I dedicate my song today to my dear mother who died 35 years ago on April 26th, 1986, at the early age of 64 years.
My song today is “I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen” This popular song was written by Thomas Paine Westendorf in 1875. The music is loosely based on Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Flat Minor Opus 64 Second Movement. In spite of its German-American origins, it is widely mistaken to be an Irish ballad. Westendorf, who was born in Virginia of German parents was then teaching at the reform school known as the ‘Indiana House of Refuge for Juvenile Offenders’ in Hendricks County, Indiana. He wrote it for his wife (who was, however, named Jennie), who had made a visit to her home state of New York due to homesickness. It is in the form of an ‘answer’ to a popular ballad of the time, ‘Barney, Take Me Home Again,’ composed by Westendorf’s close friend, George W. Brown, writing under the nom de plume of George W. Persley.
This song has been recorded by so many prominent artists over the years. They include Johnny Cash: Michael Crawford: Bing Crosby: Josef Locke: Elvis Presley: Slim Whitman: Daniel O’Donnell, to name but a few.
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The most surprising thing I discovered about this song was its origin. It has nothing to do with Ireland and nothing to do with a girl named Kathleen, and yet my earliest memories was of hearing the song sung by Irish men and women returning to Ireland for a holiday during the 1950s. We would be on the ‘cattle boat’, so called because it was the cheapest form of passage across the Irish Sea to occupy the deck above the cattle in the deck beneath you.
I also recall this song being sung by my mother whilst I was a child. Mum had seven children, of whom I was the oldest. While my mum could not sing for toffee, it never stopped her singing until the day she died. Mum believed that everyone has the right to sing in their own home whether they can hold a tune or not, whether they can remember the correct words of the song or not. What notes my mum could not hit, what words she could not remember, she simply made up.
My mother was called Maureen and because my father would never sing this or any other song to her, she would sing it to herself, substituting the name Kathleen with her own name of Maureen. Little did she know that the composer of the song never wrote it about a Kathleen either, nor did it have any Irish connection apart from being adopted by the Irish as being one of their songs. THE Irish are like that you know. They would never see a motherless child on the streets. And just as they would perceive it as being nothing less than their Christian duty to bring the stray child in off the road and allow it to become part of their Irish family, so they would do with an old unclaimed song written about a girl who was never and rechristen it with a good old Irish Catholic name. Anyway, it was probably stolen from the old Irish archive in the first place!
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My earliest memory of the song was my own Irish connection. Between the ages of six and ten years, my mother would suddenly decide on a Friday afternoon that it was the right time to visit her parents in Ireland again. My mother always had the same annual justification for paying the fare across to Ireland to see her parents ‘this year’. She would always tell us, “If we don’t go and visit them this year, they might be dead next year!”
She did not have the money to travel there with her children, nor did she possess any financial means to stay there once she arrived, but that would have been considered to be too small a matter to ever become a serious consideration, let alone a ‘deal breaker.’
While mum always had less income coming into the house than the expenditure ‘supposedly’ going out of the household every week of every year I ever lived at the parental abode, when it came to money management, she was abreast of every survival skill that any woman of her day needed to know and use. This included only paying those creditors who could take more from her than they had given her in the first place. It was far less hassle for those owed to be bothering taking back any used item that was worth less than was still owed on it, and made far more economic sense to merely add on additional interest for missed payments. Top of her list to keep in her good books was the family grocer. Was she able to establish an ongoing book with the family grocer, Harry Hodgeson, mum knew that she would be able to establish a lifelong arrangement with him until every one of her seven children had left home. Within her first month of arriving in West Yorkshire with three children in 1947, mum had established a twenty-year agreement with the local grocer, whereby she would always pay for this week’s food eaten by the household with my father’s next week’s wage which still had to be earned. That way mum frequently boasted that Harry could ever win. Little did mum realise that she and another hundred Irish migrants had established life-long contracts with the friendly family grocer that provided him and his wife, Marion, with a guaranteed lifetime income.
My mother would make her spontaneous decision to go visit her Irish parents with three children by 2:00 pm on a Friday afternoon..Dad would arrive home from his mining job around 4:30 pm to be greeted by an empty note from my mum that said, “Gone to Ireland, Paddy, to see my parents as they might be dead next year, and if I don’t go today, something tells me that I’ll always regret it. I have left your meal in the oven. I’ll stay three weeks if they have enough food in the house to feed us. First chance you get, Paddy, send us some money. I’ll pay the rent man and Harry Hodgeson when I’ll come back. If you work overtime all week and Saturday morning, then you don’t need to be at home to answer the door if anyone calls for money. And if anyone tries to get any money out of you, tell them my poor parents are on their last legs and won’t be alive next year” Maureen x
The journey across the Irish Sea from Liverpool would involve a two-hour coach ride to Liverpool, where we would hang about all evening until we boarded the ‘Cattle Boat’ around 11:00 pm which sailed at midnight. We would board the ‘Cattle Boat’ tired and hungry, and before long, my two younger sisters would be asleep on a seat or on the crowded floor with their head on an old suitcase and covered by an old coat. Although the crossing was always rough and lasted eight hours before arriving in Dublin around 8:00 am the next morning, I would stay awake for as long as my eyes would let me listen to the singing, dancing and noisy revelry of the hundreds of Irish passengers, all going home to see their parents for the last time (should they die the following year)!
Just as every Welsh man in the world has a lovely singing voice, there was always a hidden orchestra of Irish musicians among the passengers to keep the adults occupied all night long. There was always a couple of fiddlers, a few old squeezebox players (concertina), a mouth organist and flutist, and a penny-whistleblower who was happy to show their skills. While most of the musicians were accomplished players of their chosen instrument, all possessed an Irish modesty and forkedness of tongue to proclaim that it had been a decade or more since they last played in public. The common fee the Cattle Boat musicians expected in return was free whisky and ale which many of the Irish travellers were happy to susidise. There may have been a few decent Irish singers aboard, but most singers were in the same league as my mum was, and were determined to entertain us whether we wanted them to or not!
My mother’s favourite tipple was rum and blackcurrant and any passenger who bought her one, she might dance with before the ferry docked. Whatever she did during the latter half of the night, I would never know, as I would be fast asleep before 3:00 am. I do recall my mother telling me in later years that she would often call herself ‘Kathleen’ on the ‘Cattle Boat’ should a man ask her name. She knew that one of the most popular songs to be sung throughout the night would include “ I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen’, and she reckoned that being called ‘Kathleen’ instead of ‘Maureen’ for the purpose of the ‘Cattle Boat’ voyage might make her appear more Irish in the eyes of the male Irish traveller, and get her a few more free rum and blackcurrants.
The morning after arriving in Dublin, we would travel another eight hours by bus to Waterford. Waterford City is 12 miles from my grandparent’s house, and this is where I was born (in their front room) in November 1942. Now let me explain some things about the Irish village of Portlaw to you. Like most traditional Irish villages, there is only one of everything; one baker, one butcher, one grocer, one post office, and one candlestick maker. The Irish is a great nation for saving themselves effort and energy wherever possible, and because there is an established custom going back centuries of never providing anyone with additional information that is not essentially required (especially creditors) villagers are rarely referred to by their surname as well as their Christian name. They are traditionally known by their Christian name and their trade, such as Frank the butcher or Tom the grocer, but could also be known as Alice the widow, or Paul the Protestant.
There was one taxi driver in Portlaw whose name was Willie Low. Willie lived in William Street, across from my grandparent’s house at number 14. Thirty years earlier (by means never known or ever explained outside the Low household) Willie Low arrived home one night with an almost new black car. This was at a time when only rich people, politicians, and the IRA drove around the public streets in private transport. Apart from a few bullet holes in the panel of the driver’s door and a few blood stains on the rear seat, the car was in good condition. From that moment on, Willie Low became Willie the taxi driver, and until the day he died, he must have spent forty years in that occupation as being the only taxi driver in Portlaw.
Any visitor to Portlaw or returning to England from Portlaw, or getting married, or arranging a car to carry a coffin to the church and graveyard would use Willie’s vehicle. The vehicle served many purposes, but it was the only taxi in the village, it was mostly used on emergency or celebratory occasions.
My mother always used Willie all her life to bring her the last twelve-mile stretch from Waterford City to Portlaw whenever she returned home to her parents for a break. Because my mum always knew that Willie had always fancied her, she knew that Willie could be relied upon to give her the best of deals, especially when back in Portlaw on holiday without my father beside her. The pattern of my mother’s regular holiday returns to Portlaw would never vary. Whenever mum came back to Portlaw to visit her dying parents, she would phone the Portlaw Post Mistress, as she was the only person apart from the doctor who possessed the only phone for ten miles. Upon receiving mum’s telephone call, the Post Mistress would close up shop for two minutes while she ran down to Willie’s house to tell him that he had a taxi fare waiting to be picked up at the Waterford Clock; a woman with three young children in tow. Mum would urge the Post Mistress to ensure that Willie be told that it was her in need of his taxi service. As soon as Willie heard mum’s maiden name, he would instantly remember that she owed him £5 taxi fare for a previous year. He would often joke with mum not to do a ‘Harry Hodgeson’ on him as he could not afford to wait another year for last year’s £5.
Arriving in Portlaw, mum would knock on the door of my grandparents, and when her mother opened it, she would say, “I’ve come home, Mum. I had to see you this year just in case you and dad are dead next year!”
I have often wondered about the sudden death by heart attack one year of our family grocer, Harry. It was rumoured that he was one of the richest men in Yorkshire and that his wife would have inherited a sizable estate, had they been able to find his little red book with all the names of his creditors and the amounts of money they still owed him, to reclaim. The little red book was never found and Harry’s grocer’s store had to be sold off after his funeral. I also wondered if Willie Lpw kept a little red book with the names of people who owed him money? And, if he did, was mum’s name inside?
Love and peace
Bill xxx
My song today is “I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen” This popular song was written by Thomas Paine Westendorf in 1875. The music is loosely based on Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Flat Minor Opus 64 Second Movement. In spite of its German-American origins, it is widely mistaken to be an Irish ballad. Westendorf, who was born in Virginia of German parents was then teaching at the reform school known as the ‘Indiana House of Refuge for Juvenile Offenders’ in Hendricks County, Indiana. He wrote it for his wife (who was, however, named Jennie), who had made a visit to her home state of New York due to homesickness. It is in the form of an ‘answer’ to a popular ballad of the time, ‘Barney, Take Me Home Again,’ composed by Westendorf’s close friend, George W. Brown, writing under the nom de plume of George W. Persley.
This song has been recorded by so many prominent artists over the years. They include Johnny Cash: Michael Crawford: Bing Crosby: Josef Locke: Elvis Presley: Slim Whitman: Daniel O’Donnell, to name but a few.
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The most surprising thing I discovered about this song was its origin. It has nothing to do with Ireland and nothing to do with a girl named Kathleen, and yet my earliest memories was of hearing the song sung by Irish men and women returning to Ireland for a holiday during the 1950s. We would be on the ‘cattle boat’, so called because it was the cheapest form of passage across the Irish Sea to occupy the deck above the cattle in the deck beneath you.
I also recall this song being sung by my mother whilst I was a child. Mum had seven children, of whom I was the oldest. While my mum could not sing for toffee, it never stopped her singing until the day she died. Mum believed that everyone has the right to sing in their own home whether they can hold a tune or not, whether they can remember the correct words of the song or not. What notes my mum could not hit, what words she could not remember, she simply made up.
My mother was called Maureen and because my father would never sing this or any other song to her, she would sing it to herself, substituting the name Kathleen with her own name of Maureen. Little did she know that the composer of the song never wrote it about a Kathleen either, nor did it have any Irish connection apart from being adopted by the Irish as being one of their songs. THE Irish are like that you know. They would never see a motherless child on the streets. And just as they would perceive it as being nothing less than their Christian duty to bring the stray child in off the road and allow it to become part of their Irish family, so they would do with an old unclaimed song written about a girl who was never and rechristen it with a good old Irish Catholic name. Anyway, it was probably stolen from the old Irish archive in the first place!
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
My earliest memory of the song was my own Irish connection. Between the ages of six and ten years, my mother would suddenly decide on a Friday afternoon that it was the right time to visit her parents in Ireland again. My mother always had the same annual justification for paying the fare across to Ireland to see her parents ‘this year’. She would always tell us, “If we don’t go and visit them this year, they might be dead next year!”
She did not have the money to travel there with her children, nor did she possess any financial means to stay there once she arrived, but that would have been considered to be too small a matter to ever become a serious consideration, let alone a ‘deal breaker.’
While mum always had less income coming into the house than the expenditure ‘supposedly’ going out of the household every week of every year I ever lived at the parental abode, when it came to money management, she was abreast of every survival skill that any woman of her day needed to know and use. This included only paying those creditors who could take more from her than they had given her in the first place. It was far less hassle for those owed to be bothering taking back any used item that was worth less than was still owed on it, and made far more economic sense to merely add on additional interest for missed payments. Top of her list to keep in her good books was the family grocer. Was she able to establish an ongoing book with the family grocer, Harry Hodgeson, mum knew that she would be able to establish a lifelong arrangement with him until every one of her seven children had left home. Within her first month of arriving in West Yorkshire with three children in 1947, mum had established a twenty-year agreement with the local grocer, whereby she would always pay for this week’s food eaten by the household with my father’s next week’s wage which still had to be earned. That way mum frequently boasted that Harry could ever win. Little did mum realise that she and another hundred Irish migrants had established life-long contracts with the friendly family grocer that provided him and his wife, Marion, with a guaranteed lifetime income.
My mother would make her spontaneous decision to go visit her Irish parents with three children by 2:00 pm on a Friday afternoon..Dad would arrive home from his mining job around 4:30 pm to be greeted by an empty note from my mum that said, “Gone to Ireland, Paddy, to see my parents as they might be dead next year, and if I don’t go today, something tells me that I’ll always regret it. I have left your meal in the oven. I’ll stay three weeks if they have enough food in the house to feed us. First chance you get, Paddy, send us some money. I’ll pay the rent man and Harry Hodgeson when I’ll come back. If you work overtime all week and Saturday morning, then you don’t need to be at home to answer the door if anyone calls for money. And if anyone tries to get any money out of you, tell them my poor parents are on their last legs and won’t be alive next year” Maureen x
The journey across the Irish Sea from Liverpool would involve a two-hour coach ride to Liverpool, where we would hang about all evening until we boarded the ‘Cattle Boat’ around 11:00 pm which sailed at midnight. We would board the ‘Cattle Boat’ tired and hungry, and before long, my two younger sisters would be asleep on a seat or on the crowded floor with their head on an old suitcase and covered by an old coat. Although the crossing was always rough and lasted eight hours before arriving in Dublin around 8:00 am the next morning, I would stay awake for as long as my eyes would let me listen to the singing, dancing and noisy revelry of the hundreds of Irish passengers, all going home to see their parents for the last time (should they die the following year)!
Just as every Welsh man in the world has a lovely singing voice, there was always a hidden orchestra of Irish musicians among the passengers to keep the adults occupied all night long. There was always a couple of fiddlers, a few old squeezebox players (concertina), a mouth organist and flutist, and a penny-whistleblower who was happy to show their skills. While most of the musicians were accomplished players of their chosen instrument, all possessed an Irish modesty and forkedness of tongue to proclaim that it had been a decade or more since they last played in public. The common fee the Cattle Boat musicians expected in return was free whisky and ale which many of the Irish travellers were happy to susidise. There may have been a few decent Irish singers aboard, but most singers were in the same league as my mum was, and were determined to entertain us whether we wanted them to or not!
My mother’s favourite tipple was rum and blackcurrant and any passenger who bought her one, she might dance with before the ferry docked. Whatever she did during the latter half of the night, I would never know, as I would be fast asleep before 3:00 am. I do recall my mother telling me in later years that she would often call herself ‘Kathleen’ on the ‘Cattle Boat’ should a man ask her name. She knew that one of the most popular songs to be sung throughout the night would include “ I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen’, and she reckoned that being called ‘Kathleen’ instead of ‘Maureen’ for the purpose of the ‘Cattle Boat’ voyage might make her appear more Irish in the eyes of the male Irish traveller, and get her a few more free rum and blackcurrants.
The morning after arriving in Dublin, we would travel another eight hours by bus to Waterford. Waterford City is 12 miles from my grandparent’s house, and this is where I was born (in their front room) in November 1942. Now let me explain some things about the Irish village of Portlaw to you. Like most traditional Irish villages, there is only one of everything; one baker, one butcher, one grocer, one post office, and one candlestick maker. The Irish is a great nation for saving themselves effort and energy wherever possible, and because there is an established custom going back centuries of never providing anyone with additional information that is not essentially required (especially creditors) villagers are rarely referred to by their surname as well as their Christian name. They are traditionally known by their Christian name and their trade, such as Frank the butcher or Tom the grocer, but could also be known as Alice the widow, or Paul the Protestant.
There was one taxi driver in Portlaw whose name was Willie Low. Willie lived in William Street, across from my grandparent’s house at number 14. Thirty years earlier (by means never known or ever explained outside the Low household) Willie Low arrived home one night with an almost new black car. This was at a time when only rich people, politicians, and the IRA drove around the public streets in private transport. Apart from a few bullet holes in the panel of the driver’s door and a few blood stains on the rear seat, the car was in good condition. From that moment on, Willie Low became Willie the taxi driver, and until the day he died, he must have spent forty years in that occupation as being the only taxi driver in Portlaw.
Any visitor to Portlaw or returning to England from Portlaw, or getting married, or arranging a car to carry a coffin to the church and graveyard would use Willie’s vehicle. The vehicle served many purposes, but it was the only taxi in the village, it was mostly used on emergency or celebratory occasions.
My mother always used Willie all her life to bring her the last twelve-mile stretch from Waterford City to Portlaw whenever she returned home to her parents for a break. Because my mum always knew that Willie had always fancied her, she knew that Willie could be relied upon to give her the best of deals, especially when back in Portlaw on holiday without my father beside her. The pattern of my mother’s regular holiday returns to Portlaw would never vary. Whenever mum came back to Portlaw to visit her dying parents, she would phone the Portlaw Post Mistress, as she was the only person apart from the doctor who possessed the only phone for ten miles. Upon receiving mum’s telephone call, the Post Mistress would close up shop for two minutes while she ran down to Willie’s house to tell him that he had a taxi fare waiting to be picked up at the Waterford Clock; a woman with three young children in tow. Mum would urge the Post Mistress to ensure that Willie be told that it was her in need of his taxi service. As soon as Willie heard mum’s maiden name, he would instantly remember that she owed him £5 taxi fare for a previous year. He would often joke with mum not to do a ‘Harry Hodgeson’ on him as he could not afford to wait another year for last year’s £5.
Arriving in Portlaw, mum would knock on the door of my grandparents, and when her mother opened it, she would say, “I’ve come home, Mum. I had to see you this year just in case you and dad are dead next year!”
I have often wondered about the sudden death by heart attack one year of our family grocer, Harry. It was rumoured that he was one of the richest men in Yorkshire and that his wife would have inherited a sizable estate, had they been able to find his little red book with all the names of his creditors and the amounts of money they still owed him, to reclaim. The little red book was never found and Harry’s grocer’s store had to be sold off after his funeral. I also wondered if Willie Lpw kept a little red book with the names of people who owed him money? And, if he did, was mum’s name inside?
Love and peace
Bill xxx
