COMERFORD WAY: Patrick Comerford’s online journal on Anglicanism, theology, spirituality, history, architecture, travel, poetry, beach walks ... and more
A stroll along a quiet lane near Askeaton (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)
Patrick Comerford
Although the weather is still cold and the skies are grey and overcast, this is good weather for wrapping up well and going for a walk.
I had a number of pastoral visits this morning, and before returning to the Rectory to put the finishing touches to Sunday’s sermons and service preparations and to my monthly column for church magazines, I went for a walk along the country lanes near Askeaton, and by the River Deel, as far as the slipway used by the Desmond Rowing Club at a turn on the river upstream from the point where it flows into the estuary of the River Shannon.
By the banks of the River Deel below Askeaton (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018; click on image for full-screen view)
Some of the old small cottages on the west bank of the river, behind the swimming pool, are tumbling down, but patches of thatch remain on their roofs and the flaking paintwork on the walls add the scenic quality of the lanes.
Across the river, the ruins of the former Franciscan Abbey are majestic. But beside them, the ruins of the old creamery and a nursing home are a sad reminder of economic decline in past decades.
At one time, a visionary plan saw their potential for a restaurant, hotel and other facilities that would enhance the tourist potential of this town and this part of Limerick.
Hopefully, someone will return to these dreams soon and bring them back to life.
The Franciscan ruins on the banks of the River Deel in Askeaton (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018; click on image for full-screen view)
The Bank stands on the site of the short-lived Saint George’s Church, once on the corner of George’s Street and Mallow Street (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)
Patrick Comerford
In my search for the churches of Limerick, I have also come across the sites of churches that are standing no longer.
When the mediaeval Saint Michael’s Church was destroyed in the mid-17th century, it was not rebuilt, and the Church of Ireland parish was left without a church building for over 100 years.
In the 1760s, work began on building a new church at the corner of George’s Street with Thomas Street and Bedford Row. The planned church was to have a pivotal position at the centre of a polygonal piazza and would have been visible from the river. This might have given the street a vista similar to that created by Saint George’s Church in Hardwicke Place, Dublin.
The foundation stone was laid in 1767, and the new church was planned as an octagonal building. The octagonal outline for the church can be seen in Christopher Colles’s map of Newtown Pery in 1769.
The map does not include the Crescent, first known as Richmond Place, nor does it include Pery Square. The location of the new church in the centre of the new main thoroughfare, to be known as George’s Street (now O’Connell Street), reflected the place of the Church of Ireland in Georgian society. The name of the church and the street were chosen to honour King George III and not the English patron saint.
The original site on George’s Street for Saint George’s Church was at the junction with Thomas Street and Bedford Row Bank (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)
The new church would have served the original residents of Newtown Pery. But, for some unknown reason, the church was never built at the first chosen location. The site was changed to a place further south, originally surrounded by green fields, as can be seen on Sauthier’s Map of Limerick in 1786.
The unfished church was dismantled and the materials from the site were reused as the Pery family built and endowed Saint George’s Church on the corner of George’s Street and Mallow Street.
Saint George’s was completed in 1789-1791 at a cost of £507. It, was a modest building and was never intended to serve as a parish church. In Church Law, it was a chapel of ease to Saint Mary’s Cathedral. It was an interim solution for the new suburbs being developed in Newtown Pery at the turn of the 18th and 19th century by the Pery family. The Archdeacon of Limerick, the Ven William Wray Maunsell, remained the Rector of Saint Michael’s, and so a curate was appointed to Saint George’s, with the curate’s stipend paid by the Earl of Limerick.
The new church was described as a plain, commodious building that could seat 300 people, and its lofty east window once belonged to the old Franciscan Abbey in Limerick. It was called the Round Church, and at first it was in the middle of a green field.
At first it was surrounded by green fields. Later, the map of ‘Part of South Prior’s Land’ (1823) and McKern’s Map (1827) place it at the junction of George’s Street and Mallow Street.
But the church only last for about 40 years. It was demolished in 1831, as Saint Michael’s Church was being built on the corner of Barrington Street and Pery Square. Both the Limerick Evening Post and Clare Sentinel reported on 9 September 1831 that ‘St George’s Church Limerick is to be forthwith taken down and on its site will be erected an edifice for transacting the business of the Provincial Bank.’
With the demolition of Saint George’s Church, Saint Michael’s Parish was once again without a church from 1831 until Saint Michael’s was completed and consecrated.
On the site of Saint George’s Church, the Provincial Bank of Ireland built a five-bay, three-storey over basement limestone bank to the designs of James Pain. The Provincial Bank opened in 1834, with the address 63 George’s Street, and the money generated from the sale of Saint George’s to the bank provided the bulk of the sum required to build Saint Michael’s Church.
But once again there was no Church of Ireland church in the parish, apart from the privately-owned Trinity Episcopal Church in Catherine Street. While the rector of the parish had the spiritual care of the parishioners, they were without a church building. Some of the parishioners met in the Primitive Methodist chapel until 1843. However, the Methodists gave notice that year that they would withdraw the privilege grated to Saint Michael’s parishioners.
An application was made to the Church Commissioners and a sum of money was granted to complete the unfinished church. By Act of Parliament, the Revd Pryce Peacock, who was the curate of Saint George’s and lived nearby in the Crescent, was appointed the first curate of Saint Michael’s.
The Provincial Bank of Ireland, established in 1825, merged in the 20th century with the Royal Bank of Ireland and the Munster and Leinster Bank to form Allied Irish Banks.
Today, the former Provincial Bank building is the Bank Bar and Restaurant at the corner of 63 O’Connell Street and 1 Mallow Street. This landmark building is in good condition and has a very finely detailed façade with historic windows and glass. The side elevation blends successfully with Mallow Street, and ties the two streets together seamlessly. Much of the interior is original and clearly demonstrates a good change of use without the loss of architectural features.
Although the building is later than many of the Georgian buildings in this part of Limerick, the composition of its formal façade and its sympathetic proportions add variety and interest to the building.
The Bank on O’Connell Street is later than many of the Georgian buildings in this part of Limerick and was designed by James Pain (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)
Castlemahon, the former Cork home of Lady Chatterton (Photograph: Apex Painting)
Patrick Comerford
I was writing earlier this morning about the Victorian writer Georgiana Lady Chatterton (1806-1876), her travelogues about pre-Famine Ireland, her unusual marriage arrangements after she moved from Cork to England, and her decision to become a Roman Catholic, through the influence of Cardinal Newman, only weeks before her death.
Today, she is largely forgotten as an Irish writer. So, what about Lady Chatterton’s literary legacy?
What happened to the Ferrers family, into which her niece Rebecca married?
And whatever happened to Castlemahon, the former Chatterton family home in Blackrock, Cork?
Between 1836 and 1875, Lady Chatterton wrote numerous romantic novels, poems, biographies, religious tracts and travel books. Her string of romantic ‘novels’ were consumed eagerly by her female readers, but they were nothing less than turgid fiction, and were reviled and derided by literary critics.
Cardinal John Henry Newman was a fan of her writing and praised her later works and the refinement of thought in her later fiction. When she sent a copy of her privately-published translation of selected works of Aristotle to Newman in Birmingham, he responded:
‘The Oratory, February 28, 1875,
‘My dear Lady Chatterton,
‘Thank you for your translations of Aristotle. They are well selected, clear, and good, and must have involved a good deal of trouble. But it must have been pleasant trouble.
‘I fear you must have suffered from this trying season – which is not yet over.
‘With my best remembrances to the family circle at Baddesley.
‘I am, my dear Lady Chatterton,
‘Sincerely yours,
‘John H Newman.’
But it has been said without cruelty by literary critics recently that her writing style did for prose what William McGonagall did for poetry.
Lady Chatterton and other women writers of the day were the target of a scathing essay by the novelist George Eliot, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.’
In her essay, George Eliot criticised stereotypically female authors of light-hearted romances: ‘Where there is one woman who writes from necessity, we believe there are three women who write from vanity; and, besides, there is something so antiseptic in the mere healthy fact of working for one’s bread, that the most trashy and rotten kind of feminine literature is not likely to have been produced under such circumstances. “In all labour there is profit;” but ladies’ silly novels, we imagine, are less the result of labour than of busy idleness.’
Tamworth Castle, the ancestral home of the Ferrers family (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
As for Marmion Ferrers and his family and his name, people were still fighting over the Ferrers name and title 30 years after his death, as late as 1914, when the case again came before the House of Lords.
In 1855, Marmion Ferrers became one of the legal heirs to the title of Baron Ferrers of Chartley. This title went into abeyance with the death of his uncle that year, and the two claimants were Marmion and his aunt, Lady Elizabeth Boultbee.
Marmion’s mother was Lady Elizabeth’s sister, Lady Harriet Anne Townshend (1782-1845), who married Edward Ferrers (1790-1830) in 1813. The two sisters became the legal heirs to their brother, George Townshend (1778-1855), 3rd Marquess Townshend.
The Ferrers title had been inherited in the Devereux family by the Earls of Essex. Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex and Lord of the Manor of Lichfield, had two sisters, Lady Frances Devereux (1590-1674), who in 1616 married William Seymour (1587-1660), later Duke of Somerset; and Lady Dorothy Devereux, who married Sir Henry Shirley, whose descendants held the titles of Earl Shirley and Viscount Tamworth.
Lady Frances Devereux (1590-1674), Duchess of Somerset … William Comberford’s ‘trulie virtuous ladie’
As the Dowager Duchess of Somerset, Frances also held properties in Lichfield, Tamworth, Wigginton and Comberford. When she died on 24 April 1674, she left her collection of 1,000 books to Lichfield Cathedral, including the Saint Chad’s Gospels and a book of pedigrees that had been bought for her by her close friend, Colonel William Comberford. He died in 1656, and in his will he described her as ‘the Right Honorable and trulie virtuous ladie …’
The Ferrers title was called out of abeyance in favour of Lady Dorothy’s grandson, Sir Robert Shirley, who was made 1st Earl Shirley and was also recognised as the 13th Baron Ferrers of Chartley. While the title of Viscount Tamworth remained in the Shirley family, the Ferrers title and Tamworth Castle descended to his granddaughter Lady Elizabeth (Shirley) Compton (1694-1741), Countess of Northampton. Her only child, Lady Charlotte Compton, was recognised as Baroness Ferrers of Chartley.
Charlotte married George Townshend (1724-1807), the 1st Marquess Townshend. When the Townshend family came to live at Tamworth Castle in 1767, they also bought the Moat House, the former Comberford family Tudor Gothic house on Lichfield Street, Tamworth.
The Moat House, the former Comberford family Tudor Gothic house on Lichfield Street, Tamworth (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Lord Townshend was Viceroy of Ireland (1767-1772) and gave his name to Townsend (sic) Street, Dublin, originally known as Lazer’s Hill. when Charlotte died in Dublin on 14 December 1770, the Ferrers title was subsumed in the Townshend titles until 1855 and the death of her grandson George, 3rd Marquess, who had a nephew and a sister as his co-heirs. His sister, Lady Harriett Ferrers, married a distant cousin, Edward Ferrers (1790-1830) of Baddesley Clinton, who was descended from the Lords Ferrers of Groby.
George Townshend had owned both Tamworth Castle and the Moat House on Lichfield Street. But he dissipated his fortune and estates and found himself at the centre of a long-running scandal when his wife, Sarah Dunn-Gardner, ran off with a brewer John Margetts and married him bigamously in Gretna Green in 1809. They had several children who assumed the Townshend name, and their eldest son, John Townshend (1811-1903), assumed the title of Earl of Leicester.
Eventually, Sarah’s children dropped their claims, and Townshend’s brother, Lord Charles Vere Ferrers Townshend (1785-1853), bought back Tamworth Castle in 1833. But the family never recovered the Moat House, and for the rest of his life George Townshend lived in exile in Italy, where he died in Genoa on 31 December 1855 at the age of 77. Meanwhile, his brother Charles had died in 1853, and the claim to the Ferrers title passed to his sister and his nephew.
Marmion Ferrers died in 1884, and he and Rebecca had no children. All his brothers had also died without surviving sons – including Groby Thomas Ferrers, Compton Gerard Ferrers and Tamworth George Ferrers – save one brother, Charles John Ferrers, who had died in 1873.
Charles had lived in England with his mother, brothers and sisters at Baddesley Clinton Hall until about 1840, when he moved to Hampton Lodge near Warwick. He had an affair with a young woman, Sarah Pittaway, who had once been a servant in his mother’s home. They had several children, and in 1850 Charles moved the entire family across the Atlantic to Bremen in Cook County, Illinois.
But Charles never married Sarah and he died on 3 February 1873 in Illinois, leaving five sons and three daughters, two of whom had been born in Warwick before the family left England. Those two had been baptised and named Pittaway rather than Ferrers, with no father’s name on their birth certificates.
Ever since, the Ferrers title has remained in abeyance, and the family tree and the descent of Basseley Hall by marriage and through distant relatives of the Ferrers family are so difficult to disentangle that it is unlikely that a claimant would ever emerge.
As for the Chatterton family, when Georgian’s first husband, Sir William, died in 1855, the title of baronet passed to his brother, General Sir James Chatterton (1794-1868).
General Sir James Charles Chatterton was born in 1794 and entered the British Army in 1809 as a cornet, the fifth grade of commissioned officer in a cavalry group who carried the colours. He fought in the Peninsular War, at the Battles of Quatre Bras and Waterloo and in France during the advance on Paris.
Sir James bore a banner at the Duke of Wellington’s funeral, having risen to the rank of General. He commanded the 4th Dragoon Guards from 1831 to 1848. He was then MP for Cork (1849-1852) and High Sheriff of Co Cork (1851). He was Colonel of his regiment from 22 November 1868 until his death in January 1874. He is buried in Plot 40, Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey. A window was erected in his memory in Saint Fin Barre's Cathedral, Cork.
General Sir James Chatterton (1794-1868) … a photograph sold in recent years on eBay
When Sir James died, the Chatterton family title died out too, but members of the extended family continued to be involved in public life.
Hedges Eyre Chatterton (1819-1910), a second cousin of Rebecca Orpen, was Conservative MP for Dublin University, Solicitor-General and then Attorney-General of Ireland, and later Vice-Chancellor of Ireland.
He is remembered for his ill-advised attempt to thwart Dublin Corporation’s decision to change the name of Sackville Street to O’Connell Street. Dublin Corporation voted for the name change in 1885, but it aroused considerable objections from local residents, and one resident sought an injunction.
Chatterton granted the injunction on the grounds that the corporation had exceeded its statutory powers. Rather unwisely, though, he also attacked the merits of the decision, accusing the Corporation of ‘sentimental notions.’ Dublin Corporation was angered by both the decision and the criticisms, and in what was seen as an insult to the judge, Temple Street, then frequented by prostitutes, was briefly renamed Chatterton Street.
The controversy was short-lived: Dublin Corporation was granted the necessary powers in 1890. By the time the new name had become official in 1924, it had gained popular acceptance.
Hedges Chatterton was an uncle of the Cork-born missionary Eyre Chatterton (1863-1950). He was born in Monkstown, Co Cork, and headed the Dublin University Mission to Chhota Nagpur (1891-1900) before becoming the first Bishop of Nagpur (1902-1925) in India.
Castlemahon, the Chatterton family’s former home on Castle Road, near Blackrock Castle, had been known until the late 1700s as Tarkfield. Dating from 1798, it was owned by Sir James Chatterton, the 1st Baronet, and passed to subsequent generations of the Chatterton family.
In the mid-20th century, Castlemahon was owned by the Irish golfer Jimmy Bruen, winner of the British Open in the 1940s, who was given the house by his parents as a wedding present. It stopped being a private residence in 1985 when it was bought by Maura and Kevin Whelan, who ran a 16-room nursing home there until 2006. It was then placed on market, along with 1.75 acres.
Castlemahon has since been refurbished and is now a youth and retreat centre run by the Redemptorists and has been renamed Scala. Meanwhile, Baddesley Clinton, once the home of ‘The Quartet,’ has been the property of the National Trust since 1980, has crawled reluctantly into the 21st century.
Further Reading:
Burke’s Irish Families, s.v. ‘Orpen’. Burke’s Peerage, various editions, s.v. ‘Chatterrton’. Dictionary of National Biography, vol 10, p 143.
Frances Clarke ‘Chatterton, (Henrietta) Georgiana,’ Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Irish Academy).
Lady Chatterton, Rambles in the South of Ireland (2 vols, 839).
EH Dering, Memoirs of Georgiana, Lady Chatterton (1878).
Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy (eds), The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (1990).
‘Letters from the Coast of Clare, No VIII,’ Dublin University Magazine, September 1841, pp 336-345.
Rolf Loeber and Magda Loeber, A guide to Irish fiction 1650-1900 (2006).
Goddard Henry Orpen, The Orpen Family, (Frome and London: Butler & Tanner, for the author, 1930).
Joyce Sugg, Ever Yours Affly: John Henry Newman and his Female Circle (Gracewing, 1996).
John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (1990).
