REMINISCENCES OF MR T. P. O’CONNOR, M.P.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20764, 9 July 1929, Page 3

REMINISCENCES OF MR T. P. O’CONNOR, M.P.

[Copyright.]

MEMORIES OF " THE FATHER OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS." Rights of Publication Secured by the Otago Daily Times. VOLUME 11. CHAPTER XIII. The most unforgettable years of my political life were so bound up with the remarkable career of that extraordinary man that I have little to add to the story, and certainly the time has past when one should outer into the controversy as to whether the opponents or the defenders of Parnell took the wiser course for the future of Ireland..

On my return from America I went to Ireland a very short time before Parnell's death. I was soon confronted with the certainty of having to- join in a struggle which sickened me. As my boat approached the harbour I paw a friend of mine whom I recognised as the representative of an Irish paper, and immediately I was interviewed for an expression of my views. I said as little as I could beyond stating that my views remained the same as those 1 had expressed in America. Shortly afterwards I went down to my own constituents and addressed a huge meeting there. I hope I may be forgiven for repeating that in expressing my dissent from the course of Parnell I did not allow myself to pay anything personally insulting to him. There was a small minority in the meeting who had remained with Parnell—many of them afterwards my warm friends and supporters—hut the meeting was practically unanimous. I met only once after this meeting face-to-facc, passing through one of the halls of the House of Commons. I could not resist going up and shaking hands with him. I was immediately struck by the extraordinary change that had come over his appearance, The last time I had seen him was at that meeting I have already described in the library of the empty House of Commons, when some colleagues and myself discussed with him our mission to America, I have already told how extraordinarily composed and, for him, how extremely well he was looking, with his face thin but healthily bronzed, and with his composure—in spite of the coming of the divorce case which hung over him—as great as at any time of his life. The face now was bloated and pallid. I cannot say that his reception of me was cordial. I said to him i ** I hope you are well,” and his reply was cold and resentful. “ Better thou you,” he said. This was enough; 1 never spoke to him again, and we iu the House of Commons apart and without noticing each other. Mrs Parnell survived her husband for 30 .years. It may be said with truth that when Parnell died, so tar as her intelligence was concerned, bis wife died too. She varied from time to time, but her mind was never quite normal. Soon after his death her state became so acute that she had to go to a nursing home, and remained there for two years. I have hoard one of her relatives give a thrilling description of how she would get up lu the middle of the pight in a state of wild alarm, and call on them to go downstairs to the hall, where, as she thought, Parnell and O’Shea were fighting and attempting to kill each other. In addition, she was always beset by pecuniary difficulties, and these were the direct consequence of the scandal of the divorce case. By the will of ber devoted aunt, she was the sole heiress to that lady’s magnificent fortune of two hundred thousand pounds, but her position had been so weakened that heirs direct or remote immediately began to make their claims. Lawyers of the highest standing had to be employed on the one side and the other, until ultimately the costs of the litigation amounted to many thousands of pounds. It does not require much ingenuity to make a claim against a will—undue influence, and the rest. The end or it was that the claims of some 35 relatives had to be satisfied before Mrs Parnell’s claim could be met. She was not a woman who could ever be trusted with the management of money. Though she had quite enough to keep her in comfort for the remainder of her days, it somehow slipped through her hands, and the first cause of this was the ridiculous generosity of her character. She could not refuse assistance in any case which might appeal to her sympathy.

Another method in which she managed to waste her fortune was her mania for taking new houses, a mania which was partially shared by Parnell in his lifetime. She took up all kinds of leases of houses, and every change of abode involved the removal of her large household—her daughters, her horses, her dogs, and her furniture. Among the places where she had houses after Parnell's death were Brighton, Merstham, Pangbourno, Folkestone, Hastings, Sandgate, Hove, Bournemouth, Maidenhead, Treinaton Castle, Saltash, Sea View (lsie_ of Wight), Teigumouth, Havant, Hayling Island, Chichester, Burnham, Worthing, East Fcrring, Littlehamptou —but even this long list is not complete. I have heard different stories of the state of Airs Parnell’s mind during these years that elapsed between Parnell’s death and her own. She had, in spite of all her troubles, a certain strength of will which carried her through her many misfortunes, and, above all, through the death of the man to whom she gave such concentrated devotion. On the whole, however, during most of the years she was fairly normal, except for an interval when she became mentally unbalanced. Her condition .became so bad that one of her sons-tn-law, who was a surgeon specialist of considerable repute in Brighton, where he practised, had to advise her to be placed in an asylum; there she remained for two years tinder treatment.

There is another figure in this tragedy which, in many respects, is most pathetic. Her two ‘daughters bv Parnell married, and left her; but one daughter remained with her to (ho day of her death—-never, indeed, left her side. 'This was Norali, wiio was the daughter of Captain O’Shea, and was born before the beginning of the liaison with Parnell.

No eccentricity on the part of her mother, none of the isolations bv which I'imimfttnm'eg surrounded her. ever shook Nornh’s devotion to her; she was with her by clay and by night, in sickness or in health. She rigidly adhered to the Catholic faith to which her father belonged, and in which she had been brought up; she was a well-known figure at all flic Homan Catholic churches which were within reach in the various migrations of her mother, and, even out of the small allowance she must have had, subscribed to all their charities.

Slu; whs loft practically penniless at the death of her mother. I received an appeal to get her temporary employment, and she went ns a nursery governess for a while to a French family. But ultimately she resolved to become a professional nurse, and she passed her full examinations at Queen Charlotte's Hospital. Bhe adopted her mother’s maiden name of Wood, so as to avoid troublesome questions, and she was known at the hospital as Xursc Xorah Wood. Characteristically she worked too hard, with the result that she contracted that very painful disease called lupus, and of (hat she died. Slu; is the Iphigenia of the family tragedy. F’arnell had two brothers: one, John Howard, Lad some like ness to Lie

brother, hut it was a likeness that was rather liko a caricature. He was very amiable, very harmless, and rather a stupid man. Fortunately, the Corporaof Dublin, which was mainly ParHGllitO,_ was able to find him a small job which was connected with the superintendence of the pawn offices of Ireland. He had the Parnell inclination to go in for enterprises that promised fortune and left only debt, and poor Parnell, I am afraid, had to make up the losses. One of the projects of John Parnell )' as t° establish a big peach industry m the State of Georgia, and I remember one evening in the House of Commons when Parnell took out of a locker a specimen of one of these peaches—and a very beautiful specimen is seemed to be. He was chased, out of a seat in Parliament (to which lie was entitled) by the Parnellite section, who desired to have the sent occupied by one they thought could give them more effective assistance. John Parnell lived to a considerable age, and then slipped out of life with characteristic modesty and in characteristic obscurity. The other brother of Parnell I never knew, but I rather thought I saw him once at a restaurant in Victoria Station. I Mas almost aghast when I saw tlie man enter, he bore so striking a resemblance to his great brother. He was evidently a man of very restless temperament, for be entered and left the restaurant several times. I have always heard that he was obsessed throughout Ids life by the mania of persecution, and never remained more than a few days in one place. He also slipped out of life unnoticed.

The most remarkable of the sisteis of Parnell was Fanny. She was found dead in her bed, Anna Parnell wag a Very different type; she was plain and bony, and her manner and words froze your blood. She had all the reserve and frigidity of her brother very much accentuated. In a short conversation with her I saw that she had a great many of his qualities—obstinacy in opinion, coldness in language—a coldness which afterwards proved, as in his case, to bo but tbe ice which covered a volcano.

With the imprisonment of her brother and of the other leaders there came a transformation, for, as the men’s Land League had been suppressed by Mr I'orster, the Ladies’ Land League was formed to take its place. I will say no more of the operation of that remarkable body than that it was much more reckless in its practices than the men’s Land League. The dominating spirit, of course, was Anna Parnell, who was both of iron courage and of absolute recklessness. With the disappearance of her brother, Anna Parnell also ceased to have any political existence. I have already told how by devious ways some of Parnell’s old colleagues managed to come to her assistance, and how finally she was drowned while bathing at Ilfracombe—it might have been accident, but it might have been suicide.

Finally, there was a sister of Parnell who for many years was a prominent and somewhat grotesque figure in Dublin life. She used to drive through the streets in strange, highly coloured garments. She devoted some time to a sort of biography of her brother. Ultimately, her mind being unhinged, she went into a workhouse, and died the same night. ‘

I met another sister who made a runaway hut very happy marriage with a gentleman in the navy. Of the two other sisters I know practically nothing; one was the wife of a solicitor named MasDermott, who lived in Dublin; the other was married and lived in Paris. Both, I believe, died at comparatively early ages. And, finally, there is the mother of Parnell. She spent most of her life, after the death of her husband, in the United States, her native country. It was hard to say whether she could be described as wholly sane. On her side, as I have already told, there was heredity of some unbalanced mentality. She had unlimited powers of speech, feverish activity, and was as much a propagandist in the United States as any of Parnell’s colleagues. Her death was dramatically appropriate. After long years, and when her son had been dead a long time, she returned to Avondale, the early home and property of her husband. Left alone one day in one of the rooms, and in enfeebled health, she fell into the fire and was somewhat severely burned; she died a few days afterwards. In the confused state of Parnell’s fortimes after Jtis death the ancestral home had to he sold, and it is now a public institution. Aughavanagh—a little shooting lodge that Parnell occupied in the shooting season —had to be disposed of, and Mr John Redmond' became its owner, Ido not know what its condition is now, hut in Redmond’s time it was the symbol of the contradictoriness and the down-at-heelness of so many Irish things, especially in that landlord class that even in my own youth was still the omnipotent factor in all Irish life. It stood on a hill many miles away from everybody and everything; it consisted of a centre which was fairly comfortable; but on both sides there was a gaping wound where the wall stood hare and emptv with no roof upon it. The dustcovered and deserted mansion, the halfruined shooting lodge were more telling tombs of the rise and the end of the fortunes of the groat Parnell’s family than anything in Glasnevin Cemetery, where his remains lie, or that striking statue of him in O’Connell street, which was raised by the gonius of St. Gaudens. Ao story of Greek history by a Greek dramatist tells of a family tragedy more striking and more coniplete. The Esd.