John Betjeman

Irish Railway Record Society

John Betjeman and the Mallow - Waterford Line

Michael J Walsh

The early membership records of our Society are a roll call of the great and good of the railway enthusiast world of the 1940s. Henry Casserley joined during the first year, as did Charles E. Lee and one R.L.D. Maunsell, then working in the Sudan , along with the Earl of Rosse and the distinguished engineer, W.O. Skeat. In July 1948, we find Ian M. Coonie, the Scottish transport historian, as well as many well-known Irish names, including Des Coakham, now our most senior member. But alphabetically ahead in that July 1948 list of new members was one J. Betjeman, of "The Old Rectory, Farnborough, Wantage, Bucks"!

Betjeman spent the years 1941 to 1943 in Ireland as press attaché to the British Ambassador, but also functioned as a spy and political analyst. In this role, he attracted the attention of the IRA and his assassination was plotted. Happily for poetry, architecture and heritage, not to mention Anglo-Irish relations at a sensitive time, an IRA member who had read Betjeman aborted the operation.

Betjeman's Irish experience led to a small body of specifically Irish verse, most notably "Ireland with Emily", where his deceptively simple language evokes, with greater immediacy than many nominally more cerebral poets, an era still well-remembered, but in retrospect almost medieval, where

"Now the Julias, Maeves and Maureens Move between the fields to Mass."

2006 was Betjeman's centenary, with many special events and publications, including a little book on Betjeman's railway verse, with an introduction by the distinguished British railwayman, Chris Green. Not mentioned in this volume however was Betjeman's one and only Irish railway poem, "A Lament for Moira McCavendish", although it must be admitted that the "Lament" also strongly features another of Betjeman's great enthusiasms – the female of the species! We are pleased to reproduce this work of our sometime member and British Poet Laureate, with the permission of The Betjeman Literary Estate.

"A Lament for Moira McCavendish" takes us along the celebrated Mallow-Waterford line in pursuance of the lady of the same name, and in Betjeman's expertly-crafted words, we are again transported down the Blackwater Valley and beneath the Knockmealdowns towards the shoulder of the Comeraghs, crossed by the railway with spectacular viaducts and tunnels, before it dropped down for its final few riverside miles along the Suir into Waterford. Moira McCavendish is very different from many of the poetic creations of Betjeman's British verse, clearly a woman of the native population and very definitely not an Anglo-Irish big house girl, a kind of Blackwater valley Joan-Hunter-Dunn, residing in one of the many seductive and reclusive big houses that still nestle into the hillsides above the river!

Interestingly, Betjeman's romantic journey dates from between 1956 and 1967, in those brief few years of diesel operation, and indeed the cadences of the opening verses convey the sounds of a train journey on a secondary line in that era. At the time, the poet was in his 50s and his wartime Irish adventures were 15 years in the past. So what prompted the somewhat melancholy reflections of the "Lament"? Tallow Road was and remains a long way off the beaten track and in the last years of the railway, was uncommonly difficult to reach, just one train a day in each direction. Betjeman appears however to have had some affinity with West Waterford . Another Irish poem, "The Irish Unionist's Farewell to Greta Hellstrom in 1922", is again evocative of this lonely and beautiful part of Ireland . Perhaps the "Lament" reflects an attempted reclaiming of an earlier personal experience of the poet himself, perhaps it is based on a tale he learned during his train journey – who knows? There is another story to be told there, but meanwhile, we have a train to catch!

Mallow-Waterford was Ireland 's last non-radial railway served by express trains – albeit not very fast, but undoubtedly disdaining the lesser stations, and outlived even the GNR(I)'s likewise scenic Derry Road . The line's closure on Easter Saturday, 25 March 1967 marked the beginning of the end for the traditional railway scene in Ireland, so come with us on a nostalgic visit to the Mallow-Waterford in its final month, where the combination of Betjeman's verse and our pictures may lead to a furtive tear, whether for our own lost youth, a lost love, or a railway world now extant only in memory and image.

The more specifically railway-oriented history of the line is extensively recorded in our Journal, notably in the late Dave Murray’s article in JOURNAL 121, which itself contains a comprehensive bibliography of earlier contributions. A second-last day journey on the eastbound goods on Good Friday, 24 March 1967, is described in JOURNAL 43 by Joseph Leckey, the day being enlivened by a derailment at Ballyduff!

A Lament for Moira McCavendish
Through the midlands of Ireland I journeyed by diesel

And bright in the sun shone the emerald plain;

Though loud sang the birds on the thorn-bush and teasel

They could not be heard for the sound of the train.

The roll of the railway made musing creative:

I thought of the colleen I soon was to see

With her wiry black hair and grey eyes of the native,

Sweet Moira McCavendish, acushla machree.

Her brother's wee cabin stands distant from Tallow

A league and a half, where the Blackwater flows,

And the musk and potato, the mint and the mallow

Do grow there in beauty, along with the rose.

'Twas smoothly we raced through the open expansion

Of rush-covered levels and gate-lodge and gate

And the ruined demesne and the windowless mansion

Where once the oppressor had revelled in state.

At Castletownroche, as the prospect grew hillier,

I saw the far mountains to Moira long-known

Till I came to the valley and townland familiar

With the Protestant church standing locked and alone.

O vein of my heart! upon Tallow Road Station

No face was to greet me, so freckled and white;

As the diesel slid out, leaving still desolation,

The McCavendish ass-cart was nowhere in sight.

For a league and a half to the Blackwater river

I tramped with my bundle her cabin to see

And herself by the fuchsias, her young lips a-quiver

Half-smiling, half-weeping a welcome to me.

Och Moira McCavendish! the fangs of the creeper

Have struck at the thatch and thrust open the door

The couch in the garden grows ranker and deeper

Than musk and potato which bloomed there before.

Flow on, you remorseless and salmon-full waters!

What care I for prospects so silvery fair?

The heart in me's dead, like your sweetest of daughters,
And I would that my spirit were lost on the air.

The remainder of this article appears in IRRS Journal number 162, published February 2007.