as we tormented our parents on what seemed to us an unbearably long journey to the West.

I was told by my late mother Pauline (nee Scallan, from Meath), that my older sister and myself once began asking the dreaded question before we had even exited the Phoenix Park in Dublin.

Much of our time in Clare was spent on the farm. For many years, these holidays were timed to coincide with saving the hay in early summer, when extra hands were always welcome. I remember drinking already-sugared tea in the meadow as Charlie – the large farm horse – took time to graze amid his labours turning the hay.

We kids also took turns going to the creamery with Jimmy, or my other uncle, Tony, whose house we always stayed in during our time in Kilnamona. For many years the house did not have running water and we enjoyed the novelty of water drawn from a nearby well, nor was the lack of TV a hindrance to our absolute enjoyment of the freedom we had around the farm.
I consider it a privilege to have experienced a way of life that would change irrevocably within a decade. As a city kid, it left me with a special feeling for rural ways, for Clare in general and for Kilnamona in particular.

My uncle, Tony, never married and lived alone in the house in Shallee. In 1999, after Tony passed away, the house was sold. I spent a couple of weekends there before the house and land passed on to new owners taking photos and revisiting old memories. These were to be my last times inside that house, which was built by my grandfather, also named Michael Guerin.

While there, I discovered hidden on top of a cupboard, two letters written by my uncle, Jimmy to his mother, Margaret (‘Mim’, nee Neylon) in 1935. Aged 21, Jimmy had just emigrated to London. The letters capture the poignancy of the emigrant experience at that time and speak for themselves in a simple, unadorned, yet truly evocative way. Of his 11 siblings, all but two would emigrate – seven to the UK and one to America.

The first letter, although missing a page, conveys the initial deep sense of loneliness and dislocation felt by many emigrants.

320 Kensal Road
Kensington
London W.10
Sept 8th 1935

Dear Mother,
We are now in London. We left Ennis at half-one and was travelling until half-nine Summer time. We met Mrs Murphy at Paddington Station. Then we got a tram to her house. We were very lonely at Ennis but we forgot all after a time. There was girl from Limerick to Paddington with us. She was going to a convent. Her name was Nancy Kelly from Ruan. She was very nice to us an told us all she could about the jurney an about London. We got into the Boat at Rosslare. It is a very big one. There was every class of person in it. Motors, Bags, Trunks. We went all through the Boat but we could not go down to the bottom we were not let. But thank God we did not get sick at all but very near it. We had to travel six hours by train after leaving the Boat. We got very lonely when we were coming into Paddington.
But remember that if we were at home when we got here we would Stay at HOME. It is all right to go to the counties in Ireland. But out here we know no one. When a person talk to us we don’t know what they are saying nor they don’t know what we are saying. We are sorry from the very bottom of our Heart for going at all and if we were back again we would be glad to Stay at home.
Tell Nan I would like to write to her but I have nothing to say only the one thing that is when I do go home I will stay at home and be glad to be there. They all tell us that we will be able to get plenty of work tomorrow or after PG.
We are just starting to feel like ourself now and very content not forgetting home. There are excursion to all parts of Ireland here for 22/6 return. Don’t tell any one that we don’t like it. We are expecting after a time to go home with bags of money. We are 960 miles from Clare. Paddy C. Kept singing the whole…

The capitalising of the word home and the frequent references to it speak of the initial homesickness Jimmy felt. The last paragraph appears to have been written somewhat later when he was a bit more settled yet it still focuses on the theme of home.

The second letter isn’t dated but appears not to be much later than the first one. Even here, the theme of home is implicit.

320 Kensal Rd
Kensington
London

Dear Mother,
Just a few lines to let you know how we are going on. We’ve had no letter from home yet. We are expecting letters tomorrow or after.
Well we were working all day yesterday and we are expecting work during the week. We worked a 11 hours and got 11/3 in the evening. The Murphys are very very nice to us also Tom O’Sullivan are doing their Best.
Tell every one that we are working. The pay is very good here an if lucky you are never idle. Tell all the Boys that I am asking for them but no time to write. Did Michael McMahon come home. How is Nan an John. Do he miss me at all. Often it would take an hour to cross the Street with Traffic. I have no time to say anymore. I have to go to the city for things I want.
Good Bye to all
From Jas

The photo accompanying this article is the one used in Dorothea Lange’s Ireland. It was taken, I believe, on the laneway that links the main Ennis-to-Ennistymon road (N85) with the secondary road (R460) where a once very busy Kilnamona Creamery catered for long lines of mainly horse-drawn carts.

Indeed, at that time, some of the carts still had the big bone-rattler wheels and hadn’t yet converted to using car wheels, which at least offered a level of suspension. This lane was the route my uncle Jimmy took whenever I went with him to the creamery. The laneway passes what is now the home of Kilnamona GAA Club. The taller man in the picture is, I think, the late Joe Cullinan, also from Shallee.

Jimmy was a great practical joker. Although he never had any children himself, he had a way with kids. He used call to visit us in Shallee most evenings when we were on holiday and entertain us with jokes, card tricks and general mayhem.

One example of his trick-acting has to do with him coming back from the creamery with a local boy sitting on the cart as Jimmy led walking the horse. As they progressed along the road, Jimmy suddenly stopped, bent down and ‘picked up’ a penny. After a while, he stopped again and this time ‘picked up’ a truppenny bit.

Next, he stopped and ‘picked up’ a sixpence. After another while, he stopped again this time ‘picked up’ a shilling. By this stage, the local boy, unable to stand it anymore, jumped from the cart and ran up the road ahead in search of more riches. Jimmy told me this story himself and I believe him. He was that type of character.

In the 1990s, I spent at least a week every year in Shallee at my uncle Tony’s house with my own family. My daughter and son enjoyed similar freedoms to those I enjoyed as a child, although, being mobile, we drove around Clare to a much greater extent and therefore spent less time ‘down on the farm’. By that time, life had changed considerably, not only in Kilnamona but across Clare and the entire country. Tractors had replaced horses to work the land. Haystacks had turned into plastic-wrapped cylinders of hay.

Both my uncles had pretty much reduced their farming activities to keeping a few cattle. But while the country and the county had moved on, in many ways both of my uncles retained many of the old ways. My impression was that even though they lived a mere four miles from Ennis, they might as well have been 4,000 miles away, such was the gulf between their world and that of the world around them. For me, this was part of the big attraction of Shallee, how time seemed to stand still – haven of stability in an ever-changing world.

Jimmy Guerin returned to Ireland from London in 1940, living and working in Dublin for a few years. Eventually, he married May Naughton and settled with her and her widowed mother. Their cottage and farm faced Shallee Castle, on the same Ennis-to-Ennistymon road, not a half-mile from where my other uncle, Tony, lived and the home Jimmy had left to go to London. Jimmy passed away in December 2000, his wife predeceasing him by just a few months.

Given that neither Jimmy nor Tony had any offspring, I no longer have any family connection with Kilnamona, a sad fact of life in the relentless march of generation. Whenever I pass that way, my head fills with fond memories of a place that I consider my second home.

In the photos she took in Clare in 1954, Dorothea Lange captured moments in Irish rural life that show a very different Ireland to that of the 21st century. The story of Jimmy Guerin, I hope, provides a glimpse into one of the myriad personal narratives behind those spots in time.
Although Dorothea Lange’s Ireland is currently out of print, copies are still available on www.amazon.com.

Anyone interested in viewing the 2,400 photos taken by Lange during her visit here can do so online at www.oac.cdlib.org. Select ‘L’ in the displayed alphabet. Scroll the displayed list and click on ‘Lange (Dorothea) Collection’. Finally, click on ‘Ireland’ in the list of her photo collections.
A wealth of images of County Clare in 1954 awaits, including, as I discovered, other images taken of my uncle and his neighbour as they returned from the creamery.

Pat Guerin is a producer/presenter with Near FM, a community radio station serving NE Dublin.