A most loyal housekeeper
QUESTION What became of Robert Emmet’s faithful housekeeper, Anne Devlin, after his abortive rebellion of 1803?
ANNE Devlin was a staunch republican who was born at Rathdrum in Co. Wicklow in 1780.
After the 1798 rising, her family home was often raided and many members of her family were imprisoned. After her father was acquitted and released from jail in Wicklow town in 1800, the family moved to Rathfarnham, Dublin.
There, she met Robert Emmet, who was planning another rising. He had rented a house in Butterfield Lane, Rathfarnham, but there were so many people going to and from the house, as well as materials for the rising being stored there, that Emmet needed to do something to make his occupancy of the house look normal.
His solution was to take on Anne Devlin as his housekeeper. The ruse proved successful, although the rising in 1803 wasn’t and ended after a night of street clashes in Dublin. Anne Devlin was interrogated by yeomen when they went to Emmet’s house. However, they didn’t find anything incriminating against her and let her go.
A short time afterwards, she was taken to Dublin Castle but refused to inform on Emmet. He urged her to do so to save herself – he was already doomed to execution. Her entire family was jailed in an attempt to break her, and her nine-year-old brother died as a result of the prison conditions.
Anne Devlin was released in 1806 and for the next four years worked as a maid for friends of Emmet.
In 1811, she married William Campbell. They had four children, although some sources say she had two. For several years after her release, sympathisers of Emmet gave her financial assistance. From 1825, it seems she worked in a well-paid job as a laundress at St Patrick’s Hospital, run at the time by Emmet sympathisers. Her wages were far above the normal level for the job.
She worked at the hospital for at least a decade and left after her patrons departed. Then, despite ill health, she survived by taking in washing at her home. Her husband died in 1845 and after his death, she sank even further into poverty and ill health.
Anne Devlin died in 1851 in a tenement just off the Coombe. She was buried at Glasnevin Cemetery and a year later, friends and admirers had her reburied in a larger grave, with a large Celtic cross on her grave, still to be seen today. The grave is cared for by the National Graves Association.
Every year since 2005, a memorial service has been held at St Catherine’s Church on Meath Street, on the Sunday nearest to the anniversary of her death. James McNamara, Dublin 1.
QUESTION An old army expression for something dubious is: ‘It’s all my eye and Betty Martin.’ Who was she?
THIS odd phrase has been the subject of much scholarly debate. It’s thought that the original form was simply ‘all my eye,’ probably from the old French expression
mon oeil!, which is still in common use. An early citation comes from the 1763 operatic parody FitzGiggo: A New English Uproar: ‘Begin the dust! and let the benches fly!/This treatment, gentlemen, is all my eye.’
Betty Martin arrived soon after. In a letter from October 1781, one Samuel Crisp asks his sister, who, like him, was infirm, to visit him, concluding: ‘Physic, to old, crazy frames, like ours, is all my eye and Betty Martin.’ He adds by way of explanation that it was ‘a sea phrase that Admiral Jemm frequently makes use of ’.
Just who Betty Martin was remains a mystery. In 1816, the New Monthly Magazine And Universal Register published the following in its column Oedipius Jocularis or Illustrations Of Remarkable Proverbs, Obscure Sayings And Peculiar Customs: ‘A man going once into a church or chapel of the Romish persuasion on St Martin’s Day, heard the Latin Litany chaunted [sic], when the words “Mihi Beate Martin,” occurred so often, that upon being asked how he liked the service, he replied it was nothing but nonsense or something worse, as from beginning to end “it was all my eye Betty Martin”.’
However, the prayer is not part of the Roman Catholic liturgy and Latin scholars point out it is ungrammatical.
The actor Charles Lee Lewis gave us his theory about Betty Martin in his memoirs in 1805. He recalled her as an abandoned woman who induced one Christopher Martin to marry her. She became notorious and a favourite phrase of hers was ‘all my eye!’
The lexicographer Eric Partridge suspected Betty Martin was a character of the ‘lusty London’ of the 1770s, whose name has lived on in this phrase.
Tom Allen, Durham.
QUESTION Is George Weah the first footballer to become a head of state?
FURTHER to the earlier answers, though not head of state, Jozsef Bozsik, a brilliant Hungarian midfielder of the Fifties, became a politician after he retired from the game. A member of the Communist Party, he was a deputy in the Hungarian Parliament.
On November 25, 1953, he was in the Mighty Magyars team who defeated England 6-3 at Wembley.
Bozsik captained Hungary in the 1958 World Cup. In 1961, he became only the third man to achieve 100 caps for his country. He died of heart failure at just 52. Tony Shapcott, Newport, Gwent.
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