Centenary homecoming for a poet who never made it back alive
A series of events this summer will spread the word on war poet Francis Ledwidge’s vital legacy.
IN 1979, the tiny labourer’s cottage in Slane, Co Meath, where poet Francis Ledwidge was born and raised, was bought by a local committee.
If it hadn’t been, there would probably be no trace of him now in his native village, and his only legacy would be his poems. Which would be no mean feat.
But as the centenary of his death, on July 31, 1917, draws near, Ledwidge is to be remembered in a much more tangible manner with events culminating in a week-long festival (June 22 to July 2), which will include an official State ceremony on June 24.
Later in the year, plaques with excerpts from some of his best-known work will be installed around the village, and a commissioned statue erected in the public garden.
The year’s celebrations actually began last February with the relaunch by poet Dermot Bolger of Ledwidge’s Selected Poems, with an introductory essay by the late Seamus Heaney.
Bolger recalled that when he first visited the Ledwidge cottage years ago, he was mistaken for a burglar. In fact, it was the late Garda Sergeant John Clarke (known as ‘the Knightrider’) who confronted him and demanded that he recite two Ledwidge poems to prove his credentials. Bolger obliged.
The celebrations won’t conclude until October when TCD English professor Gerald Dawe will host a seminar in Slane Castle, and there will be several other associated musical and literary functions.
This month, and in May and June, there will be several events in Navan’s Solstice Centre, and around Slane village, including an exhibition of archive material and a graphic novel representation centred on the events of 1916 by the Nerve Centre from Derry.
Over the past few years we have spent a lot of time, energy and money to mark the struggle of Irish labour, the role of Irishmen in WWI and the 1916 rebellion. It could all have been encompassed in remembering the short and tragic life of Ledwidge.
He was one of nine children. Most of the rearing was left to his mother when his father died prematurely. She laboured in the fields for farmers and knitted, washed and sewed to pay the family’s way. When Ledwidge’s elder brother also died, they lost another breadwinner.
Attempts were made to evict the family from their tiny home. At 15, Francis went to Rathfarnham as a grocer’s ‘curate’, but, homesick one night, he quit and walked home to become, in turn, a groom, farm labourer and council road worker before getting a job in the newly opened nearby Beauparc copper mine from which he was sacked for leading a strike over dangerous conditions.
He went back to the council and in 1912 was made Kells District foreman. He became secretary of the Meath Labour Union and was elected a member of Navan Rural Council in 1914 when the war broke out.
By this time Ledwidge was already an established poet having come under the patronage of the local Lord Dunsany, who introduced him into Dublin literary circles. And it is this association which led to the unfair myth that he betrayed those who fought in 1916, including his friend Thomas McDonagh.
He wrote Lament for Thomas McDonagh after the executions — and, in fact, when nationalist leader John Redmond first called on Irishmen to join in the “fight to defend small nations”, Ledwidge opposed him. He was called “pro-German” when he was the only member of the rural council to vote against a motion supporting Redmond, because he believed Home Rule was as far away as ever.
Eventually, however, he joined the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers — the same regiment as his patron, Lord Dunsany. He later wrote of his decision: “I joined the British Army because she stood between Ireland and an enemy common to our civilisation, and I would not have her say that she defended us while we did nothing at home but pass resolutions.”
Dunsany was furious, believing that gaining one more soldier was not worth the potential loss of a great poet. And there was further sacrifice for Ledwidge when the love of his life, local girl Ellie Vaughey, who helped him get published in the Drogheda Independent, went to Manchester, married someone else, and in 1915 died in childbirth.
If all war is horror, the 1914-1918 conflict was especially so, and Ledwidge experienced the worst of it in Gallipoli and Salonika. The wounded lance corporal was taken to hospital in Cairo for treatment, then on to Manchester. On his return to Richmond Barracks he had clashed with an officer when he told him he was fighting on two fronts — the second the quest for Ireland’s freedom.
It got him a court martial in Derry and he was then sent to French Flanders, then Ypres in Belgium, where he was one of six who perished when a shell exploded. They were buried where they fell but later re-interred at the nearby Artillery Wood Cemetery, where a monument was erected.
Members of the Ledwidge Committee will visit the site later in the year as part of the centenary celebrations.
So now, for the first time in 100 years, the life and work of one of our most noted poets is being properly marked.
It is, as novelist and fellow poet Dermot Bolger observed, a “homecoming for a man who never made it home”. See further details of events at www.francisledwidge.com
‘Ledwidge experienced the worst of it in Gallipoli and Salonika...’