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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.
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.
4
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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;
the first photographs of him in his regimentals date from 1916. He was accustomed to farm life — 'He was very horsey,’ Iris remarked
– 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.
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,
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 Lieutenant
on 22 February 1918.
Musing about these diaries after they came to light in 1987,
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’.
He enjoyed betting on them, however, like his father, and ‘surprisingly, being Irish, did it quite well’.
5
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,
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.
They fell in love. Irene was dark, petite, very beautiful and spirited. Dublin is a great singing city, and ‘Rene’
(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.
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.
6
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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’,
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,
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.
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,
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.
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’Hart
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 porch
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.
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.
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.
7
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’.
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.
Effingham and Jane had two daughters, Gertrude Anna (born 1891)
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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,
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 city
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.
Today number 59 is divided into seven flats, the ground floor having been around 1990 a betting-shop.
8
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.
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.
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’
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.’
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.
In her fiction she depicted wife after wife who has abandoned career for her husband.
9
The fine comic writer Honor Tracy
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.
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.
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’.
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’
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.
