Forgotten exiles brought back to life

LAUNCH Celt’s history columnist compiles biographies of Cavan people who made an impact abroad

The cover of Jonathan Smyth’s new book says it all really. It shows a mass of people - including some from Cavan - all posing for the camera on Derry’s docks just before they set off on a new life abroad and the unknown. The stars and stripes held by one lady indicates that this particular ship will voyage west across the Atlantic. The stories of the vast majority of the tens of thousands to leave Cavan on ships would ultimately vanish without trace like foam on the waves. But a few made such an impact on their new home that the world took notice.

Over the last eight years Jonathan in his must-read Times Past column has sought to illuminate the achievements of these notable individuals through biographical sketches.

He happily admits having gone “down the rabbit hole on Cavan” he says of his Celt column.

“It’s a fantastic county and there’s so much to learn about it.”

If you think he’s bound to run out of topics at some stage, you don’t know Jonathan. Meticulous, he keeps a couple of journals and a database on local history issues which could become future columns.

“I’ve been gathering up names for years and years,” he says.

His column for the issue of October 26, 2023 has just appeared in my email as I write this.

Amongst the 400 Times Past columns, about a quarter have been about people who left Cavan and made good, and only occasionally made bad. He’s revisited those articles and collected many into a new book titled, Faith, Hard Work and Endurance: Selected Tales from the Cavan Diaspora. The book, his third, is launched to coincide with the festival of all things Breffni, ‘Cavan Calling’.

“One of the things I would have always watched growing up was Eamonn Andrews and This is Your life - I enjoyed those mini biographies, the other side to people,” Jonathan tells the Celt in a nook of Johnston Central Library where he works as a librarian.

The 104 characters in the collection include military figures, clerics, writers, entrepreneurs, politicians, sports figures and campaigners.

“A lot of them did extremely well. One of the things that came across was how Cavan people are very hard working, as a lot of Irish people are, and willing to take chances.

“I often heard it said by people when I was growing up: ‘A Cavanman could go anywhere because he was used to the hardship’.”

Gender

While women are woefully under-represented in the historical record, Jonathan understands the significance of this shortfall, and has tried his utmost to include women of significance. One woman who springs to Jonathan’s mind is novelist Mary Ann Sadlier.

“The Cootehill born author is often classed as North American,” begins Jonathan, who is eager to correct the record, particularly when it comes to his hometown being short-changed. “She wrote novels mainly for a Catholic audience who went off to North America, or Canada. A lot of them had a moral side - it was to try to encourage people to hold onto their beliefs and not lose what they brought with them. She sold all over the world - anywhere that had Irish people - from US to Mexico, Australia wherever, and she wrote over 70 novels, which is quite phenomenal.”

Other local women to populate the book’s pages are campaigners for workers rights, such as Margaret Jane Scott who ventured to New Zealand from Cornafean as a child.

“For me she was someone who took no bull,” he said of Margaret who rose to the top of the trade union movement in her adopted home. Coincidentally a prominent colleague in the campaign for workers’ rights in New Zealand was Aileen Garmson nee Douglas, who came from Kingscourt.

Wide boy

One Cavan exile to whom no one will be raising a monument is the late, not so great, Saville Morton, whose family hailed from around Kilnacrott.

“He was what you might call a Jack the lad or a wide boy,” said Jonathan of a journalist who wrote for the Morning Advertiser. “Anybody he became friends with he usually ended up with their wives.”

Morton’s libido led to his demise in Paris at the hands of his fellow journalist Harold Bower. Bower’s wife had literally just given birth to her fifth child when the secret of the baby’s paternity emerged.

“The husband had been standing outside the door waiting for her to have the baby, and it transpired Saville Morton was the father. Bower was that infuriated he chased Morton through the house and ended up killing him.”

Having stabbed Morton to death, Bower was acquitted by a French jury and in a bizarre denouement was hired to replace Morton as correspondent of the Morning Advertiser.

Jonathan’s willing to show Cavan, warts and all.

“What’s the harm in that?” he replies. “I love biography and I love to see the underside of the carpet as it were.”

Predictably Cavan’s diaspora story is dominated by the anglophone regions: North America, England, and to a lesser extent Australia and New Zealand. Jonathan’s stumped when asked of any notable Cavan figures who went to Asia. Africa however makes an occasional appearance.

“There was a Thomas Greene who went to South Africa and fought against the Zulus and settled there. We think he may have been from around Drung, and he made his life out there. Another man from Ballintemple went out to fight the Zulus too, but we only discovered him recently - he’s coming up [in the Times Past column] in the next couple of weeks.”

Jonathan is sincere in regarding his column as “an honour and a privilege”. By focussing on those who left these shores for the book, he believes it sends an important message: “It’s good to see how people fared out. A lot of people went abroad and were never heard of again. So it’s nice for people abroad to read and to see that there’s an interest back home in their story.”

He notes it’s a two-way relationship with money being sent home by those who did fare well abroad.

“You can see that through the building of churches and helping families back at home on the farm - so there’s a lot of good things came back as well.

“I hope the book will help towards promoting all that is good about our county, its people and our extended family, the great Cavan Diaspora.”

He’s grateful to Sinead McArdle who designed the cover, and the support County Librarian Emma Clancy and Tom Sullivan, and his colleagues in the library service. And also his wife Pauline and sons Keanu, Ethan, and Noah.

‘Faith, Hard Work and Endurance - Selected tales From The Cavan Diaspora will be launched in Johnston Central Library on Friday, July 28 at 6pm.