Edith Emily Smith (1877-1964) by Esther Oakley

Born in December about 1877. Was the second child of James Alexander Smith and Esther Hamilton, in a tall house on the quays of Newry, County Down . Her father at the time was a journalist and her mother came from Castleblaney, Co. Monaghan, where her family were farmers. All I can remember my mother saying of her grandparents Hamilton was that her grandfather was a very quiet man and her grandmother was the dominant partner. One day when she was a little girl in the fields with her grandfather when he broke a cup in which he had been carrying seeds, he hid the pieces and told her not to tell her grandmother. My mother’s father, James Smith, had a very different upbringing. His mother died leaving two small boys. His father owned a mill in Tandrogee and James went to work there, saved every penny he could in a hollow tree, and ran away as soon as he had enough to Belfast where he got a job on a newspaper. He was always a literary person, eccentric, and a drinker. My mother loved him: she said he was the sympathetic one if they were ill. She would wake in the night to find him feeling her forehead and tucking in the covers. He was a platform performer and his recitations and “penny readings” got full houses in those days. However she did concede that her mother had a hard life with him. He liked the bright lights, fun and perhaps other women also. His brother William often stayed in their house. He was also eccentric. He was an “inventor” and made his living selling patents. One time I remember when we were traveling to Dublin by train, my mother said casually that the method of fastening the carriage doors had been invented by her uncle William but he had sold it, as he needed the money. He was also a painter and traveled here and there painting and selling his pictures.

My mother was quite tall: about 5’8”. She was slim and never at any stage got fat. I only remember her with auburn or white hair, but she said that as a young person she had had bright red hair, very thick and wavy, and in school was teased, being called “carrots”. She firmly decided that when she earned her own money the first thing that she would do would be to buy a bottle of dye. She was very clever with her hands. She had a large Singer foot sewing machine (still in existence, I believe in my sister’s house in Derbyshire). That sewing machine certainly did years of hard work. There were five girls and two boys in our family and only the most essentials were bought – boys trousers, my father’s uniform, the girls’ coats, suits, dresses, underwear, etc. all were made on that Singer sewing machine. The machine drawer was never called anything but the “magic drawer”. Anything lost was found there. There were seven children and my father’s salary as an R.I.C. constable and then sergeant was very small. We got boxes of old skirts and dresses, etc. from mother’s sisters in Dublin which were all ripped and cut down to make our clothes. Mother was a quiet gentle person. She never hit us or shouted at us. But somehow we did what she asked of us to do without question. Her whole wish when she left school was to be a nurse, but in those days you had to be over 21 years for the Adelaide Hospital and over 18 years for Dr. Steeven’s Hospital, so while she waited to be old enough she got a job in Ballybrophy Post Office, six miles from where they lived. She walked to and from work each day. When she was old enough she started nursing in Dr. Steeven’s hospital. She earned £9 a year, and the hours were very long at that time, but she loved it, although social life was practically non-existent. In those days the nurses went out a great deal to private houses. The chauffer would call for the nurse in a horse and carriage, or pony and trap. One such man, a driver from a large house in Violet Hill in Tolka used to frighten her, telling her horrific stories during the drive and kept muttering, “Ditches have ears, ditches have ears.” It was afterwards a cant in our house if we wanted anyone to be quiet, to say “Shh. Ditches have ears.”

Mother always said, “When I get my family reared I’ll go back to nursing.” One day in the hospital one of her nursing mates had a toothache and she and mother were standing in a corridor when a couple of medical students came by and offered the nurse a cigarette to stop the toothache. She was having a few puffs when along came a ward sister who reported it, and both nurses were suspended. My mother was not even smoking, but rules were very strict in nursing in those days. Mother went home, did not tell her parents that she had been suspended, and waited for a call back. When it did not come, she decided that she would return anyway, and they just gave her her duties and said nothing. The other nurse did not like to do that and never did go back to nursing. It was all very strict in those days, the 1890’s. Mother had bother with her curly hair, which did not have to be seen under the cap. She met my father by nursing him through scarlet fever in the hospital. He came from the Phoenix Park depot [of the R.I.C.]. His boxes arrived with him, and she always said when she saw them with T.H. Greene printed on them, they looked familiar, and knew whoever owned them was going to belong. Although her father was a bit of a playboy himself, he was very strict with his daughters. They had to attend both Methodist and Church of Ireland services, plus Sunday school and Children’s Service, most of all her father finished Sunday by reading a whole book to them and mother said he could make the “driest” book interesting. They were not allowed to go to dances. They would climb to peep through windows but dare not go in. A deck of cards was “The Devil’s Prayer Book”. She never did know one card from another. She loved music. She only had a few lessons with a teacher when her father lost his job and she was told that they could not afford to pay for any more lessons. She said that she wept for hours, then she read the Tutor Book and kept on practicing. She always played the piano. She was a good pianist. My mother, I suppose being a nurse, had hygienic ways. If she could not finish our food she would not allow us to leave our plate down for the dog or cat to eat. She was very particular about milk: all utensils had to be scalded well. She was very fussy about cooking; for a big family the meals were nicely cooked and served. She was not however really keen on house cleaning, and would rather paint roses on the sitting room linoleum than scrub it. I have no memory of her scrubbing in an age when most kitchen furniture, tables, chairs, dressers, etc. were scrubbed with pride. Another thing I do not ever recall is my mother ever sitting to dine with us, or eating a plate of dinner. She cooked roasts of beef and lamb, was very particular about chops which had to be seasoned, breaded, boned and cooked in a certain way. Any vegetables that needed to be mashed had to be done until they were the right consistency. Cabbage also had to be properly chopped, but not with a knife. For herself, what did she like to eat? Her favourite foods; what comes to my mind is brown bread, cheese, marmite, plums, peppermint creams. She would never have margarine. During the war that was a problem we all did our best to solve. She also liked lots of sugar in tea and coffee. I can see her sitting at the table in the carver armchair, the cat sitting on the arm, a book propped against the milk jug, mother reading and absent-mindedly eating bits of something off her plate, the cat now and then reaching a dainty paw and hooking a little piece for herself unnoticed. Mother lived to 87 so I guess that the food she ate for her was just right. She was always very healthy. She was really very artistic, but in that day and age that talent was not appreciated. She would draw pictures and write verses for them. She was always puzzling out winning lines for “Nuggetts” and “Bullits”. She won sometimes, but no big prize that I remember. She liked reading – all the old authors. When we had the television when she was old and they had a film of the old authors on she enjoyed that and would say something like, “Oh, so that’s what Mrs. Proudy looks like.” In spite of her upbringing she was not a person who got great comfort out of orthodox churchgoing; in fact she seldom went to church. She taught us to say prayers might and morning – the usual to start off with, “God bless Mammie and Daddy, my brothers and sisters and all I love, and God bless the missionaries in China .” She had a boyfriend who wanted to marry her called John Hannigan. She refused, so instead he went off to be a “Missionary in China ”. Of course she was Victorian in a lot of her outlook; for instance she did not approve of the Suffragettes. She did not have a rebel outlook. She was all for politeness and good manners. She did not like early morning: she used to say she liked the world to be “aired” before she went out. She was not keen on gardening, or growing flowers, etc., but she would not have had time anyway. She would put flowers out of a room at night, saying that they used up oxygen. She cared well for animals would dose them or set broken legs if they were unlucky enough to get caught in a trap or something, but I would not say that she was keen on having them in the house. My father was the one who loved dogs.