rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">72 To Frank Thompson in 1941 she wrote of Ireland as ‘an awful pitiful mess of a country’, full, like herself, of ‘pretences and attitudes … but Ireland at least has had its baptism of blood and fire’. The Richardson family motto ‘Virtuti paret robur’ is often repeated in her later journals, like a talisman or mantra. Iris saw herself, like her friend from 1956 Elizabeth Bowen, as caught between two worlds and at home in neither.73
To be of a once distinguished Protestant family in Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century still conferred a sense of caste.74 As recently as 1991 Iris defined her mother’s family as Anglo-Irish gentry whose ‘estate in County Tyrone … had vanished some time ago’.75 Insistence that one’s family was still ‘gentry’, no matter how impoverished, was partly tribal Protestantism. Even those Irish Protestants in the early Irish Free State who came of humble stock felt that they emphatically belonged, none the less, to a ‘corps d'élite:
Ex-Unionists – including those who were not very bookish – were proud of the Anglo-Irish literary heritage. They prided themselves … on possessing what were regarded as Protestant virtues, a stern sense of duty, industry and integrity together with the ability to enjoy gracefully and whole-heartedly the good things of life. [This] esprit de corps. … was voiced with vibrant force by Yeats in his famous and thunderous intervention in a Senate debate in 1925. Speaking for the minority, he declaimed, ‘we are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Berkeley; we are the people of Swift; we are the people of Parnell.’76
Iris’s willingness to mythologise her own origins, and to lament a long-lost demesne (in her case, a real ancestry), both mark her out as a kinswoman of Yeats.* The ‘Butler’ appended to the Yeats family name proposed a not entirely fictitious connexion to that grandest of clans, the Anglo-Irish Dukes of Ormonde. Family pride runs through much of Iris’s rhetoric about her background, both in interviews and also in Chapter 2 of The Red and the Green, with its authorial identification with the old Protestant ruling order, as well as its claim for that order to speak for the whole of Ireland, Catholic and Protestant alike.
The relation between Iris and her cousins was complex. Another Richardson relative she claimed77 – on no known evidence – who had presumably not suffered from the general Richardson decline, was a Major-General Alexander Arthur Richardson, serving with the Royal Ulster Rifles in the Second World War. The Belfast family phrase ‘the Ladies’ bathing-place’ amused Iris. So did the Belfast cousins calling a ‘slop-basin’ – for tea-slops – a ‘refuse-vase’, which the Murdochs considered a genteelism.78 If Iris’s family found the Belfast cousinry genteel, Belfast cousin Sybil Livingston conversely thought the cigarette-holder Iris sported for a while ‘posh'; and she was amazed in 1998 to learn that Rene had a sister of any kind, let alone one with four sons, giving Iris first cousins in Dublin as well as Belfast. ‘You are my only family,’ Sybil recalls Iris saying – mysteriously as it might appear: perhaps there was a remarkable depth of reserve on both sides.79 Sybil around 1930 had passed on to her a ‘wonderful’ party frock of Iris’s, pale blue satin, with a braid of little pink and blue and white rosebuds sewn round the neck and sleeves. For Iris, a much-loved only child, as for Elizabeth Bowen, Ireland represented company.
Iris believed that, after her birth in Dublin, her parents lived with her there for one or two years,80 until the inauguration of the Irish Free State at the very end of 1921. These supposed years in Dublin, often mentioned in interviews – again, like Elizabeth Bowen – confirmed her Irish identity. Around 1921 all Irish civil servants were offered the choice of moving to Belfast or London. It is easy to see why, in the political turmoil of those years, with the Troubles, the introduction of martial law, and then the civil war looming, Hughes, who was after all not merely a Protestant and an Ulsterman but also an ex-officer, might have opted for London, a city he had known on and off since 1906. Iris said he came to England to find his fortune81 but saw this as a radical move, a kind of exile. In fact, if Iris as a baby spent even as much as one year in Dublin, it was only with her mother. On Iris’s birth certificate Hughes gives 51 Summerlands Avenue, Acton, London W3 as his address, and his civil service position was second division clerk in the National Health Insurance Committee, working in Buckingham Gate, London (apart from his three years’ active service) from 15 June 1914 until 24 November 1919, when he joined the Ministry of Health. Cards from fellow-conscripts during the war give his working address as ‘Printing, Insurance Commission, Buckingham Gate, London, S.W.’. The move to London – in reaction against the madnesses of Ulster in 1914, just as much as against those of Dublin in 1921 – had already begun. Presumably Iris was born in Dublin because Rene could rely there on kin and womenfolk to help with the birth. And perhaps Rene and Iris had to wait for Hughes to find the flat in Brook Green where they first all lived together.
Honor Tracy was certainly right that the value to Iris of her Irishness was great: ‘… my Irishness is Anglo-Irishness in a very strict sense … People sometimes say to me rudely, “Oh! You’re not Irish at all!” But of course I’m Irish. I’m profoundly Irish and I’ve been conscious of this all my life, and in a mode of being Irish which has produced a lot of very distinguished thinkers and writers’82 – Bowen, Congreve, Sheridan, Wilde, Goldsmith and Yeats all epitomised Irish modes of expression while living in England and ‘regretting Ireland’.83 The term ‘Anglo-Irish’ is less unhelpful if it means, as Arthur Green argued and the OED allows, some broad confluence of English, Irish and indeed Scots-Irish – a product, in fact, of both islands. It is from this point of view interesting that Iris believed she had Catholic Irish connexions,84 as well as Quaker, Church of Ireland and Presbyterian ones. The pattern of English life, she wrote in 1963, can be dull, making little appeal to the imagination.85 Ireland, by contrast, was romantic. Moreover she identified, until 1968, with Ireland-as-underdog.86 England had destroyed Ireland, one of her characters argued in The Red and the Green, ‘slowly and casually, without malice, without mercy, practically without thought, like someone who treads upon an insect, forgets it, then sees it quivering and treads upon it a second time’.87
Iris’s Irish identification was more than romanticism. Her family, Irish on both sides for three hundred years, never assimilated into English life, staying a small enclosed unit on its own, never gaining many – if any – English friends. When Hughes died in 1958, having lived for forty-five of his almost sixty-eight years in England, there were only, to Rene’s distress, six people at the funeral: Iris and John, Rene, cousin Sybil’s husband Reggie, Hughes’s solicitor, and a single kindly neighbour, Mr Cohen, who owned the ‘semi’ with which the Murdoch house was twinned. Not one civil service mourner materialised. And quite as surprising is that no friends or associates of Rene were there. Iris’s first act that year of bereavement was to take Rene and John to Dublin, to find a suitable house for Rene to move back to. The following year Rene took Iris and John to see Drum Manor. There was a dilapidated gatehouse, and some sense of a gloomy and run-down demesne.88 Rene and Iris were reverential.
As Roy Foster has shown, the cult in Ireland of a lost house was a central component of that ‘Protestant Magic’ that both Yeats and Elizabeth Bowen shared:89 Irish Protestantism, Foster argues, even in its non-Ulster