Another voice

To kill a Massingberd

Auberon Waugh

Is gentry a word which can usefully be applied to the Irish ? Burke's Landed Gentry of Ireland ran for four editions (1899, 1904, 1912 and the controversial fourth edition of 1958) before anyone noticed the anomaly but already, in 1912, there were rumbles of discontent. These centred around the fact that since the Wyndham Land Purchase measures of 1903 there were very few people left in Ireland who could seriously be described as landed. As Mr A. C. Fox-Davies wrote in his unforgetta6le preface to the 1912 edition, 'One is confronted with the problem whether there still remains a Landed Gentry at all . . . so great has been the compulsory alienation of land in Ireland during the last decade.'

In presenting the new volume its editor, Mr Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, has faced the problem squarely. 'Landed Gentry was out,' he tells us, again with reference to the fact of landlessness. He played with various alternatives—'Distinguished Families': 'Historic Families'---before settling on the one we have: Burke's Irish Family Records, now.published by Burke's Peerages Ltd at the give-away price of £38. The most obvious solution, if landlessness had been the only problem, was to call it Burke's Gentry of Ireland, but this does not seem to have occurred to him.

I think he was right for a number of reasons, among which any characteristics we may still be allowed to attach to the Irish under the Race Relations Act are not the most important. It is true that there may be an element of absurdity in discussing George Robert FitzGerald, 'The Fighting FitzGerald', under the heading of gentry, although he was an 'Etonian and nephew of the great Lord Bristol, Bishop of Derry. He it was who incarcerated his father and tied him to a bear. He was hanged at Castlebar on 12 June 1786 while an angry mob sacked his house at Turlough.

But a far more useful service in removing the concept of gentility as a prerequisite for genealogical study is that Mr MontgomeryMassingberd has also managed to reduce the taint of snobbery. It is not just that young people today (ugh!) reject the snobbery of previous generations. Far, far worse than that, they genuinely aren't interested in how to address the divorced wife of a marquess's younger son. Of all the great issues with which I have confronted the British people in the past ten years, the burning question of whether Lady Falkender's children have the right to style themselves 'Honourable' has inflamed the most fervent passions. Even I find less joy as 1 colour the coats of arms of those noblemen I have met in Burke's Peerage, where once

I used to pounce with the joy of a lepidopterist spying his first Camberwell Beauty or Norfolk Swallowtail. Formerly 1 thought this diminishing excitement might be yet another sign of senile degeneration, but now I think it is something which is happening in all our minds simultaneously, like the Renaissance or the Enlightenment.

Mercifully, dukes and earls are excluded from Irish Family Records. In giving us an entertaining, anecdotal account of some five hundred noteworthy Irish families, I think Mr Montgomery-Massingberd has achieved a quiet revolution which should re-establish genealogy where it belongs, as an essential part of any Civilised man's understanding of the world around him, a source of limitless wonder and delight and "a reminder of the extent to which we are all members of a single family. This message is particularly relevant, of course, in the Irish situation. We will now sing hymn number 124 in our New Catholic Hymnal: 'Kumbaya, my Lord, Kumbayar There is no space here to give more than a glimpse of the treasures in this marvellous book. I never knew, for instance, that Oscar Wilde had two bastard half-sisters who were burned to death at a dance in Drumaconner House on 10 November 1871. Apparently Emily's dress caught fire and her younger sister, Mary, died with her, no doubt trying to put it out. They were twenty-four and twenty-two respectively. This must have been shortly after Oscar's seventeenth birthday, and probably made a profound impression on the lad. Nor could I ever have guessed, until studying a history of the Cusack family, that Cyril Connolly was a nephew of the mechanical engineer ,who designed the royal train for the visit of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra to Ireland in 1903. There is d strange and si.iister connection between trains—especially royal trains—and the newspaper on which Connolly spent his declining years which I may expand later into a major thesis. ,

But these glimpses give no idea of the delights available. We are told of one lady that she was the model for Agatha Runcible in Vile Bodies; another person is identified as having been taught the organ by Evelyn Waugh at school. I discover that the family of my Irish brother-in-law has changed its name not once but twice—from Ruxton in the first instance and from Rothwell in the second. Aha, Rothwell, I know your secret ! I was delighted to meet again the unbelievable Mr Kavanagh. Born without any arms or legs, he hunted and shot with the best of them, travelled in remote parts of Asia, was twice an MP and member of the Irish Privy Council, and fathered a fine family of four sons and three daughters. He used to stay with my great-grandmother in Ireland, remarking on one occasion: 'It's an extraordinary thing—I haven't been here for five years but the, station-master recognised me.

These are just a few of the things which kept me enthralled over Easter. Everybody

else will find his own satisfaction. A few nights ago, sitting up late, we all agreed we would be heartbroken if the Times disappeared after its catastrophic losses in the first quarter of the year. Now that its losses ,

are almost matched by those of its worthless stable companion, there seems little hope. I honestly think that a large part of every

thing most worthwhile in England will die with the Times: intelligence, humour, com mon-sense, moderation and decency, all the middle-class virtues shared and sustained by an awareness that everyone whose judgment one respects is reading it too.

But England has always found the men to match the moment, and as Mr Montgom

ery-Massingberd takes his place in my pri

vate pantheon of heroes, beside the resplendent figure of Rees-Mogg and the slightlY

jaded figure of Bernard Levin, I think I see the answer. If only Mr Massingberd can bring about the same revolution in the next editions of Burke's Landed Gentry in England, we shall all have something to read on our desert islands of the future.

So far, the new edititm has been a disappointment. I attribute this to the choice of Mr Anthony Powell, the fashionable

novelist, as an advisory editor. By comparison with Irish Family Records it is dull

stuff: gauche, class-conscious, boastful and incomplete. Page after page is taken up with the Powell family history, but no mention is made of Powell's Somerset neighbour, the Waughs of Combe Florey. For an account of this better writer's more interesting family, readers must turn to the 1952 Landed

Gentry, now sadly out of date. 1 cannot honestly recommend that anyone should

buy the new Landed Gentry at £25 per volume for three volumes until Mr Montgomery-Massingberd's genius has had time to assert itself.

From reading his family entry, I learn that my new hero is only twenty-nine years

old despite the magnitude of his responsibi

lities. A new Pitt. The Massingberd of the title flits in and out of his family like a king

fisher. 1 see he has a sister, Mary Rose, of only twenty-four. She is a nurse. How lovely. She is married to a fellow called Jones who describes himself as an artist. Hmm.

I suppose a few people may fail to re'spond to these fascinating glimpses into

other people's families. Such people should approach genealogy from the more serious viewpoint of the contribution it can make to

solving the rottenness of modern society, the crime wave and the Irish problem. This beautiful book can also be used to extract stones from .horses' hooves. While Montgomery-Massingberd lives, there is still hope.