My God's bigger than your God!

[TordelBack]

Nice one, Joe.  Bizarrely I actually know one of the people mentioned in that piece, and I've worked with the brother of another on and off over the years.  Small island.

Yeah Prodigal, those services can be funny affairs - having grown up in a mix of pretty-much uniformly didactic traditions, I was fairly taken aback when people appeared to just randomly come out with (supposedly) reflective anecdotes, almost as if they were trying to break an uncomfortable silence.  Although I suspect the exact opposite was the case.

[JOE SOAP]

Small island indeed, which is the whole point really.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

My mother and my uncle were both given their first jobs by a Quaker business. They worked in a furniture shop, mostly selling kitchen tables and chairs. They have both described the Quakers as very utilitarian, and that it shows in their furniture; all sturdy and well made, no ornamentation or bells and-whistles.

[maryanddavid]

The Quakers were all over the west, and certainly in Mayo they did good works.
Mary bought me a book a while back, extracts from local papers, Connaught Telegraph, Western etc about the famine at the time, It makes harrowing reading.

Completly off topic, not all landlords of the time should be painted with a black brush. The local Landlord here was Lucan (Yes that Lucan or at least his grandaddy), a total bollicks by all accounts, mass evictions etcetc.
My family at the time was lucky enough to be renting off a far more benevolent landlord, which ran in a narrow little strip of land toward Lucans Estate. Our Landlord went bankrupt, partly because he didnt evict, and left all the sitting tenants in place, so  my kids are the seventh generation we can trace to where  we live. No one eyed jokes please.

David

[TordelBack]

Completly off topic, not all landlords of the time should be painted with a black brush.

True enough.  I was reading about the Martin estates following a recent trip to Ballynahinch.  I'd always thought of Richard 'Humanity Dick' Martin* (he who kickstarted the whole concept of SPCA's, and apocryphally imprisoned his tenants on an island for cruelty to animals) as some sort of inbred eccentric with a particular affection for animals.  Boy, was I wrong - like David's family's landlord, the Martins refused to evict a single tenant from the entirety of their 200,000 acres, and when the Poor Law Extension Act added the full burden of famine relief to the local land rates, having little or no income from rents in arrears meant bankruptcy. Richard's son Thomas 'the King of Connemara' Martin died from typhus contracted while visiting sick tenants in the Clifden workhouse, and the whole vast holdings were seized by the mortgage creditors, the Law Life Assurance Society of London who immediately set about rack-renting and evicting with a vengeance until the lands were 'rationalised'. 

Every aspect of this world becomes more nuanced on closer inspection. 

Also, I've just remembered I promised to sort out some GNs for David after my above-mentioned trip, but forgot to do so yet again.  I'll do that today, David.


*Also known as 'Hairtrigger Dick', a nickname that happily referred to his performance on the dueling circuit, rather than in the manorial bedchamber.