Muriel & MacDonagh (Part 1)
Muriel, Thomas and Donagh MacDonagh with Thomas wearing his kilt and tara brooch 1913.
This story just landed on my lap the week before the Rising celebrations. It was what Elizabeth Gilbert would call Big Magic and the tale goes like this. Back in March, I was stuck on a plane in Bordeaux airport grounded due to the air traffic control strikes. We were to be going nowhere for 4 hours. Luckily, I had a brilliant book and there was nothing for it but to keep reading it and imagining the plane was going fly, I would get my connecting flight back to Gatwick and make it back to Dublin that night. However unlikely that was I began to visualise my Baggot Street loft and decided, there and then, I was going to get there. The book I was reading was Rebel Sisters by Marita Conlon-McKenna, a fictional story about very real women, the Gifford sisters a tribe of beautiful Anglo-Irish sisters and how their extraordinary lives became intertwined with the 1916 Rising and the key revolutionaries of the time.
I was deep into the book and the chapter moved on to love story of Muriel Gifford and Thomas MacDonagh (a poet, academic, teacher, family man and one of the signatories of the Proclamation of Independence). If the pictures of the time are anything to go by (see pictures above and below) Muriel was the prettiest of the sisters. Quite unusually for her social class she trained to be a nurse and along with her sisters was involved in the suffragette movement in Dublin. It was a suffragette – a Mrs. Dryhurst – who first introduced her to Thomas MacDonagh who was a teacher at the now famous Pádraig Pearse school – St Enda’s in Rathfarnham.
Muriel MacDonagh, seated on a chair, July 1916.
As the book progressed and Muriel and MacDonagh fell in love and got married. They moved into their first home, a ‘flat’ over Hayes, Conyngham & Robinson’s chemist’s on Upper Baggot Street, when I read this my mind took a double take. Minutes before I had visualised my Baggot Street loft and now Muriel Gifford and Thomas MacDonagh had moved in, albeit 100 years before me! But I thought, could this be true? What sealed the deal was the following. The building I live in was built in 1895, so it would have been around in 1916, it is still a chemists (Boot’s) and my landlord’s name is one of the original chemists names, so all facts were pointing in the right direction.
It looked like it was true, but I needed to be sure, so a couple of days later I visited the National Library and discovered the Thomas MacDonagh papers which have the correspondence between Muriel and MacDonagh from this period. As soon as I opened the envelope of papers there it was in black and white, the original, handwritten letters addressed to Thomas and Muriel at 32 Upper Baggot Street! And also letters describing Muriel’s first visit to the flat with her mother Isabella Gifford.
The National Library’s report on these papers also describe their life at this time:
“It was three years after their first meeting at St. Enda’s that Muriel and Thomas became engaged in the autumn of 1911. Muriel’s engagement to a Catholic caused problems with her family, especially her mother. Their relations which had never been close, was to remain strained, as was MacDonagh’s relationship with his mother-in-law. Muriel and Thomas married in January 1912 and set up home in a flat on Baggot Street in the centre of Dublin. The marriage was a close and loving one, although Muriel’s bouts of ill-health caused periods of separation. The first of Muriel’s illnesses occurred after the birth of their son Donagh in November 1911, and mother and child spent several months with her parents while she recuperated. A second child Barbara was born in March 1915, by which stage the family had moved to the Dublin suburb of Ranelagh.”
So I am living in Thomas and Muriel’s first married home! From what I can gather the building was built by James Farrall, Robert Stirling, and J.J. O’Callaghan and was purpose built as a shop with accommodation for the family over it. It’s a 5 storey building with shop, offices and two apartments at the moment but I think it would have originally been town house like accommodation, perhaps for one family like the MacDonaghs. It would have been quite a smart house for them both, Thomas was able to afford it at this point as he had just been made a professor at UCD.
And the letters between Muriel and MacDonagh are amazing, they really show the art of letter writing and how distant we are from this, within the pages you can really see their unique personalities and the deep love they had for each other and their son. The letters also include a poem Thomas wrote for Muriel, which was penned in this house. I feel privileged to have such history in these very walls.
I am utterly hooked on this story now, so you will find a series of blogs on Muriel and MacDonagh coming soon. But for the time being I will leave you with a poem Thomas wrote for Muriel here in 32 Upper Baggot Street.
To My Lady, by Thomas MacDonagh
“You with all gifts of grace have this one gift, – Or simple power, – your way of life to lift For use of love out of the common way Of conduct where with all till now it lay. You hold no secret of yourself from you, But rightly do what’s in your heart to do. You hold no secret of yourself from me. And rightly see in me what is to see. So you, surrendering every defence, Yield not, but hold the perfect reticence Of intimate love. – we have no need of speech. Or knowledge even, our perfect trust to reach. Our Acts we guard not, and we go our ways Free, though together now for all our days.”
[An extended version of this poem was published posthumously under the title ‘To My Lady’ in The Poetic Works of Thomas MacDonagh (1916)]
Muriel & MacDonagh (Part Two), coming soon…
Images Courtesy of The National Library of Ireland
See more here