|
Disclaimer & Bowles DNA Project |
Around 1908 Neil built Gortmalogue just outside Clonmel. By the 1940s his three daughters were in residence together with 'Aunt Ann' Neil's widow. In the 1935 when my father married he in turn built another bungalow - Glencar -at the same end of the town about half or three quarters of a mile from Gortmalogue. However we were just within the town boundary although right on the edge and had all mod cons of the times - the usual urban services - h & c water, electricity even a car. Not so Gortmalogue as I will recount.
On Sunday mornings for several years in the 1940s, when I would be between 8 and 14 years old, Helen and I would be sent over to Gortmalogue to collect their by then read latest copy of the Illustrated London News. You will recall the magazine - it was a serious glossy-paper English picture news magazine with photographs all in either sepia brown or black and white. It was very 'Imperial' - many references to the Royal Family and Empire themes. Such are Irish contradictions that our family, several of whom including my father fought and were imprisoned during the Irish freedom struggle in the early 1920s, saw no contradiction in buying or reading these quintessentially English publications.
Anyhow off we were sent each Sunday up the lonely Glenconnor road to Gortmalogue. There were no houses to pass on our journey as the road was bounded on each side by the large farm estate of the County Mental Hospital as it was then called. This gave the trip a kind of 'spooky' feeling.
Gortmalogue had two entrances - a wide gate and overgrown drive which lead to the rear and would be used by the horse and trap - their only conveyance. Just further on was a pedestrian gate - much rusted - with a 75 meter walkway up to the house itself. The walk up was bounded on each side by a 'wild' garden - lots of ornamental grasses and shrubs - no flowers or cut lawn that I recall. 'Bungalow' nowadays is a much misused word - bungalow bliss! - and can describe a multitude of house design but the one Neil Boles built was of the classic Indian colonial variety. It was a low structure - wide and deep. Two rooms faced you with a central hall door. It was fronted by an open veranda in the Indian style with a lot of painted (or in need of painting!) woodwork. The front door opened on to (initially) a wide hall with the dining room to the right and sitting room to the left. These rooms had large front windows although the dining room was slightly darkened as it was fronted by the veranda.. Both rooms were beautifully furnished in Edwardian style. Heavy 'good' furniture - much polished - solid upright chairs and armchairs (none of this modern sofa 'lolling about' comfort nonsense in those days!) - a sideboard laden with silver - tea services - candlesticks and much else - all gleaming from constant polishing. In the absence of electricity there were ornate oil lamps. To my young eyes these rooms were a source of awe and wonder. They were truly beautiful rooms albeit, although I did not know it then, from an era fast approaching its sell by date However beyond the entrance hall and these splendid rooms things went downhill so to speak. The hall narrowed and became a mere passage - it had no natural light so it, and indeed the rest of the house, had a dim half light ambience. There were two bedrooms on one side and at least one if not two on the other. The passage eventually lead to the kitchen. This was spartan in the extreme - a stone flag floor, shelves and a table covered with flower patterned oilcloth. Cooking was by an Aladdin stove. This ran on paraffin oil the smell of which permeated all over the back part of the house - faint but everlastingly characteristic. It had two burners for boiling and if you wished to bake a bottomless metal box was placed over the burners to act as an oven! There was no running water but I assume there was a hand pump of some sort in the yard. In the back there was a yard, stables and a large field for the horse. I feel the horse and trap was on the way out by my time - probably bicycles were used to get to town.
The Boles ladies that would greet us on these Sunday mornings all had the manner and character derived from, what May Sharkey would have called, a 'good' family background. All would have been in their forties or fifties at that time. Gretta was a teacher and Maisie and Nellie were nurses. They all had restrained and quiet manners and spoke with deep voices with the rather solemn toneless Tipperary accent of the area but in an educated way. All of that generation were educated in England or Belgium. They were always dressed well but plainly. Come to think of it such a restrained manners and behaviour could well have had its origin in distant Quaker ancestry - to which you and your correspondent refer - there is a strain of that quietness also in the Sharkey family - even in myself perhaps!. None of them married nor indeed did their Sharkey contemporaries my aunts - May, Irene and Helen. Indeed from the eleven children of the two families only Helen and myself were to represent the next generation.
On these visits we would be much fussed over - given treats of some variety - usually lemonade and biscuits - and be brought in to see Aunt Ann Boles in the dining room. She would be in her mid/late eighties at that stage and would be seated by the fire - dressed in black and white lace. She had, to me, an old 'croaky’ voice and would probably have asked about our parents and grandparents and we, in the manner of children of that era, most likely would have little to say in return.
However this long period came to an end. Aunt Ann died in 1949 and Nellie died two or three years later - of a heart condition I think. Circa 1955 Gretta and Maisie sold Gortmalogue - to a Ryan from Irishtown Clonmel -and they moved to Anne Street. My father advised Gretta on the sale and we were given the white veranda garden seat as a keepsake. It graced our lawn for a further 20 years and when in 1975 we were selling Glencar I considered bringing it to Galway. However its woodwork was beyond salvation (perhaps it had missed the shelter of the veranda!) and so fittingly it was left to die in Clonmel. Anne Street was and is a cul- de-sac street of twenty eight houses - quite the finest of their kind in the town. (They were designed and built in 1820 by Thomas Tinsley and were of late Georgian design. His son William Tinsley became a well known architect designing many Clonmel buildings before eventually going to the USA where he designed several mid western university buildings.) So all the grand furniture and other items were re-installed in the fine rooms of the Anne Street house with the added benefit of mod cons for the first time in their lives. If my children will ever have any Bole's memories it will be of their being brought there as very young children in the early 1970s for annual 'high tea' visits to Gretta and Maisie. Sadly they both of them were dead by the mid/late 1970s and so ended an era. They are all buried in Cahir.