One day in 1888, on the North Island of New Zealand, a runaway horse with an alarmed and excited girl on its back galloped into Wills Hughes Murdoch’s view. He was twenty-seven years old,1 and had been quietly tending his sheep. He managed to race after the horse, to jump out and grab the reins, calm and finally stop it. The girl, Louisa Shaw, who was on her way to school, was that November to be his bride. She was only seventeen when they married.2
This mode of meeting and instantly falling in love sounds like something invented by his future granddaughter. Her novels test to the point of self-parody the literary convention of the coup de foudre, or love at first sight: the chance meeting between kindred souls that changes lives for ever. It was as much a family tradition. Wills and Louisa’s eldest child Hughes was to meet and fall for his nineteen-year-old future bride on a Dublin tram in 1918, towards the end of the First World War. And John Bayley was first to sight Wills’s granddaughter Iris bicycling past his Oxford college window in 1953. In three successive generations the girl at least is on the move, while the man – and twice also the girl – is love-struck, and nothing again is quite as it was.
The Murdochs are a staunchly Protestant Scots-Irish family who crossed the Irish Sea to Ulster from their native Galloway in Scotland in the seventeenth century. The name ‘Murdoch’ is essentially Scots Gaelic – from Mhuirchaidh, though an Irish Gaelic version, O’Muircheartaigh, meaning navigator, sometimes written Murtagh, is also common. They farmed modestly in County Down, where they prided themselves on having been for seven generations. In the 1880s Wills John Murdoch left the family farm for his spell in New Zealand, to learn about sheep-rearing, and probably also to make good on his own. It was a period of agricultural unrest and depression, and of Irish emigration generally.3 Family tradition suggests that Wills’s uncle had left for Indiana twenty-five years earlier, while his elder brother Richard was also in New Zealand, working as a teacher, and died there, unmarried, not long before the First World War.
Wills and Louisa’s first baby, Wills John Hughes Murdoch, was born in Thames, seventy miles south-east of Auckland, on 26 April 1890. When Hughes was a year and a half old, on 9 January 1892, Wills’s father died, and Wills came back to help run the family farm in County Down. Legend has it that on the journey home baby Hughes was nearly washed overboard in a storm, but was saved by a vigilant sailor.
The farm was Ballymullan House, Hillhall, in County Down, eight miles outside Belfast, and at that time ‘real country’. Even today it has not become suburban, but away from the old main road to Lisburn that cuts through it, it is a quiet country hamlet. Ballymullan House had been left by Wills’s greatgrandfather, another Richard, described in his will as ‘merchant and farmer’,4 to Wills’s father Richard (1824–92) and uncle William John (1825–1908). The five-bay, two-storeyed, shallow-roofed eighteenth-century house – ‘Georgian’ suggests something too English, insufficiently atmospheric and provincial – has dressed-stone corners, some old panelled windows, a large kitchen with a small-windowed ‘gam’ wall, a grey marble fireplace in the drawing-room, two fine old oak-panelled doors, an orchard and an old yard with a pump that produced ‘the most beautiful well water’.5 There were at least sixty acres of mixed farmland.
Louisa, whom Iris knew well – she died aged seventy-five, living at 8 Adelaide Avenue in Belfast, in 19476 – is remembered by her grandchildren as a cheerful, always youthful person. She was happy and had the gift of making others so. At twenty-one she had to leave her entire family and known world, to sail across the seas to a wholly strange place, and to live in a house with unknown in-laws. She was to share – contentedly – Ballymullan with her mother-in-law and three sisters-in-law – Margaret, Sarah and Annie.7 There is an echo of her journey in Chloe, also a New Zealander, ‘the girl from far-away’ in The Good Apprentice.
Two aspects of the household Louisa bravely travelled to join are striking. Iris’s father Hughes was brought up on a farm which had been inherited by the brothers Richard and William from their grandfather. Wills, son of the elder brother Richard, chose to leave for the southern hemisphere. Strife or tension between brothers is the main driving force behind the plots of many of Iris’s novels, from A Severed Head to The Green Knight. Shakespeare’s plots provide one model for this; life, another.
The second aspect, even allowing for the shorter life expectancy of that epoch, is the family’s high death-rate. Richard had, it is true, seven surviving siblings, but Wills’s sister Isabella died in 1868 aged fourteen, his brother Samuel in 1869 aged four, and his brother James in 1889 aged nineteen. As for Uncle William, the other heir to Hillhall, he had lost six children in infancy, and his wife Charlotte died in 1876. William had another four surviving children, three of them girls, one of whom, Charlotte Clark, was married. She and her elder sister Margaret died within a fortnight of each other in March 1893, aged twenty-seven and thirty-two respectively. Wills’s mother Sarah died in 1895, three years after his father. His youngest child Lilian died, aged three, in 1900.
What might such reminders of mortality do to the Murdoch family’s religious sense? Wills and Louisa’s eldest daughter Sarah, born in 1893, was washed to the wilder shores of Irish Protestantism. Her sister Ella (1894–1990) became a missionary. And Hughes, their only son – perhaps in reaction – probably turned free-thinker. In the following generation Hughes’s only child Iris was to contrive to be both passionately religious by nature and by blood-instinct, yet devoutly sceptical about most traditions in practice. Dominic de Grunne, a tutor at Wadham College in the 1950s, observing her over many decades and working, when they first met, on a doctorate on lay religious feeling among seventeenth-century Britons, soon saw in her the extreme ‘idealistic puritanism’ of her planter-Ulster forebears.8 Iris was, especially before her marriage, prone to humourless outrage about social and political issues – the wickedness of apartheid being one theme. Friends would later recount how, eyes flaming and flashing, she ‘took up the cudgels’ and ‘stood on her dignity’. She also inherited from her father’s side an intense radical individualism.
The Murdoch family burial plot is in the Church of Ireland graveyard at Derriaghy, County Down, not far from Hillhall. The church itself is an ugly Victorian confection. Two family graves, one for each brother – Richard, William – and his descendants, stand side by side like rival siblings within their low railing, opposite the south-facing door. A sum bequeathed around 1868 to keep the gravestones clean had dwindled by the 1920s, so that the grandchildren – who, most summers, included young Iris over from England – had to clean the headstones, scrape the railings, apply paint and keep the weeds in check.
There are many Richards and Williams in the Murdoch family tree. ‘Hughes’ was one common or standard middle name, ‘Wills’ another – probably emphasising a connexion with the family name of the Marquesses of Downshire, from whom the Murdochs in the nineteenth century rented eleven and a half acres of land. It is one curiosity of these graves that, as in the kind of doubling novelists delight in, two people buried here bear the same name – Wills’s sister Isabella Jane Shaw Murdoch, who was Iris’s great aunt and who died in 1868; and Iris’s formidable aunt Ella Ardili, also born Isabella Jane Shaw Murdoch, who died in 1990. The ‘Shaw’ in Aunt Ella’s name came from her mother Louisa Shaw from New Zealand, who – presumably – also came of Irish stock, and may indeed have been a distant cousin.
Louisa loved her first-born, Hughes. She used to carry him, at the age of three and a half, to the small National School in Hillhall, and then cry all the way back home because she could so little bear to leave him. Hughes went on to Brookfield, a Quaker boarding school in Moira, outside Belfast. It was a good school, and Wills’s mother and his Dublin cousins alike were Quakers.9 Hughes would send his washing home each week for Louisa to launder, and this became the stuff of family legend: she would cut off all the buttons from the garments before the wash, and sew them all on again afterwards before sending them back, week after week. Probably this was to avoid the buttons being chewed up in an old-fashioned mangle. That the story was handed down suggests that there were other ways of proceeding. ‘Did you ever hear of anything so stupid?’ asked Louisa’s granddaughter Sybil.
The year before her death in 1895, Louisa’s mother-in-law Sarah wrote to her about the well-being of the next baby, confusingly another Sarah, aunt to-be of Iris. Great-grandmother Sarah writes affectionately to her daughter-in-law in an educated cursive but unpunctuated script. Some words are misspelt.
Ballymullan House,
Lisburn, Sep 1st 94
My dear Lousia
I can imagine how you will be thinking of Sara it will seem wonderfull to you to hear she never murmured all yesterday nor going to bed nor going asleep and I kept out of the way so Rose got her ready and all was warm she had a lot of little things to amuse her and took her up Annie was here at the time as I did not wish her to begin to fret I sent them early and we stood and lisined not a word Rose told me this morning she went over and over her to she tired and then lay down I called Rose at 5 she went out to milk at once and had milked before she awoke I left my door open that she could come in but she called out MaMa and I called Rose that was the only time she cried not the only time she has said MaMa but that was the only cry she had all the time I hope you are enjoying yourself ever your Afft Mother Sarah Murdoch.
I will be glad to see Wills home he is very soon missed here Wills had taken Louisa, and probably the four-year-old Hughes, to the smart Dublin Horse Show, a key event in the Irish – and especially the Anglo-Irish – social calendar well into the twentieth century. Hughes was to inherit his father’s love both of horses and of betting on them. Both Sarah and Louisa were clearly anxious about Louisa’s absence from her second baby, yet the fact of her absence might suggest that Hughes had more of her love than did either of his two sisters Sarah and Ella. Ballymullan House was not a large establishment: as Sarah’s letter makes clear, Rose doubled as nursemaid and milkmaid. The family were not well enough off to employ a wet-nurse.
In the event, Ballymullan House did not pass to Hughes. There were several years of mounting debts, and probably the farm failed. Wills went to a funeral in the rain, developed pneumonia and died, intestate and aged only forty-six, on 1 December 1903. The family address at the time was 3 Craig Fernie Terrace, Lisburn Road, Belfast. The Certificate of Probate on Wills’s estate describes him as a ‘retired farmer’ and tells us that he left £1,274. The farm had been sold the year before.
Louisa was left on her own to bring up Hughes, Sarah and Ella. So bereft was she without Wills that she would often say her children alone kept her going. It is not clear how they lived, in those days before widows’ benefits. She was poor, but uncomplaining, and somehow made do. Despite the family burial plot at Deriaghy being in a Church of Ireland graveyard, the family belonged mainly to Hillhall Presbyterian congregation, and partly to Malone Presbyterian Church. After a split in the latter some breakaways, such as Grandmother Louisa and Aunts Ella and Sarah, counted themselves Irish Evangelical, though the two aunts, on marrying, took the faiths of their husbands: Baptist for Ella when she married the carrier Willy Ardili, Brethren for Sarah when she married the quiet, easy-going self-taught dentist Willy Chapman.
Sectarianism in Ireland is of course not a two-cornered but a three-cornered fight, with Catholic, Church of Ireland (i.e. Anglican) and the various powerful competing Non-Conformist traditions all vying with each other.10 Moreover the Protestant Non-Conformist traditions in Northern Ireland are intensely individualistic, quarrelsome and fissiparous. Brethren, Baptists and Elamites were at the cutting edge of turn-of-the-century Northern Irish Protestantism, much subject to internal splits. By 1911 there were no fewer than six sects with less than ten members.11 Iris, direct heir to exactly such a tradition of stubborn, radical Ulster dissent, developed a ‘faith’ that emphasised the urgency and loneliness of the individual pilgrimage.
Iris’s formidable Aunt Ella spent many years as a missionary with the Egypt General Mission, in which it did not much matter what denomination you belonged to. She learnt and spoke good Arabic and ‘used to teach the young Egyptians to love God’.12 Her older sister Sarah spent many of her holidays on a farm near Carryduff, five miles south-east of Belfast, belonging to an uncle who was ‘saved’, Thomas Maxwell. At around nineteen she was, together with her cousins, ‘saved’ too, and on her marriage she became a member of what on the mainland are sometimes known as Plymouth Brethren, in Ulster simply as ‘Brethren’. Willy, her husband-to-be, was Treasurer to the Apsley Hall Brethren at Donegall Pass. Even today Ulster ‘Brethren’ – unlike their Scots cousins – have no women elders.
Both the Yeats and the Parnell families, like Iris’s, had Brethren connexions.* The Brethren originated in Aungier Street, Dublin in 1827–28 when a group of men including a doctor, a lawyer, a minister and a peer started meeting together without any ritual, set prayers, forms of service or ordained ministry: they wished to return to the simplicity of the early apostolic Church. They believed in a ‘timetable’ of Last Things and taught that the saved can be caught up in the ‘Rapture’ before Christ’s return, and so spared hellfire.
Willy and Sarah Chapman belonged to the Open Brethren, who split off in 1848, and who differ significantly from Exclusive Brethren. Open Brethren both fraternise and worship freely with other evangelistic Christians, and practise believers’ (not infants') baptism. Although to leave the Church was still a momentous and alarming thing to do, your family might not necessarily refuse to break bread with you afterwards. Iris was pleased when her second cousin Max Wright, who taught philosophy at Queen’s University, Belfast, wrote a book, a painfully humorous account of just such a departure.† Wright’s family home contained thirty-seven Bibles. At fifteen he had shouted a gospel message at an unresponsive terrace of red-brick houses. There was constant pressure on Brethren to go all out for salvation, which led, one commentator believed, to a resulting impoverishment of outlook. Sarah and Willy Chapman’s three children, Iris’s closest living relatives, were bought up as Open Brethren, and Iris and her parents spent the second part –after Dublin – of many of their summer holidays before the Second World War with these cousins. Muriel, the eldest, was Iris’s particular ally.
The years before the First World War were the era of Edward Carson’s inflammatory Unionist speeches against Home Rule, of ‘not-an-inch-Jimmie’, of ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’, of a developing siege mentality among many Ulster Protestants. While the Murdochs and Maxwells who were Brethren were unquestionably Unionist, they also – even if male and so eligible – did not dream of voting, ‘For we have here no continuing city, but we look for one that is to come.’
When Hughes went to London at the age of sixteen in June 1906 to train for his civil service exam, first as a boy clerk at Scotland Yard then, later that year, with the Charity Commission, he, who is remembered as gentle, liberal, and free-thinking, was escaping from what his daughter Iris was to term the puritanism of his ‘black Protestant’ forebears.13 A letter from Hughes to his mother shortly after his arrival still evinces some fundamentalist piety, but perhaps the fleshpots of London helped wean him from it. This was a puritanism from which Iris claimed to have inherited something of value. Hughes would stay on friendly terms with both his sisters, and perhaps achieved this the more effectively by rationing their time together.
In 1908 he took his civil service exams, and in 1910 is shown certified as a ‘second Division Clerk’ with, in turn, the Local Government Board, the Home Office and the Treasury. In the four years running up to the outbreak of the First World War he worked at the ‘General Valuation Department (Ireland)’ in Dublin, staying with his Uncle Elias and his son Harold in Kingstown (later Dun Laoghaire), just outside the city, where they ran two ironmongers’ shops.14 From there it would have been a two-and-a-half-hour train journey to spend a weekend with his mother and sisters, 110 miles away in Belfast. Hughes swam in the so-called ‘Forty-Foot’, the natural pool ‘for gentlemen only’ by the Kingstown Martello Tower, both immortalised early on in Joyce’s Ulysses. Swimming there was his idea of bliss, and he always referred to it reverentially.
Photographs show him as a tall and attractive fair-haired man, with a self-contained air and a mild blue-eyed gaze that seems both retiring and contemplative, yet also ‘present’. The quality of quiet inwardness for which he is recalled, and which must have won him admirers, is visible too. The Murdoch family photograph album begins with cards from two girls, one strikingly beautiful, signed ‘With love from Daisy, October 1916’ and ‘To Hughes with love from Lillie, October 1917.’*
In January 1916, when mainland conscription started, there was none in Ireland, for fear of its political unpopularity. Hughes enlisted on 19 November 1915;15 the first photographs of him in his regimentals date from 1916. He was accustomed to farm life — 'He was very horsey,’ Iris remarked16 – which was why he entered a yeoman cavalry regiment, the First King Edward’s Horse, ‘The King’s Oversea [sic] Dominions Regiment’. Whether, like Andrew in The Red and the Green, also an officer in King Edward’s Horse, he did ‘bombing from horse-back’ – galloping in single file past German gun-emplacements and hurling Mills bombs into them – is not recorded. Generally, cavalry regiments were kept some distance from the front, and Iris later thought that this saved her father’s life.
Six months of Hughes’s war diary survive, starting at the end of 1916. The writing is spare and, even allowing for the fact that it is written ‘on the move’, the tone is notably impassive, without subjectivity. On New Year’s Eve 1916 he is laying four hundred yards of telephone wire, in full view of the German trenches at Miraumont, to connect the artillery observation post to that of his regiment. He and his fellows were soon under shellfire. All afternoon they heard the shells coming, and they would throw themselves flat on the ground until after each set of explosions. Shrapnel fell round them for some hours. When they had finished they ‘beat it back along the Hessian trench’ and rejoined their horses. The line they had laid that day was cut by shellfire almost at once, and had to be relaid in heavy rain five days later. Again Hughes’s party was spotted. A ‘whiz-bang’ dropped overhead about ten yards away, followed by a ‘perfect storm of shells round about’. They got safely away, but only just.
Hughes’s diary notes not merely the death of companions – on 22 March 1917 he writes: ‘Four B Sqn men were killed, and about 15 wounded’ – but also the casualties among horses, which he loved, and is remembered as having taken care of. Even at the front, his mother would proudly and wonderingly relate, he kept half his food for his horse.17 On 23 March 1917 he takes dispatches through the lines and is stopped ‘about four times by the French and ten times by the English patrols, each way’. On 8 April his Lieutenant-Colonel – one Lionel or ‘Jimmie’ James, author-to-be of a regimental history which Hughes purchased – wrote to Louisa that her son was ‘a most excellent and trustworthy British soldier’ of whom she should, like him, be proud.
After the post-Easter Rising executions in April 1916 Irish opinion turned against the British government,18 and King Edward’s Horse found difficulty recruiting subalterns in Dublin. On 11 May 1917 – during the Arras offensive, when 159,000 lives were lost in thirty-nine days – Corporal Murdoch was interviewed for a commission by Brigadier-General Darell at Nesle, and two weeks later left Peronne, on the Somme, for Dublin and then Lisburn. The journey home took one full week. He was gazetted Second Lieutenant19 on 22 February 1918.20
Musing about these diaries after they came to light in 1987,21 Iris pondered various matters. One was that ‘when (31.12.1916) my father wrote in his notebook, “All the afternoon shrapnel was dropping all around …” ‘, Wittgenstein, perhaps in similar circumstances, but fighting on the other side, might well have been making notes for the Tractatus. Even their ages – one born April 1889, the other April 1890 – were ‘practically the same’. She sadly notes that after the war Hughes ‘never saw a horse again, except the milkman’s horse’.22 He enjoyed betting on them, however, like his father, and ‘surprisingly, being Irish, did it quite well’.23
In the last months of the war Hughes was on leave from his regiment, which was stationed at the Curragh. One Sunday in Dublin, probably in uniform,24 he met Irene Richardson in a tram, en route for the Black Church on the corner of Mountjoy Street and St Mary’s Place, where she sang in the choir.25 They fell in love. Irene was dark, petite, very beautiful and spirited. Dublin is a great singing city, and ‘Rene’26 (rhyming with ‘teeny') as she was always known had a beautiful voice. She was training as a singer, and had already started performing at amateur concerts. She sang the standard operatic arias, and was particularly fond of ‘One Fine Day’ from Madama Butterfly. Its story of an innocent girl made pregnant then abandoned by the sailor she loves perhaps distantly echoes her own, happier story.
Hughes and Rene were married in Dublin on 7 December 1918 – a photo shows Hughes in full-dress uniform. Rene’s sister Gertie (later Bell) was a witness. On the wedding certificate Hughes gives his army rank, second lieutenant, under ‘profession’, and his address as ‘Marlborough Barracks’. Jean Iris Murdoch was born on 15 July, St Swithin’s Day, the following year, just over seven months later. The marriage was probably therefore hasty.27 Even in October 1918, when Iris would have been conceived, an early end to the war was not certain. Her character Andrew Chase-White in The Red and the Green, born, like Hughes, in a colony and serving, like Hughes, as a young officer in King Edward’s Horse, feels some pressure from relatives to marry and make his wife pregnant before he has to go to the front and a likely death. Arthur Green’s hypothesis that Hughes might have felt he had a comparable duty to perform before his marriage seems unlikely. Iris was probably a happy accident.
The extended Murdoch family comes out as a very intelligent, middle-class organism, stuffed with independent minds, a model example of Protestant and British Ireland. One group stems from the Brethren and has strong dental and medical associations; the stepson of one of Iris’s aunts was a Unionist politician, while a second cousin lectured in philosophy at Queen’s University.28 Uncle Elias, a Presbyterian married to a Quaker,* and Harold, a Quaker, ran the two well-known ironmongers’ stores at Dun Laoghaire; another cousin, Brian Murdoch, also a Quaker, became Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin.29 Cousin Sybil also married a Quaker in Reggie Livingston; and some Richardsons are Quakers. There are today a mere 1,500 Quakers in the whole of Ireland, and if the frequency with which Quakerism turns up in Iris’s fiction invites comment,† it is also disproportionately reflected in Irish history, being particularly prominent in famine relief, big business and education.30 If Iris was herself touched by Quakerism’s emphasis on integrity, quietness and peace, its belief in the availability of Inner Light to all, that all are capable of growing in wisdom and understanding, it is as likely to be from her headmistress at Badminton School as from her Irish relations that the influence came.
Rene’s family represents another strain in the history of Protestant middle-class Ireland: Church of Ireland rather than Presbyterian, Dublin-based rather than from Belfast, former ‘plantation squires’ rather than ‘plantation farmers’.31 Not yeoman farmers and merchants like the Murdochs, the Richardsons, a complex and highly inter-related family, began as major land-owners in the seventeenth century and became minor gentry in the eighteenth, when Catholics were debarred from sitting in Parliament and holding government office, as well as suffering many petty restrictions, and Protestants had a virtual monopoly of power and privilege. Thereafter, the family’s status declines. It mattered to Iris that she was grandly descended from Alexander Richardson, ‘planted in Ireland in 1616 to control the wild Irish’,32 as she put it, and living at Crayhalloch in 1619. Readers of An Unofficial Rose will recognise the similar name of the house ‘Grayhallock’, with its links to the wealthy linen merchants of County Tyrone. Alexander Richardson’s family motto ‘Virtuti paret robur‘, is proudly quoted in The Oreen Knight, and translated as either ‘strength obeys virtue’ or ‘virtue overcometh strength’.
In the 1990s an amateur genealogist from Ulster, Arthur Green, wrote up his patient investigations into Iris’s family history. He showed, amongst much else, that she was ‘una bambina di sette mesi’, painted her parents’ marriage – almost certainly accurately – as a hasty register office affair,33 and tried to show that her claims to be descended from the Richardsons of Drum Manor, and her identification with an Anglo-Irish background, were, in his word, ‘romanticism’. He also queried whether her father’s civil service status on his retirement in 1950 was as exalted as she believed. Green, at the suggestion of A.S. Byatt, sent these findings to Iris’s publishers, Chatto & Windus.34 Iris defended her pedigree with (at first) some stiffness, later lamenting that she had not asked more questions of her parents, and so been better-informed. She referred Green to O’Hart’s History of Old Irish Families,35 telling him she had lodged copies of relevant pages with her agent Ed Victor for safekeeping. Both Rene’s father Effingham Lynch Richardson and her grandfather Robert Cooper Richardson merit a mention in O’Hart, which is noted for being, before 1800, notoriously untrustworthy, a source of myth, not fact. Given the burning of papers during the Troubles of 1921–22, the chances of establishing the truth seemed remote.
Fortunately, and unbeknownst to Iris, at the start of the twentieth century the Rev. Henry G.W. Scott, Rector of Tullinisken in County Armagh, had documented these Richardsons well.36 James
I indeed granted the original Alexander Richardson Drum Manor, or Manor Richardson, in County Tyrone. Alexander’s son William married Mary Erskine, heiress to the Augher Castle estate, County Tyrone, which in turn descended to their son Archibald. William left Drum Manor to his second son Alexander, who in 1682 married Margaret Goodlatte of Drumgally. His third son William, as well as inheriting lands near Augher, also obtained a lease of lands from his brother Alexander in the townland of Tullyreavy on the Drum Manor estate, where he built a house by the lake known as Oaklands, Woodmount or Lisdhu. O’Hart37 erroneously identified Crayhalloch with Drum Manor Forest Park and also with Oaklands, as if all were different names for one house, instead of separate Richardson estates, from each of which Rene could claim descent.
William (d.1664) and Mary Erskine had three further sons. The eldest, James, married Mary Swan (1671–1740), heiress of William Swan, and their son Alexander (1705–71) succeeded to the estate of over a thousand acres at Farlough Lodge, strikingly situated above the Torrent river: a small five-bay, two-storey Georgian house with a dressed sandstone front and a square central porch38 near Newmills, County Tyrone, not far from Cookstown. Through the eighteenth century the head of the family was churchwarden and member of the vestry of Drumglass and Tullinisken parishes, overseer of the roads and an officer in the militia. Iris’s great-great-great-grandfather, for example, was Alexander’s eldest son John Richardson of Farlough (1727–85), who married Hannah Lindsay in 1757 and was a JP, High Sheriff of Tyrone in 1778, and Captain of the Dungannon Volunteers in 1782. Owning more than a thousand acres, successive heads of the family lived, it can be assumed, in some comfort as modest country gentlemen.
The Richardsons also produced serious artistic talent and had continuing artistic tastes, well before Iris emerged to give them retrospective interest. They formed a large extended family which included two women writers, one of them distinguished. Iris’s great-great-aunt Frances Elizabeth Fisher (née Richardson) published well-received volumes of verse such as Love or Hatred (three volumes) and The Secret of Two Houses (two volumes), also a book about Killarney. The better-known is Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson (1870–1946), who wrote under the name of Henry Handel Richardson. She was the daughter of Walter Lindesay Richardson MD, model for Richard Mahony in her trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917–21). Henry Handel Richardson was second cousin to Rene’s father Effingham Lynch Richardson.39 Like Rene she was musically talented, going to Leipzig to study music before turning to writing. She spent her early life in Australia and then Germany, belonging, like her cousin Iris, to a broad British and European and not merely an Irish world.40 In her unfinished autobiography Myself When Young (1948) she refers to her strongly Protestant Irish Richardson relations, and their penchant for odd names ‘such as Henry Handel and a Duke, more than one Snow and several Effinghams’. In The Unicorn Iris was to award her foolish character Effingham Cooper a key moment of insight.
The nineteenth century saw a downturn in Richardson fortunes, with the sons of yet another Alexander Richardson (1758–1827) squandering part of the £8,000 realised from sale of the Farlough estate. The phenomenon of downstart Anglo-Irish gentry was so familiar as to earn its own ingenious characterisation. Sir Jonah Barrington, whose racy memories of Irish history both Yeats and Joyce plundered, defines as ‘half-mounted gentlemen’ the small grantees of Queen Elizabeth or Cromwell living off two hundred acres. The Richardsons had been grander, somewhere between ‘gentlemen every inch of them’, whose finances were ‘not in good order’, and ‘gentlemen to the backbone’, from the oldest settler-families, generally also ‘a little out at elbows’.41 Most of Iris’s immediate maternal forebears were minor men-of-law – Dublin was a litigious city with many attorneys – belonging to the Protestant Irish lower-middle class. Rene’s paternal grandfather Robert Cooper Richardson, grandson to Tyrone’s High Sheriff,
born in 1827, and son of Robert Lindesay Richardson, a revenue officer, was a clerk in the Dublin Probate Court. Robert Cooper’s son by his first wife Hannah, Effingham Lynch Richardson, a ‘law assistant’ born in 1857, after a first marriage without issue made a second to Elizabeth Jane Nolan, daughter of William Nolan Esquire.42 Effingham and Jane had two daughters, Gertrude Anna (born 1891)43 and Irene Alice (born 29 March 1899), mother-to-be of Iris.
Rene’s father Effingham Lynch Richardson died on 6 July 1904, not long after Ulysses’ ‘Bloomsday’, one tradition making his death, officially from ‘erphelsocora of the groin’, drink-related.44 The fact that the Rev. A.W. Barton, Rector of St George’s, rather than one of his three curates, took the funeral service, suggests that the family were actively involved in the life of the Church of Ireland at parish level. Iris also claimed – on no evidence – Catholic ancestors.45 Curiously, a second Effingham L. Richardson was shown living at 40 Iona Road, Glasnevin, Dublin, until 1947, and working until 1934 at the Dublin Ministry of Labour. This second E.L. Richardson, a first cousin of the first, was re-baptised as a Catholic before marrying in 1883.46 Rene and her elder sister Gertie took ‘Cooper’, not among the baptismal names of either, as their middle name; they lived thereafter in the house of their grandfather Robert Cooper Richardson, and the twice-adopted name suggests gratitude to him for his generosity in fostering them after their father’s death. The only story Rene would tell of her grandfather was that, though a man of industrious habits who at first kept his family well, when the 6 p.m. mail van arrived he would be facetious about this, in his Dublin manner. It was a signal for his first drink of the evening.
From 1906 the girls lived with their grandfather at 59 Blessington Street, a ‘wide, sad, dirty street’, Iris wrote, with ‘its own quiet air of dereliction, a street leading nowhere, always full of idling dogs and open doorways’.47 It runs parallel to Leopold Bloom’s Eccles Street close by, and is halfway between St Joseph’s Carmelite Church and the Anglican ‘Black’ Church, at the heart of that cheerless north inner city to which the Joyces retreated across the Liffey, with all their baggage in two large yellow caravans,
when their fortunes took a downturn. Within a twilit world there are degrees of gloom and seediness. It is not hard to see why the 1906 move that Rene’s grandfather made, away from the address given as 34 ‘Upper’ Rutland Street,48 where Rene and Gertie were growing up, was propitious. A street of ill-repute, Joyce placed Nighttown and its brothels at the end of it at that time.
The northern inner city49 had been defeated first by the Duke of Leinster choosing in the 1740s to build on the South Side —'Where I build, Fashion will follow’ – and next by the exodus of gentry to England from around Luke Gardiner’s Mountjoy Square after the 1801 Act of Union. But, above all, by the massive immigration into the area of starving country people during and after the Famine, resulting in the division of whole terraces into tenements. In their novel The Real Charlotte Somerville and Ross’s down-at-heel, petit-bourgeois, essentially vulgar Protestant heroine Francie lives, in 1895, around Mountjoy Square, very near Blessington Street — like the Richardsons.50 Today number 59 is divided into seven flats, the ground floor having been around 1990 a betting-shop.
A marriage brings two worlds, as well as two people, into collision. Hughes’s cousin Don Douglas, grandson of Elias and so a ‘solid’ Murdoch by birth, regarded the Richardsons as rackety, and recalled Hughes’s marriage as a serious social blunder.51 If Rene had, by the hypocritical standards of the day, ‘got herself into trouble’, such odium would be explained. Her sister Gertie must also have been pregnant when she married, on 22 February 1919: Gertie gave birth at 59 Blessington Street to her eldest child Victor four months later, only three weeks before Iris was born at the identical address, probably in the same room. Gertie’s Scottish husband Thomas Bell, like Hughes, was a Second Lieutenant in King Edward’s Horse. There must have been a double courtship. It is striking that there is no Murdoch witness to Iris’s parents’ marriage certificate, especially as Hughes’s uncle lived close by in Kingstown, and his mother and sisters in Belfast.* Rene’s father is moreover shown, erroneously, as a solicitor (deceased). The Law Society in Dublin has no record of a solicitor called Effingham Richardson. In fact he worked in a solicitor’s office, ‘law assistant’ probably signifying a clerk. Perhaps Rene and Gertie enhanced his status to compensate for any loss of caste on Hughes’s part, or perhaps their mother had misremembered and misinformed them.
Iris’s birth at 59 Blessington Street was probably difficult, perhaps, John Bayley believed, with the umbilical cord wrapped around the baby’s neck. Rene had also had a rough time from Hughes’s sisters and mother. She ‘didn’t fit in with the Protestant ethic’, thought Iris’s first cousin Cleaver Chapman.52 As an Elder in the Apsley Hall Brethren assembly, his words come with some authority. Rene was beautifully made-up, cheerful and bright; she loved the coffee-shop, Cardews, in Kildare Street, where she went as a ‘flapper’. Her new sister-in-law, ‘wonderful’53 Aunt Ella, was bossy and critical and on occasion ungenerous, smiling but lacking charity. Rene handled the disapproval very well, with tact, patience and good grace.
Rene liked to joke about North and South Dublin, and to be ironical at her own expense, socially speaking. When Iris’s husband John Bayley in later life complimented her gallantly by saying that he was sure Rene must have been ‘the toast of Dublin’ when she was a girl, she would jokingly reply, ‘Only of North Dublin.’54 While Dublin north of the River Liffey was seedy and poor, the rich, smart suburbs stretched out to the south, from Rathmines to Dalkey. None the less, Rene had started to make her mark as a singer, and as a charming and modest personality. Like her mother-in-law, she had a happy temperament. There was a great deal of amateur opera about in Dublin, ‘that great singing city’, as Joyce’s own life, and his story ‘The Dead’, display. After her marriage Rene gave up professional performance, although choir-singing continued, and her beautiful voice was most often heard privately. She never said she minded abandoning her training, had ‘no great agony about it’, and appeared indifferent to fame and ambition. She knew she was talented, but did not take her gift too seriously. Iris, on the other hand, minded for her, and grieved for her mother’s loss of career.55 In her fiction she depicted wife after wife who has abandoned career for her husband.56
The fine comic writer Honor Tracy57 first met Iris and John in Dalkey around 1958. A big jolly woman with rubicund and endearingly porcine features, Honor wore her flaming Anglo-Norman red hair somewhere between en brosse and beehive, had an occasionally combative manner, and appeared to be one (mainly) for the ladies.58 Thus began a close friendship that survived until Tracy’s death in 1989. Over the following thirty years her graphic letters provide an extravagant, loving, tough-minded and unreliable chorus to Iris’s developing self-invention and what Tracy termed her ‘weird extravagant fancies’:
You ask how Irish she is – the answer is, strictly not at all. Her father was of Ulster Protestant stock, but that is really a Scottish race, and Murdoch is a Scottish name. Mr Murdoch was a Civil Servant and happened to be posted to Dublin (pre-Republic) for a short time, during which Iris was born. She makes the most of it, as people are very apt to do: the number of English people who claim ‘Irish grandmothers’ is a famous joke in Ireland.59
The ‘Jean’ of Jean Iris Murdoch must indeed be Scots-Irish, from the Murdoch side, albeit never used. From the first she was known as ‘Iris’, complementing her mother’s ‘Irene’.60 One charm of her name is that ‘Iris’ does not quite belong to ‘Murdoch': ‘Jean’ or ‘Jeannie’ Murdoch might be some tough lady from Glasgow; Iris Murdoch confounds two sets of expectations. An accidental charm is that another ‘Iris’ was goddess of rainbows, many-coloured, protean, hard to pin down.
‘Irish when it suits them, English when it does not,’ was what Honor Tracy’s erstwhile friend and neighbour Elizabeth Bowen said the ‘true’ Irish claimed of the Anglo-Irish – both the Protestant Anglo-Irish like the Bowens, and also ‘castle Catholics’61 like the original Tracys. Tracy, for example, spoke aggressively County English when in England, yet with a brogue when the Bayleys visited her house on Achill Island in County Mayo. Is Tracy’s wit at Iris’s expense partly tribal? It is certainly an irony at the expense of someone who – to an extraordinary degree – was to become the darling of the English, far more than of the Irish, intellectual and cultural establishments.62 She loved to tease Iris about her Irishness in a way that was envious, admiring, combative, ignorant (as in her letter above) and flirtatious. Iris took this in good part – in The Red and the Green she was to create an Anglo-Irish character for whom calling himself Irish was ‘more of an act than a description, an assumption of a crest or a picturesque cockade’.63 Both Iris’s parents showed their Irishness in their voices. Rene had a Dublin voice, a ‘refined’ voice, with that Dublin habit of pronouncing ‘th’ as ‘t’, especially at the start of a word – for example, ‘t’ings like that’. Hughes had a very mild Ulster intonation and idiom: ‘Wait while I tell you!’ he would advise. Young Iris had a slight brogue, acquired from her parents. Well into adult life she would sometimes pronounce ‘I think’ as ‘I t’ink’. On 1 April 1954, on a trip to Glengarriff on the Beara peninsula, most westerly of all the peninsulas of Cork, she noted, ‘I have an only partly faked-up impression of being at home here.’
The last of Tracy’s Catholic Anglo-Norman ancestors to have lived in Ireland was Beau Tracy, who left in 1775, when Iris’s great-great-great-grandfather was High Sheriff of Tyrone. Tracy, born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, educated in Dresden and at the Sorbonne, first lived in Ireland at the age of thirty-seven,
when the Sunday Times sent her there as a special correspondent in 1950, and she set six of her thirteen books there. But no one ever agrees about who is entitled to lay claim to Irishness. Iris’s Belfast cousins today call themselves British, not Irish, while Hughes’s humorous comment on a photograph of Paddy O’Regan, Iris’s boyfriend of Irish descent around 1940, was, ‘Typically Irish – he looks as if he wants to fight something.’64 With both parents brought up in Ireland, and an ancestry within Ireland both North and South going back three centuries, Iris had as valid a claim to call herself Irish as most North Americans have to call themselves American, generally after a shorter time on that continent.65
Iris recorded on an early dust-jacket that ‘although most of her life has been spent in England, she still calls herself an Irish writer’. From 1961, with the Anglo-Irish narrator of A Severed Head, and following her father’s death, this changes permanently to ‘she comes of Anglo-Irish parentage’, a doubtful claim if meant to refer to an Ascendancy, land-owning, horse-riding background. Iris never claimed to belong to the Ascendancy as such, and it is doubtful that Rene used the word. Yet Rene certainly knew that her once grand family had, in her own phrase, ‘gone to pot’. Iris’s interest in this pedigree dates from August 1934, when she discovered on holiday in Dun Laoghaire that the Richardsons had a family motto, and a ‘jolly good one’. She noted that, as well as ‘virtue’, ‘virtus’ in ‘Virtuti paret robur’ could also mean ‘courage … But never mind, away with Latin. We shall be climbing the Mourne mountains next week, the Wicklow mountains the week after.’66 Pious about distant glories the family may have been.67 Snobs they were not. Hughes got on very well with Rene’s brother-in-law Thomas Bell, who had been commissioned with him in the same regiment and now worked as a car-mechanic at Walton’s, a Talbot Street Ford showroom;68 one of Thomas’s four sons, Victor, later a long-distance lorry-driver for Cadbury’s, appears with Iris in holiday snaps; a further two, Alan (also known as Tom) and John Effingham Bell, also worked for Cadbury’s in Dublin, as fitter and storeman respectively. They lived on Bishop Street.69 If by Anglo-Irish is meant ‘a Protestant on a horse’, a big house, the world of Molly Keane or of Elizabeth Bowen’s Bowen’s Court, this is not it.
In her first year at Oxford, in an article in Cherwell entitled ‘The Irish, are they Human?’, Iris was to refer to the Anglo-Irish as ‘a special breed’. In her second, after the IRA had declared war on Britain in January 1939, which was to cause over three hundred explosions, seven deaths and ninety-six casualties,70 and at the start of what in Ireland is called the ‘Emergency’,71 she was treasurer of the Irish Club, listened to Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford) talk of ‘chatting with De Valera’ and herself gave a paper on James Connolly, Communist hero of the 1916 Rising.72 To Frank Thompson in 1941 she wrote of Ireland as ‘an awful pitiful mess of a country’, full, like herself, of ‘pretences and attitudes … but Ireland at least has had its baptism of blood and fire’. The Richardson family motto ‘Virtuti paret robur’ is often repeated in her later journals, like a talisman or mantra. Iris saw herself, like her friend from 1956 Elizabeth Bowen, as caught between two worlds and at home in neither.73
To be of a once distinguished Protestant family in Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century still conferred a sense of caste.74 As recently as 1991 Iris defined her mother’s family as Anglo-Irish gentry whose ‘estate in County Tyrone … had vanished some time ago’.75 Insistence that one’s family was still ‘gentry’, no matter how impoverished, was partly tribal Protestantism. Even those Irish Protestants in the early Irish Free State who came of humble stock felt that they emphatically belonged, none the less, to a ‘corps d'élite:
Ex-Unionists – including those who were not very bookish – were proud of the Anglo-Irish literary heritage. They prided themselves … on possessing what were regarded as Protestant virtues, a stern sense of duty, industry and integrity together with the ability to enjoy gracefully and whole-heartedly the good things of life. [This] esprit de corps. … was voiced with vibrant force by Yeats in his famous and thunderous intervention in a Senate debate in 1925. Speaking for the minority, he declaimed, ‘we are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Berkeley; we are the people of Swift; we are the people of Parnell.’76
Iris’s willingness to mythologise her own origins, and to lament a long-lost demesne (in her case, a real ancestry), both mark her out as a kinswoman of Yeats.* The ‘Butler’ appended to the Yeats family name proposed a not entirely fictitious connexion to that grandest of clans, the Anglo-Irish Dukes of Ormonde. Family pride runs through much of Iris’s rhetoric about her background, both in interviews and also in Chapter 2 of The Red and the Green, with its authorial identification with the old Protestant ruling order, as well as its claim for that order to speak for the whole of Ireland, Catholic and Protestant alike.
The relation between Iris and her cousins was complex. Another Richardson relative she claimed77 – on no known evidence – who had presumably not suffered from the general Richardson decline, was a Major-General Alexander Arthur Richardson, serving with the Royal Ulster Rifles in the Second World War. The Belfast family phrase ‘the Ladies’ bathing-place’ amused Iris. So did the Belfast cousins calling a ‘slop-basin’ – for tea-slops – a ‘refuse-vase’, which the Murdochs considered a genteelism.78 If Iris’s family found the Belfast cousinry genteel, Belfast cousin Sybil Livingston conversely thought the cigarette-holder Iris sported for a while ‘posh'; and she was amazed in 1998 to learn that Rene had a sister of any kind, let alone one with four sons, giving Iris first cousins in Dublin as well as Belfast. ‘You are my only family,’ Sybil recalls Iris saying – mysteriously as it might appear: perhaps there was a remarkable depth of reserve on both sides.79 Sybil around 1930 had passed on to her a ‘wonderful’ party frock of Iris’s, pale blue satin, with a braid of little pink and blue and white rosebuds sewn round the neck and sleeves. For Iris, a much-loved only child, as for Elizabeth Bowen, Ireland represented company.
Iris believed that, after her birth in Dublin, her parents lived with her there for one or two years,80 until the inauguration of the Irish Free State at the very end of 1921. These supposed years in Dublin, often mentioned in interviews – again, like Elizabeth Bowen – confirmed her Irish identity. Around 1921 all Irish civil servants were offered the choice of moving to Belfast or London. It is easy to see why, in the political turmoil of those years, with the Troubles, the introduction of martial law, and then the civil war looming, Hughes, who was after all not merely a Protestant and an Ulsterman but also an ex-officer, might have opted for London, a city he had known on and off since 1906. Iris said he came to England to find his fortune81 but saw this as a radical move, a kind of exile. In fact, if Iris as a baby spent even as much as one year in Dublin, it was only with her mother. On Iris’s birth certificate Hughes gives 51 Summerlands Avenue, Acton, London W3 as his address, and his civil service position was second division clerk in the National Health Insurance Committee, working in Buckingham Gate, London (apart from his three years’ active service) from 15 June 1914 until 24 November 1919, when he joined the Ministry of Health. Cards from fellow-conscripts during the war give his working address as ‘Printing, Insurance Commission, Buckingham Gate, London, S.W.’. The move to London – in reaction against the madnesses of Ulster in 1914, just as much as against those of Dublin in 1921 – had already begun. Presumably Iris was born in Dublin because Rene could rely there on kin and womenfolk to help with the birth. And perhaps Rene and Iris had to wait for Hughes to find the flat in Brook Green where they first all lived together.
Honor Tracy was certainly right that the value to Iris of her Irishness was great: ‘… my Irishness is Anglo-Irishness in a very strict sense … People sometimes say to me rudely, “Oh! You’re not Irish at all!” But of course I’m Irish. I’m profoundly Irish and I’ve been conscious of this all my life, and in a mode of being Irish which has produced a lot of very distinguished thinkers and writers’82 – Bowen, Congreve, Sheridan, Wilde, Goldsmith and Yeats all epitomised Irish modes of expression while living in England and ‘regretting Ireland’.83 The term ‘Anglo-Irish’ is less unhelpful if it means, as Arthur Green argued and the OED allows, some broad confluence of English, Irish and indeed Scots-Irish – a product, in fact, of both islands. It is from this point of view interesting that Iris believed she had Catholic Irish connexions,84 as well as Quaker, Church of Ireland and Presbyterian ones. The pattern of English life, she wrote in 1963, can be dull, making little appeal to the imagination.85 Ireland, by contrast, was romantic. Moreover she identified, until 1968, with Ireland-as-underdog.86 England had destroyed Ireland, one of her characters argued in The Red and the Green, ‘slowly and casually, without malice, without mercy, practically without thought, like someone who treads upon an insect, forgets it, then sees it quivering and treads upon it a second time’.87
Iris’s Irish identification was more than romanticism. Her family, Irish on both sides for three hundred years, never assimilated into English life, staying a small enclosed unit on its own, never gaining many – if any – English friends. When Hughes died in 1958, having lived for forty-five of his almost sixty-eight years in England, there were only, to Rene’s distress, six people at the funeral: Iris and John, Rene, cousin Sybil’s husband Reggie, Hughes’s solicitor, and a single kindly neighbour, Mr Cohen, who owned the ‘semi’ with which the Murdoch house was twinned. Not one civil service mourner materialised. And quite as surprising is that no friends or associates of Rene were there. Iris’s first act that year of bereavement was to take Rene and John to Dublin, to find a suitable house for Rene to move back to. The following year Rene took Iris and John to see Drum Manor. There was a dilapidated gatehouse, and some sense of a gloomy and run-down demesne.88 Rene and Iris were reverential.
As Roy Foster has shown, the cult in Ireland of a lost house was a central component of that ‘Protestant Magic’ that both Yeats and Elizabeth Bowen shared:89 Irish Protestantism, Foster argues, even in its non-Ulster mode, is a social and cultural identity as much as a religious one. Some of its elements – a preoccupation with good manners together with a love of drama and occasional flamboyant emotionalism, a superstitious bent towards occultism and magic,* an inability to grow up, an obsession with the hauntings of history and a disturbed love-hate relation with Ireland itself – can be found in Iris as in Bowen and Yeats. Bowen’s Protestant Irishness made of her a ‘naturally separated person': so did Iris’s. Yeats, coming from ‘an insecure middle-class with a race memory of elitism’,90 conquered the inhabitants of great houses such as Coole Park through unique ‘charm and the social power of art’,91 rather as Iris later visited Clandeboye and Bowen’s Court. Both Yeats and Iris elevated themselves socially ‘by a sort of moral effort and a historical sleight-of-hand’.92 Each was, differently, an audacious fabulator, in life as in art.
In the confusion of her latter years when much was to be forgotten, the words ‘Irish’ and ‘Ireland’ were unfailing reminders of Iris’s own otherness. Both struck deep chords, and she would perk up and show particular interest. In Provence in June 1997 she remarked emphatically, ‘I’m nothing if not Irish.’ The following winter, sitting at the small deal kitchen table after a bracing walk on the Radnorshire hills, she disconcerted her hearers by asking, ‘Who am I?’, to which she almost at once soothed herself by musing, ‘Well I’m Irish anyway, that’s something.’ A lifetime’s investment in Irishness, visible in every decade of her life, was then, as it had always been, a source of reassurance, a reference-point, a credential, somewhere to start out from and return to.
Iris’s early memories were of swimming, singing and being sung to, of animals, and of wonderment at the workings of the adult world. She sat at the age of about seven under the table while her parents played bridge – either reading a favourite childhood book or, as she put it, ‘simply sitting in quietness’93 and listening in astonishment to the altercations and mutual reproaches of the adults at the end of each rubber. Wonderment, imaginative identification with a fantastic range of creature-kind, capacity to feel strong emotions, secretiveness, and also Irishness: these are recurrent and related themes within her story.
Early photographs show her a blonde, plump, exceedingly pretty baby, flirting in a straw Kate Greenaway bonnet with her mother, and even more with her photographer-father, in Dalkey in August 1921. If the family was by then already based in London, neither this nor the Black and Tans, who had that year raided ‘rebel’ houses in Blessington Street itself,94 prevented the annual Irish summer holiday. The truce of 11 July that year would have offered holidaymakers, among others, reassurance.
Hughes, Rene and baby Iris lived first of all in a flat at 12 Caithness Road, Brook Green, Hammersmith. Hughes was fairly low down on the civil service ladder but had a permanent position as a second class clerk in the Ministry of Health, a ministry he was to stay at until 1942. He kept a pocketbook in which he noted the day’s expenditures, no matter how minor.95 This same meticulousness shows itself in the young Iris’s carefully managed stamp collection. She tucked away in the back both a small ‘duplicate book’, in case of losses, and an envelope marked emphatically ‘valuable stamps: King Edward’, referring, of course, to stamps pertaining to the short reign of Edward VIII.
What exactly constitutes a ‘first’ memory? Surely later imaginative significance as much as strict chronological primacy. Iris gave as her ‘first’ memory not ‘My mother flying up above me like a white bird’,96 but herself swimming in the salt-water baths near Dun Laoghaire when she was three or four years old.97 Her father got quickly to the further side, where he sat and called out encouragement. In 1997 she could still enact the excitement, fear, sense of challenge, and deep love entailed in her infant efforts slowly to swim to the other side and regain her father’s protection – a powerful enough proto-image in itself of her continuing life-quest for the authority of the Father. Another version has Hughes first of all persuading her to jump in, and into his arms.
Swimming was the secret family religion. It is not merely that Hughes liked to swim in the Forty-Foot: swimming is mentioned on postcard after postcard, in letter after letter, from and to Iris over many decades, and the word order of one particular card from Sandycove, Dun Laoghaire, from her mother to Iris makes clear which activity carried the greater weight: ‘Had a bathe this morning – after church.”98 Churchgoing is likely to have occurred mainly because Rene was still singing in the choir.
In her journals Iris would recollect, especially latterly, many songs her mother taught her. In January 1990 she records:
Recalling Rene. A prayer she must have taught me when
I was a small child. I remember it as phrased –
Jesus teacher: shepherd hear me:
bless thy little: lamb tonight:
in the darkness: be thou near me:
keep me safe till: morning light.
She must have taught it to me word for word as soon as I could talk.99”
Rene also sang to Iris ‘Tell me the old, old story of Jesus and His Love’. But who exactly was Jesus’s love? The infant Iris, misconstruing this sentence as small children are apt to, used to wonder …
Grown-up Iris knew the words of the combative ‘Old Orange Flute’, probably from her father, who could also recite Percy French’s ‘Abdul the Bulbul Ameer’. Rene sang, as well as works such as Handel’s Messiah in a choir, light ballads, French’s among others. Percy French songs suggest the comfortable synthetic Irishness Tracy later made fun of in her books. Rene took pride, too, in singing Nationalist or ‘rebel’ songs:
Here’s to De Valera,
The hero of the right,
We’ll follow him to battle,
With orange green and white.
We’ll fight against old England
And we’ll give her hell’s delight.
And we’ll make De Valera King of Ireland.
After the shootings that followed the Easter Rising, when Rene was seventeen, some Protestant Richardsons were pro-independence;100 Rene was pro-Michael Collins and against De Valera in 1922, when the two found themselves on opposing sides in the civil war. She took delight, when she learnt it later, in the song ‘Johnson’s Motor-Car’. The Nationalist ‘rebels’ borrow Constable Johnson’s car for urgent use, and promise to return it in this fashion:
We’ll give you a receipt for it, all signed by Captain Barr.
And when Ireland gets her freedom, boy, ye’ll get your motor-car.
Grandma Louisa, after a visit to London in the twenties, would often recount Iris sitting on the pavement and weeping inconsolably about a dog which had been hit by a car. Iris was to give the death of a pet dog as a first memory, and first trauma, to characters in successive books.* The dog might have been hers: a photograph of Hughes with a mongrel (possibly containing some smooth-haired terrier) survives, and a smaller third hand must belong to the child Iris, otherwise wholly hidden behind the animal. Another shows Iris proudly stroking the same beast on her own.
There were cats also, Tabby and Danny-Boy. Danny-Boy uttered memorable growling noises on sighting birds from the windowsill. Seventy years later Iris recalled her father wishing the cats goodnight before putting out the lights.101 They attracted friends: Cousin Cleaver recalls Hughes putting out fish and chicken for the neighbourhood strays.102 There seems never to have been a time when Iris was not capable of identifying with and being moved by the predicament of animals – dogs especially. When the Mail on Sunday invited her in 1996 to contribute to a series on ‘My First Love’,103 her husband John, writing on her behalf, told of her first falling in love as a small girl with a slug. It is not wholly implausible. Cousin Sybil remembers Iris and Hughes carefully collecting slugs from the garden, and then tipping them gently onto waste land beyond. In the autumn of 1963, seeing John’s colleague John Buxton look sadly at his old dog Sammy during dinner, Iris was moved to tears and could hardly stop weeping. The dog died a few weeks later.
‘The strict faith of the Plymouth Brethren appealed to many mid-nineteenth-century Irish Protestant families, including that of Parnell.’ Roy Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. 1, The Apprentice Mage (Oxford, 1997), p-543, n12.
† Told in Gath (Belfast, 1990), reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement, 21 June 1991, p.10, ‘A Peculiar People’ by Pat Raine, and by Patricia Beer in the London Review of Books, 23 May 1991, p.12. Iris and Wright met only once, when she received her honorary doctorate at Queen’s University in 1977, although they corresponded thereafter.
Probably his cousins Isabella and Annie Jane, always known as Daisy and Lillie, daughters of Thomas Hughes Murdoch.
Elias married Charlotte Isabella Neale, a Quaker. His sister Sarah married firstly Charles Neale, who was Charlotte’s brother and also a Quaker. One child of this marriage, Mariette Neale, an active Quaker, was step-aunt to Reggie Livingston, also a Quaker, who married Iris’s first cousin Sybil.
† Quakers figure in An Accidental Man, A Word Child, Henry and Cato, The Message to the Planet, The Philosopher’s Pupil and Jackson’s Dilemma. See Arthur Green, ‘The Worlds of Iris Murdoch', Iris Murdoch Newsletter, no. 10, 1996.
Nor did Rene’s mother, Elizabeth Jane Richardson, witness the marriage. Dean’s Grange Cemetery shows that she died, aged seventy-five, on 10 February 1941 at 34 Monkstown Road, where she was living, together with Mrs Walton, with the newly-wed Eva and Billy Lee. The two witnesses are Rene’s sister Gertie and one ‘Annie Hammond’, whose son Richard Frederick Hammond went, often hand-in-hand, to primary school with Rene. Annie Hammond (née Gould) worked as housekeeper first to her husband’s brother Harry Hammond, later to Dr Bobby Jackson of Merrion Square. (Letter from R.F. Hammond’s son Rae Hammond to Iris Murdoch, 4 February 1987.)
See Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch (London, 1993), Chapter 11, ‘Protestant Magic’, pp.215ff. The Richardson version of the ‘Butler’ worn by Yeats may be the frequently recurring middle name of ‘Lindsay’, associating them with the Earls of that name. The Australian Dictionary of National Biography, under ‘Richardson (Henry Handel) ‘, notes that Richardsons claimed descent from the Earls of Lindesay. O’Hart gives four different Lindesay Richardsons among IM’s immediate ancestors.
* For Iris Murdoch’s interest in these matters see pp. 277, 451, 525–6.
* Eugene in The Time of the Angels; Willy in The Nice and the Good.