Back to Kerry. Part 2

This is the second part of my reflections about returning to one of our ancestral homelands. Various members of two families, the Hicksons and the Byrnes, left the County Kerry in the southwest of Ireland some 150 years ago to make new lives for themselves in Australia. Since that time, in every generation, someone has gone back, testimony to the irresistible desire that exists in so many of us to understand who we are by seeing the places where we came from. Most recently it was me. For the first part, click here. Following is the continuation.  

John Hickson returns to Kerry, 1893, 1911, 1913, 1926

John Hickson’s daughter, Alice, my great grandmother

John Christopher Hickson (JCH), who left Kerry in 1866, had many children, and married three times. He was a nostalgic chap, and thanks to his great wealth was able, in his retirement, to return to Ireland and the UK on several occasions. His first visit back was in 1893, when he was just 45. He wrote an account of his journey in a book that survives, called Notes of Travel. My dad has a copy. He travelled with his oldest daughter, Alice, who was twenty. The circumstances of their journey remain a bit mysterious. It seems to have been a hasty decision of John, to suddenly return to the land of his birth, only a few months after his wife had just borne their eleventh and last child. He took only twenty year old Alice, but barely mentions her in his book. They were gone for six months, and John seems to have had a fine time, but Alice’s impressions are not recorded. There is some indication in the book that she was quite dejected on the voyage over, and it is fairly certain that she went against her will. Her father was getting her away from a situation that he was not happy about. It was not a journey of curious discovery for her, but a forced separation from a young man she loved. But I will write of that another time.

John Christopher Hickson, 1893

Eighteen years later, in 1911, John, ever the Anglophile and royalist (despite being Irish), traveled back to England for the Festival of Empire and the coronation of King George V, but by that time his children were all grown and he travelled instead with his wife Martha, who had never been to Britain before. They were both in their sixties, and John was keen to show Martha his childhood haunts. After enjoying the celebrations in London, John took her to Kerry, the land of his birth, and I wonder what she thought. Martha’s mother was Irish, but from County Down in Ulster, transported to Australia as a convict. Martha knew nothing of Ireland except what her husband and mother had told her, but I suspect her parents spoke little of their inauspicious origins. Nothing John or Martha might have written about that trip survives as far as I know, but John left his mark in Kerry by arranging for a memorial plaque commemorating his parents to be placed on a wall in the Killorglin church where the family had worshipped during his childhood. That plaque is still there, but the church, rather bizarrely, is now a tapas restaurant.

Commemorating his parents in the Killorglin Church of Ireland

Sadly, Martha died of cholera on the return voyage to Australia, somewhere in the Mediterranean near Italy. I believe she was buried at sea (Sydney Morning Herald, 1 August 1913). A short time later John married an English lady, Elizabeth (Alice) Hammett, who the couple had met on the ship when they sailed from England. Elizabeth had shown great kindness to Martha when she fell ill, nursing her in her final days. Less than two years after their marriage John and Elizabeth returned to England, perhaps to meet her family, but I have no information about that journey other than a passenger list for their voyage home to Sydney in December 1913. It would not surprise me if John took his new wife to Kerry, so she would understand his origins too.

Elizabeth died, too, only twelve years later, in 1925, and perhaps to console himself, John sailed to England again. At 77 he was single again and felt compelled to travel, but once again I have no record of that journey. I feel sure he would have visited Kerry again, this time on his own. Almost sixty years had passed since his departure as a young and excited eighteen year old, and the Ireland he left had by then changed almost beyond recognition. There was probably hardly anyone left there that he knew, most had died or migrated. The British had gone and the Anglo-Irish Gentry, to which John liked to trace his connections, had largely disappeared. The big house in Dingle which John always referred to as “the family seat,” though he had never lived there, had been destroyed in the turbulent years following the civil war in Ireland. A new era in Ireland’s history had begun. Amazingly, somewhere and somehow, before he left England to return to Australia, John met another English lady, Isabel Parkinson, who became his third wife. There was obviously something irresistible about him.

The Grove, one of Kerry’s “Big Houses,” destroyed in 1923

But even if County Kerry society had changed dramatically in the six decades since John had left, the mountains, the valleys, the farms and the rugged coastline were the same and surely still evoked wonder and joy in the ageing John Hickson. Australia was his adopted home, and had brought him great prosperity, but Ireland was still his heart home. Years later, long after John had died, his daughter Alice, by then a grand old lady, traveled back to the UK (in 1959) with one of her daughters and son-in-laws. I am unsure whether she went to Ireland or not. I suspect not. Kerry, I believe, held sad memories for her so she may well have avoided the place. I am not sure that any of her five children ever saw the birthplace of their grandfather, John Christopher Hickson either.

My own visits to Kerry 2016, 2019, with Hanna

John Hickson was my great great grandfather. He has many descendants in Australia, few of which I have met. It is possible that some of them have been to Kerry. I first went to Ireland in 2015 to attend the marriage of an old university friend, Simon, in Dublin. The following year I made my first visit to Kerry. On that occasion I travelled with my daughter, Hanna, who was just a year younger than Alice Hickson was when she first went to Kerry. I was there again two months ago, at the beginning of August, though this time I was with an old friend from university days, Simon, who lives in Dublin now. We walked in the MacGillicuddy Reeks, the highest mountains in Ireland, but I have written of that elsewhere. Simon was kind enough to accompany me for a day of visiting the ancestral haunts too. 

Walking with Simon and his wife Michelle

What draws us back, I wonder? Generation after generation we return. It can only be a search for who we are, a deep desire for our true identity. I am Irish, I have come to understand, as I am English and Scottish and German. But perhaps I am more Irish than any of these other nationalities, because there are two Irish families from whom I am descended, the Hicksons and the Byrnes, while there is only one Scottish, one English and one German.  And what does it mean to be Irish anyway? The Hicksons were Anglo-Irish, and the Byrnes? Celtic Irish, perhaps? Ireland, like Australia, is a mishmash of ethnic and religious identities. What is more, Ireland today is very different to the Ireland that my ancestors left, as Australia today bears only a slight resemblance to the Australia in which they landed. 

I have not met any descendants of the Hicksons or Byrnes that might remain in Ireland, and precious few in Australia, though there are many here. So there is no human connection for me in Kerry, in contrast to John Christopher, who wrote enthusiastically of the old friends he met on his trips back. Yet the landscape and the history, and my longing to understand my ancestors, draws me back. 

Ireland’s greatest attraction for me these days is, however, friendship, for that is where my old friend Simon has made his home. Thanks to him, Ireland is not just a land of the past for me, but a land of the present, a place to carve out new experiences, a land for the future. God willing in the years ahead we will walk again in those misty mountains, drink a glass of Guinness in an Irish pub somewhere, listen again to the haunting melodies of fiddle and pipes, and talk of adventures past and present.

Kerry coastline.