In last Saturday’s Diary, quoting Ernie O’Malley, I used the word “jumper” in its uniquely Irish context (which refers to neither knitwear nor athletics).
Now, long-term correspondent Martin Aherne writes to suggest the usage was incorrect and that the word O’Malley and I both meant was “souper”.
“There is a difference and a big difference between jumper and souper,” Martin says. “Maggie [the young girl mentioned in a story from O’Malley’s Mayo folklore collection] was not a jumper but a souper, converting to get fed.”
Jumpers, he implies, were Catholics who responded to the Penal Laws by turning Protestant to inherit land.
Souper imposed - Frank McNally on Famine insults and Flann O’Brien’s debt to Con Houlihan
Pint of order – Frank McNally on getting to the ballot box
Form and function – Brian Maye on architect and novelist James Franklin Fuller
Belleek prospect – Brian Maye on pottery entrepreneur Robert Williams Armstrong
On occasion, the email continues, such a convert could even get “his own family evicted and have the whole place for himself”.
Well, certainly, the words do have a different quality, if only because souper implies passivity while “jumper” is more active.
And “jumper” may well have had a separate existence prior to the Famine. But its other meanings make it hard to find in archives then. Whereas since the Famine, the terms have tended to be lumped together or used interchangeably.
Here, for example, is a remarkable passage from the Freeman’s Journal in 1855, one of the earliest to use the combination in print. It welcomes a mission to Connemara by the Sisters of Mercy, as if the nuns are religious paratroopers sent in to take out the evangelists and their kitchens:
“No wonder Soupers and Jumpers should grow deadly pale and seek succour from their old friends the bayonet and the ballot [sic? – bullet?] . . . hence all the police within forty miles of Clifden . . . called in to reassure the well-fed and well-paid stirabout brigade . . .”
***
A more recent incidence of the terms has sent me down a rabbit hole involving Myles na gCopaleen (aka Flann O’Brien), formerly of this parish, and another celebrated newspaper man, Con Houlihan, late of the Evening Press.
The story begins with a milestone from the Irish Times in October 1950, headlined “Cruiskeen Lawn is 10 Years Old Today”.
Myles’s famous column, written at first in Irish before evolving through bilingualism into English, was indeed celebrating its tenth birthday then and did so with a round-up of the decade’s highlights.
These included a diatribe from the Catholic Standard, a weekly newspaper, which had lampooned the Irish Times, its editor Bertie Smyllie, and Myles in verse, eg:
“The Soupers and the Jumpers/Had done their loathy best,/With their Lutheran ersatz-bible,/Their Smyllie homes and the rest/E’er a native anti-Irish chick/Was Bred in their Bird’s Nest . . .”
The poem concluded: “Nor in these squalid, eerie days,/An ugsomer sight is seen/Than that forlorn of ‘Gaelic’/In the Garrison Magazine/Where the Grazier’s Gazette displays/Its Myles na n-Asaleen.”
No, the satire is not quite Swiftian. Even so, as well as introducing some of us to the word ugsomer (from the archaic ugsome, meaning “frightful”), it inspired another archive search, this time for “Myles na n-Asaleen”, to see if the nickname had been used elsewhere. And that’s where Con Houlihan came in.
Cruiskeen Lawn aside, the solitary hit for “Myles na nAsaleen” was not from the Catholic Standard but from a 1973 book review in The Irish Press by the same Con, then newly arrived in Dublin journalism, though already in his late-40s.
It’s a well written piece, combining two books: Myles’s An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth), which had just been republished in English, and the biographical Óige an Dearthár (The Brother’s Childhood) by a sibling of the real-life Myles, Ciarán Ó Nualláin.
Houlihan loved the latter work, hated the former. Of The Poor Mouth, he complained:
“The extraordinary thing about this miserable book is its reputation. For over thirty years certain of the Green Guards have been confiding to their acquaintances who know no Irish the delights of this work as they would of a secret mistress. The translator talks about the nuances . . . lost in the English. He is talking nonsense. There are no nuances – only crude parodies . . . written when [the author’s] mind must have been on the blink.”
Interesting as that opinion is, however, the Flannorak in me was more intrigued by a preamble to Houlihan’s review, in which he implies that he himself was an early influence on Myles. And that – gasp! – Cruiskeen Lawn may even have plagiarised him on occasion.
Referring to himself in first-person plural, Houlihan wrote: “Once upon a time we were involved in a monthly paper that roamed along the wilder shores of radicalism until a libel action ended its career.
“The paper was published in a little town in the south-west, but Brian O’Nolan was among its readers. The evidence is simple: either consciously or otherwise some of our ideas began to appear in Brian’s column in The Irish Times. It was to us the ultimate tribute . . .”
Searching around the crater caused by that gently dropped bombshell, I have since learned that as a scholarship student at Castlemartyr College, Co Cork in the 1940s, the Kerry-born Houlihan was expelled for publishing an unofficial school newspaper.
But that would have been nearer the southeast than the southwest. Unless Con was obfuscating. Either way, I’m wondering if radicals of a certain age might remember a libelous paper in Castlemartyr or Castleisland. And if so, could they send me copies?