COMERFORD WAY: Patrick Comerford’s online journal on Anglicanism, theology, spirituality, history, architecture, travel, poetry, beach walks ... and more
The grave and monument to Lord Hastings on the walls on Valletta … he was born in Moria, Co Down, and raised in Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)
Patrick Comerford
Close to the Osborne Hotel in Valletta, where I was staying last week, the Hastings Gardens are on top of Saint John’s Bastion and Saint Michael’s Bastion, on the west side of the City Gate in the capital of Malta. The gardens offer views of Floriana, Msida, Sliema, and Manoel Island, but their name indicates an interesting connection with an Irish-born general and governor.
Inside the gardens is a monument erected by the Hastings family in honour of Francis Edward Rawdon-Hasting ((1754-1826), 1st Marquis of Hastings, who was a Governor of Malta. Lord Hastings died in 1826 and is buried in the gardens.
Lord Hastings was an Irish-born politician and officer who was Governor-General of India in 1813-1823 and Governor of Malta in 1824-1826. He took the additional surname Hastings in 1790 under the terms of the will of his maternal uncle, Francis Hastings, 10th Earl of Huntingdon.
Hastings was born at Moira, Co Down, on 9 December 1754, the son of John Rawdon, 1st Earl of Moira and Lady Elizabeth Hastings, 13th Baroness Hastings, a daughter of the 9th Earl of Huntingdon. He was baptised in Saint Audoen’s Church, Dublin, on 2 January 1755, and grew up in Moira and in Dublin.
He was educated at Harrow and Oxford, and joined the British army in 7 August 1771. He had was in the British forces for many years during the American War of Independence and fought at the Battles of Lexington and Concord and at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Rawdon was sent to Philadelphia with dispatches and returned to New York for the winter, where he raised a regiment, called the Volunteers of Ireland, recruited from deserters and Irish Loyalists.
He resigned as adjutant general in 1779, but served with the Volunteers of Ireland during the raid on Staten Island in January 1780. His most noted achievement was the victory in 1781 at the Battle of Hobkirk’s Hill. He gave up his command in 1781. On the return, he was captured at sea by François Joseph Paul de Grasse, but was exchanged.
Rawdon sat as MP for Randalstown, Co Antrim, in the Irish House of Commons from 1781 until 1783. King George III made him an English peer in 1783 with the title of Baron Rawdon.
When his mother succeeded to the Barony of Hastings in 1789, Rawdon added the surname of Hastings to his own. He inherited Donington Hall, Leicestershire, from his uncle, and rebuilt it in 1790-1793 in the Gothic style; the architect was William Wilkins the Elder.
The monument to Lord Hastings in the Hastings Gardens in Valletta (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)
He succeeded his father as 2nd Earl of Moira in 1793, and after that sat first in the Irish House of Lords and then, from 1801, in the British House of Lords.
It was rumoured briefly in 1797 that Rawdon would replace William Pitt as Prime Minister. In the Irish Parliament, Rawdon associated on most questions with the Patriot party of Henry Grattan and Lord Charlemont. In an eve-of-the-Rebellion speech in the Lords on 19 February 1798 he appealed for parliamentary reform and Catholic Emancipation, and denounced the government's policy of coercion.
Hastings presented evidence of the atrocities and tortures visited upon Irish people by Crown forces as they sought to break-up and disarm the United Irishmen who were organising the 1798 Rising. At one point, he was described by Wolfe Tone as ‘The Irish Lafayette.’ He was also the patron of the poet Thomas Moore, who regularly visited Donington Hall.
Rawdon strenuously opposed the government in the wake of the United Irish risings in 1798, and voted against the Act of Union.
As Lord Moira, he entered government in 1806 as Master-General of the Ordnance. However, he resigned the next year.
Lord Moira was appointed Governor-General of the Presidency of Fort William, effectively the Governor-General of India, in 1812 and remained in office until 1821. He was given the title of Marquess of Hastings in 1816, with the additional titles Earl of Rawdon and Viscount Loudoun.
Lord Hastings became increasingly estranged from the East India Company and resigned in 1821, although he did not leave India until early 1823. He was appointed Governor of Malta in 1824 but he died at sea off Naples two years later on 28 November 1826 on board the HMS Revenge, while trying to return home with his wife, Lady Flora.
Lady Hastings returned his body to Malta, and following his earlier directions, cut off his right hand and preserved it, to be buried with her when she died. His body was then buried in a large marble sarcophagus in Hastings Gardens in Valletta. His hand was eventually buried, clasped with hers, in the family vault at Loudoun Kirk.
It is also a Maltese legend that the Hastings Gardens in Valletta took only four hours to be built. Adriano DeVina is the only known architect of the gardens.
Sunset seen from the Hastings Gardens in Valletta last week (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)
Saint Columba baptisting a child … a fresco in the Baptistery in All Saints’ Church, Blackrock, Co Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Patrick Comerford
At first this looked like being a busy and stormy day. A planned community project meeting in Rathkeale this morning was postponed last night because of Storm Barra. However, the launch of the ‘Downpatrick Declaration’ is expected to go ahead later this evening.
Before th storm lands in Co Limerick and before the day begins, I am taking some time early this morning (7 December 2021) for prayer, reflection and reading.
Each morning in the Advent, I am reflecting in these ways:
1, Reflections on a saint remembered in the calendars of the Church during Advent;
2, the day’s Gospel reading;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.
Saint Columba’s Church, Ennis, Co Clare (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Although today is not Columba’s Day, I have chosen Saint Columba this morning because of the launch of the ‘Downpatrick Declaration’ later this evening, as part of the celebrations of the 1,600th anniversary of the birth of Saint Colimba, who is said to be buried at Downpatrick.
Saint Columba, also known Colum or Columcille, is one of the three patrons of Ireland, alongside Saint Patrick and Saint Brigid of Kildare. He is also the patron saint of Derry and is regarded as one of the ‘Twelve Apostles of Ireland’. He was born 1,600 years ago, on 7 December 521, at Gartan in present-day Co Donegal.
He is remembered as the missionary monk who introduced Christianity to Scotland, and who founded the abbey on the island of Iona.
Saint Columba studied under Saint Finnian of Movilla and Saint Finnian of Clonard, was ordained priest ca 551, and founded churches and monasteries in Derry, Durrow and Swords.
In 560, Columba became involved in a quarrel with Saint Finnian of Moville over a psalter. Columba copied the manuscript at the scriptorium under Finnian, intending to keep the copy. Finnian disputed Columba’s right to keep it, and the conflict that ensued eventually resulted in the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne in present-day Co Sligo in 561, when many men were killed.
A synod was called, and Columba was threatened with excommunication for these deaths. But Saint Brendan of Birr (29 November) spoke on his behalf. Eventually, Saint Columba set sail from the Inishowen Peninsula in Co Donegal for Scotland, where he and his 12 disciples founded a church and monastery on the island of Iona ca 563.
Iona became the springboard for the conversion of Scotland, and is regarded as the mother house of abbots and bishops in the early history of Christianity in Scotland.
Saint Columba returned with Saint Aidan to Ireland in 575, when he took a leading role in the Synod of Druim Cetta and founded the monastery of Drumcliff in Cairbre, now Co Sligo, near the battlefield.
Saint Columba spent most of his years in Iona. He died there in 597 and was buried in his abbey. he created. The Vikings first attacked Iona in 794, and Saint Columba’s relics were finally removed in 849 and divided between Scotland and Ireland. The parts of the relics that went to Ireland are said to be buried in Downpatrick, Co Down, with Saint Patrick and Saint Brigid.
Three Latin hymns have been attributed to Saint Columba, and he is associated with the Book of Kells and the Book of Durrow. Saint Columba’s feast day is 9 June.
On 9 June 1186, 15 bishops, many abbots and church dignitaries and a large number of clergy and laity were present at the reburial of what were now revered as the relics of Saint Patrick, Saint Brigid and Saint Columba (Columcille) in Downpatrick.
This morning, I am also thinking of and giving thanks for many places I have stayed and prayed, and sometimes preached, including Saint Columba’s House, a retreat house on Maybury Hill in Woking, Surrey; Saint Columba’s Church, Ennis, Co Clare; Saint Columba’s Church, Swords, Co Dublin; Saint Columba’s Church, Kells, Co Meath; and the Church of Saint Columba and Saint Joseph in Glenstal Abbey, Co Limerick.
Saint Columba’s Church, Swords, Co Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Matthew 18: 12-14 (NRSVA):
[Jesus said:] 12 ‘What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? 13 And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. 14 So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.’
The Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary today (7 December 2021) invites us to pray:
Let us pray for tea plantation workers across Asia and Africa, who often suffer from poor working conditions and meagre wages.
Children of the Kindertransport … Frank Meisler’s bronze sculpture at Liverpool Street Station in London (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Patrick Comerford
The Tales from the Vienna Woods is a waltz by the composer Johann Strauss II (1825-1899), written just over a century and a half ago, in 1868. Although Strauss was baptised in the Roman Catholic Church, he was born into a prominent Jewish family. Because the Nazis had a particular penchant for Strauss’s music, they tried to conceal and even deny the Jewish identity of the Strauss family.
However, the stories of Vienna’s Jews cannot be hidden, and many of those stories from Vienna are told in the exhibits in the Jewish Museum in its two locations, at the Palais Eskeles on Dorotheergasse and in the Misrachi-Haus in Judenplatz.
Rather than describe both museums in detail in one or two blog postings, I decided after my recent visit to Vienna to post occasional blog postings that re-tell some of these stories, celebrating a culture and a community whose stories should never be forgotten.
In the past week, I have been reminded of the stories of three Holocaust survivors who were born in Vienna and who moved to live in Northern Ireland after World War II: Inge Radford, who lived in Belfast and later in Millisle, Co Down, and Edith (Medel) Sekules and her husband Kurt Sekules, who lived for over half a century in Kilkeel, Co Down.
Inge Radford (1932-2016) was born in Vienna, one of 10 children, and six members of her family died in the Holocaust.
Inge escaped to England on the Kindertransports in July 1939. But in 1942 her widowed mother and five brothers, Sigmund, Kurt, Walter, Herbert and Fritz, were deported from Vienna to Minsk in the former Soviet Union, now the capital of Belarus. They were initially incarcerated in the Minsk ghetto and then transferred to the labour camp in the village of Maly Trostinec, where they were murdered.
Maly Trostinec had no permanent gas chambers but there the Nazis used mobile gas vans. In May 1943, 500 people were murdered every day in the gas vans that went daily to and from Minsk and Maly Trostinec.
However, five members of her family escaped the Holocaust. A local voluntary committee in Sevenoaks, Kent, raised money to bring Inge and five other children out of Europe and guaranteed the £50 a child expected by the British government.
At 16, Inge’s eldest sister, Elli, went to live with relatives in the US. Her 13- and 14-year-old brothers, Ernst and Erich, went to live on farms in Denmark, while her nine-year-old sister Rose, and Inge, then seven, went to England, separately and unknown to each other, under the auspices of the Jewish Children’s Refugee Organisation.
Inge later said the fact that these five siblings grew into relatively unscarred and useful citizens was due to the many people who tried ‘to minimise the trauma of family separation and loss for us and for hundreds of other refugee children.’
‘Homes and hearts were opened to us’ she said. Many children stayed with their ‘adopting’ families through school, university, marriage and parenthood. ‘For me,’ she said later ‘these new, kind and loving relationships blurred the picture of a small, smiling woman surrounded by several boys all waving as the train pulled out of Vienna station.’
Inge’s sister Rose lived happily with a Yorkshire Baptist family until she joined their older sister in the US. Inge went first to the Isle of Man and then lived half her life in England and the second half in Northern Ireland. She was reunited many years later with her two sisters who went to the US and her two brothers in Israel.
She was a social worker, a probation officer, and worked in the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast. Her husband, Professor Colin Buchanan Radford, was a French academic and dean of the Faculty of Arts at Queen’s University Belfast. He was made OBE in 1994 for services to the arts.
They lived in south Belfast and later in Millisle on the Ards peninsula in Co Down. Inge died in March 2016.
Their daughter, Dr Katy Radford, is project manager at the Institute for Conflict Research and works with other organisations including the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Commission for Flags, Identity, Culture and Tradition. She was made an MBE in 2011 for her contribution to community relations in Northern Ireland.
Edith Sekules (1916-2008) and her husband Kurt Sekules (1907-2001) were both born in Vienna: Kurt was born in 1907, the son of Ludwig Lajos Sekules and Else (Hitschmann); Edith was born Edith Mathilde Medel on 8 June 1916 into a middle-class Jewish family, the daughter of Eugen Mendel and Marianne (Bielitz).
Edith grew up in a sophisticated, secular family, enjoying a vibrant Jewish culture. Her love of classical music and literature was nourished in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s, when she frequented the city’s opera and musical recitals. But problems in her father’s motor business forced Edith to abandon her studies and enter the catering industry to help her family.
Meanwhile, she had met Kurt Sekules, a radio engineer, and they married in 1936. Two years later, the Nazis marched into Vienna and annexed Austria. Edith soon lost her job at the prestigious Hotel Bristol and Kurt was also dismissed.
In the midst of this crisis, their first child Ruth was born in May 1938. The young Sekules family, like many of Vienna’s Jews, resolved to leave Austria as soon as they could.
Edith’s younger sister Lottchen, known as Lotte, left for London having found a job in domestic service. Their mother followed Lotte to England, where she too found work as a domestic and cook.
Kurt applied for a job in Estonia, and he, Edith and their baby daughter boarded a plane for Tallinn on 28 September 1938, the same day that Chamberlain left England to meet Hitler in Munich. Her father and grandmother, however, were forced to remain in Vienna, in the ever-worsening conditions for Jews. They both died the following year.
Edith and Kurt applied to emigrate to Australia and in 1939 their applications were approved in 1939. However, because they were German nationals when war broke out, their permits were cancelled. In June 1940, Estonia became part of the USSR and, when Hitler attacked Russia, the Sekules family became enemy aliens.
They were arrested by the secret police and taken in cattle trucks to Harku, a detention camp near Tallinn, along with many Jewish refugees who were arrested because of their German passports.
They were shunted eastward from camp to camp ahead of the advancing Nazi army, each time in crowded cattle trucks. Rations were basic, space was minimal and the work that allowed prisoners to earn extra food was arduous. Many prisoners did not survive the harsh, Siberian winters.
The family spent some years in Soviet detention camps, including Oranki in Gorki in modern-day Russia, Aktyubinsk in modern-day Kazakhstan, and Kok Uzek at Karaganda in Kazakhstan.
During the winter of 1944, Edith suffered a miscarriage and underwent an operation without any anaesthetic. After the operation, she was allowed a 15-minute rest and ordered to walk the half-hour journey back to the camp alone.
But when World War II ended, the prisoners were not released. Returning Russian soldiers were given priority on the railway lines, and Edith and Kurt did not begin their long journey back to Vienna until January 1947. By then they had three young children, Ruth, Walter and Leah.
Economic conditions in post-war Austria were hard, and there was still a pervasive anti-semitic climate. The Sekules family decided to move to Northern Ireland, where Kurt’s parents had escaped before the war. They travelled via London, where Edith was reunited with Lotte and her mother.
Until a letter from the Kok Uzek camp arrived in London after the war, Edith’s mother had assumed that Edith and Kurt had died in the Holocaust. She had had trees planted in their memory in Israel that Edith visited some years later.
Kurt’s parents and his brother Robert also left Austria before war broke out. They settled in Derry after getting visas under a British government scheme to set up factories in Northern Ireland, and founded an artificial flowers business. The fate of Kurt’s sister Stella and her children remains unknown.
With the help of a family friend, Bernhard Altmann, Edith and Kurt set up the Kilkeel Knitting Mills, a successful knitwear business in Kilkeel, Co Down. Their fourth child, Esther, was born in 1954.
Edith spoke of her experiences at Women’s Institutes and in schools, and spoke at the first two years of Holocaust Memorial Day in Northern Ireland. According to her obituary in the Jewish Chronicle, she attributed her survival to her determination to save her family.
The couple visited Vienna in 2000 when Kurt was 92 and Edith was 83. It was their first visit to Vienna in over 50 years. They went into the same cafes where they used to go when they were a young couple, and took the same walks they had enjoyed in the 1930s along the banks of the Danube.
Edith Sekules published a memoir, Surviving the Nazis, Exile and Siberia (London: Valentine Mitchell), in 2000. Kurt died at 93 in Kilkeel in 2001; Edith died at 91 on 20 February 2008. They were survived by their son, three daughters, 10 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.
Walter Sekules told the Sunday Independent last year how he is worried by the rise of the Far Right in Europe and the growing expressions of hatred of foreigners and immigrants. Asked if he could ever forgive those people who adopted the evil policies that led to the Holocaust and those who would still spread hatred today, he responded: ‘I’m sorry that they haven’t learned better.’
