Bill Burns (http://atlantic-cable.com/) has been providing much very useful advice about the future of our web-pages. The 'stories to share' website needs moving to a permanent home, as does the collective record of my father's work which exists in rather dense form at http://www2.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~ddc/Maurice Project/. Anne is working on this side of things at the moment. We are also considering providing an on-line version of my book on the history of weather forecasting, so altogether we need to think carefully about our ongoing strategy.
Regarding the met book, the chapters were circulated to many and I have been fortunate to have had some very useful responses. I am still not certain whether I am going to seek out a publisher for this. The main objective is to make it accessible to as many people as possible. It will be some months before I have an opportunity to incorporate all of the suggestions that have been made, but watch this space.
A long time ago I mentioned finding a confusing book entitled "Elizabeth Bowen Notes on Eire" compiled by Jack Lane and Brendan Clifford and published by Aubane Historical Society 1999 (ISBN 9 780952108191). It seemed to promise everything that was so tantalisingly alluded to in an interview that I did with Lt. Genl M.J. Costello on 25 June 1985. While maintaining a complete denial of anything but total neutrality by the Irish Free State Costello responded to my enquiries about two British security officers " Quintrell travelled extensively in S. Ireland and together with a Col. Knaggs supplied reports of supposed submarine sightings. They rewarded anyone who supplied information with rounds of drinks. Accordingly sightings abounded. In general Quintrell and Knaggs were fairly ineffectual. However Miss Elizabeth Bowen, the writer was a most important source of information, whom the British disregarded until very late in the war." Several years later I enquired in Irish Army archives but they reported that they had no record of any Bowen correspondences that Costello claims had been routinely read by the Irish authorities. Of course they hadn't, because, as this book shows, she submitted reports under her married name, Elizabeth Cameron. So, maybe next time I am in Cathal Brugha Barracks I will try again.
If I had hoped that this book was to provide answers to my curiosity about 'the Bowen Factor' then I was to be disappointed. For one thing the purpose of the book (at least to the outsider) appeared unclear. A "North Cork Anthology" was compiled in 1993 in which the authors felt under pressure to include Elizabeth Bowen on account of her links with Bowens Court. They report " . . In the end, we compromised and - somewhat lightheartedly - we included excerpts from Seven Winters and Last September, but put a line through her name in the title. This was to signify that though Ms Bowen had been physically connected with North Cork, through Bowens Court, she was not a North Cork writer." They could easily have omitted her from what was a 'parish-pump' work, but their actions were interpreted as vindictive by the outside world and eventually led to a whirlwind of invective in the newspapers. Possibly because this stung them, they produced "Elizabeth Bowen Notes on Eire", where they are aggressively defensive and use a tone more reminiscent of the "Burn everything British, except their coal" attitudes of the 1930s. Their excerpts from Bowen's reports are of no real historical significance except to highlight a spirit of the time when more young men from the Irish Free State than from Ulster went to serve in the forces of the King. They were doing their bit for what they believed in, so, why should she not do hers?
Parts 2 and 4 of the book are at the heart of the confusion and do not need to be read. However, in Part 3 Brendan Clifford is clearly on home ground when he lays out what he believes to be the "Reasons for Irish Neutrality". Even here he is scathing of what he calls 'revisionist historians'. Now I disagree with him on two counts. History in my school days was a catalogue of Irish woes, the results of vindictive British against the Irish. There was no sense of a bigger picture in the teachers or the teaching. There was no sense of the fact that 'top-dogs' were doing similar things everywhere, Turks/Armenians, Germans/Herero, Japanese/Chinese. There was no awareness that our hero, Roger Casement had exposed the conditions under which the people of the Congo survived, or didn't (see Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost). So, I welcome revisionist historians. The second reason for my disagreement is because in fact in his analysis of Irish neutrality, Clifford's work in this area is quite revisionist. One may not agree with every word he says, here or in (http://web.ukonline.co.uk/pbrooke/bptdg/programmes/0601-/clifford/talk), but at least he is providing a fresh perspective.
And finally, a limerick or two. While at a recent IET Fellowship Fellowship Assessor Training event I was minded to compose a limerick about the process. On my return home I posed Anne with this task, which led to:
When considering a Beatle for Fellowship
Be sure to enquire if the Yellow Ship
Is a true Submarine,
Some craft in-between
Or merely an aspect of Mellowship
She says that this is far from her best limerick. The events surrounding the illegitimate offspring of a prominent Irish cleric may already have slipped from public memory, but here is her version:
The bishop of Galway said Blastit -E
vents have now shown that I'm pastit -E
nough of dog collars
They're not worth the dollars
I spent to repent my inchastit -E
