and ‘used to teach the young Egyptians to love God’.12 Her older sister Sarah spent many of her holidays on a farm near Carryduff, five miles south-east of Belfast, belonging to an uncle who was ‘saved’, Thomas Maxwell. At around nineteen she was, together with her cousins, ‘saved’ too, and on her marriage she became a member of what on the mainland are sometimes known as Plymouth Brethren, in Ulster simply as ‘Brethren’. Willy, her husband-to-be, was Treasurer to the Apsley Hall Brethren at Donegall Pass. Even today Ulster ‘Brethren’ – unlike their Scots cousins – have no women elders.
Both the Yeats and the Parnell families, like Iris’s, had Brethren connexions.* The Brethren originated in Aungier Street, Dublin in 1827–28 when a group of men including a doctor, a lawyer, a minister and a peer started meeting together without any ritual, set prayers, forms of service or ordained ministry: they wished to return to the simplicity of the early apostolic Church. They believed in a ‘timetable’ of Last Things and taught that the saved can be caught up in the ‘Rapture’ before Christ’s return, and so spared hellfire.
Willy and Sarah Chapman belonged to the Open Brethren, who split off in 1848, and who differ significantly from Exclusive Brethren. Open Brethren both fraternise and worship freely with other evangelistic Christians, and practise believers’ (not infants') baptism. Although to leave the Church was still a momentous and alarming thing to do, your family might not necessarily refuse to break bread with you afterwards. Iris was pleased when her second cousin Max Wright, who taught philosophy at Queen’s University, Belfast, wrote a book, a painfully humorous account of just such a departure.† Wright’s family home contained thirty-seven Bibles. At fifteen he had shouted a gospel message at an unresponsive terrace of red-brick houses. There was constant pressure on Brethren to go all out for salvation, which led, one commentator believed, to a resulting impoverishment of outlook. Sarah and Willy Chapman’s three children, Iris’s closest living relatives, were bought up as Open Brethren, and Iris and her parents spent the second part –after Dublin – of many of their summer holidays before the Second World War with these cousins. Muriel, the eldest, was Iris’s particular ally.
The years before the First World War were the era of Edward Carson’s inflammatory Unionist speeches against Home Rule, of ‘not-an-inch-Jimmie’, of ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’, of a developing siege mentality among many Ulster Protestants. While the Murdochs and Maxwells who were Brethren were unquestionably Unionist, they also – even if male and so eligible – did not dream of voting, ‘For we have here no continuing city, but we look for one that is to come.’
When Hughes went to London at the age of sixteen in June 1906 to train for his civil service exam, first as a boy clerk at Scotland Yard then, later that year, with the Charity Commission, he, who is remembered as gentle, liberal, and free-thinking, was escaping from what his daughter Iris was to term the puritanism of his ‘black Protestant’ forebears.13 A letter from Hughes to his mother shortly after his arrival still evinces some fundamentalist piety, but perhaps the fleshpots of London helped wean him from it. This was a puritanism from which Iris claimed to have inherited something of value. Hughes would stay on friendly terms with both his sisters, and perhaps achieved this the more effectively by rationing their time together.
In 1908 he took his civil service exams, and in 1910 is shown certified as a ‘second Division Clerk’ with, in turn, the Local Government Board, the Home Office and the Treasury. In the four years running up to the outbreak of the First World War he worked at the ‘General Valuation Department (Ireland)’ in Dublin, staying with his Uncle Elias and his son Harold in Kingstown (later Dun Laoghaire), just outside the city, where they ran two ironmongers’ shops.14 From there it would have been a two-and-a-half-hour train journey to spend a weekend with his mother and sisters, 110 miles away in Belfast. Hughes swam in the so-called ‘Forty-Foot’, the natural pool ‘for gentlemen only’ by the Kingstown Martello Tower, both immortalised early on in Joyce’s Ulysses. Swimming there was his idea of bliss, and he always referred to it reverentially.
Photographs show him as a tall and attractive fair-haired man, with a self-contained air and a mild blue-eyed gaze that seems both retiring and contemplative, yet also ‘present’. The quality of quiet inwardness for which he is recalled, and which must have won him admirers, is visible too. The Murdoch family photograph album begins with cards from two girls, one strikingly beautiful, signed ‘With love from Daisy, October 1916’ and ‘To Hughes with love from Lillie, October 1917.’*
In January 1916, when mainland conscription started, there was none in Ireland, for fear of its political unpopularity. Hughes enlisted on 19 November 1915;15 the first photographs of him in his regimentals date from 1916. He was accustomed to farm life — 'He was very horsey,’ Iris remarked16 – which was why he entered a yeoman cavalry regiment, the First King Edward’s Horse, ‘The King’s Oversea [sic] Dominions Regiment’. Whether, like Andrew in The Red and the Green, also an officer in King Edward’s Horse, he did ‘bombing from horse-back’ – galloping in single file past German gun-emplacements and hurling Mills bombs into them – is not recorded. Generally, cavalry regiments were kept some distance from the front, and Iris later thought that this saved her father’s life.
Six months of Hughes’s war diary survive, starting at the end of 1916. The writing is spare and, even allowing for the fact that it is written ‘on the move’, the tone is notably impassive, without subjectivity. On New Year’s Eve 1916 he is laying four hundred yards of telephone wire, in full view of the German trenches at Miraumont, to connect the artillery observation post to that of his regiment. He and his fellows were soon under shellfire. All afternoon they heard the shells coming, and they would throw themselves flat on the ground until after each set of explosions. Shrapnel fell round them for some hours. When they had finished they ‘beat it back along the Hessian trench’ and rejoined their horses. The line they had laid that day was cut by shellfire almost at once, and had to be relaid in heavy rain five days later. Again Hughes’s party was spotted. A ‘whiz-bang’ dropped overhead about ten yards away, followed by a ‘perfect storm of shells round about’. They got safely away, but only just.
Hughes’s diary notes not merely the death of companions – on 22 March 1917 he writes: ‘Four B Sqn men were killed, and about 15 wounded’ – but also the casualties among horses, which he loved, and is remembered as having taken care of. Even at the front, his mother would proudly and wonderingly relate, he kept half his food for his horse.17 On 23 March 1917 he takes dispatches through the lines and is stopped ‘about four times by the French and ten times by the English patrols, each way’. On 8 April his Lieutenant-Colonel – one Lionel or ‘Jimmie’ James, author-to-be of a regimental history which Hughes purchased – wrote to Louisa that her son was ‘a most excellent and trustworthy British soldier’ of whom she should, like him, be proud.
After the post-Easter Rising executions in April 1916 Irish opinion turned against the British government,18 and King Edward’s Horse found difficulty recruiting subalterns in Dublin. On 11 May 1917 – during the Arras offensive, when 159,000 lives were lost in thirty-nine days – Corporal Murdoch was interviewed for a commission by Brigadier-General Darell at Nesle, and two weeks later left Peronne, on the Somme, for Dublin and then Lisburn. The journey home took one full week. He was gazetted Second Lieutenant19 on 22 February 1918.20
Musing about these diaries after they came to light in 1987,21 Iris pondered various matters. One was that ‘when (31.12.1916) my father wrote in his notebook, “All the afternoon shrapnel was dropping all around …” ‘, Wittgenstein, perhaps in similar circumstances, but fighting on the other side, might