Carry On… the Spinsters' Club
Following on from the bold antics of the Bachelors’ Club antics in Bailieborough, it is the turn of the ladies this week. Personally, I have never liked the word spinster. It reminds me of Rosa Klebb, a frumpish clothed but fiendish secret service operative (the stern old dear with the knife-tipped shoe in From Russia with Love). But when it came to marriage it seemed that neither the bachelors’ nor Spinsters’ around Bailieborough were for turning, or were they?
These singletons it seems had a whole lot more going on than met the eye. The oaths they swore were not worth the paper on which they were written. Dear me, indeed, I think the activities of these prehistoric clubs should be likened to a plot from one of the old ‘Carry On’ films.
Rules broken
Ireland’s population was decimated from the mid-1840s onwards. Firstly, by the Great Hunger, and then by the constant exodus of families through emigration to the UK, America, Australia and elsewhere. Each sought work and a higher standard of living. Contrary to public perception though, Ireland’s population began to increase from 1929 onwards, albeit, at a snail’s pace.
In the 1930s De Valera’s economic war with Britain, coupled with the worldwide depression and never-ending emigration, likely did little to help people to find suitable marriage partners. Were things so bad that whole sections of society resigned themselves to band together in such celibate clubs?
Excitement was rife when the Bailieborough Spinsters’ Club held their weekly meeting at the end of August 1929. A whopping attendance of 57 women members came to hear the chairwoman expose terrible news that threatened the club’s very existence. The chairwoman broke to them the awful reports, by then, proven to be true, that ‘breaches of promises’ had occurred, and the time had now come where they must arise to take a ‘breach of promise action’ against the offending lotharios in Bailieborough’s Bachelors’ Club.
Next, the evidence. A cannister packed with countless love letters was placed on the desk before the chairwoman and for the female audience to observe.
The object, a tea cannister, on being weighed, amounted to four pounds in weight of handwritten missals expressing the heartfelt feelings of the bolder bachelors, which severely angered the chairwoman but possibly pleased some of the ladies in receipt of the correspondence.
The secretary sifted out a selection of the more outrageous, if not entertaining epistles to be read aloud in the hope of arousing the crowd’s disgust. The secretary began by reading out some interesting sentences composed by the lovelorn gents. There were the likes of: ‘My own darling inkly didlums’; ‘my lamp of love’; ‘fibre of my being’; ‘a snare to the all ensnaring wiles of a ruthless cupid’; and lastly, ‘to cherish till the evening shadows fall’.
The men’s attempted infiltration into the spinsters’ affections did not end there. The treasurer revealed a further bombshell. She livened proceedings further by pulling from her handbag another bundle of letters neatly held together by a pretty blue ribbon. One angry woman demanded that the spinsters bring in a solicitor on the matter. Another questioned the sanity of men who could write such stuff. The chairwoman assured them that all men could write like that. It was certainly not a question of sanity, she said.
Members of the club began feeling braver. A lady then stood to read an excerpt from a page she had received on which the man wrote to her: ‘We went to the dog races at Harold’s Cross and saw Walls of Derry running away from Mick the Millar. I then woke up and found it was only a dream, which I think will one day come true.’
The frosty chairwoman spoke. She was uncertain as to what dream the gentleman referred but, when the vice-chair pointed out that there were several crosses at the end of the letter, indicating kisses, it was decided to include it with the condemned letters.
Educated idiots
Many more excitedly waved their letters to get reading them. One woman had only received the first letter from ‘her boy’ in which he called her a ‘peach’ and who went on to say, ‘I know too, that you have a lock of quids left by, just enough to start house-keeping together, so I suggest that we get buckled right off the reel.’
At that, the incensed chairwoman told her fellow members she hoped the man who wrote it had ‘enough cash to mend the lady’s broken heart’.
However, the bachelors were causing the Bailieborough women serious aggravation by some of the reports they were articulating to the general public. A petulant lady who wished to be identified as Mrs Blank informed The Anglo-Celt: ‘I am a widow and feel rather annoyed at the hubbub that the Bachelors’ Club and other educated idiots have started regarding the length of the dresses worn by the lassies.’
She continued, ‘they are stylish, and why wouldn’t they? Weren’t we all young once, and don’t we like to be young still? Take myself for instance… I was married four times, and still dress in the fashion.’
Preferring to use the pseudonym, ‘perplexed,’ one man gave a straight answer when commenting to the newspaper. Perplexed wrote that, ‘no one except a born idiot would attend a second meeting of the Bailieborough Bachelors’ Club.’
He went on to admit he had been at four meetings but was subsequently expelled because he simply directed a lady to the post office.
And what of the bachelors? Well, they were ‘a right brood of vipers’ according to Perplexed who elaborated on ‘the paranoia’ associated with the men of whom he said: ‘There is nothing but spying and counter spying from morning till night’.
He concluded that ‘a man would be much better married than continue a member of this club’.
In conclusion, he told them, ‘take my advice, boys, and have nothing to do with them.’
Wise words indeed.
READ MORE