What Once Held Communities Together

I wrote a few weeks back about how much of our community life has disintegrated over the years; elderly Irish tell me that people used to go to each other’s houses on winter nights and tell stories, used to bring musical instruments that they knew how to play, and used to sing old songs together, since everyone knew those songs and everyone could sing well and without embarrassment.

I mentioned that this was true in my native USA as well, as seen in the “funny pages” or cartoons of American newspapers, which have changed little over the years and thus provide a window into the America that was. You can see the same rich communities in old black-and-white movies like It’s a Wonderful Life, and if you are tempted to think that those were mere fictional conceits, like the way people burst into song in old musicals.

Yet in his excellent book Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam used dozens of polls, surveys, diaries and other statistics to back up their depiction of what American life used to be, a culture rich with neighbourhood gatherings, card games, fraternal lodges, dinner parties, bowling leagues, PTA meetings, political caucuses, town bands, Boy Scouts and many other groups.

In Ireland over the last few centuries, neighbours used to assemble “mutual-improvement societies,” training their members not only to read at a time when where was little public education, but to understand and debate scientific and political issues of the day. They organised adult schools, subscription libraries, reading circles, dramatic societies, and musical groups. Other volunteer associations organised to pay each other’s medical bills, unemployment benefits, and burials, to offer savings banks and job referral services – and by 1880 as much as 80 percent of all male workers belonged to such groups. It was only through their loyal support and intense political organisation, for example, that someone like Ramsey MacDonald, illegitimate son of a farmhand, could rise to become Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Similarly, movies and television have given us hundreds of portrayals of American life through the decades, but rarely has any media showed the fraternal lodges that were part of so many Americans’ lives. Most people have heard of the Freemasons as the inexplicable target of conspiracy theorists, or parodied as the Stonecutters on The Simpsons, but there were literally thousands of similar organisations, with chapters in almost every town and neighbourhood.

They included the Elk, the Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias, the Knights of Columbus, and such sadly extinct and magnificent-sounding organisations like the Prudent Patricians of Pompeii, the Modern Aztecs, and the League of Friendship of the Supreme Mechanical Order of the Sun. They took many forms -- quasi-religious orders, paramilitary groups, social clubs, health funds, college funds, unions, co-operatives, and grass-roots political organisations, many of these at the same time.

Each lodge member contributed a small amount of money each week to a fund, and when any member took sick, the lodge typically gave them sick pay to cover the loss of employment. Lodges often hired a doctor or nurse to check up on all its members; called “lodge trade,” it offered work for thousands of medical professionals, and unlike our modern medical system, it was affordable and gave patients a say in their own care. When a member died, the organisation often paid for the funeral and perhaps a pension for the widow(er) and children. Many did more than that. A lodge called the Knights of Labour evolved into the first labour union, and every union created since has followed its template.

As recently as the mid-20^th-century a majority of Americans were members of these organisations – again, of both genders and all races. Of the 3,500 fraternal organisations that existed at the beginning of the 1900s, about 1,500 were African-American. And while they are called “fraternal,” many existed solely for women and were run by women, some independent of any men’s organisation.

This doesn’t even include the PTA, Lyceums, Chataquas, Temperence Societies, Agricultural Societies, Philosophical societies, educational institutes, book circles and church clubs. These organisations were deeply woven into community life for centuries, and their sudden and astonishing decline after the 1960s has been rarely commented on or even noticed.

These kinds of close communities lasted longer here than in the USA, but are fading here now as well --- but this trend is not inevitable. These organisations did not appear in the landscape, after all – they were organised, and could be again. 

 

Photo: Knights of Columbus gathering. Public domain. 

 

The Neverending Forest

A prehistoric squirrel, it is said, could have scampered from Norway to Singapore without touching the ground, so dense was the carpet of trees that stretched across the world. Similar forests stretched across North America and many other parts of the world – all of them providing a home to thousands of living things, all of them vacuuming the carbon dioxide from the air and keeping the climate stable.

Most of that landscape was felled for timber and paper long ago, the land given over to crops and suburbia – or to wasteland. Of course, humans need food and houses, but we also need timber and wildlife, and our ancestors would have been wiser to preserve some of those forests for future generations. And sometimes, they did – for at least six thousand years, some humans have used an old technique to continually harvest timber from a forest while keeping it alive indefinitely.

When the evergreen trees around here are cut at the base, their roots die. But many broad-leaved, deciduous trees continue to soak up water and nutrients through their roots. The roots put their energy into creating shoots, which grow into new saplings – and soon you will have several smaller trees where you had one before. In a matter of years or decades – how long depends on the type of tree – you can harvest those smaller trees, called “underwood,” and the process begins again. You can keep doing this as long as the original base continues to live, which can be more than a hundred years.

Commonly coppiced species included ash, chestnut, oak, hazel, sycamore and alder, and most of these created shoots from the cut stump, called a stool. The new trunks usually curved outward from the original stool, and so their naturally bowed wood was often prized for ship-building. Other species, like cherry, would send suckers upward from the roots surrounding the stump. Either way, the new shoots grow quickly, fed by a root system made to support an entire tree.

Willow stands in a class by itself in coppicing, as it does not need to mature before being cut, nor does it require a decade or two of waiting. Its flexible shoots – withies – are perfect for weaving into shapes, which provided early humans with homes, boats, chariots, armour, fences, barns, sheds, coops, weirs, animal traps, and baskets.

Woodsmen coppiced areas where they could keep out cattle and horses, as animals might eat the shoots. In places where animals might roam the woodland they would pollard – or cut branches higher up on the tree out of their reach. Waterford farmer and self-sufficiency expert John Seymour called coppicing and pollarding “the most fundamental of woodland crafts.”  

In medieval Europe vast stretches of woodland were coppiced or pollarded regularly for charcoal, firewood, timber and other uses. Here in Ireland, willows – sometimes called sallies or silver-sticks – were pollarded each winter from century-old trunks that had never been mature trees, often looking like fields of spiky sea urchins. Weavers here were said to harvest the willow on St. Bridget’s Day – Feb. 1 – and with large machete-like tools called bill-hooks, collected ten tonnes to the acre.

In a copse – a forest of regularly coppiced trees – each tree is marked with the year it was last felled, and only a fraction of them are felled again each year. Coppiced trees – harvested every several years or so – are interspersed with trees allowed to grow to maturity and felled for large pieces of timber. The latter group – called “standards” – are harvested at a rotation time of about 10 times the coppice; for a coppice cut once a decade, for example, the standards will be cut once a century.

If more forward-looking souls were to turn their fields into copses, they could have a regular harvest of wood for many generations to come. Enough copses around the world could supply the world with paper and timber, warmth and wildlife without the need to ever fell another forest.

Nations of the Learned

 

When I describe the schools that barefoot rural children once attended, in the USA of 1900 or the Ireland of the 1950s, everyone assumes their education would be pathetic -- the “three Rs,” so named because we assume that backwoods hillbillies would have spelled the subjects “reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmatic.” We assume that the poorer you are, the worse your education, and these days that’s often true in my native USA, where two-thirds of all adults cannot read at a proficient level, and a third cannot handle a basic level. We assume knowledge only becomes vaster and more refined over time, and the further back you go, the dumber everyone was.

This belief, held by almost every man, woman and child today, crumbles the instant one reads descriptions of schools from a century ago, or actual school-papers of children then, or newspapers and magazines of the time, or reading the books normal children once read. Children used to read sophisticated literature that few college students – or professors – attempt anymore. So did mechanics and farm-hands, house-wives and fishermen.

They did not read them to boast that they had done so, as a few intellectuals might today, but out of a passion for learning. They discussed these works at the lodge and the shop and the pub. They wrote about them in their diaries. All this, you’ll recall, in addition to their practical skills, their knowledge of local lore, of the natural world and the people around them – all of which are also rare today.

Ann Gardinier remembered learning John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Dante’s Inferno, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, as well as Latin, poetry and Shakespeare, all at the age of 11. [1] Alice Taylor remembered translating Virgil from Latin to English and back again. [2] Sean Cleary described performing Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in school, translating them into the native Irish language.

Nor was their schooling limited to literature; Liam Bradley remembered having to prove geometry theorems in grade school. “Mental arithmetic was a daily feature in our school life. My old school companions would be horrified at the hesitancy of modern schoolchildren in mental computations … there was really no need for pocket calculators.” [3]

Country schoolhouses might have been only one room with children of many ages, but that was a great advantage to which modern students have been denied, Bradley said. “Students of many ages had to be taught together, and younger children, instead of being isolated, overheard some of the things that their older peers were learning.”

Teachers – especially the Christian Brothers – gained a reputation for strict rules and corporal punishment. At the same time, Christy – who was taught by the Brothers, and became a teacher himself --said they had a dedication that few teachers show today. “They gave 24/7 in their teaching,” he said. “They were there after school, and they were there in the morning. The principal would have done the secretary work, the accountancy, the timetable, everything” without much of a salary. In contrast to movie monks, real ones grew up on farms, were “men with ruddy, weather-beaten faces who might have been .... uncles or neighbouring farmers, men who could turn from teaching honours maths to fixing the tractor,” according to one old student. [4]

In the countryside where there were no monasteries or convents, Taylor remembered that teachers rented their own schoolhouses and rode bicycles for miles every morning to school. “Those young educational entrepreneurs could have found jobs in well-established convents or colleges, or emigrated to exciting new places, but chose instead to face an uncertain future and invest their time and money in renting premises to set up these small schools,” she said. “These teachers are the unsung educators and enlighteners of many young minds around Ireland. We owe them a debt of gratitude.” [5] [6]

For many children, book-learning was not limited to school, but was a part of daily life, in-between farm chores. In the countryside of the early 1900s, Mary Fogarty estimated she read five hundred books a year, waking with her mother and sisters at 5 am to read for two hours, and then again before bed. “We read Lorna Doone – I was in love with John Ridd for weeks – The Vicar of Wakefield, more Dickens,  Thackeray, Kingsley, and the Brontes, returning now and then, for little Annie’s benefit, to the loved books of our first days – Little Women, Masterman Ready, Scottish Chiefs, Gulliver’s Travels, and Mayne Reid,” she wrote in her memoir. “Mother enjoyed Maria Edgeworth more than we did, also Jane Austen; we much preferred George Eliot.” [7]

Ann Gardinier remembered reading Robinson Crusoe and Charles Dickens around the fire with his family. [8] Alice Taylor devoured Dickens as well before moving on to the Brontes. [9] Crosbie began reading with crime novels, as well as Treasure Island and Kidnapped, but soon was reading any kind of book. [10] “Reading had always been our great escape. We devoured anything we could get our hands on, suitable or not, though my mother kept a close eye.” [11]

Of course, everyone was poor by our standards, and schooling varied wildly from one person to another; a survey around the time of Irish independence in the 1920s found that 14 percent of the population were illiterate – but that is lower than the portion of Americans that are functionally illiterate today. Even the unschooled, though, valued the written word; some elders remembered people who were illiterate, and who dropped in at a neighbour’s house to listen to the newspaper read to them.

Most said that everyone they knew read whenever they weren’t working. Sometimes they did both at the same time; one elder described ploughmen holding books in front of them – usually something we would consider a classic – as they ploughed, or craftsmen employing a boy to read to them from such a book as they made barrels or shaped leather. Taylor said that her father loved poetry and recited it for his children. “His favourite poet was Goldsmith and The Deserted Village rolled off his tongue with such relish that you knew he approved of all the poet’s sentiments.” [12]

Farmer Stephen Rynne, who chronicled his life in the early 1900s, described passing the winter nights reading Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Cobbett’s Rural Rides and Advice to Young Men, Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, and Joseph Joubert’s Thoughts; without them, he said, “the long winter nights would be too long by streets.” [13] Nor were any of these people wealthy; Rynne remembered one of his farm-hands spending his leisure hours reading the Confessions of St. Augustine, [14] and the local greasy mechanic in Rafferty’s village had read Gibbons’ Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Dickens, Gerard Manley Hopkins, WB Yeats, and Paine’s Rights of Man. [15]

“That generation .... seemed on average to have greater facility with words – better handwriting, even – than we do and to use language more precisely,” Gene Kerrigan said. [16] If you want first-had evidence of this, read from Rynne’s journal from almost a century ago. Read it aloud to yourself, slowly, letting the words roll around like music:

“One pauses to look at the bronze and golden trees: every beech a Titian, every lime a Norse goddess, elms like sunsets, and oaks like Vandyke’s old men. Boastfully a Spanish chestnut holds up her unlocked seed-vessels. The berry clusters of the hollies bite out like rubies from the rich velvet of foliage. The brownish-green masses of the sycamores seem like tapestry in which one could imagine pictures: horses and huntsmen, or medieval battles. In the wood, this year’s leaves lie with the skeletons of their ancestors.

... Yet give me gleaming autumn with its fast hours, its replete grandeur, its pacific beauty languishing on earth and bending from the sky. Just now the world is like a Dutch kitchen: all bronzes, lustre and pewter. There are calm, gold days making up weeks together, each day as rich as the woven costume of a mandarin. Leave me autumn with its threat of winter, and let romantic-minded urban dwellers enjoy the summer to their hearts’ content.” [17]

When I describe this to people today, they are sceptical: these must have been the few rich farmers, people tell me, the oppressors rather than the oppressed. Or they must lie to justify how miserable their life was. They didn’t know any better, people tell me – they were too stupid to realise how miserable they were. And if we use simpler language, they tell me, it must be an improvement – back then, people were too ignorant to use small words. And why, they ask, would anyone want to read works from long ago, before anyone knew anything?   

They never ask the more obvious question: If even the poorest people spoke and wrote beautifully less than a century ago, if people knew and loved magnificent works for thousands of years until recently, if everyone had a book in front of them until yesterday, what happened to us? 

 

 Photo: My daughter helps with the firewood while she catches up with her reading.

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[1] The House Remembers, 136

[2] Quench the Lamp, 104

[3] No Shoes in Summer, 68

[4] Ballyfin – A Boarding School Memory, RTE documentary

[5] Books in the Attic, 15

[6] No Shoes in Summer, 14

[7] The Farm by Lough Gur, 172

[8] The House Remembers, 129

[9] Quench the Lamp, 127

[10] Your Dinner’s Poured Out, 131

[11] The House Remembers, 10

[12] To School Through the Fields, 61

[13] Green Fields, 69

[14] Green Fields, 76

[15] And the Band Played On, 85

[16] Another Country, 67

[17] Green Fields, 19