Sagarra Living With My Century

A Memoir
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-84351-844-0
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

Professor Eda Sagarra, born in 1933, has been a significant and influential figure in Irish and European academic policy-making, contributing to the early development of the Erasmus scheme. Now, aged nearly 88, this memoir gives striking evidence of her self-discipline and formidable energy. This substantial memoir by one of the foremost female academics in Ireland starts with Sagarra's own perspective on committing her life story to history during the pandemic lockdown of 2020: The following memoir recalls for those born in the present century and schooled without the strong sense of Irish history, which defined our people from the Great Famine of the 1840s until recent times, what it was like to grow up as a woman in the twentieth century and seek a career in a man's world. It tries to re-capture as much what it felt like to the person experiencing it as what was happening in society. Younger people today who read of the restrictions to which women were subject in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, will find it difficult to comprehend why our generation and the one that followed ours didn't challenge them. But probably the greatest contrast between the Ireland of then and now was the room for manoeuvre - or rather the absence of it. Today our lives are premised on a constantly changing world. Ireland is more connected across the globe than ever it was. Today most people are mobile. The Ireland when I was young was in almost every respect a static, hierarchical and paternalist society, one in which the accident of your birth would generally determine your whole life. No life is representative, but every person's experience is unique and worth recording for those who come after us.  A south Dublin convent girl, Sagarra probes childhood and family, schooling, and UCD - with a perceptive commentary on the Ireland of the 1930s and 1940s. Her remarkable memory and shrewd eye for detail present at times a painfully honest account of family and in the upper middle-class world of Catholic south Dublin, revealing the profound influence of Europe during her postgraduate years in post-war Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Running through this forensic account of her academic life is a keen awareness of the constant if subtle barriers to female advancement. For contemporary critics reconstructing the history of gender equality in Ireland and for readers of feminist history, this makes for essential reading. Her description of retirement since 1998 is colourful, poignant and revealing, and her reflections on old age and youth resonate.

Professor Eda Sagarra has had an illustrious academic career. Currently emeritus Professor of German at Trinity College Dublin, she was also the first female Registrar at Trinity from 1981 to 1986 and held the position of Professor of German from 1975 to 1998. Author of a number of key books on German history and literature, she has also written about Irish history in the form of a biography of her father, the Irish Volunteer Kevin O'Shiel.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sagarra, Eda

Leseproben

— ONE —

The 1930s: Who I am and where I came from

FAMILY

My elder sister Clodagh and I were the relatively uncommon mixture of Irish counties, our father from Tyrone in Ulster and our mother from Cork, the largest and most southerly county of the province of Munster. In Ireland we all have our stereotypical associations of the character of each county, of Tyrone people as being frugal and (to outsiders surprisingly) proud of their rugged landscape,* while Corkonians are regarded as having an irritating sense of superiority, documented in their alleged fondness for a white map of Ireland with only Cork in red, the rest being marked ‘not Cork’. At the time of his marriage to our future mother Kevin O’Shiel at thirty-eight was thirteen years older than his wife. In the secretive manner of Irish families in those days, we were never told about his first marriage nor of his two sons, our stepbrothers, who had died at birth, the second costing his mother her life. And when as a child I came across a large cigarette box inscribed in Irish ‘Do Caoimhghín Ó Siadhail le linn a phósta … 22 Mí Lúghnasa, ó n-a Chó-ofigigh 1922’* and shared my exciting discovery with Clodagh, it never dawned on either of us to speak about it to our parents. We only discovered about our deceased half-brothers sixty years later during a visit to our father’s sister, Syra.

In common with most Irish families, we were descended on both sides from small farmers (my mother would insist, ‘medium farmers’). The O’Shiels were a long-established Ulster family, hereditary physicians to the princely Ulster O’Neill family. They had changed their name to Shields in penal times, having had their ‘profitable lands’ confiscated in the 1660s for being ‘on the wrong side’. Kevin’s father, the mild-mannered Francis Shields, had been apprenticed by his eldest brother to a local solicitor, a characteristic step at that time among the slightly better-off farming classes concerned with upward social mobility. Francis’ mother, Elizabeth (Mitty) Roantree (1864–1932), granddaughter of a butcher and daughter of a primary school teacher and later inspector of schools, was evidently made of stern stuff. She was certainly much more socially ambitious than her husband – to her son Kevin’s frequent embarrassment. When she announced to her husband and their then teenage children that she was going to apply for membership of the local tennis club only to be told that she wouldn’t succeed: ‘There are no Catholics in Omagh Tennis Club’, she simply said, ‘There will be when we are members.’ And Mother was always right. She didn’t wholly approve of Kevin’s choice of second wife, who evidently didn’t take her mother-in-law’s pre-wedding advice to buy a ‘good serge suit for Sundays’. Instead, she like her four sisters preferred to make her own (fashionable) clothes and loved, as my father did, fancy hats and high-heeled shoes to show off her shapely legs. We never knew our northern grandmother, but my impression of her is indelibly shaped by my first encounter with her authentic voice in the form of her will. I suppose the desire to exercise influence on the living beyond the grave is part of human nature, but never a good idea: Working on my father’s biography in the National Archives in 2004, I checked our various ancestors’ wills and encountered the following: ‘I divide my possessions between my son Frank and my daughter Syra. To my eldest son, Kevin O’Shiel, I leave the sum of £150 which is more than the value of all the presents he gave me in his lifetime.’

The fertile townlands of Imovalley farmed by the Smiddy ‘tribe’ from East Cork, whose men were as small in stature as in their holdings, were worlds removed from the stony ground of eastern Tyrone tilled by my O’Shiel ancestors. Cecil’s paternal grandfather William Smiddy was probably the first of his family to realize the potential of his own holding and moved to the outskirts of Cork city in the late 1870s. Cecil’s maternal grandfather, Cornelius O’Connell, had gone into the timber business and could afford to send his only surviving daughter Lilian, born in 1879, to Paris for a year to train as a painter. His money was well spent. Several professionally executed portraits and studies of still-life in oils and water-colours adorn the walls of Lilian’s descendants. She married Willam Smiddy’s eldest son Timothy in 1900, who was employed by his father-in-law in the family business, but unfortunately abandoned her art after her marriage, probably following the birth of four children in five years. Cornelius O’Connell died in 1904 but when his widow Mary followed three years later, she left the family business to her youngest son, aged twenty-two, disinheriting his elder brother and making no mention of Lilian or her grandchildren, whose father was now out of a job. Women’s power is often termed ‘soft power’, but clearly, as suggested by these two female ancestors, Mary O’Connell née Crowley and Elizabeth O’Shiel née Roantree, ‘softness’ could on occasion be toxic.

For decades I liked to pride myself on our typical ‘Irish peasant’ origins. Closeness to the land, as my father so often told me, was a feature of the Irish psyche, and as a young adult after years of being made to feel different following four teenage years in an English boarding school and in all more than twenty years living abroad, I continued to identify myself and our family with ‘the broad mass of the Irish people’. It was only when confronted with the historian Roy Foster’s description of my biography of Kevin O’Shiel (2013) as an uncommon document on an upper middle-class northern Catholic family, and more particularly when I read Tony Farmar’s study of middle-class Ireland from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century,* that I was forced to face the fact: ours were privileged lives. For, despite its financially straitened circumstances and narrow tax base, where a mere 60,000 citizens were liable for income tax, the Irish Free State (1922–48) paid its senior civil servants handsomely. At the time of my birth in 1933 my father as Land Commissioner had a salary of some £800 a year and my mother could afford to employ two country girls, Josie as housemaid and Dolly to look after us as small children. Josie wore a navy cap and uniform in the morning, pale brown and cream in the afternoon; Dolly, whom we idolized (and who together with Josie for years was prayed for each night), wore a dark blue dress with a large white apron except when taking us to the park for our daily walk. Though they had free ‘bed and board’ and ‘the mistress’ supplied their uniforms, they would have been paid for a six-and-a half-day working week a wage of no more than sixty or seventy pounds a year. This they would put towards their ‘dowry’; Dolly in due course got married from our house.

When in 1970 the pioneering Thekla Beere began her two-year research as newly appointed chairman of the Commission on the Status of Women (1970), she was, as she later explained in her understated manner to an interviewer, ‘surprised by what we found’.† People of her world, she said, had little or no conception of the harsh lives of ‘the broad mass of the Irish people’, more particularly of women. If they were married, many women were worn out at the age of forty by multiple births, if single, generally forced to spend their lives as unpaid labourers on the family holding. Domestic service in 1930s and 1940s Ireland was one of the few options for single women in Ireland whose parents could not afford to pay for secondary education (the preserve of the ‘privileged few’). It was a lottery as to whether one’s employer treated her servants as human beings;‡ if not, the employee had little redress since her ability to change jobs in the hope of better conditions was entirely dependent on the ‘maid’s reference’. ‘When reading a reference always look for what isn’t there,’ my grandmother would advise, and this was at least as true in terms of insight into the character of the employer as for those seeking work.

CATHOLIC IRELAND

To my generation and to the following one, ‘Catholic Ireland’ was self-evidently the context of our world. Most Irish families had relations in female or male religious orders or among the diocesan clergy. We were no different. A sizeable percentage of any final-year school class in mid-twentieth-century Ireland would ‘enter’; relatively few before the 1970s would ‘drop out’ before their final profession as nuns, monks or priests, not least on account of ‘the shame’ this would bring upon their families and community. All but one of ‘ours’ stayed the course. On our mother’s side was a great-uncle, Brother Aloysius, who spent seventy years as a Christian Brother, more than half as headmaster of the Richmond, later known as O’Connell School(s). Of the nuns I can only recall Great-aunt Nora, probably because our aunt Muriel hated going to see her as a young child, ‘as she always had a bit of cabbage stuck between her front teeth’. On our paternal grandparents’ side of the family, we had one (Jesuit) priest, Fr Daniel Shields, a pillar of conservative values who served many years as chaplain to one of the Guards Regiments in Britain. Three of our Roantree grandmother’s sisters became nuns in different orders. None of our own aunts or uncles or their children entered religion, probably reflecting the greater career opportunities by then available for...