The Ker family of Portavo in Co Down would make the Osbournes look tame - but the history of the ordinary people is also documented, writes Susan McKay
One of the first illustrations in the wonderful book Portavo is an 1842 watercolour of David Stewart Ker. It is captioned: "Few incoming landlords can have inspired such a sense of promise". The young man in the painting is blue-eyed and blonde, a languidly handsome and confident aristocrat with +a hunting dog at his knee. He had just inherited the family estate, some 36,650 acres of prime land stretching from Ballynahinch in Co Down to Larne in Co Antrim, becoming the head of one of Ireland's 30 wealthiest families.
One hundred pages later, there is a photograph of a weak, sloping-shouldered man with a vacant look in his eyes and a petulant set to his mouth. It looks like Wilde's picture of Dorian Gray. This, too, is David Ker, 30 years later at the age of 60. The caption reads: "The fact is David is a complete lunatic". By this stage, his estate was in ruins and his second wife, who was "wild as a hawk" and "drank like a fish" had run off with his son.
This is just one story drawn like a thread from the rich fabric of this, the second volume of Peter Carr's masterly investigation of Portavo, a townland at the northerly end of the Ards peninsula, on what is now known as the "Gold Coast" of north Co Down. Carr began working on this project in 1988, and it comes as no surprise when he admits: "I fell in love with it." It was, he says: "a privilege as much as a labour". There was a "huge amount of drudgery", working his way through "dirty, filthy" boxes in the Public Records Office in Belfast, but he found plenty of treasure.
THE 'BIG HOUSE' Ker family is at the heart of the book, and, as he puts it: "This family makes the Osbournes look tame." The first volume of Portavo introduced the family, which arrived in Ireland in 1566 as fugitives from justice following the murder of Rizzio, favourite of Mary, Queen of Scots. In 1775, David Ker (the family used the same few Christian names from generation to generation) embarked on his Grand Tour of Europe. In Venice, he fell in love with a 14-year-old opera singer, Madalena Guardi, reputedly the daughter of the painter, Francesco Guardi. The couple eloped, pursued on horseback by her brothers. She died young, leaving four children.
"That," says Carr, "was when the family became aggressively territorial, acquiring their empire, and, in 1837, after a bloody election, their seat in Parliament."
Despite their wealth and power, "the Kers were never really Kosher Anglo-Irish aristocracy," says Carr. "They were cultured and cosmopolitan, half Italian Catholic and half Scottish Presbyterian, and they went on to become Church of Ireland. That expressed itself in tangled ways." The tangled ways are taken up in the 1840s in volume two, with young David Ker behaving like a model landlord, developing the town of Downpatrick, draining marshes and building quays. He also set out to make the family seat at Portavo a ravishingly beautiful palace - but these plans were cruelly thwarted when the house burnt down in 1844.
Carr has a novelist's eye for the peripheral characters. When David Ker and his first wife travel to the Holy Land, their Protestant consciences recoil from the gaudiness of the sacred sites, but they cheer up in Bethlehem when they meet there "an orientalised cousin of the Batts of Purdysburn near Belfast who lived contentedly, if less than respectably . . . with a man half her age."
Down has been regarded as one of the counties that escaped the worst rigours of the Famine, but Carr reveals that it was not so. Portavo was typical. The harvests failed and many of the labourers and small farmers were soon in the "iron grip of penury". The estate's records are missing, but Carr retells two damning stories about the Kers' response.
The family had by this stage moved to Montalto, a mansion outside Portavo. The poor took to gathering under its porch - so the family removed it. The Ker children are described feeding beggars "like monkeys" from the diningroom windows.
However, some interventions into the crisis were made by the estate, and they were paid for in part by the sale of some of the Kers' extraordinary collection of paintings by the great Italian, Flemish, Dutch and French masters. These Rembrandts and Van Dycks were not just trophies, Carr points out. They were "reference points in a mental universe, proofs of cultural identity". In the coming years, precious books and a Stradivarius violin would go the same way.
BY THE 1860s, the family was in steep decline. Ker's first wife had died and his children lived in terror of his drunken rages. He married Caroline Persse, a relative of Lady Gregory, and they caroused their way through "a blizzard of bills" before she left him for his son.
Another son killed himself, while a third son "married a Zulu and was never mentioned again". Meanwhile, David's brother Richard was moving in charmed circles in Venice with Robert Browning and the painters James Whistler and John Singer Sargent.
The next heir was a spiv who squandered the family fortunes at the race tracks. Carr compares him in the end to a "heroin addict who, having used up all his good veins, begins injecting through his toes". He was also a womaniser - Carr tells the story of Richard Ker's agent showing Ker's son, David, around his inheritance. They happen upon a young man lounging against a gate. "Smarten yourself up," says the agent. "This is young Mr Ker." The young man is completely nonplussed. "We're all young Mr Kers round here," he replies.
Carr describes the outrageous devices employed by landlords to win elections, notably the use of barrels of beer and bludgeons, a situation which was revolutionised by the introduction of the secret ballot in 1872. By then "landlordism was crumbling" in Ireland, if not in England, Scotland or Wales. The diminished Ker estate was liquidated and its farmers became freeholders in the early years of the 20th century in what Carr describes as "a massive social, legal, financial and even moral undertaking . . . a model of peaceful and far-reaching social change." William Wallace, the Kers' solicitor and agent, became a leading figure in unionism, and in planning the state of Northern Ireland.
THE WAR YEARS were experienced in the townland as "a high in the economic cycle". The second World War saw German bombs dropped on Portavo, as on Belfast. In the 1960s, the Kers were close friends of Captain Terence O'Neill as well as of Lord Brookeborough.
The colourful gentry dominate Portavo, but the book is also about the small farmers, the fishermen, and the landless labourers. "I was drawn to those who lost," says Carr. "I felt the strongest imaginative connection to them." There is Lisa Magee who lived alone in her thatched cottage on the shore. The Commissioners of Irish Lights wanted to build lighthousekeepers' cottages on the site. She would tell neighbours: "They want ta toss ma hoose an get rid o' me. But ah won't go. Am telling ye. Am no goin." And she didn't. There is Will Patton who, having yielded to mechanisation, used to say "Woa boy" to his new tractor. There is Johnny Aird who, after Lady Dufferin and her aristocratic pals parked their cars and blocked his narrow yard, filled the cars with "clocking hens which did their business" on the upholstery.
Carr has misgivings about the nouveau riche who began to build their villas along this coast from the 1960s, turning the area into a suburban community - "that is to say," he notes, "a community that was not a community".
In 1957, Cyril Lord arrived. This carpet millionaire from a working-class Lancashire family was "loud, flash and loaded". His large pink mansion by the sea (too large, too pink) was always full of guests, including Errol Flynn and Gracie Fields.
When his business collapsed, Lord went to the Bahamas and his house was turned into a convalescent home for Baptist stroke victims. While The Troubles raged, Carr notes, "the bourgeoisie completed its conquest of the Portavo coast". The townland "lies within the apathy belt . . . Its new arrivals were the people who famously opted out of politics".
Portavo, just one of 61,000 townlands in Ireland, is now celebrated in two lavishly illustrated, fascinating and beautifully written books. Carr is a modest author. "There is such a strong synthesising trend in history," he says. "It is important that the local voice is heard."
Portavo - an Irish Townland and its Peoples, Part 2: The Famine to the Present by Peter Carr is published by The White Row Press, £20