Be it ever so humble
There’s no place like home.
A charm from the sky
Seems to hallow us there.
Which seek thro’ the world
Is ne’er met with elsewhere
An exile from home,
Splendour dazzles in vain
O give me my lowly
Thatched cottage again.
John Howard Payne, ‘Home Sweet Home’
‘Home Sweet Home’ was one of the most popular songs of the nineteenth century. Soon after its first performance in 1823, in the opera Clari, the song was sung in drawingrooms and streets, in arrangements from piano and brass band to the hurdy-gurdy. It was more than sentimental nineteenth-century schmaltz extolling the virtues of domestic life. For those displaced and dispossessed by the political and economic turmoil of the nineteenth century, the song spoke directly to their memories of a ‘home sweet home’ irretrievably located in lost times and places. The song was well-enough known to be a musical joke. When in 1859 Jean Francois Gravelet, known as the Great Blondin, walked a tightrope across the Niagara River near the Falls, he was greeted as he reached the Canadian side by a brass band playing ‘Home Sweet Home’. The song slipped easily into the encore repertoire, often as a last song in a farewell concert, with Adelina Patti, Nellie Melba and Joan Sutherland keeping up the tradition. Adelina Patti added a few extra high notes to further please her audience. A technically brilliant remastering allows us to admire Nellie Melba’s pure voice on a recording made in 1905, and now easily accessible on YouTube. Wherever and whenever audiences heard ‘Home Sweet Home’, it stirred memories of home and homeland and created a half-pleasurable, half-painful emotional reaction in audiences well-primed to shed their tears.
Home remembered from afar is part of my own family history. In 1913 my Irish grandparents, Alice Rebecca and Robert King, left Connemara for Australia, together with five members of their family. Religious intolerance in the vicious form of ostracism and boycott forced them to leave. For Alice and Robert, ‘home’ had many meanings: the home they remembered, with its beauty, and its troubles; the new home they found in a welcoming Australia; and the ultimate home that, in faith, they believed awaited them at life’s end.
Whereas the Irish-born generation in Australia looked back on Ireland as a lost homeland, for the Australian-born grandchildren Ireland is more a romantic place of song, legends and stories. In our family, sentimental Irish songs are popular. Some of us have Irish names. Claddagh rings are exchanged. We go back on tourist visits. Two of us inherited our grandparents’ version of ‘Home Sweet Home’ in the form of reproductions of paintings by the Irish artist Paul Henry. Henry, who lived in Connemara from 1900 to 1919, was one of the first Irish Impressionists. He shows the hard life of the times for what it was: the lowly thatched cottages, the sods of peat turf stacked against walls, the rutted dirt roads that wind to distant blue hills. Hardship was there, but also beauty. Henry’s skies glow. His water shimmers. ‘A charm from the sky seems to hallow us there’ is brilliantly captured in light reflected from sky and lough. At the turn of the twentieth century, the west of Ireland came to be seen as a pure land, a place where the ancient language, culture and spirit lived on uncorrupted, and Henry caught this moment in time. My grandparents could subscribe to the image, while fleeing the reality.
As an emigrant family there is one thing we had to which we could return. The house built by my great-grandfather Michael King sometime in the 1860s still stands in Cleggan, County Galway. As an ancestral house, Seaview House was far from humble: a large two-storey stone farmhouse with a slate roof and a view over Cleggan Bay. It presided over the largest farm in the area. The house and farm remained in King family hands for some one hundred years until 1967, when it was inherited by a step-relation, then sold to become a riding school. Cleggan is now a holiday destination for tourists. My grandparents would have been astounded at its transformation.
The one photograph we have from the late nineteenth century shows an imposing white house with a jaunting cart parked outside. On Sundays, two horses were harnessed to the cart to take the family a few miles to church. At one end of the house, a door opened into a separate shop and post office, for the family also ran the first post office in Cleggan. Once, my King greatgrandparents were clearly prosperous and settled. Yet one by one their children left Connemara until only one son remained on the family farm. The story, as members of the Australian-born generation unravelled it, turned out to be far more curious than our parents ever knew.
The story of my grandparents’ emigration starts with the terrible events of the 1840s, the period of the great Famine, a period well before they were born, but which shaped their lives. (In histories of Ireland, the word ‘Famine’ is given respect with a capital letter, as is ‘Workhouse’.) Between 1845 and 1848 the potato crop failed for four successive years, and it was the poor in the west of Ireland who suffered the most. Between the two census years of 1841 and 1851, the population of Connemara fell by ten thousand, about one third, as peasants were evicted from their land and most faced starvation. In 1847, 87 per cent of the inhabitants were dependant on soup rations distributed by the Relief Commissioners.
It was to Connemara in the 1850s that my great-great-grandfather Thomas King (c.1812–1885) moved with his family. He was a scripture reader employed by the Protestant Irish Church Missions. On my grandmother’s side of the family, my great-grandfather William Manning (1828–1903) was native to the area and lived there through the Famine years. By the early 1850s he converted to Protestantism, swayed by the harsh doctrine that the Famine was the judgment of God upon the Catholics for holding to their old religion. God had judged the poor, but the Irish Church Missions, with funding from England, would help them learn the error of their ways.
The Irish Church Missions were established from England to convert the Catholics of Ireland to Protestantism. Though they brought food to the starving and education to the children, their main aim was to save their souls. Both Thomas King and William Manning were mission agents and scripture readers, employed to teach ‘the true knowledge of scripture’ in homes and schools. By 1856 they were two of eleven mission agents at Sellerna, where Thomas King remained until his death in 1885, while William Manning moved on to other places within the region. They must have known each other. In 1901 William Manning’s youngest daughter, Alice Rebecca, would marry Robert William King, a grandson of Thomas King. Alice and Robert were my grandparents. Both sides of my Irish family were evangelical Protestants in a Catholic area, a recipe for the trouble that would come their way.
William Manning was a native Irish speaker, able to interpret the Bible in the language of his people. We still have his Irish Bible in our family, though none of his descendants can read it. Inside, pinned to a green grosgrain ribbon, there is a small pressed flower of the May, or hawthorn, perhaps as remembrance of William’s granddaughter Mabel (May), who died in 1897 at the age of twelve. Certainly the Bible provided a memento of home for his daughters Alice and Sarah, the mother of May, for they brought it to Australia when they emigrated in 1913.
The mission agents’ philanthropy came with heavy conditions. The writer Tim Robinson describes the Irish Church missions as ‘that second blight that visited Connemara’. It wasn’t enough the people had to endure the Famine. They had to cope with a zealous group of missionaries, including my ancestors, who told them the Famine was their own fault. According to the Protestant tract, The Banner of the Truth (1852), Catholics were not Christians because they put their faith in the ‘false atonement and false mediators’ of Pope and priests. Today, I find it distressing to read these virulent sectarian diatribes, with their elaborate, mean-spirited claims that Catholics were damned to hell.
At the time of the Famine, for those looking for explanations for the horrors they endured, the tirades must have seemed credible. In the battle for the souls of the benighted, anything goes. Miriam Moffitt, the historian of the Irish Church Missions, writes that the methods used by Protestants in their missions, and Catholics in response, were ‘dubious, underhand, hypocritical and harsh: but it must be remembered that this battle was fought for the purest of motives—that all should enter the kingdom of heaven’.
For the Protestants, heaven was a place where you wouldn’t meet a Catholic, and in the Catholic heaven of those times you would certainly never meet a Protestant. Disputatious members of each faith endured a life of misery in this world, and were prepared to make life miserable for others, for their own good. They certainly weren’t aiming for an afterlife that embraced difference. The term ‘conversion’ is of that era, replaced in the twenty-first century by the less coercive notion of ‘inter-faith dialogue’. In nineteenth-century Ireland, there was less dialogue, more inter-faith hostility. There is a family story that Annie Greer, a Manning granddaughter, was trusted with minding a Protestant neighbour’s newborn baby. She ran away with him through the night to a safe place, so the Catholic priest could not baptise him. That must have been round 1900 or so.
It was a harsh life in Connemara then, and a harsh set of beliefs. For over fifty years, William Manning devotedly served the Irish Church Missions, both as teacher and scripture reader. He retired in 1892, already having been described in 1880 as ‘aged and infirm’ and unable to go out in bad weather. I imagine the life his wife, my greatgrandmother Mary Jane Manning, must have led, raising ten children and moving with her husband to his seven postings in the west Connemara area. (Thomas King served twenty-nine years, mostly in the one place, Sellerna.)
Most likely there is no Manning house still standing to which the family can return. The mission cottages would have been humble enough, though some are described as ‘slated houses’ rather than, presumably, the older thatched cottages or cabins. Today in Connemara there are few physical traces of the schools and churches built by the missions. Many buildings were burned or demolished during the Civil War of 1922–23. In 1926 the disused mission church at Sellerna, where both William Manning and Thomas King had been stationed, was demolished. The stones were removed and dispersed by local people intent on destroying all trace of mission activities. The mission schools brought reading and writing, and teaching in the English language to areas where there were no schools, but the children faced examination in Scripture, and were taught arguments and verse to refute the ‘Romanism’ of their parents. No wonder the scripture readers were often pelted with stones, or beaten up when they found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Irish Church Mission activity was all but over by the end of the nineteenth century. The older agents like William and Thomas died, and their children either migrated, or converted. My ancestors were part of a religious movement that was a spent force by 1900. My grandparents left Ireland because the proselytising missions of their ancestors had failed.
I mentioned there is a King family house, Seaview House, that still stands at Cleggan, built by my great-grandfather Michael King in the 1860s. This is the house to which three of my King cousins have returned. In 1965 one of us met Theresa King, the widow of my great-uncle Hal King. Theresa was then ninety-two years old, and sprightly enough to show off the farm, but apologised for no longer being able to climb over the stile. Theresa pointed to three small holes in a drystone wall, which my uncle Wallace and my father Oliver had carved with their pen-knives around 1911. In a letter written in 1932, Hal recalled: ‘Each time I cross into the garden, I see the stone, and I think of you all, and I very often lay a potato or two in these little holes that I find loosely lying in the furrow.’ In 2002 another cousin returned and went riding on local paths on a horse from the Seaview stables. He found Hal’s grave in a cemetery on nearby Omey Island. Hal, the one King who remained in Connemara, had died a Catholic. In 2007 another cousin, Fiona, went back, and found out more. She met Theresa’s great-nephew John, who had inherited then sold the house. One by one the three cousins going ‘home’ learned a little more of the family story, but it was Fiona who learned the terrible family secret.
As children, we were told stories of why the family left Cleggan. In the first decade of the twentieth century, my grandfather Robert lived in the family house with his parents and then his own family. He farmed the land, and also ran a thriving fish-salting and marketing business, taking the catch of local fisherman and preparing it for sale on the London market. He employed a good number of local men and women. But in 1910 that all changed. A local priest told his flock they had to boycott his farm and business because Robert was Protestant. No Catholics would work for him.
In the nineteenth century in Ireland, ‘boycotting’ was a popular and efficient form of revolt against, first, absentee English landlords, then against the activities of the mission agents. The boycotts arose, Miriam Moffitt writes, from Catholic resentment at the mission’s controversial approach and its system of bribing converts to attend service or send their children to mission schools. However by 1910 there is no evidence that Michael King or his family were active mission agents. Indeed they seemed to have left proselytising well behind to become merchants and farmers. The boycott seemed more of a local thing, organised by a local priest, and seemingly more against Robert than his brother Hal, who was allowed to buy the farm and continue the business. Hal was then or later became a Catholic convert, so perhaps that’s why he was spared. Whatever the reasons for the social and economic ostracism, our family were pawns caught in the struggle for supremacy between the Catholic and the Protestant churches and, like so many in such circumstances, they were forced to leave.
Of course all this would be nothing more than the propensity of one half of humanity to make life miserable for the other half, except for some intriguing documents relating to Seaview House that Fiona’s visit brought to light. Legal documents relating to house sales tend to be kept. There are plenty of stories in Ireland of Americans who returned and peremptorily tried to claim their ancestors’ cottages. Through the new owners of Seaview House, Fiona was introduced to John O’Toole, the step-relation who had inherited and sold the property. John had kept some important documents. He said: ‘I’ve been waiting for a King to return.’ Fiona took him to the pub and got the stories.
To backtrack for a moment: some of our family stories come from unpublished memoirs of my uncle Wallace, who was born in Ireland in 1902, and had some clear memories of his first ten years there. Reading his memoirs today, it is clear he didn’t know much about his grandparents Michael and Matilda. As Wallace was a doctor, it was clearly a professional matter for him to record, if not the date of death, then the causes of the deaths of his family members. But of Michael he had little information, and of his grandmother, though he supposedly lived in the same house as her, he said: ‘Matilda was a small slight woman, who was not very well, so that we didn’t see much of her’.
What Fiona discovered when she went back was that Michael did not die until 1917, well after his son Robert came into ownership of Seaview. She learned of bad blood between the brothers Robert and Hal when Robert was faced with boycott, and planned to sell the house. She learned of the legal dispute between the two brothers. She heard about a buried treasure, and a fortune gained and lost. She found out that Michael King had descended into madness, which was why Robert came into ownership of Seaview well before the death of his father. Here is some of what John told Fiona on video:
Once again my grand-aunt Hal’s wife told me this. It was her testimony. Mike King invested money in a new bank that had started business in England. I don’t know the name of the bank but this bank went bust after a short period and Mike lost all his money and this I’m afraid had a very detrimental effect on his mind and then he had some money left in sovereigns, perhaps a few hundred pounds which would be quite a bit. Well then he went and buried the sovereigns somewhere in his own land. I’m afraid I was never able to locate the place and the story goes that he was seen burying the money and when he went back to find it, and it had been stolen, and that led him if not to full insanity then it certainly tipped him along.
John produced a copy of Michael’s will, and it makes for sad reading. In 1917 Michael had died in the Oughterard Workhouse. All but one of his children had emigrated by then. No doubt the will was a fairly standard Workhouse will for someone with little to leave except his mare. But from the will it is also clear that Michael died a Catholic, asking for a priest to say mass for the repose of his soul, and for burial in the Catholic Cemetery at Oughterard.
Death in the Workhouse—this was a shameful family secret none of Michael’s Australian grandchildren ever knew. Death as a Catholic in the Workhouse—that would have been even worse for his children, and they never mentioned it, at least not to the family chronicler, Wallace. It would not have worried my father and his siblings, who were glad to be free of the sectarian troubles of Ireland. Michael’s wife, Matilda, we discover from other documents, was in New York for part of the time Wallace lived in the house, from 1905 to 1908 and again from 1909 until her death. Her emigrant daughters Isabella and Martha must have rescued her from an impossible situation. The reason Wallace didn’t often see his grandmother, though he thought she was living in the same house, was that she was in America. That’s a family secret for you.
My cousins are sorting through the family papers we have, and making copies for each other. Marvellous things are turning up. We were excited to find a poem written by our great-uncle Robert Manning in 1897. Robert was the second son of William and Mary Jane Manning. He wrote the poem on the death of his niece Mabel Greer at the age of twelve, of peritonitis. (We have the fact she died from peritonitis, as Wallace recorded it.) The poem was no doubt written fairly quickly for the sudden, sad occasion. It describes this world as a transient dwelling-place full of suffering, and says there is a better home in heaven, an ultimate place of rest.
The poem survives on a printed broadsheet, possibly for distribution at the funeral. A few lines will give the gist:
This day in darkness dawned for me,
This day, loved May, has set you free—
This day to me brought tears and sadness
To you, sweet child, eternal gladness
A crown of bright robes, Heaven’s golden street
Harps, palms and songs, for pure lips meet.
Heaven’s golden streets, a throne of gold, and a bright crown—the images are conventional, yet compelling for my missionary forbears. ‘May His spirit gently lead us home / Home to that land where sighings cease / And all is love and joy and peace.’ For young May: ‘Death’s wave was faced, and heaven’s shore reached.’ She has ‘gone home’.
What we know of May’s short life is that it was tough. She was one of twin girls born to my great-aunt Sarah Greer née Manning, who was widowed when her children were small. The twins were ‘farmed out’, we don’t know where, while their mother worked at a Protestant orphanage and school in Limerick. In 1913 May’s surviving twin, Annie, migrated with her mother Sarah and my grandparents to Australia.
My family’s experience of exile from home well fitted the sentiments of ‘Home Sweet Home’. They mourned a place of beauty at which they looked back with sorrow, even if it was sorrow mixed with anger at what had happened. There was homesickness, yes, but a determination, in coming as far away as they could to Australia, to leave their experience of religious intolerance behind. They left and never went back. They arrived just before World War One. Next came the Great Depression. They lived through tough times in Australia, but they missed the Civil War in Ireland, and the rest of the troubles, which in 1921 claimed the life of their cousin, another Alice King, by IRA or Auxiliary gunfire.
Robert died in 1931, Alice in 1939, in Sydney. They never returned to Ireland. Today their grandchildren and great-grandchildren travel the world, accepting the new era of mass travel as their right.
One of the reasons for the huge popularity of the song ‘Home Sweet Home’ was that it captured so well the sense of longing for home amongst those forced into exile to all corners of the world in the vast social changes of the nineteenth century. I can also claim a personal connection with the song. My late husband, Harold, took great delight in a distant family relationship to the singer Dame Anna Bishop, wife of the Englishman Henry Bishop, who in 1823 added the lyrics of ‘Home Sweet Home’ to a tune he had composed in 1813. Anna was Harold’s great-great-great-aunt. Her sister and sometime accompanist Louisa was Harold’s great-great-grandmother.
When, in 1839, Anna Bishop ran away from her London home with the French harpist, convicted forger and bigamist Nicholas Bochsa, she took the song with her, and performed it all over the world to enraptured audiences of exiles. In 1854 she sang in a canvas and deal theatre put up for her in the Californian goldfields. Her rendition of ‘Home Sweet Home’ reduced rowdy miners to tears. In 1866 she was shipwrecked on Wake Island in the Mariana Islands and, after three weeks and 1400 miles at sea in an open boat, arrived in Guam with twenty-two other survivors. In gratitude, Anna and her group gave a concert for the Governor, where her ‘Home Sweet Home’ brought down the house. By 1876 Anna was in South Africa where she sang to soldiers in the military garrison at Pietermaritzburg and they cried too. Two years later, many of the soldiers fought and died in the Zulu Wars, a long way away from home. Through the power of her voice, Anna aroused emotions of loss in her listeners, to whom music also brought release and consolation. She sang the cadences of home.
In 1849, while travelling by coach in country Mexico, Anna and her entourage were accosted by robbers. According to Bochsa’s version of the story, which may be a little embroidered, brigands forced their coach to stop in a lonely place, and called to Anna: ‘Senora Bishop, do not be alarmed! We wish only to rob you of a song.’ In this situation, ‘Home Sweet Home’ would not have been appropriate, for the brigands were very much at home, and the song was remote from their expectations. Anna, however, was an accomplished performer, and adept at pleasing her audiences. In every country she toured, she learned some local songs. As the brigands waited impatiently for the accompanist to get organised, Bochsa unpacked his harp and found two broken strings. Forced to play on, he performed sitting on a wayside grave. Anna had a song even for this occasion: ‘La Pasadita’, a satirical take on the activities of American soldiers in Mexico City. She sang to a wild ‘Bravo!’ from her wild audience.
As an ambitious young woman, Anna found in Nicholas Bochsa someone who both recognised her talent and knew how to exploit it. At fourteen years of age, Anna had been selected as a student of piano for the Royal Academy of Music in London. At sixteen she began to study singing, and soon saw the possibilities of making an exciting career of her own. At the age of twenty-one, she married her singing teacher, Henry Bishop, a month after the death of his first wife. She began her professional career in the concerts Bishop organised. But Bishop was hopeless with money, and did not promote Anna’s career as much as she wanted. When Anna met Bochsa and took part in his concerts, she found she was able to earn good money doing what she did best. Both musicians were well placed to exploit the dramatic rise in the music industry and music market in the nineteenth century. They fell in love, and ran off to tour the world together, though forced to avoid France where there was a warrant out for Bochsa’s arrest. Sir Henry Bishop was left to bring up his and Anna’s three children. Anna and Bochsa were the scandal of London.
Bochsa was an entrepreneur in a new mould: indeed some of his activities indicate he was possibly one of the first of the dodgy musical entrepreneurs. As a child, he was a prodigy, from the age of eight playing six different instruments in the orchestra of the Lyons Opera. He was harpist to Napoleon Bonaparte from 1813 until 1814, then to Louis XVIII of France. He was widely acclaimed as the finest harpist of the nineteenth century. His departure from France was both sudden and scandalous. In 1817, on hearing that he was about to be arrested for forgery, Bochsa arrived at the Paris theatre where he was billed to appear. He kept the coach waiting as he raided the cloakroom of valuables and stole the night’s takings. He escaped to London, and began organising concerts there.
In March 1839 Bochsa organised a tour for Anna through Ireland and Scotland. In Dublin he set the price for tickets a little higher than Dubliners were accustomed to paying, as a hook to make them think they would be getting something really special. It worked. Clever publicity ensured that the theatre was sold out in advance. Bochsa knew the bigger the audience, the better—that the crowd would be more easily swayed by shared emotions. He also gave value for money. The concerts were long, and the programme packed with variety. Anna sang solos from opera, with spectacular changes of costume to suit each character. On this tour, her sister Louisa Rivière played the piano accompaniment. A massed band performance by the ‘the complete and eminent Band of the Eleventh Fusiliers’ added to the spectacle. Bochsa capped his virtuoso performances on the harp with a flourish of variations on tunes called from the audience.
Bochsa knew how to draw the crowds, and how to manipulate their emotions. ‘Home Sweet Home’ found a ready place in his concerts. Together, Anna and Bochsa were a musical, professional and emotional partnership. They remained a devoted couple until January 1856 when Bochsa died suddenly on their Sydney tour. Above his grave Anna erected an elaborate statue of a woman seated in mourning beneath a harp with broken strings. What remains of the grave can still be seen in Camperdown Cemetery.
Not just ‘Home Sweet Home’ but songs of exile more generally appealed to the new audience for mass entertainment. I mentioned earlier how rapidly ‘Home Sweet Home’ made the transition from the opera stage to the street. The lyrics were published as a broadside ballad and sold by street singers. One ballad sheet surviving from 1850s Manchester has the words of ‘Home Sweet Home’ on one side, and on the back the words of a song of lesser fame today, ‘When This Old Hat Was New’. The two songs complement each other. Once ‘this old hat was new’ and times were good, but alas, present times are bleak, and the owner, poor, hungry, and dispossessed, is a reluctant wanderer far from home. ‘When this old hat was new’ suggests home exists now only as a memory and, wherever the audience is now, it is no place like home. In the lyrics of ‘Home Sweet Home’ the rhyme of home with roam is repeated three times. Yet ‘Home Sweet Home’ also projects an ideal of home as a place of comfort and safety. ‘Home Sweet Home’ was a song to be sung after rescue from shipwreck, or to soldiers going to war, or to itinerant goldminers. Songs of exile were popular because they spoke to the real experience of so many lives lived in far away places from which there would never be a return.
In 2008 Dame Kiri te Kanawa recorded ‘Home Sweet Home’ in Maori. When I first heard it on YouTube, I imagined she was singing her own translation of the words. I admired her impassioned performance, and the enthusiastic response of her audience. I marvelled at how a song performed for an English domestic audience in 1823 could be so transformed in time, place and language, yet maintain a popular appeal. I discovered, however, that the Maori translation had been made in 1914 by Sir Apirana Ngata, the first New Zealand Maori parliamentarian, when he compiled a songbook for the use of the Maori Contingent in World War One. Here is how a verse of the song translates back into English:
You can search this whole world
For a place resembling
Your home villlage
and find a profound emptiness there.
I like to imagine that the men singing these words in a hostile place remote from their home villages found something that helped them, if only for a moment. Such is the power of music that it moves into the place of profound emptiness, allows for the experience of loss, and hopelessness, and terror, and then, ultimately, grants solace. That ‘Home Sweet Home’ might possess that quality is perhaps a revelation, yet not a complete surprise. Songs that speak of home, or exile from it, trigger emotions and memories that are part of the experience of us all.