Patrick Comerford
It is always a delight to receive a new book in the post, particularly a book that I am part of, even though that may be a very small part.
Rod Smith is a journalist and family historian living in New Zealand. He has already researched and published a history of the Guinness family, Guinness Down Under, and now he has written an equally fascinating book about the Trench family and the Earls of Clancarty, Clancarty: The high times and humble origins of a noble Irish family.
I have been invited to speak at the London launch of his new book next month. But he also invited me to contribute one of the forewords and has used my photograph of a memorial to the 3rd Earl of Clancarty in Saint Brendan’s Church, Loughrea, Co Galway.
In addition, part of my foreword has been quoted on the back cover of this exciting new book.
The book arrived in the post today, and I hope to say more about it when it is launched in London next month.
Foreword
How we understand the place of landed, titled families in Ireland and their contribution to Irish life has changed profoundly in recent years. This reappraisal has been helped, in part, by the Landed Estates project at the University of Galway, the fresh approach and publications programme at the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates at Maynooth University, pioneered by Professor Terence Dooley, and the work of historians in response to the ‘Decade of Centenaries’, including the Easter Rising in 1916, the War of Independence and the Irish Civil War.
In the past, writers were often dismissive of the roles of families such as these, caricaturing them as oppressive or capricious landlords, portraying them as quaint or eccentric, or finding them relative to nation-building narratives only when their scions were creative writers such as WB Yeats or George Bernard Shaw, or identified with nationalist causes, as with Henry Grattan, William Smith O’Brien or Douglas Hyde.
Too often, the Irish identity of these families was easily questioned or traduced, with pejorative labels such as ‘planters’ or hyphenated stereotyping such as ‘Anglo-Irish’ that doubted their identity and that implied Irish identity depends on particular cultural, linguistic or supposed ethnic backgrounds. The unsettling rise of populist racism in Ireland is a consequence of cultivating a definition of Irish identity that is neither broad enough nor tolerant enough, that is not visionary enough to embrace the variety and breadth of ethnicity and culture that contributes to the mosaic making up the full, beautiful, diverse and rich picture of Irish identity.
The contribution of the Trench family to that mosaic is both rich and beautiful in its scope. They were French Huguenots in their origins, so offering an early contribution to linguistic and religious pluralism in Ireland. And their lives have embraced church life, and the cultural, political, architectural, educational and social life of Ireland.
In this book, Rod Smith retells the Clancarty story, a remarkable tale of a family whose members are more than eccentric title holders or benign landowners. Every family has its surfeit of embarrassing members, in this case the eighth earl, who openly sympathised with Hitler and the Nazis, and later believed in flying saucers and aliens living at the centre of the earth. On the other hand, the ninth earl is an artist and crossbench peer who is vocal about the arts and Europe and those on society’s margins.
A wider study of the Trench family would include Richard Chenevix Trench, Archbishop of Dublin and a key figure in initiating the Oxford English Dictionary; Wilbraham Fitzjohn Trench, Professor of English Literature at Trinity College Dublin and a trenchant critic of both Yeats and Joyce; Terry Trench, a founding figure in An Óige, the Irish Youth Hostel Association; and the academic and journalist Brian Trench and his brother the musician and composer Fiachra Trench.
One of the untold stories that continues to fascinate me is that of Archbishop Power Le Poer Trench of Tuam. Although a vigorous evangelical, he was sensitive to Irish culture and was loathe to ordain any man for his diocese who did not speak Irish. His portrait was inherited by his direct descendant, the psychiatrist Dr Maurice O’Connor Drury (1907-1976). Con Drury first met Ludwig Wittenstein in Cambridge in 1929 and their friendship lasted until Wittgenstein died in 1951. Drury was the psychiatrist who helped to restore Wittgenstein to full health in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s, and so a descendant of the Clancarty Trenches rescued one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century.
These untold stories offer a wider perspective on a family whose rich and varied biographies and contributions to Irish life are introduced in this insightful study. Thankfully, this book introduces the truth that the stories of families such as this must never be confined to the margins and the footnotes of Irish social and political history.
(Revd Professor) Patrick Comerford,
formerly Trinity College Dublin and the Church of Ireland Theological Institute
