Brookwatson near Nenagh, Co Tipperary, is the childhood home of the scientist John Desmond Bernal (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)
Patrick Comerford
I have decided to continue my research into the story of the great scientist John Desmond Bernal (1901-1971), his Limerick roots, and his interesting descent from prominent Sephardic families who changed their family names when they arrived in Ireland.
John Desmond Bernal, crystallographer, molecular physicist, social scientist, committed Communist and campaigner for world peace, was born in Brookwatson, Nenagh, Co Tipperary, on 10 May 1901. He was the eldest child of Samuel George Bernal (1864-1919) and his wife Elizabeth ‘Bessie’ Miller, who had married the previous year.
So, on a recent weekend, I decided to visit Brookwatson on the Borrisokane Road, on the northern fringes of Nenagh.
I was curious to know where Brookwatson or Brook Watson got its name, and who it had been called after.
I had heard before of the stories of the adventurer Sir Brook Watson (1735-1807), who as a boy sailor lost his right leg below the knee in a tussle with a shark while swimming off the coast of Cuba. I sometimes wondered whether his wooden leg had influenced Robert Louis Stevenson in creating the character of Long John Silver.
Brook Watson went on to become the first chair of Lloyds and was later became Lord Mayor of London in 1796.
But Watson seems to have had no Irish family connections, and he had no surviving children.
Brookwatson takes its name from the Watson family of Garrykenndy (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)
Instead, Brook Watson in Nenagh is named after the Watson family who lived near Garrykennedy, Co Tipperary, from at least the mid-18th century. They appear to have inherited Garrykennedy from the Feltham family, descended from a Lieutenant Henry Feltham who was granted the lands of Garrykennedy in the 1660s.
Henry Feltham and his successors in the Watson family kept the harbour at Garrykennedy in working order. It was a valuable asset as a port on the River Shannon, and it provided access to efficient transport long before the expansion of the railway network in Ireland.
Watson family members married into the Feltham, Gason and Drew families. Feltham Watson was living at Brook Watson in 1837 and at the time of Griffith's Valuation, when the house was valued at £26 and held from the representatives of Peter Holmes.
James Watson married Julia Blake, and in November 1857 the Garrykennedy estate of Julia Watson, or of Charles Blake her trustee, or of Christopher Hume Lawder, the assignee of James Watson, an insolvent, was advertised for sale.
This estate amounted to 248 acres held in fee simple, and it included the town of Portroe and the demesne lands on which an old mansion had been removed by the ‘late tenant’ to make room for a new one, of which he had completed one tower. The sale rental included a view of the Garry Kennedy demesne on the shore of the River Shannon. It was bought by William Parker for £6,000.
The estate of Carrol Watson called Brookwatson, with 147 acres held in fee farm, was advertised for sale in June 1864. By 1870, it was in the hands of the Brereton family.
The locked gates at Brookwatson (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)
Brook Watson or Brookwatson is a detached, three-bay two-storey house, with a projecting central bay that has an oriel window. There are single-storey and two-storey additions on the south side with lean-to and hipped roofs and a single-bay, two-storey block with an entrance door and an oriel window on the northside.
The house has hipped slate roofs and half-hipped roofs over the oriel window and on the north block, and there are brick chimneystacks. The entrance to the yard has rendered round stone piers with alternating red and yellow brick caps.
There are rendered stone and brick piers with cast-iron gates at the avenue, and interesting ‘ha-ha’ to the east of the house.
The half-hipped roofs, oriel window and other features make this house interesting building architecturally. The interesting rendered circular piers to the yard and to the garden entrance, as well as the stone outbuildings and the ha-ha add to the interest that this house holds.
However, while the land is being farmed, the house lies vacant today and is boarded up. It is Bernal’s birthday tomorrow [10 May]. It would be sad if this house, with its architectural features, its curious family stories, and its connections with one of the great international scientists of the 20th century was allowed to go into further decline.
Brookwatson has interesting architectural features, curious family stories and is connected with one of the great international scientists of the 20th century (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)
09 May 2019
Stranded without coffee in
a world Kafka could create
A lonely wait on the platform at Limerick Junction (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)
Patrick Comerford
A younger family member shares many of my interests, including travel, conflict and dialogue in the Middle East, Italian wine and food. We have shared connections with Trinity College Dublin and with Cambridge. Although we live on opposite sides of the Atlantic, we have met in the most unexpected places, including an hotel lobby in Dingle, and we have even worked together almost 20 years ago in an edition of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.
He is better travelled than I am, and has joked sometimes – he may be half joking but wholly in earnest – that he feels safer in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon or the streets of Kabul than he does in Temple Bar in Dublin on a Saturday night. Not that I have been in Temple Bar on many Saturday nights, needless to day.
We were comparing travel notes during a recent lunch – in an Italian restaurant in Temple Bar.
Which countries had one been in that the other had never visited?
Indeed, how do you count whether you have been somewhere?
It’s a little like trying to count up the scores in Darts, I suppose.
Can you count if you have been in Syria if it has been a stopover in Damascus Airport? Or in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights?
Is swimming in the Dead Sea a visit to Palestine, to Jordan or to Israel?
How do you count – how do you even admit to being in – the Israel-occupied strip of south Lebanon?
Was Walvis Bay in South Africa or Namibia?
There are some places for which I have no stamps on my passport. The European travel areas have eliminated the need for many of them. I did go to the bother of getting my passport stamped – unnecessarily – in San Marino, but there is no obvious way of getting your passport stamped as you walk in and out and back in again in the Vatican City.
As we continued this line of silly talk that, perhaps, we agreed is only possible among family members, he suddenly said he had never been in Northern Ireland?
I was taken aback.
Never in Northern Ireland?
But then I realised his method of counting where he had been depended on staying overnight somewhere. Yes, he had walked and trekked through the Mourne Mountains in Co Down. Yes, he had visited Belfast on countless occasions, but he had never stayed there overnight. He felt he had never been to Northern Ireland.
On that basis, he might say I have never been to Morocco, North Korea, San Marino, Scotland, Slovenia, Switzerland, Symi, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, the Vatican … Yes, I have been to all of them. But in his books, they would not have counted, because I had never stayed overnight.
For my part, my minimum calculation for visiting anywhere is whether I have had a cup of coffee there.
Time having coffee is time well spent and time that is not wasted. And if I have had a coffee somewhere, then I have been there.
Since I moved to Askeaton, there are many places I have visited without staying over but where I have had time to enjoy coffee. That means I have visited Charleville, Fermoy, Killaloe, Nenagh, Thurles, Tipperary … so many cups of coffee are within range of a bus journey or two from Askeaton without ever having to stay overnight.
But there is one place I have to question. Catching the train from Limerick to Dublin or Waterford usually involves changing trains at Limerick Junction, as I have been doing this afternoon.
Now, Limerick Junction is an unusual place, to say the least. It is not in Limerick – in fact, it is in Co Tipperary. And sometimes, when connections have turned the cold statistics of timetables into Kafkaesque fiction, I have been left standing in the cold and in the rain for seemingly endless times on the platform at Limerick Junction – with no shelter against the elements. And with no place to buy a cup of coffee.
I dare not leave the platform to seek out a cup of coffee in the nearby village – the late train may arrive early, or the early train may arrive late.
It can be a solitary, lonely experience, exasperated by the lack of coffee.
So, by own standards, have I ever been to Limerick Junction? Was I really there this afternoon?
Patrick Comerford
A younger family member shares many of my interests, including travel, conflict and dialogue in the Middle East, Italian wine and food. We have shared connections with Trinity College Dublin and with Cambridge. Although we live on opposite sides of the Atlantic, we have met in the most unexpected places, including an hotel lobby in Dingle, and we have even worked together almost 20 years ago in an edition of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.
He is better travelled than I am, and has joked sometimes – he may be half joking but wholly in earnest – that he feels safer in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon or the streets of Kabul than he does in Temple Bar in Dublin on a Saturday night. Not that I have been in Temple Bar on many Saturday nights, needless to day.
We were comparing travel notes during a recent lunch – in an Italian restaurant in Temple Bar.
Which countries had one been in that the other had never visited?
Indeed, how do you count whether you have been somewhere?
It’s a little like trying to count up the scores in Darts, I suppose.
Can you count if you have been in Syria if it has been a stopover in Damascus Airport? Or in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights?
Is swimming in the Dead Sea a visit to Palestine, to Jordan or to Israel?
How do you count – how do you even admit to being in – the Israel-occupied strip of south Lebanon?
Was Walvis Bay in South Africa or Namibia?
There are some places for which I have no stamps on my passport. The European travel areas have eliminated the need for many of them. I did go to the bother of getting my passport stamped – unnecessarily – in San Marino, but there is no obvious way of getting your passport stamped as you walk in and out and back in again in the Vatican City.
As we continued this line of silly talk that, perhaps, we agreed is only possible among family members, he suddenly said he had never been in Northern Ireland?
I was taken aback.
Never in Northern Ireland?
But then I realised his method of counting where he had been depended on staying overnight somewhere. Yes, he had walked and trekked through the Mourne Mountains in Co Down. Yes, he had visited Belfast on countless occasions, but he had never stayed there overnight. He felt he had never been to Northern Ireland.
On that basis, he might say I have never been to Morocco, North Korea, San Marino, Scotland, Slovenia, Switzerland, Symi, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, the Vatican … Yes, I have been to all of them. But in his books, they would not have counted, because I had never stayed overnight.
For my part, my minimum calculation for visiting anywhere is whether I have had a cup of coffee there.
Time having coffee is time well spent and time that is not wasted. And if I have had a coffee somewhere, then I have been there.
Since I moved to Askeaton, there are many places I have visited without staying over but where I have had time to enjoy coffee. That means I have visited Charleville, Fermoy, Killaloe, Nenagh, Thurles, Tipperary … so many cups of coffee are within range of a bus journey or two from Askeaton without ever having to stay overnight.
But there is one place I have to question. Catching the train from Limerick to Dublin or Waterford usually involves changing trains at Limerick Junction, as I have been doing this afternoon.
Now, Limerick Junction is an unusual place, to say the least. It is not in Limerick – in fact, it is in Co Tipperary. And sometimes, when connections have turned the cold statistics of timetables into Kafkaesque fiction, I have been left standing in the cold and in the rain for seemingly endless times on the platform at Limerick Junction – with no shelter against the elements. And with no place to buy a cup of coffee.
I dare not leave the platform to seek out a cup of coffee in the nearby village – the late train may arrive early, or the early train may arrive late.
It can be a solitary, lonely experience, exasperated by the lack of coffee.
So, by own standards, have I ever been to Limerick Junction? Was I really there this afternoon?
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