Written by AJD updated 11/2023
THE DUGGAN FAMILY HISTORY
The roots of the Duggan family spring from the soil of southwest Ireland in the 18th century, and to apply to these origins the historical tests normally and easily brought to bear on family successions in 19th century England would be a totally unfruitful procedure. Whatever documentary evidence may ever have existed in West Cork has almost certainly perished, and all that can be done is to compare the personal family traditions with the broader issues which were at stake in Ireland at the time. As matters now stand, the things which were said to have happened, could certainly have happened within the context of those times, and moreover that context can be seen to have influenced the whole development of the family and moulded its philosophy until after the Second World War.
During the hundreds of years of bitter enmity with England, the ancient Irish aristocracy has been overthrown and reduced to serfdom time after time. The seats of families have been destroyed again and again, then members slain or dispersed, their chattels purloined, and their documentary heritage incinerated. Kings and queens, knights and ladies have been reduced to the cabin and cabbage patch alongside their own villeins, until today there is scarcely an Irish peasant who cannot claim, with some validity, to be the scion of some great ruling house of the distant past, and some still make their wills, leaving to posterity great estates that were forcibly confiscated long ago and on which their families have not set foot for generations. This obsession and total self-identification with once glorious past is to be found in every true Irishman. He may have forgotten his father’s name and failed to recognise his brother, but he will relate in detail the heroic saga of some distant ancestor. He may not know where he is going, or even where he is, but he knows where he has come from, and to him that place, even though he has never seen it, is his home. Very occasionally these claims are susceptible to historical analysis and are proven to be correct; William Smith O’Brien MP, a leader of the uprising in 1848, was for example, a confirmed descendant of Brian Boru who defeated the Vikings (and in classic tradition, O’Brien was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered) but such instances are rare. The Duggans spring from a more obscure and less heroic stock which, in times of political upheaval, has its advantages.
The traditional spelling of the family name is O’Dubhagain which, transliterated would be Dugan, meaning ”son of the brown-haired one”, the equivalent of the Scottish “Macdonald”. (After the family had domiciled in England it was spelt “Duggins”, then “Duggin”, and finally, in about 1890, “Duggan” as it has since remained.) All Irish Duggans have this strange sense of belonging to a regal clan which, like all clans, has its coat of arms which, in the case of the Duggans, boasts a rampant lion supported by a quarter moon and nine stars. Although not one Duggan in 1000 could interpret the meaning of this extraordinary device, any one of them could, without fear of change or payment of the, emblazon it upon his notepaper, his teapot or for that matter, above his manure heap as an heraldic entitlement, even though he may not know, or have any means of discovering, the Christian name of his grandfather.
As far as is known the progress of Irish history has never been illuminated by any epic deed on the part of the clan Duggan. The name has a certain aboriginal quality about it, suggesting that they were men of spade and fishing net rather than of mace and battle-axe, but at the time of emergence into the pages of modern history two sects of the clan were firmly established, one in Munster and the other in Connaught.
The family’s earliest known ancestor Michael, however, is known to have come from Schull (or Skull), a small anchorage which stands on an inlet of the Roaring Water Bay. The traditional Irish rulers of this area were the O’Driscoll’s and to the O’Mahony’s, whose ruined and un-tenanted castles now glare at each other across the rushing tides of the Atlantic. The O’Mahony stronghold, Ardinterant Castle, lies to the west of Schull, but its usual power was already broken by the British before Michael Duggan’s time. It would be very interesting to know the name of the family which usurped the places of O’Driscoll and O’Mahony in this region after the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, but the Irish memory for detail does not serve as well, and only the 19th century squireens of the Fleming family are remembered. The ruling landlord family after the Boyne had its domain in Newcourt House, about halfway between Schull and Skibbereen, a distance of 15 miles. Outside the house were two stone watergates, built as a folly, one on either side of the road. (One has been demolished by a passing car, the other still stands as the only stone watergate in the British Isles.) The Duggan’s were not traditionally Schull people and it is said that the first of the family to settle there were brought from the Munster sept, based on Kilkee in County Clare, to act as bailiffs for the newly established landed gentry.
It would have been an unpopular, even dangerous way of life and it is remarkable that even today there are few Duggans in the village of Schull itself. Most of the Duggans in this region inhabit an area in the parish of Schull known as Derrinard. (The name means ”old oak wood”; the trees were eventually cut down for smelting copper and for making charcoal.) It is wild and desolate countryside without a settlement, and the landscape is a bleak, undulating vista of grey rock and yellow furze, but in nearly all of its scattered households there is the ghost or the reality of the Duggan. We assume there, that somewhere in this region, to a family with mixed allegiances, Michael was born about the year 1785. The barbarous Penal Laws imposed upon the Irish in 1695, which made them little better than slaves and proscribed their religion, were mostly repealed in 1793, when Michael was about eight years old. Nevertheless, he must have been brought up in a social atmosphere of illiteracy and suspicion in an age when it was still necessary to evade to the law in order to survive. If the Duggan’s work was in fact, bailiffs, they must have been thrown heavily upon disquiet in Newcourt for their existence.
According to tradition, Michael became a coachman, and it is inconceivable that any of the catholic Irish peasantry in the west of Cork at that time could possibly have owned coach. Furthermore he said to have eloped with the youngest daughter of his employer. Her name was Mary Ann Fitzgerald. The Fitzgerald family, derived from a line of Norman conquerors as its name suggests, was for centuries among the upper crust of catholic Irish clansmen, and after the Boyne then can be little doubt that several, if not numerous, of its branches came to terms with the English. After all, if one has been apparent, it is easier to become a squire than a serf, even if it means giving up a religion that it has become almost a capital crime to profess. As likely as not, Mary Ann’s family had taken such a turn and were rewarded with a place in the landlord system of southwest Cork, using people such as the Duggans to collect their rents and look after their horses.
Not all the Fitzgerald’s were so fortunate. On the Skibbereen side of Newcourt today there is a family of the name whose ancestors did not owned a coach. The grandsire died in 1916 at the reputed age of 98. When he was a lad of 11 (in 1829) the family was evicted from its cabin, and fled to Baltimore, a few miles to the south. It has since returned into groups which farm above and below Skibbereen cemetery respectively. The owners have the same Christian name and are known as Pat the Hill (Upper Abbey) and Pat the River (Lower Abbey) which in itself conveys some idea of the difficulties in conducting genealogical research in the southwest of Ireland. Pat the Hill, whom I interviewed in a confined space outside his back door, with a sow in labour on one side and a manure heap on the other, denied any possible connections between our families as well he might have done, for I was clad in city clothes with a rolled umbrella, no doubt recalling to his mind the darkest days of bailiffs and evictions. In the end, however, and with something of restrained venom, he told me that the family of Fitzgerald’s had once lived at Newcourt.
As one approaches Schull along the road from Skibbereen and Newcourt, their stands the ruin of a stone cabin burnt down and destroyed in the 1916 rebellion. That office contained all the civic records of Schull which makes it unlikely that anyone will ever be able to confirm this and congealed amalgam of tradition and hearsay which provides the only clues to the family’s Irish origins. Yet given the point of climax to which it leads – the elopement of Michael was Mary Ann – it is not difficult to see why they should have gone – or rather fled – to England. Neither landlord Norm Bailiff would have given quarter in such a situation, and the couple, who were far from being children at the time, could have expected neither mercy norm sympathy from the local peasantry.
The means of flight would have been at hand, for the harbour of Schull will take a ship of up to 200 tons and has long enjoyed a casual, if desultory, trading connection with South Wales and the west coast of Scotland. No formalities would have been required, for in those days Southern Ireland was an English province. It was an event such as would make a pretty chapter for a novelist, but we shall never know the critical heave of the little ship as she left the jetty, nor the hazards of the crossing, nor the route they took whereby they came to Gloucester for their stands to be born. When their journey began, we cannot say, but they had come to rest on the Severn’s shore by 1829.
If they were to return today, they would have no difficulty in recognising the place. The village of Schull has about 400 people. The barren glaciated mountain of St Gabriel overlooks it from 1300 feet. The copper mining, begun in Bronze Age times, has now been abandoned and the only industry is the processing of shellfish. In the East End Hotel, the management is run by two ladies whose maiden names are Duggan. The bailiffs of old are becoming assimilated as last, but most of them still cling to the wilderness of Derrinard.
Yet the family line was founded not only upon the romance of an Irish elopement, but also upon the catastrophe on Irish famine, and in particular its effects upon the district of Skibbereen, the whereabouts of the family known as Canty. In this part of Cork and the population did so exclusively on potato that no trade in any other kind of food existed. In October 1845 the full extent of the potato blight caused by the fungus Phythophthera intestans came to be realised, it was not until 1846 at its most terrible consequences became evident. These are vividly described and historically documented in the classic volume of Cecil Woodham-Smith, and the origins of the Canty migration and many of the verbal traditions behind it are fully supported by various parts of the text. With us, the maladroitness off the government: “The cut the inadequacy of Government measures is impossible to describe” and “The English knew as little of Ireland has of West Africa”. Of conditions in Skibbereen, Woodham-Smith quotes “On market day, 12th September 1846, not a single loaf of bread or pound of meat to be had in Skibbereen.” “In autumn people lived on nettles and blackberries”: “In Skibbereen workhouse more than half of the children admitted after 1st October 1846 died of diarrhoea”.
There followed the longest and most severe winter in living memory. By December, starvation was rampant and a local Protestant clergyman, Mr Caulfield, was feeding 60 or 70 people day with free soup at his house. On the 15th of December Mr Nicolas Cummins, a Cork magistrate, visited Skibbereen, and his account of the houses there appeared in a letter to The Times on the following Christmas Eve. Mr Richard Inglis, they Commissariat Officer followed him to days later. Three dead bodies lay in the street; the woman was begging with a dead child in her arms, deaths in the workhouse had numbered 197 in six weeks and 100 others lay dead in lanes all cabins.
While all this was going on the landlord of Skibbereen, Sir William Wrixon-Becker, was drawing £10,000 per year in rents. From his estates in the surrounding districts Lord Carbery drew £15,000.
The disaster soon embraced Schull, where 18,000 people inhabited a parish of 21 square miles. On the 15th of February 1847 Commander Caffyn of H.M.S. Scourge shot two dogs there, which were tearing the human body to pieces. The Protestant rector, Dr Traill, who had been one of the first to establish a soup kitchen, died of typhus. The disease spread rapidly throughout West Cork, killing Irish and English alike, and headlong flight from Ireland began. On the 12th of February, another Commissariat Officer, reported that “funds sent for the destitute were being applied in Skibbereen in shipping off the wretched naked creatures to England and Wales”.
The deck passage to South Wales cost only a few shillings; there was a large export of coal from Cardiff to Cork so the Irish were taken over as ballast, “being cheaper to ship and unship than lime or shingle”. Naturally enough, they were hardly welcomed. The Mayor of Newport detained the vessel belonging to a Skibbereen grain merchant because it had been used for landing paupers, and because of this local hostility the Irish were landed secretly in days and coves, dropped off before arriving in port and making their way to cheap lodging houses, “with pestilence on their backs and famine in their stomachs”. Not all survived in this way; of one consignment from Skibbereen and Clonakilty, 61 died on landing.
In the spring of 1847, the West Country of England were warned of the Irish advance. Chepstow and Cheltenham took the first wave, Bath was swamped and counties like Somerset and Gloucester, which had never before seen an Irish beggar, were overrun. Tens of thousands of others streamed into London at the rate of the thousand a week. To Stepney in the East End, they came, from Cork, Galway and Skibbereen. The flying riverside parish of Poplar became a hotbed of typhus. While back in the rural districts of Cork to bankrupt English squires sat in the jerry-built mansions with the rain dripping through the roof, the Irish, in England, took their quiet revenge.
Among the survivors and of these dreadful events were Simon Canty, his son Thomas and his daughter, Dora. All of them, and particularly the last named, will figure in this family story, and the vignettes of family tradition such as the soup kitchens, the mayordom of Newport and others, will recur as echoes from the scene of their desperate migration. Tradition has always insisted that Dora came from Skibbereen. In fact, the Canty stronghold is in the parish of Rath, not far away; Creagh is within the parish and many Cantys are buried there; there are Cantys in Baltimore and in Oldcourt. They have a great reputation for argumentativeness; I was told that they could “set a king and his queen at each other’s throat” and Dora could do the same. Yet, when she came to England has a mere girl she could read and write and so, and cook food other than the potato, and one might wonder whence she acquired such skills. Could she have worked as a servant among the English gentry at Skibbereen – at Newcourt, even? And is that, perhaps, the reason why she and her father went to Gloucester, there to seek a helping hand of Mary Ann and Michael, already established in the city, albeit poorly, for nearly 20 years?
The people of Skibbereen have never let themselves forget the tragic experience of those years of the famine. The Sinn Fein movement again there; the man who raised the Irish flag above the Dublin Post Office in 1916 was a Skibbereen citizen; the monument in the village square bears the names of rebels, famous or notorious, in every 19th-century Irish uprising. The cemetery, which surrounds the tiny Cistercian ruin, is a woeful shambles but its main feature is carefully preserved – the massive common grave into which were thrown the uncoffined bodies of those who died of starvation, exposure and typhus in 1846 and 1847. The final, atrocious memory of the Cantys as they left their homeland for ever.
I reached Skibbereen in the afternoon of Wednesday the 21st of April 1971, the first family member to set foot in the place for over 120 years. There were police and roadblocks everywhere, for on the previous day the British naval launch, Stork, had been blown apart in Baltimore harbour by the Irish Republican army. I wondered what on earth the Irish would do if they had not got the English as enemies.
At the present time there is no documentary proof of when, or why, Michael Duggan and his wife Mary Ann, came to England, but five reasonable interpretation of later events it seems likely that they arrived in Gloucester about 1827. According to what are believed to be their death certificates, Michael would then have been 45 years old and Mary, 39. For recorded ages of deaths in those days were apt to be exaggerated, and they may have been five or even 10, years younger than this, although it matters but little to the family’s subsequent history. In fact that there are pointers which suggest that they were not young when they arrived. The legend of their elopement suggests that Mary Ann, a victim of the Irish dowry system, might have waited over long for a husband of means; when Michael died he was described as “a farmer”, suggesting that he cherished to the end of his life the recollection of a settled life, even of ownership, in the land of his birth; moreover in the later events of his family there is an undercurrent which implies that he was not a young father, but that there was a quality of uncompromising seniority about him. He came to be the much-disliked man who died virtually alone and whose name was forbidden ever to be mentioned by his son Edwin who survived in by over 20 years.
One of the few oft repeated traditions is that Michael came to England to work on the locks associated with the canals of the Severn system, and the economic developments within the city at this time make this tradition likely.
Although Gloucester was established as a port in 1580 the city’s commerce depended, for 200 years, on Bristol plus one barge which ran between them once a fortnight, but in 1793 and act of Parliament authorised the construction of the Gloucester and Berkeley Strip Canal. The funds for this undertaking became exhausted in 1797 when only 5 1/2 of the 17 3/4 miles had been cut, and nothing more was done until 1817 when a government loan was made under the Poor Employment Act to allow the shorter canal to be completed as far as Sharpness, instead of Berkeley Pill. The canal was completed in 1827; it was the largest canal in England, being from 70 to 90 feet wide and 20 feet deep and capable of taking ships of up to 600 tons. The canal made Gloucester a great centre of trade. The size and number of its 19th-century warehouses testifies to this, and a comparison of maps of Gloucester in 1790 and 1843 shows clearly that the dock area of the city had been transformed and that new streets and rows of dwelling places ramified into the surrounding countryside under the impetus of this great enterprise. In the first two years of its existence it was used by 7741 vessel is, and one of the particular features of this trade was its association with Ireland, importing large quantities of corn in exchange for coal, bark, salt and bricks. The canal tariffs were 5d a quarter for corn, the shilling per tonne for potatoes and the shilling per head of cattle. The exporter paid three shillings for 1000 bricks and the shilling a ton for flint.
Originally only one basin existed and the larger East Basin was not constructed until 1849, permitting ships of 800 tonnes to find anchorage. Nevertheless the canal, even in its early days, brought new life to the city. After the work on the new canal was suspended owing to “public circumstances of an unfavourable nature” a brig, the “Tres Ries” of Oporto arrived with a cargo of wine in July 1803, having taken six weeks to get up the Severn (8). She was so badly damaged by dragging her bottom along the sands that once she had berthed, she was fastened from side to side to keep her upright in the water. On the 5th of April 1827, however, another foreign vessel the “Meredith” sailed splendidly in with a cargo of brandy from Charente and thus the new port was opened. Michael Duggan might have watched her arrive, or followed her, not long afterwards in an Irish cattle boat. In any case the family fortunes, if that is not too optimistic a word, were to centre around the port and its canal system for another 30 years. In 1826 the Customs dues at Gloucester were £19,000 and rose to £156,000 in 1842; but little or none of that money ever came the way of the Duggans. Rather, as we shall see, did the Duggans go the way of the canals. In 1797 a canal was begun to run from the Severn near Gloucester to Hereford, a distance of 33 miles, via Newent and Ledbury, and, starting at the Gloucester end, it reached Ledbury in 1814. There it stayed for a long time before pushing onwards to its destination. Finally this canal was finished, with a towpath for its two-day journey on the western bank and one lock for every two miles of its course (9). Not only there might Michael Duggan have been employed, for the system to Tewkesbury, too, flourished in those days.
On the 10th of August 1858 the new lock was opened there at a cost of £35,000. It was gigantic; each gate weighed 18 tons, and it could take a vessel 300 feet long (7). From Gloucester to Sharpness Point was 16 miles; it was 17 to Ledbury and 11 to Tewkesbury, and within that small compass the life of the Duggan family in England began.
The first positive thing we know of Michael and Mary Ann was that they had two sons, and there is a high probability that both were born in Gloucester. Edwin was born between 30th March 1828 and the 29th of March 1829, and his younger brother Daniel probably between the 30th of November 1831 and the 6th of April 1832. The latter is described (10) as having been born in the Parish of St Michael and this may be of some significance, for the unskilled starving Irish who were to follow settled largely in the Parish of St Nicholas, a more deprived quarter of the city. There were no more children which, if Ann was 43 when Daniel was born, is hardly surprising.
The (Anglican) Parish of St Michael would have been a natural homeland for the Duggans, as the only thing which we know they brought with them was their religion, and it was there that the first glimmerings of Catholicism took root in Gloucester, after the Reformation. Michael Duggan was not alone among Catholic newcomers to Gloucester for in February 1828 the first priest for some hundreds of years took residence there. He had come directly from France and his name was Abbe Augustine Louis Josse (11). He was 64 years old, and was lucky to be alive at all, for he was a first cousin of Louis Phillippe, but with the extraordinary adaptability of aristocrats he settled down to minister to the likes of Michael and Mary Duggan, earning his living by teaching French to Anglican children (12), and supporting himself and his flock on the proceeds. For St Michaels was only a little less poor than St Nicholas, providing five guardians to the workhouse as against six, in 1829. From the rest of the city it was necessary to provide only three (6).
To obtain any notion of the immense difficulties faced by the Duggan family in their early years in England it is essential to understand the religious situation in Gloucester at that time. In 1519 a young Catholic by name John Hooper graduated at Oxford and joined the Cistercians at Gloucester. On the Dissolution he returned to London and finally fled to Switzerland. After many adventures he became reconciled to Henry VIII and was installed as Bishop of Gloucester where the people of the city took him to their hearts. Upon the advent of the neurotic queen, Mary Tudor, Hooper was almost immediately apprehended and imprisoned at the Fleet. On the 22nd of January 1555 he was sent to Newgate and thence to Gloucester for the last time, not as Bishop but as a martyr. He spent one night there in the house of a Tudor merchant (now set apart as a special room in the Gloucester Folk Museum and known to this day as “Bishop Hooper’s Lodgings”) and on the following day, the 9th of February 1555 he was burned at the stake, in the courtyard of St Mary de Lode within sight of his own cathedral. The iniquity of this appalling deed was an evergreen recollection in the early 1800’s; even now, his memorial stands, flanked on the north and south by a modern housing estate with the church of St Mary to the west and to the east the arch of College Green surmounted by a half-timbered house from whose very windows the atrocious scene was undoubtedly witnessed. The remnants of the stake are on display in the Folk Museum, having been purchased in 1877 by four people, one of whom was William Price M.P., then Commissioner of Railways, and of whom more will soon be heard. Once the hapless Mary was succeeded, Catholicism in Gloucester was not to be heard at again for over 200 years. During the latter part of the 18th Century, however, certain Independent denominations had succeeded in obtaining a handhold, here and there, in the poorer quarters of this intensely Anglican stronghold. Their perseverance did no go unrewarded for by 1829 the intrepid Robert bikes was already known, locally, as the “Founder of Sunday Schools” (6). In The Gloucester Guide of 1792 (12) it recounts that “in Lower Northgate Street, very lately built, is Mr Wesley’s Chapel”; yet the Catholics had already preceded “Mr Wesley” by a few years. The first post-Elizabethan Catholic chapel was opened in 1789 by a member of the Usher family, kinsmen of the Earl of Fingail, at 11 – 13 Berkeley Street, a house previously owned by Sir Charles Burrow. (11). This chapel was finally turned into a primitive Catholic school. In 1802, Robert Raikes, whose first Sunday School had been established in St Catherine Street, printed The Gloucester New Guide and noted, under “Protestant Dissenting Meeting Houses'” that a chapel existed in the suburbs of Lower Northgate Street for the Roman Catholic worship, (13) and the “Dissenting Minister”” was the Reverend Mr Duchemain. It was not a particularly thriving community; in the returns of Bishop Collingridge of Clifton in 1813, the Catholics in the city were said to be no more than 40 in number (14). At the time of the arrival of Michael Duggan and the Abbe Josse, the chapel was still ”’without the Lower Northgate Street'” (6) and according to one writer at least (15) very little headway was being made. The Catholics were poor, obscure and despised, their chapel being humble and unpretentious at the back of the house in a small hidden garden. In 1835 there was no Catholic school and the community consisted of five well-to-do families in the neighbourhood and about six poor Irish families, of whom the Duggans, no doubt, were one. In that year, not more than 17 Catholic children lived in the city; Edwin would have been seven years old, and his brother Daniel, four.
The hardships of the family can hardly be overestimated; In 1832 the poorer parts of the city were swept by cholera; although it is not known precisely where the Duggans lived at this time an overcrowded and ill-heated tenement, peopled by the sick, the downcast and the despairing was probably their home. In 1831 the population of St Michael’s parish was a mere 913, yet nowhere in the records of those times is the name Duggan – or any other Irish name – to be found.
Gloucester was a veritable city of pre-Reformation churches but even by 1830 they had proved to be too many for the Anglicans to hold. At the intersection of the four main streets in Gloucester – the place known as the Cross – four churches once stood; Holy Trinity, St Owen, All Saints and St Michael. As the first three collapsed, one by one, the stones were used for renovating the fourth which came eventually to be entirely rebuilt, except for the tower which remained mediaeval. This church, which remained open for public worship until 1939 contained a peal of ten bells, a greater peal than any other church in Gloucester, including the Cathedral itself. The second largest bell was the curfew, tolled daily for hundreds of years. In 1829 it would ring out at 8 p.m. and all lamps and fires, including those of the Duggans, had to be extinguished. (In 1956 St Michael’s was pulled down, except for its tower. The bells were piled on the pavement until Gloucester Cathedral brought two to add to its peal of eight, while the other, including the curfew were sold to a scrap merchant for about £900.)
No doubt aided by the Catholic Emancipation Act and the untiring influence of the Abbe Josse, the beginnings of some kind of Catholic community began to emerge. In the year ending on Low Sunday 1840, there were 200 Easter communions and eight Baptisms, although neither marriages nor conversions were recorded (14). A local family emerged as benefactors, and at the expense of Squire Canning of Hartpury a new chapel was built in a more conspicuous place – “a very neat little building situate in the London Road nearly opposite the cattle market”. On the 21st of January 1841 the Abbe Josse died at the age of 77. Astonishingly enough he was followed to the grave by all the local Anglican clergy and buried by Parson Bayley in St John’s churchyard (12). He was the second Catholic priest to have been buried there; a former rector, Bernard Girard, described as a Professor of Theology, who evidently happened to die in Gloucester at the age of 64 on 24th November 1825, preceded him. The good Abbe was followed, in his ministry (and to the graveyard in due course) by the Reverend Peter Hartley, a man of 47.
Whatever schooling the young Edwin and Daniel derived, we do not know, but it is probable, that most of their education was obtained at their mother’s knee. Mary could at least write her name and may well have been more literate than that; their father, on the other hand had nothing but his mark until the day he died. During the 1830′ s his ties with Gloucester may have been tenuous, for there were only two locks on the ship canal, one at each end. He would not have achieved that much responsibility; indeed the Gloucester locksman in 1841 was named Thomas Cox (15), who also collected the tonnage dues. In 1839 these amounted to £17,700 on 1300 foreign and coasting vessels and 9000 barges, so there was a lot to do and it is possible that Michael was one of his labourers; but it is more likely that Michael’s work took him further afield to the Long Reach or the Leadon, above Gloucester itself.
In the early 1840′ s, according to family tradition, the two brothers were apprenticed to a ropemaker in Portsmouth at a wage of one penny a day. There seems no reason to doubt this story. The prospects of two sons of an illiterate Irish lock-keeper in Gloucester in 1844 would have been bleak indeed, and it is possible that this was the result of a quick decision, made on the spur of the moment, perhaps after a chance meeting in the docks with the master of a coaster needing deck hands and an offer of a free journey to clinch the bargain. By the time they returned, some important changes had taken place.
In the year 1845 the Irish were struck by a failure of the potato crop which resulted in one of the worst famines that Europe had seen since Tudor times. The procrastination and ineptitude which accompanied Britain’s attempts at alleviating the disaster, suggested to the already suspicious and recalcitrant Irish that something akin to genocide was taking place. To the civil disabilities of landlordism, bigotry, military occupation and religious persecution was now added the calamity of mass starvation. Most of those who were fortunate enough to survive lived to detest the English for the remainder of their lives.
Such a one was Dora Canty, an indomitable woman, courageous and strong-headed, who, in more ways than one, preserved the family line of the Duggans throughout the second half of the 19th century. She came from a Cork family, and tradition has it that she, like Mary Ann FitzGerald, the wife of Michael, was born in Skibereen. Her birth was probably in 1832 and when the famine broke, she would have been about 13 years old. She evidently responded well to adversity; even at so young an age she was literate, could sew and cook and taught in hedgerow schools, small classes held secretly out of doors at a time when the teaching of Catholicism to children in public was disapproved of, and even forbidden, by the government of Ireland.
Her father’s name was Simon. His first-born son was named after him and little is known about his life, save that he was made to undertake public penance for taking a meal from an Anglican soup kitchen during the famine. Dora’s sister, on the other hand, evidently refused the soup; she dropped dead from starvation in the street, so it is said, sometime in 1846.
At that point, the Cantys had had enough; Dora’s brother Simon emigrated to Canada and became a ship’s chandler in Hamilton Gore; she herself, with her father and another brother, Thomas, came to England. Thomas probably went to seek his fortune in London; Dora and her father made for Gloucester, her to work as a labourer, she as a servant.
As one proceeds down Westgate Street, sloping gently towards the Severn, the dismal pile of St Nicholas juts awkwardly into the thoroughfare, its grim stones redolent of the evil King John who put them there, a brooding, silent image of its own parish, the poorest in all Gloucester. No one alive today can remember, or even tell, when last the bells were tolled. The spire was removed in 1780, but the extraordinary wooden clock, worked by ropes and pulleys, was kept going by a clockwinder named Wilton who died in 1956 at the age of 90. The clock will never chime again.
On the north side of Westgate Street were the nail manufacturers; 80% of the nails used in English churches were made there. On the south side were the pin manufacturers and a bell foundry. Further towards the river one passes close to the scene of Hooper’s martyrdom and then crosses a small tributary by a small bridge, once known as Foreign Bridge. From there onwards, Westgate Street becomes The Island – the stranger’s quarter, the furthest flung recess of the parish of at Nicholas, and the worst of Gloucester’s 19th century slims. It was here that Dora Canty and her father came in 1847. As Trevelyan (16) writes “The worst slums in the new urban areas were those inhabited by the immigrant Irish. The mass of unregarded humanity . . . were as yet without any social services or amusements they had no luxury but drink, no one to talk to but one another, hardly any subject but their grievances. Naturally, they were tinder to the flame of agitation”.
One does not find good descriptions of The Island in Gloucester Guidebooks. In 1848, Thomas Jew (17) doesn’t mention the place, and Bond and Counsel (6) give it only passing mention. Raikes alone (13) gives an account of the trades folk in 1802, but even this was before the houses had had time to become the derelict shacks which awaited the Cantys. The City survey map of 1843, however, shows that the “residential” sector of The Island from the south side of the street to the river consisted of 80,000 square feet which contained a gasometer, 13 sheds, 3 yards, two wharves, an Independent chapel, and 7~ human habitations. Contiguous with this area to the west were an iron foundry, a flour mill and a boat-builders yard. The Cantys lived at number 19, more or less in the centre of this inferno, facing the sombre, barrack-like edifice of St Bartholomew’s alms-house on the north side of the street, and with an unnamed wharf immediately at the rear. In 1851, practically all the cottages were owned by five men, whose names alone appear in Rate Books.
The rich young rakes of Gloucester seemingly visited this appalling vicinity of squalour as part of an occasional nocturnal adventure, and it is to one of them that we owe the best extant description of the place, recorded in 1857 by twelve verses of doggerel (18). The impression is conveyed of a teeming shanty town of shops or stalls, lit by oil lamps or candles, in which brandy, gin and beer flowed more quickly than the Severn itself, dominated by a character known as “Old Harry, the man of the Island”.
Shortly after the Cantys’ arrival, Edwin and Daniel returned as rope-makers to their home in New Inn Lane. Ropemaking had flourished in Gloucester from about 1720, and the manilla hemp was being imported there direct from the Philippines: Terrell’s of Canon’s Marsh was the largest firm with the longest rope walk in the country. As lads of 19 and 16 respectively they would have had at least the prospect of decent employment.
In July 1847, Fr Peter Hartley, who had succeeded the Abbe at the Northgate Street chapel, was taken ill while saying Mass. He died, most probably of typhoid or typhus, eleven days later, on the 3rd of August at the age of 53. He is said (12) to have contracted his fatal illness at the bedside of a parishioner in one of the “fever dens”. He was much thought of; a later account (19) describes how he visited an Irish labourer during his dinner; the parishioner complained bitterly of his lot until Fr Hartley told him that he had not eaten meat for a fortnight.
After Peter Hartley had followed the Abbe to the Anglican churchyard of St John the Baptist, there was a speedy succession of four priests until 1850, when Leonard Calderbank arrived. Meanwhile, Edwin married.
In family histories, romantic interest often attaches itself to the first meeting between husband and wife, but in Edwin’s case there is not the slightest intimation of how he met Jane Wilkins, a milliner and dressmaker of his own age. She lived with her father, Richard and her mother, Charlotte in St Catherine Street, the scene of Robert Raikes’ Sunday-school enterprise and a thoroughly Nonconformist locality. Dora Canty probably knew them both by this time; indeed they were married in the Independent Chapel in The Island, by the Minister, Joseph Hyatt. No Duggans were witnesses; the 7th of August 1848 was a sad day for Irish Catholics who must a have seen, with dismay, one of their hopes, still a minor, marrying outside the Faith. Moreover, Jane was nearly three months pregnant.
Eliza Jane Duggin was born to Edwin on the 12th of February 1849. Her birth was registered after a delay of nearly two months and recorded as having taken place at the Wilkins’ home in St Catherine Street. There is, however, a strong family tradition, known as the Tewkesbury legend, which suggests otherwise. It is said that as her confinement drew near, Jane went to live at an inn known as “The Quart Pot” in Tewkesbury, and it was there that Eliza was born. Furthermore, Dora Canty was said to have been in attendance, and surreptitiously took the infant Eliza to Tewkesbury church and had her baptised a Catholic without her mother’s knowledge. Later, this story may be shown as at least credible, but at this point Edwin, Jane and little Eliza become lost to view. There can be little doubt that the outraged Michael drove his son away; no clear picture of Edwin re-emerges for over 20 years.
Dora, having given her name to the Tewkesbury legend, would have returned to The Island in time for a further crisis. The Gloucester Journal (20) related “Cholera broke out in The Island in May (1849). The clergy displayed Christian courage and benevolence under these awful circumstances. We wish we could add that the owners of property had discharged their duty with similar fidelity”. Things got worse, and a week later the paper ran an editorial (21) on the sanitary condition of Gloucester. “At this moment the low quarters of the city are ravaged by Asiatic cholera. The inhabitants of the worse drained districts have to bear the accumulation of offensive matter from the higher districts in addition to what they themselves produce”.
The deaths from cholera numbered ten per week; the drinking water was blamed, and a special hospital put up in the workhouse garden. Further investigations (22) showed that there was only one privy to each row of houses, and the presence of “fatal spots” in The Island was confirmed. Mercifully, when the epidemic had burned itself out, Dora was still there.
Her first encounter with Daniel took place before the Tewkesbury legend, in 1847 or 1848. According to tradition it was the habit of the Irish in Gloucester to congregate in beer houses and to talk sedition far into the night, much in the way that Trevelyan has described. The story relates that Daniel met Dora at just such a meeting, and immediately exclaimed to a friend “That woman will be my wife” It seems an unlikely story as Daniel would hardly have been older than 17 at the time, but in any case, there was to be no shotgun wedding as far as Dora was concerned. She eventually married him in the Northgate Street chapel on the 21st of February 1854. Leonard Calderbank officiated, the witnesses being one Thomas Nutting who put his mark, and Daniel’s mother Mary Ann, who signed. Ten days before their wedding the editorial in the Gloucester Journal (22) had begun in sombre tones “The events of the last few days leave us no hope for peace, and there is every reason to believe that England will be involved in a war against the Czar”. On the 4th of March the stakes were raised with the announcement that a new Bill would authorize the Militia in England to be increased from 80,000 to 120,000. Within a month England was at war with Russia, and the destinies of Daniel and Dora were forsworn. Perhaps it was no accident that Daniel’s age on his marriage certificate was given as 20 instead of 22.
Michael and Mary, meanwhile, still continued to live in New Inn Lane. It must have been an interesting existence, because the lane, although not much more than 100 yards long, contained the coach house of the New Inn, a malt house, a warehouse, several workshops, three stables, ten small cottages, a pin factory owned by a man named Gutch, and a tenement owned by a Miss Abell in which lived Thomas Holbrook, Sarah Dancey and the Duggans whose name was forever recorded in the Rate Books as “Duggins”. Throughout the time he lived there, Michael’s rates went up from about 6/- per half year to about 8/4d, but he was never in arrears. The lane could hardly be described as exclusively residential, but somehow 28 families managed to live there including Gutch, who had fallen on hard times. In 1851 it seems that he was living in one of the stables; there was certainly not more than one other pin-maker in Gloucester at that time and Gutch’s predicament well illustrates the fluctuations of the industrial fortunes of Gloucester. In 1744, pins were the chief manufacture of the city; in 1802 nine pin factories employed 1500 people out of a total population of 7,600. It took twelve workers to make a pin by the old process, but in 1826 a process for making solid-headed pins was introduced in Birmingham and required only simple machinery. Within ten years pin manufacture in Gloucester was dying on its feet, and the likes of Gutch relegated from the factories of Westgate Street to makeshift workshops in places such as New Inn Lane.
As yet Dora and Daniel had had little time to dwell upon the capricious fortunes of a city which was beginning to feel the competitive pressure of the north in terms of economy. They may have lived with Michael and Mary after they were married, but Miss Abell’s tenement was hardly the place for a baby. Dora’s son was born on the 20th of February 1855, at Rignum Place, in the Parish of St Owen. He was christened Edwin, and this could only have betrayed Daniel’s determination to commemorate his outlawed brother. To Michael it could only have seemed an act of defiance and a judgement on the harshness of his character.
For Edwin the Younger, a less auspicious birthplace could hardly have been found. True, it lacked the squalor and notoriety of the Island and the decrepit uncertainties of New Inn Lane, but in some ways it was remoter, more deprived and humbler, even than those. In 1809 there was built a railroad known as the Knapp tramway, which later became the Gloucester and Cheltenham Tram Road; it began on the North Quay, ran a circuitous route through the Gloucester Docks, and then ran eastwards across Lower Southgate Street and Parkers Row. At this point the Tram Road Depot was situated, followed by five houses, at the rear of which stood six cottages owned by” a Mrs Jackman. The houses were rated at 4/3d per half year, and the cottages at 7id. Although Daniel’s home does not appear in any Rate Book for 1855 it is possible that Dora was confined in the third cottage and continued to live there for a year or two afterwards. It is unlikely that she went to live in New Inn Lane with a brand new Edwin in her arms. The establishment there had been shuffled a little; Turk, the barman at the New Inn, had joined Michael in the tenement and so had the pin-maker who evidently bolstered up his diminishing self-confidence with the title “John Joseph William Gutch”.
The wretched adventure in the Crimea dragged on. In November 1855, Sir Charles Napier was reported (23) as saying “I regret to see that the recruits we are getting are mere children. Great numbers are unfit for war”. However, things were going badly for Daniel Duggan, as well as for Sir Charles Napier, and he took Dora northwards to Birmingham. In 1857 he went alone to Long Preston in the West Riding of Yorkshire, perhaps to seek work, and at the end of that year, in spite of the fact that the victorious British had withdrawn from the Crimea in July, he joined the Militia. For this purpose he travelled to Burslem, about 70 miles to the south, where he enlisted in the First Staffordshire Regiment as Private No. 3959, on the 17th November 1857. He was immediately posted to Edinburgh Castle where he remained until January 1859. It is not known how much he saw of Dora and his son Edwin during this time. In January 1858 Dora had seen fit to purchase a copy of her marriage lines, possibly to counteract the erroneous entry in Daniel’s Paybook to the effect that he married her in 1856 and not 1854. Undoubtedly, she herself would have been working, perhaps in Edinburgh, or if not, in Birmingham.
At the beginning of 1859 Daniel was posted to Aldershot. On the 6th of April, at the age of 27, he collapsed and died from an aneurysm. The odds seemed heavily stacked against Dora, but notwithstanding, she took her four-year-old son to Ledbury and got a job as a servant at the Feathers Inn. While Dora worked Edwin began to grow into a boy. He was looked after by a tailor and tradition has it that on one occasion he was locked in an upstairs storeroom as a punishment for some naughty deed, whereupon he threw the tailor’s dummies out of the window into the street below. Another story with a certain Beatrice Potter cachet about it tells of how he ran errands for a Ledbury Butcher, thus receiving tips. These he placed in a money-box which was screwed to the floor of his bedroom at the tailor’s, but the tailor would periodically empty the money-box via the ceiling of the room below.
After three years, the Ledbury idyll came to an end and Dora and Edwin returned to Gloucester, where Dora obtained work as a cook-housekeeper to an Anglican minister. After quarrelling violently with him because, so it is said, he asked her to prepare roast pork on Good Friday, she resolved to leave Gloucester for good and her gaze turned eastwards to London. It was a formidable enough journey in those days; a Gloucester merchant would see that he was well insured before he undertook it. True, the Mazeppa, the crack mail coach, drove from New Inn to Cheapside via Cirencester and Cheltenham in five hours, but Mazeppas were not for Irish immigrants like Dora Canty.
She was thirty years old, a maidservant and a widow with a small son, in a land not her own, surrounded by religious bigotry and political hostility. She had seen, at first hand, the tragedies of famine, pestilence and war, and bore the name of a family split in twain by the lack of compassion and understanding. Yet her courage remained undimmed. She packed a few belongings in her bag and with the seven-year-old Edwin at her side, she walked to London. * * * We need not follow them at once, on their peregrination, for this is a convenient point at which to drop the curtain finally on those Duggans who held the stage at Gloucester for nigh on forty years and to trace, however tentatively, the fortunes of Edwin the Elder: although within his line the name of Duggan perished and Catholicism was lost, his was the only 19th century success-story which the family could boast. Thus it might as well be told. It should be said at once that there is no documentation of any kind, at the moment of writing, to indicate the whereabouts of Edwin, or the nature of his work, from the birth of his daughter Eliza in 1849 until her marriage in 1872 – a period of 23 years. Nonetheless there is a distinct possibility that concentrated research could elucidate this problem, given time and inclination, and what follows is simply an outline of one approach which could be pursued. To begin with, there is much circumstantial evidence to show that Edwin aligned himself strongly with his wife’s parents, Richard and Charlotte Wilkins. To put the last evidence first, as it were, the three of them were buried in the same grave. Secondly, there is a mysterious association between the Duggans and the Wilkins with a family whose name was Price. This is a very common name in Gloucester, but the coincidence of the name with the whereabouts of the Duggans is curious. In 1851, the Register of Electors indicated that Charles and William Price owned cottages in New Inn Lane, and also in 1852. In 1854 William Price held both a cottage in New Inn Lane and a cottage in Rignum Place. It was cottage No. 3 in Rignum Place, and he continued to hold it until April 1859, the month in which Daniel Duggan died. Meanwhile, in May 1858 a certain Henry Wilkins took a house in Green Dragon Lane, which was near Rignum Place, and in May 1859 he was joined next door by one Edwin Wilkins; six months later, William Price took the house next door but one. Edwin Wilkins stayed on in Green Dragon Lane, constantly in arrears with his rates, until November 1864. In September -of that year, Mary Ann Duggins died at her home in New Inn Lane, at a stated age of 75. These simple statements are merely grains from the sands of time, and it would be foolish to build a worthwhile edifice upon them. However there may have been a William Price who was a person of some resource and who extended his help to the young, struggling families of Edwin the Elder and Daniel. It is time that Catholicism in Gloucester was beginning to make headway; in March 1860 the new Catholic Church, albeit unfinished, was consecrated by the Reverend W. Clifford, Bishop of Clifton, Yet in an electioneering address by Mr John Joseph Powell in 1862 it was sid “I am old enough to remember when petitions were carried about this town and when signatures of infants, both of Churchmen and Dissenters, were obtained to prevent, as they were told, their fathers from being burnt as heretics in St Mary’s Square”. (24) The Duggans no doubt remembered it too, and the memories of Bishop Hooper were undoubtedly a stronger influence in Gloucester of 1860 than the figure of the Reverend Clifford, thurible in hand, intoning the Magnificat in Latin. At their level, cottages and houses, however mean, would have been easier to rent under the name of Wilkins or Price than under the name of Duggan. We shall never know whether Edwin Wilkins was not really Edwin Duggan, still holding on in Gloucester until his mother died, or whether the kindness of William Price guaranteed for Dora a roof over her head at Rignum Place until the untimely death of Daniel at Aldershot. During the course of this superficial study, the possibility was examined that William Price might have been, in fact, William Philip Price of Tibberton, South Hamlet. He was a Liberal parliamentary candidate who won the Gloucester elections in 1857 and 1859. It must be conceded that the city was then struck off the roll of Parliament for corruption, but this is not to deny his philanthropic intentions; in any case he was re-elected in 1865. He was a politician of singular courage and is still remembered in Gloucester, although nothing is known or recorded about him in the Houses of Parliament itself, apart from his speeches. In 1859 an electioneering address made by him in Gloucester stated “The present unsatisfactory state of the law …. is offensive to the great body of Dissenters whom I desire to see relieved from the compulsory payment of Church Rates” (26), and six years later, in 1865, he made an even stronger statement in support of the Catholic minority, “I am not prepared, cost what it may, to manifest my Protestant sympathies by an act of oppression upon my Roman Catholic fellow-subjects”. (27) In spite of this outspoken and sympathetic attitude, which must have been given sow identity in terms of action in the City of Gloucester itself, possibly through the Catholic priesthood to whom he was well-known, it still seems far more probable that the William Price of New Inn Lane, Rignum Place and Green Dragon Lane was connected with the Wilkins family rather than with the Reform Club and the commemorative window in Gloucester Cathedral. Once again, there is the matter of the “Quart Pot”. This once-famous, now forgotten, inn was established in the reign of Henry VII (28) and enjoyed a prominent position in Tewkesbury, being situated in Barton Street at the Cross, which is virtually the centre of the town. The malting industry was one of the principle sources of wealth in Tewkesbury for hundreds of years, and the inn flourished well into the mid-nineteenth century. According to family tradition it was owned by Jane Wilkins’ father, but this is definitely not so. However, on the 5th April 1854, the Quart Pot, with a large blacksmith’s shop and two cottages adjoining, was put up for sale (29). The inn closed for ever and the premises became the site of a large ironmongers shop. This business was run by two men named Price and Robinson (30). but within a short time only the name of J. Price was used in advertisements. There are at least four families named Price who have had long associations with Tewkesbury. One of them, John Price, was an ironmonger who had several flourishing businesses there from 1835 onwards, at 91 Church Street, and at 3 Church Street. In 1865 he converted three shops in the High Street and bought the Old Coach House for a warehouse. He was clearly a capable and successful business man; given that he was a brother of Charlotte Wilkins, Jane’s mother, that he had a business interest in the Quart Pot which became his ironmongery, and that he had either a father or a brother named William, we could define the source of the supporting hand which came to the aid of Edwin the Elder through his in-laws during his early married life. He remained associated with the name of Price to his dying day, and when I spoke about his wife Jane to Miss Harris of Pontymister, aged 98, in 1969, she said immediately “His wife was a Tewkesbury woman”. Perhaps, then, the Quart Pot held the mysteries. not only of Eliza, but of her mother as well. All that remains of the inn is its iron fireplace, now in Tewkesbury Museum; the rest has given way to Armstrong’s, a gentleman’s outfitters, and on the site of J. Price’s ironmongery business stands a Methodist church. None of the foregoing brings us any nearer to Edwin. There is a family tradition that he became a freeman of Gloucester, but this is almost certainly wrong; his father-in-law might have become one, as there is a record of a Richard Wilkins, a freeman of Westgate Street in 1851 (31), by which time Jane’s father would have been a man of 46. But it is likely that Edwin left Gloucester in the 1860’s, and returned to the scene of his apprenticeship at Portsmouth. He may have had friends there; he may have found work there; he may have had backing enough to start a business there, possibly in the suburb of Landport. The 1860s saw the last of the Duggans’ associations with Gloucester. In 1864 Leonard Calderbank, who had married Dora and Daniel, built a school and founded a church, suddenly died. At his funeral all the shops along the route of the cortege were shuttered (32). On the 31st August 1865 Michael Duggins paid his rates, with 8/4d, for the last time. He died at Bristol, in the Asylum of the Sisters of the Poor, on the 21st of March 1867, at a reputed age of 84. His recorded occupation, perhaps echoes his life-long boast, “Formerly a farmer in Ireland”. Simon Canty was soon to follow him. He expired, also from senility, on the 11th May 1869, being described as a 78-year-old rag merchant. Even in death, the born Irishman contrives his incongruities. He also, very often, dies in the absence of his relations. Tradition, once again, supplies the motivation of Edwin the Elder, and, according to family lore, a sister of Jane Duggan, nee Wilkins, married a certain Mr Bear who was a master-butcher, of Newport, South Wales. He was a person of considerate influence and became Mayor of Newport before he died. He had as a friend one William Howell, a pharmacist of Risea, several miles from Newport along the Ebbw Vale. Contiguous with Risea, on the Newport side, is the smaller town of Pontymister, and it was to Pontymister that Edwin came from Portsmouth with his wife Jane and the 21-year-old Eliza, about the year 1870, to set up in the grocery business. The modern history of Risea began with the setting up of a tinplate works by Messrs. Banks and Co in 1820. Later a chemical works was established by a Mr Morris, and the inevitable colliery was directed by Mr Rhodes. Between 1842 and 1861 the population increased from 1072 to 2744 (33). In 1840 a few Congregationalists settled in Risea, holding their meetings at the home of one Mr Price, several miles away; in 1858 they founded the Capel y Glyn (the chapel in the valley) near the main road, in Risea. The Ebbw Vale is narrow at this point; in Risea and Pontymister there is little but the main road, with an unending vista of terraced houses. It was not long after Edwin’s arrival at Pontymister that his daughter Eliza married William George Midgley in the parish church (of England) on the 22nd of October 1872. Eliza signed, and so, of course, did William who was an engineer. Edwin was a witness, but no Midgleys attested, the second signature being that of Mary Ann Nurse. Eliza’s residence was simply given as “Risea”. The post office at Pontymister was a vital institution for the people of the lower Ebbw Vale; the mail from Newport arrived by train at five in the morning, and from the north six hours later. In 1868 the postmaster was Mr David Nurse, junior, and Edwin was shortly to succeed him. Within a few years he was operating the post office in one half of a large cottage, as postmaster and general dealer, with the Midgleys in the other half. The cottage was named Landport House. Edwin’s in-laws, Richard and Charlotte Wilkins, were living in Pontymister as well, although how or when they came to be there is not known. Charlotte died within a year of Eliza’s wedding and was interred in a commanding situation in Newport cemetery on the 6th of May 1873. Edwin, by this time, had renounced his Catholicism, and began to bestow his allegiance upon the Capel y Glyn, whose services had been held in the English language, rather than in Welsh, for several years. In 1875 a terrible storm swept down the valley and removed the chapel roof, but history related that its members struggled on, “led by their deacons Messrs. Inkin, Purnell and E. Duggan” (34). The same year brought serious economic depression into the area as the tinplate works closed down for two years. At the risk of personal financial disaster, Edwin gave the villagers of Risca and Pontymister extended credit facilities, but, as often happen, when the crisis had passed many of them failed to honour their debts. Edwin, on the verge of bankruptcy, called in his creditors and presented his case. After they had heard him, they wiped the slate clean. He must have felt a very proud man. In January 1881 Richard Wilkins, at the age of 76, followed his wife to the grave in Newport cemetery, and the irresistible march of time made good their place with their great-grandchildren, William and Arthur Midgley, born of Eliza by their father William. The Midgleys were nothing if not traditional, and could be described as engineers with salt water in their veins; tradition, strongly supported by the aforesaid Miss Harris, asserts that they were a Portsmouth family. It is quite possible that Eliza met William George in Portsmouth, but he himself was born in the London dockland area of Poplar. Yet his father, whom we may call William the First, was a marine engineer, and sailors’ children are often born away from the family’s home town. At all events, William the Second made his home alongside Landport House in Pontymister, and his two sons, William (the Third) and Arthur, both became first engineers in the merchant navy. The proximity to her parents suited Eliza well; William George was an armourer in the Royal Navy, a calling which must often have taken him away from home. Not that the two households always saw eye-to-eye; the Midgleys, like most seafaring men, were accustomed to alcohol and Eliza, according to Miss Harris, “liked her drop”; but Edwin, deacon of Capel y Glyn, never touched the duff and undoubtedly showed his disapproval from time to time. Meanwhile, Eliza’s sons grew into a pair of handsome young men; Arthur, in particular, seems to have been very popular. About the year 1885, Edwin and Jane took into their house a twelve-year-old girl reputed to be Jane’s niece. Her name was Alice Price and she was said to have been a native of Twyning, near Tewkesbury. In fact she was born at Pillowell in the Forest of Dean and her father’s name was Josiah. Her mother’s maiden name was Hawkins, and if this is not a misreading of Wilkins she could not possibly have been the niece of Jane Duggan. Thus the mystery of the Price connection remains unsolved; perhaps it is as well to let it be. Alice soon became a great favourite with the people of Pontymister and was at first a scholar and then a teacher at the Glyn Chapel. The place needed her support; in 1887 they obtained their own pastor, Mr Jacob Williams, but the total membership was only 50, the chapel was dilapidated, and carried a debt of £500. Edwin was evangelising all he could. Family tradition has it that he succeeded in weaning the tin-plate workers from beer on to barley water, with a consequent improvement in Post Office Savings accounts, a story unsupported by historical evidence. Yet there is no doubt of his immense popularity .with young folk: the pain and disillusionment of his own early years had made him a champion of youth in later life. In 1889, at the age of 60, his heart began to fail and in February 1890 he made his will. On Saturday the 29th of March the young men of Pontymister Rugby Club won the Monmouthshire cup. Amid great rejoicing the team and its supporters came up the main street and some of them burst in to Landport House to tell Edwin the great news. But in the words of Miss Harris who was an eye-witness, “He said nothing, for he was dead”. There was turmoil everywhere; Jane Duggan was desperately ill with pneumonia and Alice Price, the 17-year-old darling of Glyn Chapel, lay dying in the last stages of pulmonary tuberculosis. Within forty-eight hours, she, too, had breathed her last. In the South Wales Gazette for the 11th of April 1890, much detail is given about the funerals of Edwin and Alice. Edwin was buried with Richard and Charlotte in Newport Cemetery and “the greater portion of the inhabitants of Pontymister attended”. A wreath was sent from Mr and Mrs J. Morris of Portsmouth (it will be remembered that the chemical works in Pontymister were owned by a family of the same name), and eventually a fine headstone was erected over the three of them. It was paid for by William Howell, and Edwin’s surname was spelt “Duggin”. At least he had discarded the “s” of the old Gloucester days. The funeral of Alice Price took place at the Glyn Chapel, and of 18 people named as sending wreaths, not a single Price appears among them. She was the seventh person to be interred in the older of the two Risca cemeteries, and her plot was purchased for £7/10/0 by William Howell. A headstone was raised for her by public subscription in Pontymister. In white stone, with a leaded inscription it stood out clearly from its contemporaries eighty years later in the decrepit disused graveyard. Delicately carved and yet unassailable, it guards forever the secret of Alice Price. Edwin’s will was executed on the 22nd of May. He left all he possessed to his wife, Jane, and his estate amounted to £333.6.6d which is a third of a thousand pounds less two pence stamp duty. Whatever it represents, it was a respectable sum for a man who began as a ropemaker’s apprentice for a penny a day. It was a common belief that Edwin had named Landport House in respect of his days in Portsmouth. Yet his memorial card bears the inscription “Edwin Duggin, who fell asleep March 29th 1890. Aged 61 years. Gloucester House, Pontymister”. Gloucester is the largest inland port in Britain, and Edwin finished, as he began, a Gloucester man. Moreover, when all is said, he was a good one at that. His wife, Jane, did not remain very long at Pontymister after her husband’s death; according to Miss Harris she went “to the Forest of Dean”, and once again there is the hint of the Price connection, a family calling one of its daughters in from the cold. She visited her daughter in Somerset in about 1906, as an old photograph can testify. She could easily have been 80 years old and sat proudly for the photographer with her daughter, her grandson and a great- grand-daughter. A matching death certificate for Jane is not easy to find; one wonders whether she died under the name of Wilkins, or even, dare one say it, Price. A certain Jane Duggan died at Kingston in Herefordshire in January 1910 aged 96, but it is unlikely that she was once the wife of a Monmouthshire postmaster. Thus our Jane leaves the stage as mysteriously as she made her entrance, and as she goes, the Prices go, too. The Midgleys lived in Pontymister until the early 1900’s, when William (the second) retired, taking with him Eliza to a cottage in Catcott, Somerset. Their son William became a first engineer in the Merchant Navy and retained his connections with Pontymister to the end. Miss Harris remembers how he recounted his voyages during the First World War and how one night, as he left her house he said “This one will be my last”. She never saw him again; he was lost in the S.S. Acton which was torpedoed a few weeks later. His name, strangely enough, is engraved on the War Memorial in Catcott; he had never married and in that village his closest family associations lay. His brother Arthur likewise became an engineer in the merchant fleet, married a Somerset girl named Helen Padfield, and survived the war. His first-born was a son, whom he called William, but the boy died when he was about 10 years old; there were two more children, Bernice and Marjorie, whose descendants, according to Miss Harris, keep a public house on the road between Torquay and Paignton. It is called “The Orange Tubs”. Edwin’s evangelising in the realms of teetotalism was never very successful. One half of what was once Landport House is now the Risca working men’s club; the other half is a betting shop. His ghost must be having a rather unhappy time. When I was six weeks old my father, Thomas Duggan, took my mother and me to stay with Eliza and her husband in Catcott. According to my mother’s account, the conditions were rustic in the extreme. The cottage was very primitive, the water supply being drawn from a pump 50 yards away. It seems that I was taken for a very long walk during whit h the perambulator collapsed and was replaced by another borrowed from Helen Padfield’s brother who was the headmaster of a country school at Chilton Poldn, some miles away. No doubt there were other incidents, too, and perhaps a moment when I scanned Eliza’s ageing features with uncomprehending eyes that, so far, have linked two Duggans across more than 120 years. A little while later, Eliza’s husband died, and on the 6th of October 1924 Marjorie Midgley watched by the bedside as her grandmother, the daughter and only child of Edwin the Elder, drew her last breath. “It is not a pleasant place, it is not agreeable, or easy or exempt from reproach. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible numerosity of society, the manner in which the senseless bigness is fatal to amenity the biggest aggregation of human life – the most complete compendium of the world.” it was to that that Dora Canty brought her son Edwin, in 1862. They represented two of 330,000 immigrants who came to live in London during the 1860’s, and a large proportion of that vast number were destitute Irish Catholics. In 1861, 178,000, or about 5 per cent, of London’s population were Irish born. Almost all of them were unskilled, and there- fore worked by building railways and docks or eked out a living in one of the sweated trades such as tailoring or shoemaking. They lived, not in the suburbs, but in concentrations in or near the City itself which were known as “rookeries”, in which the forces of social compression, including the heavy demands on available land made by railway construction, produced untold squalor. At about this tine over 300 infants out of every 100 born in Irish rookeries died before their first birthday. In the Whitechapel rookery the population density in the 1860’s was over 200 to the acre and the erode death rate was 30 per 1000 per annum. The expectation of life at birth was well below 35. The bonds which held these hapless societies together were adversity, politics and religion. Of the first, there was plenty to go round. The second was based upon a unanimous hatred of the British government, and most of their meagre leisure time was spent in seditious conversation aid the formation of minor associations concerned with the political causes of the better-known Irish rebels. Theme was no shortage of fuel for these ineffective bickerings; in 1868, when Edwin the Younger was 13 years old, Michael Barrett, an Irish guerrilla, was hanged outside Newgate prison. His was the last public execution in England. However, the Irish were to find that London was not conducive to successful revolutionary activity because of its enormous size. As far as religion was concerned, the Catholics alone among the county’s churchgoers were regarded as other than respectable. They were not a part of the social order, they included only a few tradespeople and they were concentrated in the rookeries. Only a minority, such as Edwin, nurtured a true spiritual allegiance; the majority of the Irish menfolk, at any rate, adhered to Catholicism as a form of social “apartheid” and as something which enabled them to exteriorise their political frustrations. Priests were few in number and most of their efforts were actually spent in stopping the leakage of Irishmen away from the church. The opening lines of this chapter were those of Henry James, writing in 1881, by which time a few improvements had come about in the metropolis since the arrival of the Duggans nearly 20 years before. The average age at death of a Whitechapel labourer was greater than 22; most Whitechapel roads had drains and most homes had sinks for the disposal of dirty water, and gaslight by which work at night. Philanthropists such as Angela Bundett- Coutts had been at work in the East End, and although about 25,000 children slept every night in the streets of London, some of them, at least, were receiving the rudiments of an education. Only a James, a Dickens or a Mayhew cold adequately describe the fortunes of the London Irish in 1862, yet it may be said that their social horizons existed within four points of a compass, the church, the prison, the workhouse, and the graveyard. One or more of these, sooner rather than later, would claim each and every one of them, save for a fortunate few who came by the ministrations of the Little Sisters of the Poor. As with all immigrants, the moment of his arrival was critical for Edwin, and determined the course of his life and that of his descendants. We do not know the motives which prompted Dora to undertake her journey to London, but she probably harboured the intention of becoming a servant. At that time there were over 250,000 domestic servants in Greater London of whom five-sixths were women and many of those were immigrants. Naturally, we suppose, she sought such help as he could provide, from her brother, Tom Canty, who was living in the Whitechapel rookery which lay between Rosemary Lane (now Royal Mint Street) and East Smithfield. The advent of an unemployed widow and a seven-year-old son would have been an almost intolerable burden for a rookery inhabitant, and in due course Dora would have had to fend for herself. She chose a most unexpected solution to her problem. On the 17th of November 1863 she, the defender of the Faith from Skibbereen, married John Charley, a man rather younger than herself and, by tradition, a Huguenot. They were married by Fr Thomas Thacker in the tiny chapel of St Joseph, in Lamb’s Passage, off Bunhill Row. Both of them gave the address, 9 Princes Place, Banner Street, a stone’s throw to the north. There is no confirmation to be had that John Charley, or indeed any other Charley, was to be numbered among the Huguenots whose records are so meticulously preserved by the Society of that name in University College, London. They were a closed community of silk weavers who had pursued their craft in Spitalfields since the middle of the 17th century. After 1826, when there were at least 10,000 looms in London, the craft began to decay and it received a terrible blow in 1860 when the tax on French silk goods was repealed. Either way, however, John Charley was a shoemaker and his father, Thomas, had been a plasterer. The inaccuracy of the tradition may have sprung from a strange fact; Dora’s second marriage was witnessed by a John Duggan who was totally unrelated to the family; as far as is known. In 1872 a J. Duggan was working as a silk weaver at 7 King Street off the Old Ford Road, and if the two men were one and the same, both Protestantism and silk weaving were represented in St Joseph’s Chapel on the 17th November 1863. The new marriage was hardly in the best interests of either Dora or Edwin. The provision of footwear was one of the main branches of the clothing industry, and in the rookeries, it was mainly concerned with cheap shoes for women and children, most of the work being done at home on sewing machines, as semi-skilled sweated labour replaced the old skilled craftsmen. Finally, by about 1890, the whole system collapsed when factory-made footwear began to flood the country from Northampton and Leicester. Economically, John Charley was not a good long-term proposition for an Irish widow. By 1872 he was painting coaches at 29 Essex Street, Bethnal Green Road. There can be little doubt that when Dora became his wife she intended to convert him to Catholicism, but although she was the more dominant, and even older, personality, he persisted, throughout his life, in the Protestant religion. This led, inevitably, to dissensions and separations, and to John Charley’s oft-repeated complaint that his wife spent mere of her time in church, praying for his soul than she did at home preparing his dinner. To have survived the abrupt change from the rural surroundings of Gloucester to the urban degradation of the Whitechapel rookery was the first of many testimonies to Edwin’s detachment and resilience. Be must have wondered to what kind of a nightmare his mother had brought him. To the end of his life he remembered the beauty of the spires of Oxford as he walked through the city on his way to the grime and sweat of Bunhill Raw. To pit against the future harshness and rancour of his stepfather he had but one fleeting recollection of Daniel, who had come to his rescue after he had fallen into water. As a young lad he must have witnessed historic events. On the 10th of January 1863 the Metropolitan line opened from Paddington to Farringdon Street, the first underground railway in the world, but only after the sewer containing the river Fleet had burst and flooded the tunnel to a depth of ten feet. In 1865 Malian Booth pitched his tent in Whitechapel and began his “Christian Mission to the Heathen of our Country”, from which the Salvation Army evolved. In 1866, cholera struck the rookeries and by the end of July over 1200 people had died of it in Whitechapel and its environs. Destitution itself shielded him, in the same year, from the worst financial crisis of the century. He obtained work as an errand boy to a physician, Dr Gaskey, who had a practice in the City Road and who taught him to read and write in part-payment for his services. John Charley, however, had other ideas and presently had Edwin trained as a leather-cutter, no doubt in connection with his own shoe-making enterprise. It was, however, an occupation which had wide associations with the clothing industry in general which utilised large quantities of partially processed leather, and Edwin was proud of his useful skill, describing himself as a “journeyman leather-cutter” until the end of his days. But Charley’s sweatshop was too much for him; he was so ill-treated that he ran away from home. It is almost certain that he had the connivance of his mother for otherwise he could hardly have made the distance to Pontymister where he lived for some time with his uncle, Edwin the Elder. Between the rookery and the Ebbw Vale the young Edwin made his adaptations, as necessary for survival. Life was austere rather than harsh; his uncle had to be addressed as “Sir” and all mention of his family associations was forbidden. How he got on with the Welsh mining community or the fraternity of the Chapel-y-Glyn we shall never know, but he remained grateful to his uncle who might, as we see it now, have saved his life as surely as his father had done when he pulled him out of the water. From about 1875 to 1886 nothing whatever is known about Edwin the Younger. He returned to London, probably at a time when it was calculated that he could look after himself, and by then the rookery had begun to disperse. Eastwards from the Mint along the Whitechapel Road stands the ungainly pile of the London Hospital and to the north of this was a Catholic parish founded by the Marists in Albert Place, based upon the church of St Anne. Within this parish, at 27 Artillery Street, Edwin emerged from obscurity, as a leather-cutter, in 1886. The house, owned by G.A. King, was the last in the street and abutted on the Great Eastern railway tracks between Shoreditch and Bethnal Green. By this time Edwin had achieved considerable popularity among the parishioners of St Anne, and had become something of a mainstay of the community. Be was known as “Ted” Duggan and evidently possessed a highly developed sense of humour, put to good effect as an entertainer at parish functions under the pseudonym of “Professor Duggan”. A printed programme of Grand Entertainment on Monday December 6th 1886 details his appearance in scenes from the farce “Charley O’Malley”. He may have written it himself and the name suggests that he might have been having his own back on his stepfather. His social graces and gentle, unassuming disposition would undoubtedly have come to the notice of an older doyen of the parish whose name was Thomas McGreal. He was not merely the father of a household, but an important member of an almost dynastic family group which was centred upon his home at 56 Queen Anne Street.* An analysis of this immensely complicated family and its generally accepted relationships with the Duggans is attempted in an appendix to this work, but suffice it here to state that Edwin the Younger married a woman named Margaret McGreal, reputedly a daughter of Thomas, on the 20th of February 1887, within three months of his celebrated performance at St Anne’s Parish Hall. The circumstances of this marriage are somewhat mysterious, and matters are not elucidated by the extraordinary number of mistakes which occur in Edwin’s marriage certificate. However, the couple were not married in the Whitechapel parish, but at St Joseph’s Church in Holborn, the mother-church of the chapel in Lamb’s Passage in which Dora, Edwin’s mother, had been married to John Charley, 23 years previously. The celebrant was Father P. Fitzpatrick, and Margaret’s address was given as 15 Radnor Street, to the north of Old Street, but within half a mile of the church. Even more strangely, Dora did not sign as a witness to the marriage; this was left to a son and a daughter of Thomas McGreal, namely Richard, then aged 20, and Julia, then aged 23. They each signed their names, but the bride, their sister, who was older than either of them, put her mark. Edwin signed his name “E. Duggin”. It is curious that this marriage took place in a Holborn parish, rather than at St Anne’s in Whitechapel, and it is just as out-of-character * Albert Place changed its name to Underwood Street and then to Underwood Road. After “World War II, Artillery Street became Peace Street. No vestige of Queen Ann Street remains; it lies within the premises of Kearley and Tongue. that their first chid, a son named Thomas Daniel, was born, not in Whitechapel, but to the north-east in the district of Bethnal Green. His birth took place on the 31st of July 1888 at 29 Cordora Road, a humble street of terraced houses numbered 1 to 21 on the north side and 22 to 36 on the other, and prevented from being anything but a cul-de-sac by the Regent Canal which runs across the end of it. Number 29 backed close by the railway line from Liverpool Street to East Anglia; in the family tradition, then, Thomas made his appearance amid the country’s transport system, be it tramways, canals, docks or railways, and in due course was trundled down Grove Road to the Catholic church, of the Guardian Angels in Mile End, and there duly baptised. It was at the time of these events that the spelling of the family name assumed, once and for all, its modern form. According to tradition, it was the Reverend Father Carney, guardian of the Marist church of St Anne, who advised Edwin to replace the “i” with an “a”, and hence Thomas was registered as the first Duggan. His mother, being illiterate, was probably unconcerned. Not to be outdone, Edwin himself acquired the second Christian name “Joseph” at about this time, but no one took much notice of that because he was universally known, and liked, as “Ted” Duggan. We may confidently suppose that Dora, then in her middle fifties, was still exerting a considerable influence on everything. It was said of her at the time that she could set a regiment of soldiers on fire with her tongue; she would have been a fair match, even for the patriarch Thomas McGreal. Furthermore, her brother Thomas, was also in evidence, like her, a famine- survivalist, but over six feet tall and with a cleft palate. He had taken the Queen’s shilling, become a soldier, married a woman named Charlotte, and had a son named Thomas, born about 1878. This family lived at the top of a three- storey tenement at 18 Pelling Street in Limehouse, off the southern end of the Burdett Road, about a mile from where Thomas Duggan was born, the son of Edwin the leather-cutter. But eighteen months later, the Duggans joined the McGreals, for their second child, a daughter named Margaret, was born on the 9th of January 1890 at 54 Queen Ann Street. The houses in this street were little more than terraced brick-built cottages and, like those in Cordova Road, were numbered consecutively along one side. 54 was a corner house, abutting on Court Street. 55 was occupied by a man named Donaghue, and at 56 lived Thomas McGreal. At some time or another the unhappy Charley was to be found at 57, but Thomas McGreal ruled over all. It was like a four-chambered rookery at a time when the Irish community elsewhere was beginning to disperse and rookeries were becoming a thing of the past. It was in these surroundings that Edwin the Younger established himself as the head of a family, from 1890 to 1900. The preoccupations of his trade as a journeyman leather cutter are without much historical significance, save as his means of livelihood during this time; the two most significant factors of his existence were the McGreals and the Church. The precise number of children sired by Thomas McGreal is unknown, but the fortunes of three of them, apart altogether from those of Margaret, were inextricably intermingled with chose of Edwin (Joseph) Duggan at this period. Mary Ann McGreal married a man nearly twice her age, George Cusick, on Christmas Day 1880; Julia McGreal married one Thomas Conniffe; and Richard McGreal married Agnes Hasberry 1 in April 1890. All of these married from, lived in, went from, and returned to such places as were available at 54 to 57 Queen Ann Street during the last decade of the 19th century. They tended each other when they were ill, bought and sold each other’s property when they ware on hard times, minded each other’s children when they were away, and watched, with affection and concern, the natural forces of attrition eroding, little by little, the dominant binding influences of Thomas McGreal and Dora Charley. The Church, blasting its way through the back streets of Whitechapel with all the panoply of counter-Reformation triumphalism, was a perennial source of spiritual encouragement and material support to them all. Ted Duggan, weaving his way among innumerable in-laws and their vicissitudes as well as his own, was a veritable blue-eyed boy. One Saturday night in 1891 he was summoned by the Marist Superior at St Anne’s, and charged with the duty of conducting Cardinal Vaughan round the parish to show him “how the laity spent their leisure time”. Exactly where Edwin took the Cardinal we shall never know, but they finished the tour at 54 Queen Ann Street where the Cardinal, mightily pleased with his excursion (and perhaps inwardly relieved to have survived it), solemnly bestowed his Apostolic Benediction upon the bricks and mortar and all that they contained. As far as anyone knew, Jack the Ripper was still abroad in that vicinity; in due course the residents at No. 54 were to follow his last victim, the prostitute Catherine Eddowes, to their common lodging in St Patrick’s Cemetery, Leytonstone. But as yet, Edwin’s two children, Thomas and Margaret, continued to grow and thrive. The household was full of warmth, domestic excitement and tricks. In dull moments their father would place the cat outside the living- room cupboard, open the door, and applaud the animal as it pounced upon the mice which emerged. A Gentleman named Ellis was a regular visitor to the Duggans, and was to be the god-father to Edwin’s grandson. In those days he was a tall, arresting figure with alpaca cape and silver-tipped Malacca cane. He also had a wooden leg, and one day, while he was ascending the stairs in a tram, his leg became detached and fell into a bucket of whitewash being carried by a man behind. Edwin promptly reproduced the incident as a farce for the delectation of the parishioners of St Anne’s. The little Thomas, too, was put upon the stage at about four years old, complete with trumpet and, rather oddly, in a Scottish uniform. The joys of those days were none the less enjoyable for being makeshift. Edwin might not have earned more than twenty shillings a week, but coal and meat and bread were cheap, Thomas McGreal provided the extras and the Church saw to the rest. Times were hard, but Edwin had survived much worse. In due course his two children attended the Marist school at St Anne’s, a short distance away. Between home and school stood the forbidding pile of St Andrew’s workhouse, and Thomas always remembered the grim assembly of destitutes lining up for admission as he made his way back to the security of No 54 in the late afternoon. But he himself was no willing scholar and would lie down in the roadway, compelling his younger sister to drag him by the feet lest he be late for class. Finally the Marists took matters into their own hands, and Thomas was removed from the Whitechapel rookery and sent to Dumfries when he was eleven years old, there to be trained as a boarder. The only other family member to leave the sanctuary of the McGreals was Dora’s second husband John Charley who had moved to 60 Green Duet, Bethnal Green. Inevitably the workhouse claimed him in the end, and he died there at the age of 66, twenty-seven days before the nineteenth century came to an end. We do not know what his last words were, but they might well have been, “Apres moi….” In 1900 Edwin changed his job; through the influence of his friend and ally Mr Ellis who evidently had connexions in the city, he became a care- taker in a block of offices near Fenchurch Street at 9 Billiter Square. He was resident there, of course, and took with him his two Margarets, wife and daughter, thus beginning a lasting separation from Queen Ann Street and the McGreals. Thomas was at school in Dumfries, but the family attachment was strong and there was a regular correspondence with him which included birthday cards, a few of which are still in existence, and a portrait snapshot of Edwin taken at Southend, possibly during an excursion in the holidays. Thomas was evidently doing well and a letter from him, dated 21st April 1902 does credit to a boy of 13. “My dear Parents, I send you these few lines to let you know that I received your kind letter quite safe. I hope you had a Happy Easter, and I should like to know where you spent it. I should also like to know if you have heard from Aunt Duggan since, and I should like to know her address. I suppose you think it very negligent of me for not answering your letter before; but I did not notice the ending of the P.S. which said write before Sunday; but I should very much have liked to be its God father; and the name I should choose would be Agnes; but I suppose I am too late now. “Dear Mama, I hope you are getting on all right and that you are keeping up your Religious Duties. I know your birthday is in May, but I do not know the day, so I will wish you many happy returns of the day, so as to make sure. “Dear Maggie, I received your kind letter quite safe and was glad to hear that you ate quite well. I hope , ou still pray for the poor children and that you write to the Cardinal. I should like to receive that St Peter’s Net every month. I think this is all I have to say at present, so Good Night and God Bless you. I remain your loving son and brother Thomas”. The letter betrays a strong clerical influence, which is hardly surprising; there is a trace of Irish usage, too, in the use of the word “since”; we know that none of Thomas McGreal’s offspring were enthusiastic churchgoers; but the first paragraph is a complete enigma. Edwin used often to talk about his two sets of “relations”. One was a family named Allen, of whom nothing is known. The other was an old German, Herr Bosch, whose son joined the 9th Lancers and fought in the Boer War. “Old” Kosch bought his son out of the army, but the lad immediately joined up again, his father exclaiming in despair “He loves the Queen more than he loves his father!” But Kosch was no true relation, and neither did Edwin have siblings or half-siblings. “Aunt” Duggan was probably a McGreal, possibly Jude., and the lost Goddaughter of Thomas might have been Julia’s daughter, Edith. 2 His sister, Margaret, evidently got on quite well with the Cardinal; in December 1903 she was awarded a Certificate of Merit by his Diocesan Inspector, C.J. Moncrieff-Smyth, just before she left the school at St Anne’s. Thomas survived the rigours of his education, too. He hated the cold washing water in the early morning, and he carried a scarred leg from a football injury for the rest of his life. Yet he obtained his King’s Scholarship and remained at Dumfries as a pupil teacher, afterwards. On the 30th of July 1905, Edwin, possibly having relinquished his “professorship” on the hordes of St Anne’s Parish Hall, took to more serious matters and joined the United Irish League of Great Britain. Characteristically, perhaps, his membership card, number 90715, described him as Mr Edward Duggan of the Robert Emmet branch, dedicated to assist in the attainment of Irish self-government, behind J.P. O’ Connor, the President and James F.X. O’Brien the General Secretary. But it was not long before even more urgent calls were made upon his loyalties. On the 19th of February in the following year, 1906, the death took place, at 55 Queen Ann Street, of Thomas McGreal aged 59. he was the eldest son of “old” Thomas, and although little is known about him, he had probably come to assume a key position in the McGreal rookery; his youngest brother, Richard, who registered the death, actually referred to him as his father. Without much delay, the ageing inhabitants of the house were put into the care of the Little Sisters of the Poor; Thomas McGreal, upon whom so much had rested for so long, went to St Joseph’s in Portobello Road, while Dora Charley found her resting place at St Ann’s in Manor Road, Stoke Newington. But elderly people do not take kindly to such upheavals; Thomas died on the 10th of March 1907, and Dora went her way, too, twenty-six days later. The family’s Irish connexions were thus laid to rest, once and for all. Edwin’s job in Billiter Square was no sinecure; coal and ashes had to be heaved up and down, floors polished, windows cleaned and the security of the offices safeguarded. He also operated the lift and once jammed his wife’s leg between the lift and the wall of the shaft, and tragedy was missed only by inches. Perhaps as a result of this the family moved out and took up residence at 96 White House Street, Limehouse*: but tragedy was following them behind. On the 5th of May 908 his daughter, Margaret, died at the age of 19. It was a turning-point in the family’s affairs. Within a few weeks Thomas, her brother, relinquished his appointment as a teacher with the Marists in Dumfries, and returned to London. The metropolis was, after all, his birthplace, and it laid claim to him in the moment of crisis and decay. From that moment onwards the Duggans became no longer Irish, but Londoners, and they pursued their migration, eastwards across the Lea valley, into the suburbs which sprang u in the make of the Great Eastern Railway. Edwin and his wife moved to 99 Strone Road, Manor Park, and Thomas became an assistant master at Forest House School in Woodford Wells, under Oscar Masterman-Schmitt M.A. Cantab., whose name alone would have *Now White House Road, Stepney. predestined him to be the principal of a private boys’ school in the early twentieth century. In the summer of 1909 there took place a garden party in Woodford attended by Thomas Duggan and several daughters of one Joseph Louis Quick, of Forest Gate. By any standards, Thomas was an exceedingly handsome young man, and Margaret, Joseph Quick’s youngest daughter, was of a rare beauty. Their mutual attraction was evidently sudden, complete and permanent. Any social inequalities as between the chief accountant of the Panama Canal Company in Windsor Road and the journeyman leather-cutter of White Horse Street, mattered not. There is no record that the two ever met; the son and daughter were devout Catholics and Thomas had at least as good an education as any of the sons of Joseph Quick, only one of whom, Bertie, had managed to obtain the London matriculation. The horse-drawn omnibus which plied its way from the Princess Alice, across the Flats and through rural Wanstead to the Horse and Wells became the vehicle of high romance. A photograph of Thomas, fast asleep in an armchair in the masters’ room of Forest House School in 1910, bore the simple inscription in the hand of Margaret Quick, “My Tom”. At Christmas in that year, Thomas gave up teaching; he was anxious to earn more money and had good reason for doing so. He became a commercial traveller for the Educational Book Company and went to live with his parents in Stone Road. For two years all went well, and then the health of Edwin began to fail. He died in West Ham Union Infirmary (later to become Whipps Cross Hospital) on the 12th of May 1913; it was Whit Monday and his wife’s birthday. The son of Dora Canty outlived his mother by a bare six years. If the essence of greatness is to survive misfortune, hardship, and injustice, to sorrow and yet make others happy, to spurn the temptations of pride and ambition and to remain steadfast against prejudice, Edwin the Younger must emerge as the greatest of the family’s ancestors. In his living- room, on the sideboard stood a small, hand-made wooden box with a glass lid, It contained a number of white pebbles and flint chips and a label which read, “Stones from my father’s grave”. With that as his only legacy, Edwin did well. 3, 4 Yet true love went its way, notwithstanding. Edwin died, Edward the Seventh died, the Titanic went down, Lloyd George stormed his way through Parliament, and across the English Channel the avarice of Kaiser Wilhelm steadily grew. The affections of Thomas and Margaret grew likewise, and on the 26th of April 1914, the second Sunday after Easter, with the war-drums ringing in their ears, they became engaged. Their ring, inscribed “T.D.-M.Q.” still survives. As in the case of Daniel and Dora, they did not have to wait long for the call of a national emergency, and Thomas joined the Territorial Army. Within four months, Britain declared war on Germany. Meanwhile, the house in Strone Road had been given up and Edwin’s widow had moved to 22 Latimer Avenue, East Ham. She did not long survive the outbreak of war, and died there on the 5th of December 1914, fourteen years and a day after John Charley expired in a workhouse. According to Thomas, his mother was “found dead in bed”, but Margaret, who was evidently looking after her at the time, admits only to being in the kitchen, making a cup of tea, while the mother of “Her Tom” gave up the ghost.. Many years later, I made it my sorrowful duty to discover the common graves of Thomas McGreal, Dora Charley, Margaret Duggan and her parents in St Patricks Cemetery, Leytonstone. I stood with a gravedigger in the pouring rain, surveying the dismal scene, and telling how, one aft er the other, they had been struck down. “Aye, sir,” he said, with the uncommon wisdom of a man of the earth, “Consumption it was, in those days”. He was right, and there can be little doubt that, in sending his only son from the Whitechapel rookery to Dumfries, Edwin spared the family line. The sister of Thomas’ mother, Julia Conniffe (nee McGreal) and her husband moved into the Latimer Avenue house to look after the only remaining Duggan. But within the year, matters were taken out of their hands. In 1915, Thomas was called up, and Number 29487, Gunner Duggan 2.2.A. of the 178th Brigade, D. Howitzer Battery, made his way towards the bloodiest battlefields in human history. Some years before, in January 1909, his mother had insured his life, with a premium of tuppence a week to the Prudential Insurance Company, for fifteen pounds. No bookmaker in the country would have given those meagre odds on the family fortunes as Thomas ambled along towards the trenches. But the bookmakers had never heard of Margaret Quick.
Appendices
- Agnes Harsberry was a music teacher. She was very eccentric and took snuff which often fell into the food while she was cooking. At her insistence, her son Thomas McGreal was educated by the Marists in Dumfries. She was evidently jealous of the education Thomas Duggan had had.
- 99 Stone Road had been occupied by Robert Sharpe and his wife Martha Louise Conniffe. He was a confectioner and a popular, uncompromising family figure. He moved to Hemel Hempstead where he ran a sweetshop and finally died. Through him “Bob Sharpe”, the Duggans were able to move into the eastern suburbs of London
- A further detail of this story is that Thomas’ mother asked him for a glass of her favourite tipple, namely porter into which a hot poker had been plunged. My father gave her that drink after which she fell asleep forever. Her death was, it seemed, unexpected.
- In fact, neither of these stories are true. Julia Conniffe who, with her husband Thomas and her daughter Edith were living nearby in Corfield Road, was looking after the ailing Margaret Duggan. One evening Thomas Duggan came in from work and said he would stay up with his mother during the night. Accordingly, Julia left the house. She was wakened at 7 am the next morning by a sudden knocking on her front door. Thomas stood there with his hair on end and tears running down his cheeks, saying that he had woken up in his chair to find his mother dead. He employed an undertaker whose name was Hurry. Sure to his name, he took the horse-drawn hearse down the cobbled Romford Road to “St Pat’s” at something between a fast trot and a gallop. Thus Margaret peremptorily left the land of the living, to the embarrassment of her few mourners,. Little wonder that my father dismissed the whole affair with the minimum of detail.