The fireside in the old Castle Bar was a cosy spot, the flickering light from the fireplace melding bar-room and customers in a warm hazy glow. For close on two hundred years it has served the intricate weave of community kinships and bloodlines, new alliances and old scores accumulated over five and six generations. Story-telling and the ancient art of ‘tracing’ are respected and it was here that my friend John Joe gave account of his paternal great-grandfather and the ‘Honey Scent‘.
The curious tale stayed in my mind for the rare light it turned on accidents that set so much of man’s mortal course. It was St Patrick’s Day 1961 and I was in my native parish for a spot of rest after a stint in the Congo with the 32nd Irish Battalion. The little village in the lush pastures of eastern Duhallow was cheery in the frosty sunlight as we spilled out from second Mass. Hustling through the familiar throng, I came up with John Joe. Greetings were not necessary, our joint mission was to ‘wet the shamrock’ in the Castle Bar.
John Joe was a lively stocky local farmer. He lived happily in a house full of womenfolk and faced the outside world with the open smiling face and heart of a child. Yet he was a tough customer a Fianna Eireann veteran of the Tan War. He was an all-round sportsman of ‘county’ standard until well into early middle age.
An intimate of my father and grandfather, John Joe and myself were especially bonded by a mutual passion for all aspects of sport and local history – bridges that readily spanned our yawning generation gap. In the crisp Spring air, John Joe was un-typically redolent of a spicy body perfume and headed-off my inevitable comment with the explanation that ’the girls’ had given him an expensive body spray for a birthday present and he was wearing it to humour them…………..
Wetting the Shamrock
In the Castle Bar, our usual ‘Sunday morning’ group was gathered around the fire, Mick the Huntsman an old comrade of John Joe, and Johnny Mack the resident wit and deflator of pomposity. John Joe’s exotic scent was the opening topic, the discussion moving easily to nature and innovation, exploitation and the vagaries of human vanity.
’You know’ says Mick ’not all body odours are offensive’ I knew one or two men who had a pleasant smell – like wild woodbine or honeysuckle you know’. Nods all around – we had all come across the ‘honey smell‘ in the perspiring masculinity of our work and leisure. ’Yes’ says John Joe ‘and ‘tis fellas with foxy, or what you might call yellow, hair and a reddish complexion that have it.’ We nodded and he went on ’There is some of it in my own family, my own cousin Denis Horgan, the weight thrower, had it and the women were stone mad about him!’. Mick looked at him, ’faith’ he says ‘you had a bit of it yourself for you put a few of them through your hands before your own woman tied you down!’. John Joe smiled – he liked that. ’No’ he says ‘but seriously, I’ll tell you something, my great-grandfather had it – and it saved his life !’ He looked around, gauging reaction to the startling pronouncement. We said nothing but settled ourselves, for a good tale was surely on the way. ‘Well’ he says ‘twas a long time ago now, long before my time. The grandmother in Kilcorney I heard at it and of course she knew the man well‘. John Joe paused – he saw he had the floor.
The Honey Scent
‘Now’ he says, ‘it all started the Christmas before the big 1798 Wexford rebellion. John Jeremiah – ‘John Jerh’ they called him – was about seventeen years old, an only child living in Cullen with his mother. The father married late in life and died, God rest him, when the lad was still young. They had a bit of rushy land on the Finnow river, back in Cullen, near Millstreet. That year, the days after Christmas came very wet and towards evening of New Year’s Eve the river was full to the banks and rising. John Jerh took a turn around the Inch to make sure no animal would be trapped in the flood. He was a great big fellow, well over the six foot mark with the rounded sloping shoulders and thick lower body of the really powerful man. He would be dressed only in a smock to his knees and a hession sack to hold off the rain from the mop of foxy curls bobbed at the shoulder; nobody on the land wore boots or shoes in those days. Straight away he spotted the horse near the river bank. He knew the animal – Mr Nicholas Aldworth‘s – and he knew the rider was a son of Lady Aldworth of Newmarket and an officer in the English army.
Over the Christmas, John Jerh had seen him early and late, crossing the river in the Inch – young Aldworth was friendly with a lady in a ‘Big House’ in Millstreet at the time. John Jerh guessed that he had come off the horse in the flood and was somewhere in the river. A quick scout along the bank and he had him: jammed into the fork of a tree that grew in across the river and he looked to be dead.
In grave danger himself from the fast swirling current, John Jerh got to him and lifted the slight figure like a drowned cat. With no delay, he headed with man and horse for his mother’s house. One of the stonemason Callaghans, the mother was used to dealing with casualties in that hazardous trade and she spotted that Aldworth was still alive but suffering from what today we might call Hyperthermia. While John Jerh put down a big fire, she stripped Aldworth to the skin, rough-towelled him and put him into the big feather bed beside the fire. Then she and John Jerh stripped off and snuggled around him, one on either side, warming him with their body heat.
Towards morning Aldworth recovered and by dinner time they had him back on his feet and he was able to head for home. A superior and very correct young gent of about 20 years, he thanked Mrs Horgan for her hospitality and gave her all the gold and silver coins he had – which were not a few. To John Jerh he said ’sir, you saved my life and I’ll not forget you for it’. Back in Newmarket he gave his mother the full account of the rescue and he remarked on the memorable ‘honey scented’ body odour given off by both of the rescuers as they nursed him in the bed.
The Croppy Pikeman
Soon after, Aldworth rejoined his company of the 72th Regiment of Foot in Buttevant and John Jerh and his mother got on with the business of living as best they could. Like many of his race, John Jerh had a gift for handling horses and from late childhood he was working at fairs for buyers and agents.
By the time he was 18, he was a regular ‘rider’ for the gentry up and down the country, particularly for Mr Tom Palmer, agent for the Earl of Ormonde in Kilkenny. John Jerh would take five or six horses to or from a fair, riding one and leading the others, sometimes there would be one or two other ‘riders‘ but more often than not, he would be travelling alone. The trip to Kilkenny or to Ormonde’s outside estates could take four or five days and John Jerh and the horses would overnight by arrangement at convenient Ormonde farms and at inns where the agent had an account.
On the return trip he would deliver horses to military Barracks or to gentlemen’s places in Cork, Kerry or Limerick. He was back home in 8 or 10 days for the round trip, with coin in his pocket. He would make maybe five or six trips in the course of the year; the big horse fairs falling nicely with seasonal slacks on the land.
In the May of 1798, he was at the fair in Cahermee with a command to take five horses to an outside farm of the Earl of Ormonde on the Carlow-Kilkenny border. As he travelled eastward, John Jerh would have heard of the turmoil that has broken out in Carlow and Wexford just at that time, but he was still taken by surprise a few miles short of his destination when he was surrounded by a group of very hostile armed insurgents.
The horses were ‘confiscated’ and John Jerh had the stark choice ’die or join!’ With his rebel pedigree, John Jerh naturally shouldered the Pike. Over the next five or six weeks he was with the ’croppies’ in battles with militia and English forces in Carlow and into County Wexford. On the 21th of June he was on the blood-wet slopes of Vinegar Hill by Enniscorthy, pitting his great strength and courage against the heavy cannon fire and charges of Horse and Foot hurled against the doomed rebel camp. Late in the evening he was one of a group of several hundred bloody and exhausted prisoners awaiting execution at the top of the hill.
The Reckoning
As the prisoners stood together, indifferent to their fate, John Jerh’s gaze took in a batch moving toward a nearby rath where a rough twenty-noose gallows was in operation. Suddenly a voice, haughty but vaguely familiar rose from among the guard, ‘Sergeant, bring out that big red fellow to me, I want to question him.’
John Jerh lifted his gaze and with a dull surprise he recognised the slightly-built captain of Foot despite the battle-stained English uniform. It was none other than Mr Nicholas Aldworth of Newmarket! Rousted out at bayonet-point, John Jerh was quickly before Aldworth. ’Tell me’ says Aldworth, ‘are you from Cullen?’ ’I am’ says John Jerh. Aldworth changed to soft lilting Gaelic, the cradle-tongue of both men ‘What in the name of God are you doing here?’ he whispered. Quietly and straight forward, John Jerh explained his case.
Now Aldworth was under no illusion about the prisoners, men and women, awaiting execution. They were the undefeatable heart of the rebellion. To secure the King’s Peace they had to die, and the battle-scarred redhead was clearly no reluctant one of them. But Aldworth owed a great debt of compassion to the mother and son and he saw that it must now be discharged with life and liberty. ’Fair enough’ he says ’you should not be here at all‘. He spoke to the sergeant ’I’m taking this man away, he is a servant of mine and is a prisoner by mistake’. The sergeant shrugged and moved away, it was a common enough confusion in battlefield conditions.
‘Now’ says Aldworth to John Jerh, ‘you must get home to your mother. See that horse down there in the glen?, that’s my horse, the same one that I had in Cullen; I came off him earlier-on and I’m up here only to get a soldier to catch him. As I was passing near you, I got a whiff of that ’honey scent’ that took me back to your mother‘s house! – and then I thought I recognised yourself. Go you down and catch that horse and bring him back to me here. I’ll have a Pass made out for you that will get you through the pickets and any patrols you meet. On your way, call to Ormonde’s agent in Kilkenny and let him know what happened to his horses, you can show the Pass as surety. Leave the horse with Lady Aldworth in Newmarket and give her word that I am safe and well.’
John Jerh had to balance the predicament of his mother back in Cullen, surely faced with ruin, starvation and death not having a man to look after her, against loyalty to his beloved comrades. It was a painful decision. Without a word or a backward look, he set off down the glen and was back with the horse in a few minutes. The horse was stripped of the regimental trappings and Aldworth handed the Pass to John Jerh. It was written on an army field despatch form and identified John Jerh as a Despatch Rider ordered to the Colonel of the 72nd Regiment of Foot at the Military Barracks in Buttevant.
Away went John Jerh and having delivered his various commands, he finally walked in on his mother in the house in Cullen. She was the mightily relieved woman to see him safely back in the family home! He explained his adventures to her but in the times that were in it, she insisted that the whole business be kept a family secret until things settled down.
And a secret it was kept for more than fifty years until the Aldworths’ agent let it out when John Jerh’s son was taking over the home place and John Jerh himself was an old man‘.
John Joe adjusted his hat and reached for his glass, signalling the end of his narration. After a thoughtful reflective pause, Johnny Mack brought us all back to the Castle Bar, ‘Good job’ he says ‘there were no deodorants in them days!‘ – and it was only then that we noticed that every glass in the company was empty!
A Twist in the Tale
I often met with John Joe after that. Every now and again John Jerh and the extraordinary incidents that shaped the lineage of his descendants, came up for debate. But John Joe never got to hear the twist in the tale, for twist there was !
On a trip home almost twenty five years later, my mother informed me that my old friend was dead and buried. When she heard out my account of John Jerh, she let drop that Mr Nicholas Aldworth was her own grandmother’s grandfather through the Stannards of Newmarket. My own lineage was also shaped by that same river rescue and the honey scent recovery in Cullen on New Year’s Eve two hundred years before! John Joe, a keen ‘tracing’ enthusiast, would have relished that !