The lost Protestants of ‘Kingstown’

I was born in New Zealand in 1951, the child of Irish emigrants. My mother was always homesick. She longed for Ireland. Circumstances meant that she spent many years away from home but, as soon as she could, she returned to Dún Laoghaire where she had spent her childhood. She brought her children with her. We were aged from 17 to nine. I was the 12-year-old in the middle.

My mother had always told us we were Irish. But the Ireland we returned to in May 1963 was not the Ireland of her experience and her memory. Her Ireland was a Protestant world; her father was the rector of the Mariners’ Church in what she still called “Kingstown”.

Their Protestant world was unionist: the Mariners’ parish magazine published in June 1916, after the Easter Rising, described in great detail the response to the troops brought over from England to put down the rebellion.

“The Kingstown people rich and poor, vied with each other to make the troops comfortable and showing them every possible kindness. Many of the men had come over at such short notice minus their kit bags and their pay and it well behoved us to come to their help.”

When my mother lived in “Kingstown” in the 1920s and 1930s it was still a Protestant town. Protestant shops, Protestant schools, the town’s squares and terraces with names such as Clarinda Park, Crosthwaite Terrace, Royal Terrace, signifiers of its past. The Mariners’ Church was at its heart, a vibrant and thriving parish.

Population decline

But in the years my mother had lived on the other side of the world it had changed. The decline of Dún Laoghaire’s Protestant population which had begun after independence had speeded up. The church had closed; many of the shops were gone, as were the people.

The censuses from 1911 onwards turn these observations into facts. In 1911 the Church of Ireland population was just short of 250,000. Fifteen years later, in 1926, that population had dropped to just over 164,000. The population continued to decline through the following decades, reaching a low of 89,000 in 1991.

This decline was made real for me by the contrast between my mother’s stories of her rectory childhood in Kingstown and the reality of life in modern-day Dún Laoghaire. I was intrigued by it. Where had all these people gone and why had they left? I decided to find out.

I used the church records collected in the Representative Church Body library in Dublin to identify people who, between 1900 and 1939, had married in the Mariners’ Church and had their children baptised there. I found 48 who fitted the category. These I decided were my “Mariners’ Families” and I would find them and ask them about their lives.

Eventually I tracked down 30. Some were still living in the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown area; some had gone to live in Northern Ireland or England. Others had emigrated to Australia and Canada. All were happy to talk about life in the Mariners’ and their lives now.

One issue became immediately apparent. In my search for the families I had contacted a man whom I thought was from the Mariners’. He emailed me and said that there had been a split in the family in the middle of the 19th century because one of his ancestors had married a Catholic. As a result his part of the family had become Catholic.

My Mariners’ people all spoke of the effect of the Ne Temere decree on their lives (Ne Temere was a papal edict of 1907 that placed restrictions on marriage, particularly mixed marriages). It had a huge impact on the choices they made – the people with whom they socialised, fell in love and married.

One woman spoke angrily of how, after marrying a Catholic, her baby was “whipped away” from her in hospital and baptised in the Catholic Church. Another felt that Ne Temere threatened the very existence of the Church of Ireland community.

“It wasn’t long after Ireland became independent and the Protestant community was very fearful . . . There was a civil war and there was definitely a fear that we wouldn’t survive and that if you married a Catholic you and your children had to become one.”

I asked what their parents had felt about independence. Some said they had ignored it. Others that they spoke wistfully “about how good things were under English rule for the Church of Ireland community . . . I feel that my parents kept a Union Jack in the attic in case things might change back to ‘the good old days’.”

One woman commented that “they thought it wouldn’t last”, another that they “didn’t really notice it”.

‘The rebels’

But the Monsells of Mulgrave Terrace noticed it. Clarendon Monsell was a civil servant. After independence he and his wife and their four children all went to London although they knew no one there. His son told me Clarendon was determined to remain loyal to the British government, and he refused to work for those whom he continued to call “the rebels”.

Of those who had emigrated some, like their Catholic neighbours, left to find opportunities in a new world as Ireland languished in a state of economic decline.

Derek Marks from Rosmeen Gardens, who went to Canada in the 1970s, cited the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the “climate of violence” as his main reason for leaving.

One man who moved to Northern Ireland to get work as a teacher told me he felt that only people who had good Irish would do well in the Republic. And this man in particular had reason to be fearful of the new Ireland.

His grandfather, Andrew Knight, an inspector on the Dalkey tram, was shot by the Dún Laoghaire IRA in July 1921, as an “informer”. His body was dumped under a hedge in Castlepark Road, his jawbone shattered by the bullet that killed him. He left behind his widow, Lily, and their four children.

I found other instances of IRA violence against the Church of Ireland community of south county Dublin. The vestry minutes of Holy Trinity parish, Killiney, Easter 1921, extend a vote of sympathy to Captain J Atkinson “in the great trial he has recently suffered in the attempt on his life”.

The statement of Patrick J Brennan of the Dublin Brigade of the IRA, recorded in the Bureau of Military History archive, confirm that the attack on Capt Atkinson took place on March 19th, 1921.

Parish records show fear and apprehension as their numbers declined. Monkstown parish’s vestry minutes for 1922 state: “the Select Vestry . . . have to regret the departure of several families who have thought it prudent to remove to places where the security of life and property is assured.”

Canon Harry Dobbs of All Saints’ Church in Blackrock noted on April 23rd, 1922: “Conditions anarchical & so far as one can see hopeless. Murder. Rapine. Robbery. Violence & the continual migration of Protestants to other countries.”

Divorce

Some people who left Dún Laoghaire did so because they felt themselves at odds with Catholic social teaching. In 1935 Ethel Crossley went to England with her four children. She had married Rowland Crossley, a sergeant in the signals corps of the British army in 1918. The marriage was extremely unhappy and she wanted a divorce.

Although divorce was technically legal in 1935, within two years De Valera’s Constitution would ban it outright. Already the sale of contraception had been outlawed, a sign of the influence of the Catholic Church on social legislation.

So Ethel did what many others have done. She took the boat with her children aged between 15 and four. She knew no one in London but she was resourceful and quickly found a flat and a job as a pub pianist.

When war came in 1939 Ethel stayed on. The family survived the Blitz and the destruction of four of their homes. The younger children were evacuated outside the city. Ethel’s late daughter Liz Whitehouse told me how they survived. “The phone never stopped ringing. Everyone was having parties and they all wanted Mum to play for them. You never knew when it’d be your turn to die.”

After the war Ethel and her children often came “home” to Dún Laoghaire for summer holidays. When she died many years later her children scattered her ashes from the mail boat in the middle of the Irish Sea.

The Mariners’ Church is still part of Dún Laoghaire. Now it is the Maritime Museum, recording and reflecting Dún Laoghaire’s strong relationship with all things to do with the marine world.

Christ Church, beside the People’s Park, continues to minister to south county Dublin’s Church of Ireland population. So do the churches of Glenageary, Dalkey, Killiney, Ballybrack, Monkstown and Dean’s Grange. Their congregations are small but the last census recorded a slight increase in the Church of Ireland population.

Many of my “Mariners’ families” felt unable to live in an independent Ireland dominated by the Catholic Church. Perhaps now, 101 years after the Easter Rising, a pluralist Ireland can recognise their place as part of the rich fabric of Irish life.

Julie Parsons's latest novel, The Therapy House, partly based on her research of Dún Laoghaire's Protestants, is published by New Island