The story of the Tilson case began on December 10th, 1941 in Dublin, when Ernest Tilson, a 24-year-old Protestant, married Mary Barnes, an 18-year-old Catholic, in St Mary’s Church on Haddington Road. The wedding took place under fraught conditions: Mary was pregnant and her mother, Annie, a very religious and pious Catholic, vehemently opposed the marriage because of Ernest’s religion.
Moreover, because this was a mixed marriage and the couple wished to be married in a Catholic church, both were obliged to sign a pledge agreeing to raise any children of the marriage as Catholics. In an effort to ensure that the marriage proceeded, or simply to quell tensions, Ernest signed the pledge, only to subsequently renege on it in 1950 when he removed three of his four sons to the Protestant-run Birds’ Nest orphanage in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, intending to educate them as Protestants. To recover her sons, Mary took a case to the High Court and won; her husband later appealed in the Supreme Court that court’s ruling and lost. Their dispute – which received widespread newspaper coverage in Ireland, Britain and the United States – polarised Ireland along confessional lines and became a cause celebre of the 1950s.
Any discussion of the Tilson case inevitably draws comparisons with the Fethard-on-Sea boycott, which occurred seven years later in 1957. The Tilson case involved a boycott of Protestant business. Immediately after his loss in the Supreme Court, Ernest sought refuge at his parents’ house in Oldcastle, Co Meath, where many Catholic residents – encouraged by their 80-year-old parish priest, Fr O’Farrell – began boycotting the Tilson family tailoring firm. Ernest’s parents, David and Harriette, and his sister Mitty, registered a protest against their treatment. Each Sunday for many years, the family had dressed in their best clothes and walked together along the footpath to service in the small Protestant church in the town. During the boycott, however, in a small but significant departure, they walked to church in the middle of the street, their heads held erect.
Mitty recalled other forms of intimidation in Oldcastle around the time of the court cases: she described a frightening atmosphere as rosaries were recited by a group of Catholics on the street outside their house; threats were made to burn her family out of their home, and, over successive nights, a man returning from the pub sang Faith of Our Fathers outside their front door. She also recalled verbal abuse, the decline of her dressmaking business and her fear of Catholic antagonists as they made their way from Mass.
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A letter from Ernest to Rev WLM Giff of the Irish Church Missions, written four weeks after the Supreme Court appeal concluded, clearly indicates that the Tilson tailoring business remained under boycott: “The boycott of my family is in full swing. No more work has come in from any of the RCs. [Roman Catholics] since, and my presence here does not help matters either. There is only one alternative, to quit the country as soon as possible. I feel most embarrassed living on my people and depending on them for everything, especially now since the same volume of work is not coming in and I being the cause of the trouble.”
In another letter to Giff, Ernest’s mother Harriette described how Fr O’Farrell, assisted by his curate, was stirring up tensions between the Catholic and Protestant communities in Oldcastle in the wake of the court cases. That said, the letter also shows how some Catholics in the town were prepared to defy their parish priest: “The Roman Catholics in this place are making great use of their Canon Law. About a week ago, a jumble sale in aid of the local Church of Ireland table tennis club was being held. The parish priest and his curate visited the schools the day before and warned the RC pupils that under no conditions were they to patronise the sale…
The personal dimensions of the Tilson case have never been acknowledged by historians or other commentators
“The night of the sale came on, and the courthouse was picquetted [sic] by Catholic action men, they warned the people outside of what the priest would do in the event of them going inside. A few walked away and others went to the sale regardless of the consequences. A very small crowd in comparison with recent sales… We must say ‘hats off’ to those who defied Canon Law.”
Accounts vary, but it is generally believed that the boycott eventually petered out 12 or 18 months after the Supreme Court appeal. One local Catholic resident explained, albeit with savage irony: “Mitty Tilson was the best seamstress in the town – if not the county. And if you had a son or a daughter making their First Communion and you wanted them dressed in the best outfit, then you went to Mitty.”
Although much has been made about the decisions in the High Court and Supreme Court, the personal dimensions of the Tilson case have never been acknowledged by historians or other commentators. During the boycott Ernest moved to Belfast and later to London, where he endured years of living alone, while Mary, who remained in Dublin, had to face the onerous challenges of raising her four sons as a single mother on a very modest income without State benefits. Their children also experienced difficult times having to grow to maturity in the absence of their father.
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Some might point out that Ernest was the author of his own downfall, or that the wounds inflicted on his Catholic family were inflicted by an irascible Protestant, but equally one might argue that when his troubles began in 1941 he was in an impossible bind: faced with the moral imperative of marrying his pregnant partner, but compelled to sign an objectionable written agreement issued by a church of which he was not even a member.
There is a surprising end to this story. Many years after the matter was settled in the courts, Mary and Ernest – Catholic and Protestant – reunited and lived out their days together until their deaths in Dublin in the 1990s. On their reconciliation, their son Alan – who was placed in the Birds’ Nest by his father 73 years ago – recalls, ‘”it was great – we were a family again”.
The Tilson Case: Church and State in 1950s Ireland by David Jameson, is published in hardback by Cork University Press (€39) and is available from bookshops and at www.corkuniversitypress.com
