The Van Gogh experience

When the infant child of Theodorus Van Gogh was born in the Netherlands in 1853, he was given the name Vincent. It was a name that had been used in the family for several generations. His grandfather was called Vincent and he had an uncle called Vincent. As was traditional in Irish society at the time, the first-born son was called after his paternal grandfather. The name Vincent had, however, been given to a child that had been still-born, exactly a year before. It was not uncommon then, in Ireland, or apparently in the Netherlands, to re-use the names of children who had died as infants. Vincent’s family had a long tradition of artists and clergymen. His father was a Minister in the Dutch Reformed Church and he himself was to spend a period as a Church Minister in a poor mining district.

It has been told that Vincent’s still-born older brother was buried near to his father’s church and given a memorial stone. It read simply that here had been laid the body of Vincent Van Gogh. The story relates how Vincent used to pass by and read the stone with these or similar words carved on it every time he attended his father’s church. It apparently had a profoundly unsettling effect on the youthful Vincent. He inwardly shuddered as he read the stone-carved words that appeared to announce his fate. The experience of seeing one’s own name in such a context is sometimes called the ‘Van Gogh experience’.

I inherited my now late uncle’s name and I have only to go to Kilcurry graveyard to have my own Van Gogh experience and see my name on a gravestone. Recently, however, I had the pleasant experience of blessing a new extension to one of our local Primary Schools and part of the celebrations included the unveiling of a marble stone into which my name had been carved as having blessed the building. It was not an unsettling experience but I found it thought-provoking to think that someone had carved my name in such a permanent manner, and that I would see, each time I pass by it in the future.

These broody thoughts were perhaps provoked by the themes of the season. My priestly preoccupations this time of year revolve around the celebration of All Saints and All Souls Days and the celebration of Hallow-E’en that precedes them. November is remembrance time in the rhythm of the Church Year. Our festivals and rituals are not a morbid remembering but rather a wholesome way of dealing with the realities of transient life so that we can return to life with greater depth and intensity.

The turning back of the clock to ‘winter-time’ and the resulting darker evenings provide their own cue to such thoughts of transience. Outside, the first sting of frost and the drift of fallen leaves into sheltered corners are nature’s way of reminding us of the perennial cycle of life and death. The decay of another year is signalled by the dropping of nature-polished chestnuts, the frenetic acorn gathering of shy squirrels and the artistry of a leaf canopy painted from nature’s palette in shades of yellow, rust and ginger. At night, the spirits of Hallow E’en are chased away by the whistle and the sharp explosive sounds of fireworks.

Back inside the school building there were few such thoughts. The students went through their well-practiced paces with the exuberant joy of the very young. The most junior pupils looked on with a mixture of puzzlement and joy, even as they joined wholeheartedly in the singing, stopping occasionally to yawn or to throw themselves into some gesture of uninhibited participation. They were burdened neither with the weight of years nor with heavy thoughts as to what the future might hold for them. An invited guest confided in me that she found the scene deeply moving, making her want to cry both for joy in the present moment and in tearful anticipation of the realities of life that lay ahead of the children.

As we congregated around the tea and sticky-buns afterwards, the talk was of Recession and of re-structuring our expectations, individually and collectively. In the world of economics it seems that nothing is written in stone but rather in sand. A high tide can erase the carefully-constructed castles that we built in our summer days. A storm can wipe the slate clean of all traces of our plans and projections. It seemed as if we were imaginatively walking by a representation of our future prominently placed before our eyes in a manner that we could not avoid. We had our collective ‘Van Gogh experience’ and we too shuddered inwardly.

A question of riches

A question of riches

It was my first Halloween break from college. I had survived the first six weeks of term and now I was homebound. I fell into my previous routine and spent some of my time helping out in the family bar. It was a nervous time. The regulars did not know quite what to make of me. Could they curse in front of me like they used to do in such an unthinking way? Would I be the same person that they had known for the past six years as I served them drinks at all hours of the day and night? There was a lot of mutual sussing out to do.

At the end of a busy night my parents and I cleaned up the ‘shop’ as my late father insisted on calling it and we sat back to relax and discuss the day’s happenings. Eventually we got around to the subject of my new life as a seminarian in Maynooth. ‘So what are you learning’, I was asked. ‘Well’, I replied, “it’s a bit hard to explain”.

I told them that we were studying philosophy and by way of immediate explanation I said that one part of the course was called metaphysics. That required further explanation. ‘It’s the science of being as being’, I answered, repeating the stock, text-book definition. ‘What else do you study’, my father asked, hoping to move me off what was clearly incomprehensible to him. ‘We do history of philosophy as well,’ I added. On being questioned further as to the content of that, I told my parents that we were currently studying communism. ‘And I thought you went to Maynooth to learn how to say Mass,’ my father said, clearly confused by the strange ‘ologies’ that I was trying to explain to him and their relevance to my prospective life as a priest.

I had a bit of adjusting to do myself during that first term in Maynooth. Though I was clearly enjoying the experience of being at college and living away from home again, it had all been something of a surprise to me as it unfolded. I was astounded at first by the opportunities and the privileges that attending college brought. The amount of free time available to me as a student seemed outrageously generous at first. I had been used to working all hours and all seasons. In student life as I knew it then, I had a mere eighteen forty-minute lectures each week to attend and about six month’s holiday time throughout the year. I could not believe that people lived such charmed lives.

The philosophy that we studied as a prelude to the more religion-oriented theology of later years was certainly abstract at times but we had a very gifted teacher whose stated aim in life was to get us to think. He opened up our minds to questions and to possibilities that we had never entertained before. We were taught to ask questions and to think deeply about life as it manifested itself in the detail of our daily lives. After a few years of philosophy we graduated to theology. We began to study the scriptures and the laws of the church and the history of from where it had all emanated. It could be interesting, depending greatly on the particular teacher or lecturer, but it did not have the explosive power of the initial encounter with people and with theories that questioned everything to the point of absurdity and stripped life back to its bare meaning.

One of the effects of the current upheaval in the economic world is a return to questioning among the most affected. If securities can be so insecure and if banks, once considered solid and safe, are crashing like dominoes, then fundamental questions arise. Even religious ideas like the seven deadly sins get a mention occasionally as the effects of greed, corporate and individual, kick in. The uncertainty of life and of the material world has been highlighted by the sudden change from high economic growth to virtual stagnation. We appear to have gone from boom to bust in record time. The insecurity of it all has sent some people looking for answers to their questions and seeking security elsewhere.

The English poet Philip Larkin wrote a poem called ‘Church-going’. It tells of a visit he makes to a country church. He asks the question, ‘What remains when disbelief has gone?’ He speaks of a hunger within, for meaning and for purpose, that sometimes surfaces in times of crisis like this. The church, he says, is a serious place for serious subjects. It may even be considered, once again, as an alternative source of riches, not of the material kind. Meantime, Larkin writes, ‘It pleases me to stand in silence here; A serious house on serious earth it is,/ In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,/ Are recognised, and robed as destinies./ And that much never can be obsolete,/ Since someone will forever be surprising/ A hunger in himself to be more serious,/ And gravitating with it to this ground,/ Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,/
If only that so many dead lie round’.

A County Louth Harvest morning

A County Louth Harvest morning

Driving across the harvest-shaved plains of Louth early one morning recently, my memories re-wound to another place and time when impressions of Autumn were first burnt on to the uncluttered tablet of my mind. The early-day mists were slowly lifting their veil, leaving beaded traces of their presence behind. A shock of whin-bushes on an uncultivated ditch wore white mantillas of finely-weaved cobwebs threaded with dew-drops. I was told at school by my fellow students that these morning dews were very powerful. One of their effects was that they could wash away freckles. I cupped my hands and caught a web-full of magic and smeared it all over my spotted face. The only thing that was washed away was my innocence. The morning vista, seen from the security of my car, appeared as an apparition of October past, a lost play-ground through which I once walked in rapt wonder.

Patrick Kavanagh was born in October 1904 and the month featured in some of his most finely-wrought images. In the epic poem called ‘The Great Hunger’, he spoke of October winds, ‘playing a symphony on a slack wire paling’. He associated the month with his father. What he wonderfully called ‘October-coloured weather’ seemed to remind him of the autumn of life as he had seen it unfold in the life of his late father. He wrote, ‘Every old man I see/ Reminds me of my father/ When he had fallen in love with death/ One time when sheaves were gathered./ That man I saw in Gardiner Street/ Stumble on the kerb was one,/ He stared at me half-eyed,/ I might have been his son./ And I remember the musician/ Faltering over his fiddle/ In Bayswater, London./ He too set me the riddle./ Every old man I see/ In October-coloured weather/ Seems to say to me/ I was once your father’.

As late as 1883, Pope Leo XIII started the practice of devoting the month of October to the Rosary. ‘The October Devotions’ became a fixture in the spiritual calendar especially for the rural Irish. For a few years, while we were still young and while my father was concentrating on farming rather than on life behind the bar, we used to say the Rosary in the evening time. We knelt on the oil-cloth covered floor with our elbows propped on about-turned, hard wooden chair-seats while our rosaries dangled underneath, teasing the kittens and amusing ourselves between ‘decades’. My father called the prayers with great speed, leaving no interval between the two stanzas of the Hail Mary/Holy Mary. It was the audio equivalent of a dog chasing its tail.

The prayer-baton was passed on from one to another with seamless contact as we took our turn, hoping that we would not forget the name of the ‘Mystery’; the number of prayers said and the text of the prayer. The beginning of the end was signalled by the recitation of the Litany of Loreto. This is a list of finely-crafted, poetic praise-names, titles and invocations to Our Lady. My father knew it off by heart. I was puzzled by the meaning of two of these invocations that happened to come one after the other. In my father’s verbal haste, ‘Mother most chaste’ sounded like ‘mother was chased’ and my childish, enquiring and shocked mind wondered why. ‘Mother inviolate’, the following invocation, was interpreted in the concrete imagery of childhood as ‘mother in violet’. Maybe, I thought, that’s why she was chased! Then there was the tail-end prayers or ‘trimmings’ as they were affectionately known. These were a set of ‘One Our Father and Three Hail Marys’, mostly for deceased relatives or for the contemporary concerns of the household. The ‘Hail Holy Queen’ wrapped up the prayer-package for the night.

What we lose in flowers during autumn, we gain in fruits and harvest. H. W. Beecher wrote, ‘October is nature’s funeral month. Nature glories in death more than in life. The month of departure is more beautiful than the month of coming – October more than May. Every green thing loves to die in bright colours’. It was a month of conkers and sycamore seeds as I remember it. There was a belt of sycamore trees sheltering our farmhouse from the wind that blew in over the lake. We threw the winged seeds into the air and watched them fall, whirring like a helicopter with only one blade. Chestnut trees were uncommon so we valued them greatly and travelled to collect their polished fruit. With boyish bravado we notched up conquests until a beloved conker finally split and fell from its knotted cord. Nature’s spray of berries and seeds, fruits and nuts could afford to be generous.

All seeds cannot fall on fertile ground. Mellow autumn allows us to stock-take and to prepare. This is what autumn teaches as its flaming trees light up our way into darkness and winter cold.

When a bank goes burst

When a bank goes burst

On a cold Sunday morning, 16^th February, 1856, people passing along Hampstead Heath in London noticed a ‘well-dressed gentleman’ lying on a mound, as if asleep. This unusual sight in such a cold month excited curiosity in some of those passing by. Some people who moved closer noticed a small silver tankard that had fallen from his hand and lay nearby. A crowd soon gathered and the police were called as it became obvious that the ‘gentleman’ was quite dead. The police soon ascertained that he was an Irish Banker, John Sadlier. He had committed suicide. This was to prove not only a personal tragedy for the forty-something banker and his family but also for many thousands of Irish people as well.

John Sadlier was born near Tipperary Town in 1814. His family were wealthy by the standards of the time and place. He was apprenticed to a solicitor as a youth. He qualified and moved on to work in Dublin. Later, he moved to London and began a career as a parliamentary agent. Soon he began to try his luck in financial speculation. His initial success led him away from his chosen profession and he became a full-time banker. He returned to Tipperary and with his brother, he ran their highly successful ‘Joint-Stock Bank’. He appeared to have the Midas touch so farmers and smallholders from all over the area left their savings and dowries in the keeping of the trustworthy Sadlier’s Bank.

Banks make profits from taking in money and then lending it out at a greater interest than it pays out. Sadlier’s Bank took in lots of money but instead of lending it out to customers to finance the development of the farming industry, the bank found more exotic outlets for its loans. It invested in Italian, Swiss, Spanish and American railways and in many other ventures. On the reputation of the family bank and through his English contacts, John Sadlier was appointed Chairman of the London and County Joint-Stock Bank. Like many successful business and legal people, he set his eye on politics and was elected M.P. for Carlow in 1847. He later served as M.P. for Sligo. In 1852 he was one of more than fifty Irish Members who had been elected to the British Parliament, pledged to independent opposition, on a platform of support for the Tenant League. He also established a newspaper, ‘The Telegraph’, in Dublin in 1851 to put across his views to the public.

John Sadlier was a speculator and opportunist and when the prospect of a prestigious job as Junior Lord of the Treasury was offered to him, he defected to his political enemies along with a colleague called William Keogh and promptly made enemies of his erstwhile friends. In 1853 he lost a Court action taken against him by a Carlow elector who claimed that Sadlier had prevented him from recording his vote. Sadlier denied the charge but the jury gave the verdict to his accuser. He was forced to resign his post as Junior Lord of the Treasury. This was to be the turning point of his career.

He spent the next two years covering up from his former colleagues and acquaintances the trauma he was experiencing. It was during this time that he lost everything as his financial speculations went wrong and his political career hit the dust. Sadlier had been educated by the Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College. He was a solicitor, a politician, a newspaper proprietor and a defender of the Catholic Faith but above all he became a speculator in votes, land, railways and banks. He was, it seemed, a man of all talents. Ambition outweighed ability however, and Sadlier's disgrace as a politician and his failure as a speculator brought misery and shame to a great number of innocent people.

He tried to cover his tracks by forging shares in a Swedish Railway Company. He forged deeds of land that he was supposed to have acquired in Ireland. He forged cheques and other financial documents so successfully that no suspicion arose, yet, as to his true financial state. The end-game began when one wise investor checked out the deed of a supposed Irish property that had been given as security for a loan of ten thousand pounds. The house of cards began to collapse. Drafts from the Tipperary Joint-Stock Bank were initially not honoured in London but later they were again accepted. A troubled Sadlier brother, running the Bank back in Tipperary, telegrammed, ‘All right at all the branches. Only a few small things refused there. If from twenty to thirty thousand over here on Monday morning, all is safe.’ John Sadlier visited a Mr. Wilkinson in the City asking for help in his predicament. His financial friend had helped him before but this time the answer was in the negative. Sadlier’s reaction was to stride up and down the office pondering out loud on how, if the Tipperary Bank should fall, it would be his fault and it would be the ruination of thousands of people.

That night a distressed John Sadlier left his London home at midnight, telling his butler not to wait up for him. He took with him the small tankard that was found beside him the next morning, some knives and a phial of Prussic Acid. On Monday the news of his death reached Ireland. Country people stormed in to the towns, some armed with crowbars, picks and spades, thinking that if they could get in to the Branch Offices, they could recover their investments and hard-earned savings. Elderly people were confused and distressed. Some wept hysterically or prayed. The rich lost out too as Sadlier’s debts were revealed to be of the order of one and a quarter million pounds Sterling.

Though Sadlier had left intensely remorseful suicide notes reproaching himself for the ruin of others, he became notorious as the ‘prince of swindlers’. In his book, Manias, Panics and Crashes – a History of Financial Crises, Charles Kindleberger refers to John Sadlier as, ‘one of the greatest, if not the greatest, and at the same time the most successful swindler that any country has produced’. Sadlier’s story was to provide inspiration for Charles Dickens’ character, Mr Merdle in the novel called Little Dorrit.

This extraordinary story of the rise and fall of John Sadlier has its parallels in our own time of course. Its lessons on the fickleness of finance and of reputation and its commentary on the consequences and prevalence of corruption, greed and betrayal are remarkably contemporary, though it all came to head in Victorian Britain one hundred and fifty two years ago.