In my timeline of traditional Irish harpers through the Long 19th Century, I have listed three people who were still alive after 1900. Peter Dowdall in Drogheda died in 1902; Paul Smith in Dublin died in 1904, and George Jackson in Belfast died in 1909. All three of these had learned to play the traditional wire-strung Irish harp from teachers who themselves had learned in the inherited tradition with lineages going back to the 18th century and beyond.
This post is to discuss a very brief mention of an un-named harper in 1906.
The source of these comments
I was in the Library of the Royal Irish Academy looking at Robert Bruce Armstrong’s own personal copy of his Irish and Highland Harps (1904). Armstrong has inserted extra material (catalogued by Michael Billinge and Keith Sanger) including letters received after publication. I have already used some of these letters and notes, about William Savage’s harp, in my post on George Jackson.
This week’s visit was specifically to look at the correspondence between Robert Bruce Armstrong and the music historian William Henry Grattan Flood. Armstrong had written to Grattan Flood early in 1905, sending him the calotype portrait of Patrick Byrne and asking for more information about Byrne. Inserted into the book are 13 letters written by Grattan Flood to Armstrong between April 1905 and June 1908. They not only cover information about Byrne but are quite wide-ranging, with snippets of information about the Ardmore, Ullard and Jerpoint stone carvings, the Egan “Patriotic Present” harp, and the loan of books that Armstrong was posting to Grattan Flood. Armstrong was obviously writing to Grattan Flood asking questions on various harp-related topics, and Grattan Flood’s letters are responding to Armstrong’s queries. Armstrong copied the text of his first enquiry onto a slip of paper which is inserted into the book along with some of Grattan Flood’s replies, but we do not have the rest of Armstrong’s outgoing correspondence with Grattan Flood.
Grattan Flood’s first reply includes some interesting information, that Grattan Flood had heard about Patrick Byrne from his own grandfather; but we can discuss that information later when we are actually talking about Byrne.
What interests us here is a couple of incidental mentions of an un-named traditional harper, who is our man that this post is about. I think Grattan Flood and Armstrong are not actually interested in our man. Gratttan Flood only mentions him as a potential source for information about Patrick Byrne, and Armstrong apparently does not try to follow up on the mention. Grattan Flood does not give any more information about our man apart from mentioning him in passing in the context of the search for information about Byrne.
Grattan Flood is notoriously unreliable, and in his letters we can see him doing the same kind of confabulating as in his published books. But because these references to the un-named harper are so incidental, I think we can take them at face value.
The references
On 22 Apr 1905, in his very first reply to Armstrong’s questions about Patrick Byrne, Grattan Flood wrote:
I shall make further
Letter from W H Grattan Flood, 22 Apr 1905. Royal Irish Academy Library SR 23 G 35
inquiries of an old friend in
Dundalk + give you further
particulars later on
Unfortunately we are not told who this old friend in Dundalk is, or whether this same friend is relevant to later parts of our story. But I am including this apparently irrelevant line because it might give us some clue to follow up on later.
Over the course of 1905, the two men continued to exchange letters; they discuss ancient words, bagpipes, old harps, and stone carvings. Armstrong also sends rare books in the post to Grattan Flood, for him to borrow, and Grattan Flood returns them to Armstrong.
Grattan Flood had not forgotten that the original contact had been in search of information about Byrne:
I am still awaiting enquiries
Letter from W H Grattan Flood, 6 Jan 1906. Royal Irish Academy Library SR 23 G 35
re. Patrick Byrne
A week later there was news:
I am in communication with the Last Survivor
Letter from W H Grattan Flood, 13 Jan 1906. Royal Irish Academy Library SR 23 G 35
[of the] Drogheda Harp Society, who Knew Patrick Byrne
+shall let you know the result when I [????] ·
[?????] [anyway] yours sincerely
Wm H. Grattan Flood
Grattan Flood’s handwriting is particularly bad in places; the square brackets indicate words I cannot read. Two I have guessed at; but I can’t read two of the words at all. At first I thought the first illegible word could be “hear” or “know”. But I think there are one or two extra letters at the end; I don’t think the first letter is l, or h, or k; the dot at the end looks like a full stop but may be a misplaced dot from an i. The first word on the next line might be part of this same sentence, or may be the beginning of signing off the letter; it is squashed into the bottom of the page. It may start with the letter k but I am not confident of this. There appears to be a letter i in the middle of the word. It is very unsatisfactory.
We get one more fragment of information from the letters, three months later. Grattan Flood apologises in this letter (which is written on black-bordered notepaper), saying that he has become behind in his correspondence since his mother had died and he had been travelling and dealing with her estate:
…my aged in-
Letter from W H Grattan Flood, 9 Apr 1906. Royal Irish Academy Library SR 23 G 35
formant is unable to write, but
a friend who interviewed him on
my behalf can only get out of
him that Patrick Byrne was the
same [,] Patrick Byrne [of] Carrick-
macross + was a [most] famous
harper. He says [he was] [touring]
in Scotland + played there “for
gentlemen + at the theatre”
The words in square brackets are pretty hard to read and these are my best guesses. The letter continues with more fragments of information about Byrne that are obviously from Grattan Flood’s own reading.
Anyway that is it, there are no more references in the letters to this traditional harper.
What can we say about this person?
Our biggest problem here is that we don’t know this person’s name. We do know that this was a man, who had been a student at the Drogheda Harp Society. This means that he had been learning to play the traditional wire-strung Irish harp under Hugh Frazer between 1842 and 1844.
Hugh Frazer had a great lineage in playing the traditional wire-strung Irish harp; he had learned the harp in the early 1820s from Edward McBride and then from Valentine Rennie; both McBride and Rennie had learned in the years around 1810 from Arthur O’Neil, who had learned the traditional wire-strung Irish harp from Owen Keenan in County Tyrone in the 1740s.
Assuming our man was aged between perhaps 10 and 20 years old while he was studying the traditional wire-strung Irish harp under Hugh Frazer, he would have been aged between his early 70s and mid 80s in 1906, when Grattan Flood’s friend was interviewing him.
And the final piece of information we can say about our man is that he knew, or at least knew of, Patrick Byrne; however maybe he didn’t know Byrne that well since the information he gave to Grattan Flood’s friend is pretty sparse.
But we do have a fragment of reported direct speech from this traditional harper, telling us that a colleague used to play “for gentlemen & at the theatre”.
Finding out more
The reason I have put this post here is that I am kind of stuck. I am treating this as a pretty definite evidence that there was a traditional harper still alive in 1906 that I otherwise have no record of.
If we look at my timeline we can try to see if it might be someone we already know about. I first thought this might be Dowdall, but it can’t be him because he had died in 1902. I have six other names of people associated with the Drogheda Harp Society, whose names appear in a newspaper report of a concert in Drogheda on 19th February 1844. The six names are listed as performing alongside Hugh Frazer.
The only one of these six that I have written up so far is Hugh O’Hagan; but our man can’t be him, because he had died back in 1886.
J. Branagan is listed as performing in the concert; we find him later as a harper, but I have not yet written him up. It could be him I suppose.
Miss Flinn, Mr. Halpin and Mr. McEntegart are listed as performing in the concert, though I have no other references to them so far. I don’t even know if they played the harp, or were singers, or what.
Peter Dowdall performed in the concert, and we have later references to him playing the harp as an amateur – he worked as a clerk. It can’t be him because he had died in 1902.
William or Billy Griffin or Griffith was one of the harp students; I have references to him working as a traditional harper into the 1870s but I have not yet written him up. It could be him I suppose.
We have references that, within a few months of starting the harp school in Drogheda, Hugh Frazer had fifteen pupils (The Kilkenny Journal and Leinster Commercial and Literary Advertiser, Wed 27 Apr 1842 p2). That means there are at least nine names of people learning to play the traditional wire-strung Irish harp in the 1840s that I don’t know. Our man could well be one of these other pupils of Frazer.
Of course we don’t know where our man lived; we know that he learned the harp in Drogheda, but he didn’t necessarily live there after that, though it is very possible. I think that most of the people learning the traditional wire-strung harp under Hugh Frazer in Drogheda in the 1840s were Drogheda locals. We know that Dowdall and Griffith continued to be connected to Drogheda; Hugh O’Hagan lived in Dundalk most of his life, and we also have the hint that Grattan Flood’s friend who went to interview our man may have lived in Dundalk. My header image is a late 19th century view of North Quay, Drogheda (image: NLI Flickr, no known copyright restrictions).
A dead end?
How could we try and track down this man? Since he was still alive in 1906, aged in his 70s or 80s, then he should appear in the 1901 census; if he lived on longer, he could also be in the 1911 census. But without his name we cannot start looking for him there. We could also look for his death record, but again this is not possible without knowing his name.
There must have been letters between Grattan Flood and his friend, in which the friend reported on the interview(s) with our man. W H Grattan Flood’s private papers were kept after his death by his son, William Grattan Flood PP (The Capuchin Annual 1974, p.56-62). but I don’t know where the letters and papers are now.
We are not even told the friend’s name, so we can’t even get at the information through them.
Basically I am completely stuck for now!