Off the Cliff

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Second paragraph of third story in The Casuarina Tree (“The Outstation”):

Now the prahu [boat] appeared in the broad reach. It was manned by prisoners, Dyaks under various sentences, and a couple of warders were waiting on the landing-stage to take them back to jail. They were sturdy fellows, used to the river, and they rowed with a powerful stroke. As the boat reached the side a man got out from under the attap awning and stepped on shore. The guard presented arms.

Second paragraph of third chapter of The House of Doors:

‘I have read your book, Mr Willie,’ said Ah Keng.

I enjoyed both of the previous books that I read by Tan Twan Eng – The Garden of Evening Mists and The Gift of Rain. Like The Gift of Rain, his latest, The House of Doors, is mainly set in Penang, which is a place of fascination for me as it is where my grandparents met and my father was born. As I started The House of Doors, I realised that it rather depends on knowledge of Somerset Maugham, one of many well-known writers whose works I had never read, so I got hold of The Casuarina Tree, his collection of short stories set in Malaysia, and finished it before I finished The House of Doors (it is slightly shorter).

The Casuarina Tree, published in 1926, is not one of Maugham’s best known books – it’s not in his top twenty according to Goodreads or even in his top forty, according to LibraryThing. But it is set in Malaya after Maugham’s visits there in 1921 and 1925, six short stories of between 34 and 45 pages each, with a prologue and afterword. They are all about expats with dreadful secrets, whose character flaws may become public or may remain hidden, with the moral depravity of the English brutally exposed as a result of contact with the human and physical geography of Malaysia.

The most successful of the stories is “The Letter”, based on the real case of Ethel Proudlock who shot and killed her English neighbour who, she claimed, was attempting to rape her. But they are all effective, brutal vignettes of colonial life.

Supposedly Maugham became persona non grata in Penang because too many of the episodes that the stories are based on were recognisable. That sounds like a marketing myth to me – they may just not have liked him very much. Anyway, you can buy The Casuarina Tree here, though it’s easy to find for free on the internets.

There is one person who pops up both in The House of Doors and in my grandmother’s memoirs of Penang a few years later, the lawyer Hastings Rhodes, who was the state prosecutor in Ethel Proudlock’s trial in 1911 and then hosted my grandmother for dinner just after she and my grandfather got engaged in 1927. She reports that “Hastings Rhodes drove me home and professed to be heart-broken at my engagement, but I took that with several grains of salt.” He was recently divorced, and the same age as my grandfather, and died unexpectedly in 1929.

The House of Doors is about Lesley Hamlyn, living in an unsatisfactory marriage with her husband in Penang in 1921, and hosting her husband’s old schoolfriend Willie Somerset Maugham and his secretary/lover Gerald Haxton, while also looking back on her own friendship with the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-Sen ten years before, and coming to the realisation that both she and her husband are emotionally involved with Chinese men. There is a framing narrative set in South Africa, and Ethel Proudlock’s murder trial gets a look in too.

There is a lot here, and I didn’t think that Tan Twan Eng juggled the balls of plot and character as well as in his other books. When a story is based on real events, authors sometimes let their imagination get fettered by the historical record, and I felt that had happened here. Oddly enough Maugham, the person about whom most is known, comes across as the most well-rounded of the characters, while Lesley, the ostensible protagonist, felt a bit flat to me. But other people seem to like it, so perhaps I was just in the wrong mood. You can get The House of Doors here.

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https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-irish-assassins-conspiracy-revenge-and-the-murders-that-stunned-an-empire-by-julie-kavanagh/

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

In Gweedore the crisis was exceptionally severe. A total collapse in the demand for seasonal laborers—the “tattie-hokers” who went en masse to harvest potatoes on Scottish estates—had left most families without a supplementary income, forcing them to buy goods on credit from local shopkeepers. Some of these acted as the district’s bankers—the hated “gombeen men,” who were regarded by the community as money-grabbing usurers. They, too, were refusing further loans. From Dublin a certain amount of aid was being organized by two influential private charities; in London a group of Quakers who had provided relief during the Great Famine stepped in again. One was led by a gentle, white-whiskered philanthropist named James Hack Tuke, who set off for Donegal at the beginning of March.

On 6 May 1882, the newly appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, arrived in Dublin for his first day in the job. In the evening, as he was walking from Dublin Castle to his official residence in Phoenix Park, Thomas Henry Burke, the Permanent Under Secretary who also had an official residence in the Park, spotted him from his own carriage and dismounted so that the two could have a chat as they covered the last few hundred metres to their homes on foot.

They never made it. Seven members of The Invincibles, an extremist Irish nationalist group, surrounded them and stabbed them to death with surgical knives. They had been planning to attack Burke for weeks, and did not even know who Cavendish was, but did not want to leave the red-bearded chap alive as a witness. The attackers were driven away in a cab whose driver rejoiced in the nickname “Skin-the-Goat”; he pops up in person in Chapter 16 of Ulysses as the keeper of the cabmen’s shelter at Butt Bridge where Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom get their heads together before going back to Bloom’s house for cocoa. (That’s not the only reference to the 1882 murders in Ulysses; James Joyce would have been three months old at the time, but they cast a long dark shadow.)

With all due respect to Lord Mountbatten and Kevin O’Higgins, the Phoenix Park murders were the most dramatic political assassinations ever to take place in Ireland – the victims were the British government minister responsible for Irish affairs, and the most senior civil servant in the Irish administration. On top of that, Cavendish and his wife Lucy were very close to her aunt and her aunt’s husband, who happened to be the prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone; Cavendish, whose father was the Duke of Devonshire, had been Gladstone’s private secretary for several years, and more or less ran the Treasury between the Liberals winning the election in 1880 and his appointment to Ireland in 1882. As for Burke, he was the most visible and most senior Catholic in the Irish government, and it was not until twenty years after his death that another Catholic got the job of Permanent Under Secretary.

The timing of the murders could not have been more disastrous in the delicate dance of British policy and Irish nationalism. The dominant Nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell had been released from prison only a couple of days before, and Cavendish had been sent to Dublin by Gladstone with a mandate to try and find reconciliation with the Nationalist Party and the Irish Land League, which had mounted a highly successful civil disobedience campaign against the (often absentee) landlords and against the British state, bringing attention to the dire economic situation of Irish tenant farmers. They had introduced a new word to the English language, after a land agent in County Mayo who was ostracised by the local community, to the extent that local shopkeepers refused to sell anything to him or his household: the unfortunate Captain Boycott.

The immediate effect of the murders was cataclysmic. Parnell’s reaction to the news was that he must resign from politics entirely, though he was dissuaded by Gladstone among others. Nationalist politicians condemned the murders, but of course for the English (and Scottish and Welsh) public, there was a seamless connection between Nationalist parliamentary activism and the assassinations. And in fact it turned out that several of the Invincibles were also senior officials in the Irish Land League. Several years later, The Times published letters apparently from Parnell which seemed to endorse the murders, though these were dramatically proved to be forgeries.

Superintendent John Mallon of the Dublin Metropolitan Police narrowly missed being on the scene of the murders himself, and pursued a dogged investigation of the crime. From good old human intelligence, he already had a good idea who the leading members of the Invincibles were, and interrogated them all until two of them confessed, one of them James Carey, the leader of the gang. The other five Invincibles were all hanged, including the two who had actually carried out the stabbing. The getaway driver, Skin-the-Goat, was imprisoned for sixteen years but emerged in time to make his appearance in Ulysses.

There was a grim postscript to the grim story. Carey, the informer, was given a new identity by the British government and sent off to make a new life with his family in South Africa. On the boat he made friends with one Patrick O’Donnell, a Donegal man from Gweedore. When they arrived in South Africa, O’Donnell saw an account of the Invincibles trial in an English newspaper which included a recognisable portrait of Carey, even though he had subsequently shaved his beard off. O’Donnell, who was politically motivated but seems not to have had any direct connection with the Invincibles, realised that his new friend on board was in fact the notorious informer, went back to the boat and shot Carey dead. (Most of the passengers seem to have brought their own guns with them.) He was convicted of murder and hanged. Carey’s fate was then used by Arthur Conan Doyle in the fourth, and worst, of the Sherlock Holmes novels, The Valley of Fear.

Julie Kavanagh is best known as a historian of ballet, but she has turned in a great piece of work here, not only going to the well-plumbed depths of British official sources, but also delving deep into the Invincibles and their structure, as far as one can trace it given the relative lack of written records and the mutability of some of the protagonists’ names. One unusual source that she uses extensively is the correspondence of Queen Victoria, who was deeply interested in the Irish situation, and of course hostile to the Nationalist agenda. There is one odd glitch where she starts to explore why O’Donnell was tried in London rather than South Africa, but fails to put in the actual reason why it happened that way. Otherwise this is a very readable account of a very dramatic (but nowadays overlooked) historical event. You can get The Irish Assassins here.

One last note relating to my Cambridge days. The unfortunate Lord Frederick Cavendish and his wife Lucy had no children. She dedicated the rest of her life (another four decades) to the promotion of girls’ and women’s education. Forty years after she died, her great-niece, Margaret Braithwaite, was one of the founders of a new Cambridge college for postgraduate women students, especially those from under-represented and non-traditional backgrounds; and the new college was named after Braithwaite’s great-aunt. During my not very successful tenure as Deputy President of Cambridge University Students Union, I was assigned Lucy Cavendish College as one of my liaison responsibilities. I always vaguely wondered who it was named after, and now I know.

This was my top unread book in the rapidly dwindling pile of those acquired in 2021. Next up is The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925, by Charles Townshend.

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