My workhouse obsession has been in full swing for a couple of years. It was sparked by the discovery that some of my ancestors in north Fermanagh had survived the Famine years of the 1840s only by entering the workhouse at Lowtherstown, now Irvinestown. Seeing their names and the descriptions of their pitiful circumstances in the workhouse records was a moving experience, and it set me off on a quest to discover more about their stories.
The workhouse buildings at Irvinestown are long gone, but Bawnboy, County Cavan, built to the same plan, like all the Irish workhouses, made a fitting substitute. You can read more about my first visit to Bawnboy here - it was another cathartic experience. I read all round the subject of the famine and the workhouse. My most helpful guides were John O'Connor's 'The Workhouses of Ireland', Breege McCusker's 'Lowtherstown Workhouse' and the recently published 'Atlas of the Great Irish Famine'. I travelled to the Irish Workhouse Centre in Portumna, County Galway, where Steve Dolan answered every question I could think of and showed me round another incarnation of the building which Margaret, James, Catherine, Irvine and Thomas Elliott entered in 1848.
As I worked my way round the topic and visited the dreadfully atmospheric workhouse buildings, I decided that an audio-visual piece based on my own family's Famine story would be a good response to what I'd discovered.
I was clear from the start that I didn't want to make a didactic piece, communicating historical information in a dry way, but a personal story, expressing the feelings of a real and relatable human being.
I chose Catherine, my great-great-grandfather James's little sister, as the focus of the work. To me, she became Cate, and I was delighted to find, when I came upon her details in someone else's family tree, that she was called this in real life.
I had a large portfolio of workhouse images I'd created at Bawnboy and Portumna. Now I needed Cate herself. Finding a famine-thin eight-year-old model was obviously out of the question, so I decided to focus on Cate as a woman in her twenties, thinking back to her experiences as a child. My model Hopewell personified the Cate of my imagination perfectly, with facial expressions and expressive gestures to communicate every moment of her journey. With her bare face, hair pulled back and handmade antique high-necked blouse, she became a thoughtful and damaged young woman from 1864.
Many of my workhouse photographs featured windows, as elegantly decayed architectural features and symbols of both imprisonment and escape. I couldn't believe my good fortune in locating, for Hopewell's "Cate" shoot, an old six-paned window which echoed strongly those of the workhouses. This became a key pivot point in the piece, with Cate shown first sitting outside the window, but moving behind it as the story recounts her admittance to the workhouse, her face partly obscured now by its bars. I structured a narrative that moved to and fro between Cate as a 24-year-old and the workhouse of her childhood, shown now as a near-derelict building. This was going to involve considerable suspension of disbelief on the part of the viewers, but I hoped that it would be effective.
My script was structured round Cate's experiences, told simply and clearly. My voice actress, Rosie, conveyed her words with total integrity, bringing them to life in a way that made me forget it was actually me who'd written them.
To provide contrast, I also included the words of the Matron of the workhouse, the visiting minister, the workhouse inspector Dr Denis Phelan (these words are taken from his real report into conditions at Lowtherstown), and an anonymous local man. Helpful friends and colleagues read these parts for me, populating the piece and lending it further authenticity.
Early in the process, I composed a simple lullaby for the Elliott family....
Safe, safe in my heart
I'll keep you safe in my heart
Stay near or go far, wherever you are
I'll keep you safe in my heart
As the script emerged, I decided to use the song at two key points in the drama: the moment when Margaret was separated from her children on admission to the workhouse (Charles Kickham's novel of 1869, 'Sally Cavanagh' helped me with this scene), and the tender moment near the end when Cate reveals her own current circumstances.
I composed all the music for the piece myself. I spent some time developing a palette of sounds to create the mood I wanted, with instruments such as a bouzouki, lute, cor anglais, flute, piano, folk percussion instruments and double bass. The style I chose is more contemporary than those of my other pieces, with no attempt to recreate the sounds of the nineteenth century apart from the presence of the simple lullaby. There's a recurring idea of a smear or glissando, referring to Irish traditional music but also aiming to cause a sense of disquiet.
The opening notes of the lullaby, 'Safe, safe in my heart...' became a motif which reappeared frequently in the score, always referencing the idea of keeping a child safe from harm. I also composed a theme for the workhouse itself: this can be heard for the first time when the matron starts to read the list of names of those admitted on 22 November 1848. (The 67 admissions she mentions for that date is an accurate figure.)
As well as the ubiquitous windows, a couple of other ideas emerged as visual themes within the piece. Flowers appear at significant moments. A cross transforms back into a broken workhouse window.
'Safe' has been a labour of love. I hope that it conveys something of the desperation and tragedy that these people experienced, something of the possibility of redemption and the long shadow cast over everything that came later. I suspect it's not my last piece of work on the subject.
Click on the image below to see the finished piece on Vimeo.
