Clodagh Finn: The love stories that made headlines
Said Have Molly Allgood A Had With Relationship Jm Synge Was Tempestuous To
Whatever about the legal and long-term implications of putting the term ‘durable relationships’ into the Irish Constitution, is there any formulation of words more likely to deaden the thrill of romance? It takes all the danger out of a liaison, making it sound more like a sensible, lace-up shoe.
Perhaps good partnerships are indeed like that but, ahead of Valentine’s Day next week, let’s rekindle a bit of the spark with these love stories from history:
In 1889, the October wedding of Margaret ‘Tottie’ Fitzgerald, a barmaid of Queenstown (now Cobh), and American millionaire Maurice du Pont of Delaware caused a sensation in the US press.
Du Pont came from the famous industrialist family later credited with inventing nylon, and landed in Cobh in July of that year while travelling to Europe. He was smitten by Margaret ‘Tottie’ Fitzgerald, from Brosna, Co Kerry, from the get-go.
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According to a highly entertaining report in the , the millionaire with his natty neckwear and russet shoes could be seen ‘basking in Tottie’s smiles’. He spent his time ‘lounging in an easy chair in front of the barroom of the Queen’s hotel, with one eye cast out over the sea and the other intently fixed on the busy little barmaid within the house’.
The admiration was clearly mutual as the couple were married by the Rev Canon Sheehan at SS Peter and Paul’s Church in Cork on 12 October. It was a romance that captivated the American public, according to Christy Keating who brings the story back to life in the current issue of the Cobh Chronicle.
“Love as a Leveller” proclaimed the Lancaster Intelligencer of Pennsylvania. “Young Millionaire Maurice Du Pont Marries a Pretty Barmaid,” ran the headline, before going on to tell readers not to mind the way and wherefore: “Love can level ranks, and therefore — a marriage not for titles.”
The report was later reprinted in this newspaper under the heading, “Maurice Du Pont weds the pretty girl in Queenstown”. It was followed by this killer line: “Beauty and virtue are the only dowry she brings to her husband”.
Though she appears to have had a lot more besides because other reports describe her as a woman “tart of tongue, good-looking and witty” who was welcomed into the family by her wealthy in-laws.
Whatever about the beginnings, theirs was a story with a very happy end. The couple were together for 52 years. Those years were the happiest of Tottie’s life, she told in 1946. “If I had my life to live over again, I would plead for one thing, that my husband be allowed to live as long as I.”
They might have been described as ‘the odd couple’, but playwright John Millington Synge and actor Molly Allgood got engaged in 1907 not long after Molly played the first Pegeen Mike in Synge’s .
Molly, sister of fellow actor Sara Allgood, took the stage-name Maire O’Neill to set them apart. She was just 18 when she met the-then 34-year-old Synge. Much was said about the gap in age, not to mention life experience. Synge came from a privileged background and had studied at Trinity College in Dublin, while she had spent time in an orphanage and came to the Abbey theatre from her job as a department-store shop assistant.
Love flourished anyway, even if the relationship was said to be tempestuous at times. Only Synge’s love letters survive and they tell a story of deep love and devotion. He called Molly his ‘changeling’ and signed off ‘Your Tramp’.
In one, he wrote: “Dear Heart, in four days — damn them — I will be in the Seventh heaven again, with my little changeling, my little jewel, my love and life, in my arms.”
He died in 1909 before they had a chance to marry. Two years later, Molly married English drama critic George Mair. She called her first daughter, Pegeen.
Nurse and Cumann na mBan member Elizabeth O’Farrell famously stepped out of the frame when Patrick Pearse was photographed surrendering to General Lowe after the Easter Rising in 1916. Her boots were still visible when the first published the picture, but they were edited out in subsequent editions.
In later years, she said she regretted not being visible because women’s contributions had been so overlooked in the new State. She came to represent the airbrushing, both literal and figurative, of women from history.
If her political activism was obscured, her relationship with fellow Cumann na mBan member Julia ‘Sheila’ Grenan was not. They lived together as a couple and when Elizabeth died in 1957, Julia was described as ‘the chief mourner’ at her funeral in Glasnevin cemetery, Dublin.
Four years later, Julia had her body exhumed and moved to a new grave next to the Republican plot. Julia said she wanted to be buried with her partner and, pointedly, left a blank space on the gravestone which had been erected by the National Graves Association.
When she died in 1972, her wish was fulfilled and the blank space was inscribed with these poignant words: ‘And her faithful comrade and lifelong friend, Sheila Grenan'.
In fact, it is more accurate to say that Friedrich Engels, co-founder of Marxism, had close relationships with two Irish women. He met Mary Burns while he was researching the Conditions of the Working Class in England, the 1845 book that exposed the horror of Manchester’s factories and slums.
Mary’s parents emigrated from Tipperary to Britain and she had been working in factories since the age of nine. She volunteered to show Engels the city’s slums and they soon became a couple.
Like so many other factory workers, her life makes little impression on the documentary record. On the other hand, her influence on Engels leaves behind a lasting and deep trace. She helped him to appreciate the lot of the factory worker and, as a supporter of the Fenian movement, changed his at-first contemptuous view of the Irish.
The couple visited Ireland in 1856 where Engels witnessed the impact of the still-recent Famine. He was shocked by the level of repression and policing in Ireland.
They never married, believing it to be a bourgeois institution, but they lived together as a couple until Mary died, aged 40, in 1863.
Sometime later, Engels began a relationship with Mary’s sister Lydia, or Lizzie. Although they did not marry at first, Engels regularly referred to her as his ‘wife’, and a politicised one at that. ‘My wife is a revolutionary Irishwoman,’ he once wrote.
Despite her radical views, Lizzie expressed a wish to marry formally after she became seriously ill. Lydia ‘Lizzie’ Burns and Friedrich Engels were married just hours before she died on 12 September 1878.
“My wife,” Engels wrote in a letter to German social democrat Julie Bebel afterwards, “was a real child of the Irish proletariat and her passionate devotion to the class in which she was born was worth much more to me — and helped me more in times of stress — than all the elegance of an educated, artistic middle-class bluestocking.”