Finally Meeting Princess Maud – the story of Seamus Dunleavy

I recently acquired a copy of Finally Meeting Princess Maud by Seamus Dunleavy and Shirley Thompson. The book was first published in 2006 by the Warwickshire-based publisher of local history publications, Brewin Books. It is the co-written autobiography of Mayo born wrestler and business man Seamus Dunleavy. Having enjoyed some of Shirley’s other books about well-known local personalities, such as her trilogy written with Pat Roach, I had the pleasure of meeting her earlier this year to help with research into her latest work to be published later in 2017 and I came away from our meeting with a copy of Finally Meeting Princess Maud.

Written in a personable style, the book recalls Seamus Dunleavy’s memories in a conversational manner, for the reader it is like being in the room with Seamus as he takes a trip down Memory Lane with commentary from Shirley putting each chapter into context.

The book begins with his childhood on Barrack Street in the County Mayo village-town of Charlestown. Born in 1934, Seamus grew up in impoverished conditions with his mother struggling to feed and clothe the family whilst his father was working away in England as a carpenter. It is a familiar story no doubt for working-class Irish Catholics of Seamus’s generation, though worth hearing for the younger generations who have no conception of just what life was like for families living in real conditions of poverty.

Yet Seamus makes no appeal for sympathy or sentimentality and his recall is matter-of-fact, dignified, often humorous, warm and always entertaining. If indulgences and luxuries were few and far between for the Dunleavy family of Barrack Street, Seamus found his treasure in relationships with family and friends - the book is packed with anecdotes of the people he has known and from the start one finds oneself thinking “this is a nice fellah”.

Some autobiographies tend to skip through childhood very briefly but for Seamus his memories are detailed and of great interest and value. This includes the story of his youth in Charlestown and migration to England in 1952 on board the famous Princess Maud of Wales to Liverpool docks. The modest B & I Line freight ship Princess Maud may not have reached a place in popular consciousness as prominent as the Empire Windrush which brought Jamaican migrants to England around the same time, but according to Seamus it has a legendary reputation amongst Irish migrants of the early 1950s:

“I had heard about Princess Maud, all of my life, from the immigrants around Charlestown – the rough conditions, seasickness, fights, dancing on deck, hopelessness – most leaving with nothing but the fare – to the farmlands of Lincolnshire.”

Seamus’s recollections of living and working in Liverpool also have great historic value for us today in contributing to the story of the Irish diaspora. He tells of the life of labourers on the docks and work in factories, the basic housing, the trams and double-decker buses, cinemas, Merseyside landmarks, popular music and the football rivalry between Liverpool and Everton. It was in Liverpool that Seamus joined a club called Duffy’s Boxing Club in Litherland and on deciding that his physique was better suited to wrestling, he subsequently joined the Amateur Wrestling club at the Pegasus Club. Seamus tells of the delight of his parents when he sent them a copy of the Bootle Times with the story of his selection for the All England Championships.

In the late 1950s Seamus moved to Birmingham and worked at Hams Hall near Coleshill before finding digs on Wenman Street, Balsall Heath and later moving to Birchfield Road in Perry Barr. His life became a mixture of hard work and craic whilst pursuing his love of wrestling up and down the country. In 1958 he became a professional wrestler, combined with working on the door at the Shamrock.      

Seamus’s life in Birmingham through the 1960s and subsequent decades is a fascinating read. The book tells how he coached fellow Brummie Pat Roach and other local wrestlers, how he became a landlord offering bedsits which were a cut above the rest (sinks in the rooms) and how he ran several nightclubs in the city including the Talk of the Town, the Speak Easy, Daddy Longlegs, the Cascades and Peter Rabbit. Seamus also recalls to Shirley the traumatic night in 1968 that an unknown assailant in a donkey-jacket shot him as he arrived home in his car.

In spite of this event and other scrapes with trouble, Seamus Dunleavy had a long and successful career, most famously as a wrestler and then as a business man. He married Mary Griffin who he first met at a Saint Patrick’s Night Dance in Hurst Street. They were engaged in July 1961 and married at English Martyrs Church on 16 April 1963 with a reception at the Mermaid Hotel on Stratford Road. The couple had three children, Shamus, Russell and Tracey.

Finally Meeting Princess Maud is a great read and well worth seeking out a copy. As well as telling a fascinating story of a journey from hardship to success, it is packed with cultural and geographical references from both Ireland and the West Midlands which will have strong resonance to the local Irish community. Many will recognise local landmarks and personalities now gone and most will also be familiar with the journey of the Irish immigrant to England in the 1950s which Seamus Dunleavy’s life-story exemplifies in its own unique way.

Published by Brewin Books Ltd (www.brewinbooks.com)

ISBN 1 85858 284 9

From Kilkenny to Calcutta – how an Irish orphan became an indomitable matriarch

Lilian Dillon

Every Irish family has been touched by the great diaspora, losing loved-ones forever to the grey funnel line across the rolling sea. Their stories are recalled in song and poetry around the world. But some stories are less well-known and the tale of Lilian Dillon, a small girl from Kilkenny who found herself orphaned in Calcutta, is one.   

I was recently doing family history research for my sister-in-law Rachel Palmer from Devon. Rachel’s family are from the southern counties of England, her ancestors’ origins ranging from Suffolk in the east to Devon in the west, taking in London, Brighton and various other towns and villages along the way. Rachel’s ancestors include some fascinating characters including two ancestors with knighthoods, a Victorian chemist who invented homeopathic remedies still on sale today and a journalist who conspired with Harry Houdini to uncover fake mediums in Edwardian London.

Not far into my research I came across two Scottish lines of Rachel’s tree but was not expecting to discover Irish genealogy until Rachel’s Uncle Jan whispered to me that I should look a little further …to India.

Rachel’s maternal line includes a branch of families living in India, many working in the country’s gargantuan railway network from the mid-1800s, who saw out the final years of rule of the East India Company through the subsequent eight decades of rule by the British Crown, (the Raj). Just like in Ireland, the history of British rule in India is contentious, though what interests me is the impact of history on the microcosmic lives of individuals.

One such individual was an Irish girl named Elizabeth (aka Lilian) Dillon, who we discovered to have been Rachel’s 3 x great grandmother. Her story is remarkable, born in Kilkenny in 1849, as the great hunger ravaged the country and its destitute population flocked to the ports for steerage on America-bound ships, Lilian’s father Matthew took the option of a career in the British army and joined an Irish regiment where he became a captain.  

From the Flight of the Wild Geese in 1691 when Irish Jacobite forces left to serve in continental armies, Irish soldiers gained a formidable reputation around the world. Ironically though not surprisingly, Irish regiments were highly valued by the British army, fighting in battles from Bunker Hill in the American Revolutionary War to the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean.

As Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, a Longford born unionist said “…Jack Frost is the best recruiting sergeant we have” and the East India Company having previously taken advantage of this principle in the early 19^th century, had actively targeted Ireland to recruit men like Matthew Dillon with the promise of food, clothes and a roof over their heads. Irish officers and soldiers, it is said, made a disproportionate contribution to the 'steel frame' around which the Raj was built. There were nearly as many Irish men in the Bengal Regiment as there were English, Welsh or Scots. In the 1850s enlistment to the army was for a minimum of 21 years, so when soldiers were sent to India they often took their wives and children with them.

The Indian Mutiny, also called the 1^st War of Indian Independence began in May 1857 when Indian troops known as sepoys rose up against the rule of the British East India Company. The mutiny quickly escalated into a civilian rebellion across the central northern regions of India. Accounts of the atrocities on both sides of the fighting make shocking reading. Much was made of the brutality of the rebels not just towards besieged British soldiers but civilians too, especially women and children, though this must be balanced against the violent retribution of the British army.

It was in this rising that 8 year old Elizabeth Dillon saw her parents murdered and also lost her brother Wentworth. Perhaps, like Rudyard Kipling’s hero Kim (an orphaned Irish military child in India named Kimball O’Hara), little Elizabeth might have taken to the roads as a vagabond, but we know that she was ultimately taken in by a Catholic orphanage run by nuns in Calcutta where conditions though “harsh” were better than starvation.

When Elizabeth was 19, the nuns had her married to an Italian opium and indigo planter named Dominic Rossetto. The couple had two children, Frederick Rossetto (Rachel’s 2 x great grandfather) and his sister Mary Angela. When Dominic died she married one Frederick Coaker but left him because of his bad treatment of her son Frederick. Her third marriage to William Robinson was happier and she had three more children.

From the unimaginable trauma of seeing her parents murdered and losing her brother, brought up as an orphan amidst the poverty of 19^th century Calcutta, becoming a widow, then escaping an abusive second marriage, Lilian Dillon survived to become a respected lady of Indian-European society. Her descendants recalled her as a quiet, serious, but indomitable woman, a devoted matriarch to her family. Just like Kipling’s fictional Kim, neither wholly British nor Indian, Lilian endured the struggles of this vast land of contrasts and tensions to assert her own identity and independence.  

Lilian lived her final years in the comfort of a Calcutta nursing home and died in 1921.  

JFK – his Irish roots

In the year that the new President of the United States, Donald Trump, takes office in the White House, we take a stroll down memory lane to remember a previous president, celebrated for his Irish heritage but whose tenure was tragically cut short when he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. That President was of course, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

My thanks go to Alan and Jayne Kavanagh of Droitwich for putting me on the trail of the Kennedy family’s roots in Ireland. During a recent conversation I enquired of Alan’s own Irish roots and he told me that his father Kevin, like so many others of his generation had come to England in the 1950s. He had married Muriel and they settled down and brought up four sons, Alan, John, Gary and Jason in Kingstanding, Birmingham.

Kevin Kavanagh originally came from Waterford so we talked about Alan’s own memories and knowledge of his dad’s family in Ireland, the Kavanaghs of Waterford and it was during this conversation that Alan told me “someone in the family said we were related to John F Kennedy”. I sensed that Alan may have thought no more of this than it being a family myth, though as we discussed the geographical proximity of Waterford city to the famed Kennedy cottage just over the border in Wexford, the possibility of a connection seemed worthy of serious consideration.

Since watching the recent episode of Who Do You Think You Are? in which Danny Dyer traced his family tree back to Edward III, I would not dismiss any such claim lightly, especially in Ireland which has such a strong oral history tradition and a much lower population than the UK, so the probability of connections with famous people is higher.

Shortly after my conversation with Alan and Jayne, I briefly met Alan’s dad Kevin Kavanagh who is now 80 years old and still cutting the fine figure of a strapping Waterford man. He still lives in Birmingham with his lovely wife Norma. I talked to them about Waterford and Kevin’s memories of his childhood. He told me that he and his brothers were such a handful that every summer their parents packed each of them off to stay with relatives in different parts of Ireland, just to keep them apart and minimise the trouble they got up to.

In the 1950s Kevin came to England on his way to New Zealand where he intended to make a new life. He was only intending to get a visa and jump on a flight or a boat but ended up staying longer than intended, finding work in the UK and marrying his first wife Muriel. Subsequently Kevin never made it to New Zealand and has lived in Birmingham ever since. We also talked about the connections of the Kavanagh family of Waterford to the Wexford ancestors of John F Kennedy, Kevin does not know the exact line but has a nephew who has researched it. Himself and Norma have visited the Kennedy Homestead museum at Dunganstown.

Kevin also told me about his grandparents, John and Anastasia who ran a bar and grocery shop on Merchants Quay in Waterford. The couple are found with their large family in the 1911 census of Ireland – John gives his place of birth as Kilkenny and Statia (Anastasia) said she was born in Wexford (both county borders are very close to Waterford). We might begin to speculate that it was Anastasia’s family who were related to the Kennedy family – though there is still research to be done to confirm the connection.

John Fitzgerald (Jack) Kennedy, commonly known by his initials JFK was the 35^th U.S. President from January 1961 until his death almost two years later. During that time Kennedy became one of the most popular U.S. presidents in American history and his death shocked the whole world and made such an impact on the global consciousness that people still ask to this day “where were you when you heard that Kennedy had been shot?”

But the grief and shock waves of JFK’s assassination were felt particularly powerfully in Ireland, not just because of the Irish heritage of the Kennedy family or because he was the first and only Roman Catholic president but because his four day visit to Ireland in June 1963 with its speeches, crowds and celebratory passion was still fresh in everyone’s minds. In June 1963, Kennedy had been like the prodigal son returning home from the diaspora, the Irish people had welcomed him and fallen in love with both him and his beautiful wife Jackie. Just six months later, his bright candle had been cruelly snuffed out.  

 

 

When Kennedy visited Wexford in 1963 he made clear the pride he had of his Irish roots. At his ancestral home in Dunganstown he was greeted by a huge crowd waving both Irish and American flags and was serenaded by a choir singing “The Boys of Wexford.” Whilst at Dunganstown, Kennedy met members of his extended Irish family at the Kennedy homestead and famously took tea outside the family cottage.

Kennedy’s great-grandfather, Patrick Kennedy was born at Dunganstown in 1823 and migrated to the U.S., arriving in Boston in 1848. The Kennedy family quickly made their mark on business and politics in America and through their marriages with other influential American-Irish families such as the Hickey and Fitzgerald families became one of the most powerful and well-known dynasties in the States. 

In future editions of The Harp I hope to return to the story of Kennedy’s roots in Ireland and confirm the connection of local Birmingham family the Kavanaghs. Do you have connections or memories of President Kennedy in Ireland? Please get in touch and tell us your story.