Lottie McManus of Killeaden

BACK Lottie McManus of Killeaden. Feis Mhaigh Eo 1906, Castlebar.

The McManus family came from Westmeath. James McManus, perhaps inspired by the travel stories of his uncle, Capt. James Corrigan, left Ireland to seek his fortune as the manager of a sugar plantation in British Guinea. There he married an English girl named Charlotte Strong, in 1845. Her father was the Rev. Leonard Strong who bought lands in Ireland, among which were the Killeaden property.

He gave the Killeaden property to James and Charlotte McManus in 1853, soon after their return to Ireland. They had lived briefly in Westmeath and in Castlebar where their daughter, Lottie, the writer, was born in what is now Heaton's store in Ellison St.

Lottie was a prolific novelist who popularised the victories and exploits of the Wild Geese and Ireland's ancient heroes. Children read these stories with delight some forty or fifty years ago. The story of her own life, too, made thrilling reading. She told most of it in her book White Light and Flame.

As a young girl, growing up in Mayo, she had tended to look down on Ireland with its "tribal squabbles" and looked up to England as " the civilised conqueror" rescuing her people from the darkness of ignorance and superstition.

It was only while living in Sussex, the family having left Killeaden, that she began to read about Ireland, and to realise that her earlier views were misinformed and crude. "The Bog of Stars" by Standish O' Grady had a great effect on her, and whetted her appetite for things Irish. At this time, too, she became aware of Raftery's poem, in praise of her own Killeaden. Thady Conlon, the clever man who lived in her parish, sent her a copy of the poem, written in Irish, and a translation, which he himself had made.

In 1897 she returned to Killeaden, having become completely Nationalist in her outlook. "The door to the inner court had been locked to the writer (i. e. herself), for but one key would open it, the Irish language". She was took lessons from Thady Conlon who was greatly amused by her pronunciations.

Whatever about the success or otherwise of her efforts to learn Irish, she set about founding branches of the Gaelic League throughout Mayo. Irish, she tells us was the mother tongue of the older folk, especially when conversing among themselves or saying their prayers. Their grownup sons and daughters could speak it, too, but seldom did and never to their children. It was regarded as a mark of degradation.

In the following June 1898, she called on Fr. Denis O'Hara, P.P., Kiltimagh, "with the hope of establishing a branch of the Gaelic League in the parish". Although he received her kindly, he believed that the revival of the language was "impracticable and a sentiment". Nevertheless, he agreed to preside at a meeting held after second Mass on a fine July day of that year. Forty members enrolled after the formal speech, and Coillte Maghach had the second branch in Mayo, after Newport.

In this same year she met many of the people actively engaged in the cause of the language; she met Nora Borthwick, a Scottish Gael of the clan McDonald of the Isles on her mother's side, and later took her to Kiltimagh; she met Douglas Hyde, O Coincheannan and Fr. Peadar O Laoghair; she met Arthur Griffith, George Birmingham and Lady Gregory who visited Killeaden.

In the years that followed, leading up to the Easter Rising of 1916, and the subsequent quickening of events leading to the treaty and thereafter, Lottie describes some of these horrific happenings, that occurred locally, in her diary.

Despite her success as a recreator of a romantic view of Ireland's shown in her novels, Lally of the Brigade, In Sarsfield's Days, and The Silk of the Kine, she was very much a realist and pragmatist where furthering a cause is concerned. In my view, Lottie can take her place among any of the popular writers of the last hundred years. The Ireland of the author of White Light and Flame cannot be left to sink into apathy and oblivion.

This is a condensed version of a two-part article by Padraic Filan, which appeared in the 1984, and 1985 editions of The Bohola Post.

BACK