Ireland

Returning to Glennascaul

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Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 27, 2002

That contemporary legends appear in film in now well known. Some time ago, Paul Smith and I attempted a preliminary listing (Smith and Hobbs, 1990) but it is possible to multiple the examples we gave several times. Some films make explicit reference to the concept of the urban legend (for example, Candyman and Urban Legend). Short films employing legend themes have a particular interest, since they often focus on a single story and, because of their brevity they are closer to oral telling than is likely in a feature length film. Examples include The Date (see LTAM No. 13, p. 28) and the films discussed by Veronique Campion-Vincent in her paper “Preaching tolerance? (1995).

In discussing the film-legend relationship with students, there is one short film I find particularly useful, because it seems to aim to mimic some of the features of oral story telling. I have shown (and therefore seen) Return to Glennascaul many times. However, I only recently realized that I had overlooked one significant aspect of it.

Return to Glennascaul was shot in Ireland in 1951 or 1952 (sources differ)(Note 1). It was written and directed by Hilton Edwards and features Orson Welles, who both narrates the film and acts in it. Welles as a young man had acted in the Gate Theatre, Dublin, where Edwards was one of the directors. Hilton Edwards had a role in Welles’s film Othello which was being shot intermittently around that time. (Welles was having difficulty financing the project.) This is relevant to interpreting the blurring between the real and the fictional and between belief and nonbelief in the film.

Return to Glennascaul is subtitled “A story that is told in Ireland“, thus signaling from the beginning that it is a re-telling rather than simply the telling of a tale. The film opens in a film studio where Welles is apparently shooting Othello. He breaks off to tell the story of the film which he refers to as “a short story straight from the haunted land of Ireland”. Ireland, he says, is “crowded with the raw material of tall tales”. This one “purportedly happened to me”. Note this unusual context for the use of the term “purportedly”. Normally one would employ it to refer to the experiences or actions of someone else, the word indicating uncertainty as to how good the evidence is for believing what is being described. One would not use it about one’s own experiences, since we tend to claim good knowledge of what has happened to ourselves.

Welles is then seen driving at night. He stops when he sees a fellow driver tinkering with his engine. The driver, later named as Sean Merriman, says he is having trouble with his distributor. Welles says that he has similar problems, a pun on “distributor”, since Welles presumably is referring to film distribution. Merriman accepts a lift from Welles. When offered a cigarette, Welles comments on the cigarette case, which leads Merriman to refer to a rather strange experience involving the case. However, he hesitates before telling Welles about it since he expects Welles not to believe him. “Sometimes I hardly believe it myself”, he adds. To this Welles responds that if a man begins to doubt his own experience it must be a good one. Merriman proceeds to tell him a story, which the film portrays in flashback. It is a version of the legend generally called The Vanishing Hitchhiker. In the voice over, Welles states that he is telling the story as told to him. He does not ask the audience to believe it. “Judge for yourself.” At this stage, Welles’s commentary also includes an apology to two women. The reason for this apology becomes clear only as the film closes.

About a year before, Merriman had been driving late one night when two women stopped his car. He offers them a lift, which they accept. He drives them to their home, a house called “Glennascaul”, which Welles explains in the commentary is Irish for “glen of the shadows”. They invited him for tea or “something stronger”. Going upstairs, Merriman admired a painting, which the older woman explained had been a gift from a friend who had gone out East. The younger woman in turn admired Merriman’s cigarette case when he took it out. Merriman explained that it had belonged to an uncle who had died in China. However, the inscription dated from when his uncle was a young man in Ireland: “For P. J. M. from Lucy, Dublin, 1895. Until the day breaks and the shadows flee away.” Merriman said that he thought the words were from the Song of Solomon. (They are indeed. In fact, exactly the same words occur twice, at 2:17 and at 4:6.)

One o’clock struck and Merriman said he would have to leave. The women, especially the younger one, indicated that they hoped he would return. Having driven only about a hundred yards, Merriman realized that he had left his case behind and decided to return. However, when he reached the houses, the gates were shut and the driveway overgrown. He struggled up to the house itself but it seemed deserted. There is a sign indicating the house is for sale, so Merriman decided to go to the agent the following day.

Mr Daly, the estate agent, told Merriman that the house had been empty for years. Two ladies had lived there, a mother and a daughter. At first he could not remember their name, but when Merriman mentioned “Campbell”, the name they had given him, Daly agreed that that was indeed their name. Merriman asked if the daughter was a delicate girl with red hair. Daly explained that the daughter was over sixty years of age and her mother more than eighty. The mother had been dead for several years.

Merriman took the keys of Glennascaul and went to the house, which he found desolate. Footprints on the bare floorboards fitted his own shoes and he followed them to a fireplace. On the mantelpiece lay his cigarette case. Frightened, Merriman ran from the house. Here the flashback ends.

In the car, Merriman explains to Welles that he got in touch with the family solicitor. The mother had been dead for ten years. The daughter died two years later. Her name was Lucy. This of course was one of the names inscribed on the cigarette case. The other, “P. J. M.”, was his uncle, Patrick Joseph Merriman.

The film ends with Sean Merriman leaving the car and Orson Welles drives off. Two women, apparently seeking a lift, signal to him to stop but he drives on. The shorter of the women says “Did you see who that was?” and the taller replies “Yes, but I don’t believe it”. Thus it concludes with a further example of belief/nonbelief ambiguity.

One point to note about this outline is that it does not convey the contribution of the camerawork and the music to creating a feeling of mystery. However, at the end, there is a sharp contrast in the music, which becomes jaunty and lighthearted, as if implying that the story is, after all, just a piece of frivolity.

I hope it will be clear from this account I have given of the film why it has seemed worth using as a teaching aid when discussing the character of contemporary legends. As I mentioned previously I have shown it to students many times (and watched it with them). However, it was only recently that I realized that there was one significant aspect of the film I had overlooked.

As explained in my outline of the film, it starts with Welles filming Othello. I had failed to note the scene being filmed. Welles was delivering a speech from Act One Scene Three in which Othello, accused by her father of having bewitched Desdemona, explains to the Duke of Venice how he won her hand. He told her the story of his adventures:

Wherein I spoke of most disastrous chances:
On moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth ‘scapes I’ th’ imminent deadly breach;
Of being taken by the insolent foe,
And sold to slavery. Of my redemption thence,
And portance in my traveller’s history.

We hear only a fragment of the speech. Welles breaks off before the mention of Cannibals and “…men whose heads/Do grow beneath their shoulders”. However, it seems clear that the speech was not picked at random. Othello is telling the Duke about his own story telling. The stories are the stuff of “travellers’ tales”.

Notes:

  1. Main credits of Return to Glennascaul:
    T.R. Royle presents a Hilton Edwards and Micheal MacLiammoir Dublin Gate Theatre Production. Screen Play and Direction by Hilton Edwards.
    Cast: Michael Laurence (Sean Merriman); Shelah Richards (Mrs Campbell) Helena Hughes (Lucy Campbell); Orson Welles.
  2. It seems to me that the otherindcation that Lucy Campbell and P. J.Merriman had had a love affair that “went wrong”. Students do not always make this interpretation unassisted, however. We are given no hint that I can see as to why the lovers separated. However, it is just possible that a reason is suggested by the surnames: Campbell (Protestant?) and Merriman (Catholc?).

References

Campion-Vincent, V. (1995) Preaching tolerance? Folklore, 106, 21-30.

Smith, P. and Hobbs, S. (1990) Films using contemporary legend themes/motifs, pp. 138-148 in Bennett, G. and Smith, P. (eds.) Contemporary legend: The first five years. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.

Lost Lives

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Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 22, 2000

David, McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney and Chris Thornton. Lost Lives: The stories of the men and women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles. Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1999, 1630 p. Index.

This is a most unusual book. The authors set out to give an account of every person who has died as a result of the “troubles” in Northern Ireland since the 1960s. The entries are chronological, starting with a first death in June, 1966 and ending with case number 3637 in July 1999. Regrettably this means the work is not definitive, since the deaths continue. The authors seek to set out the facts in calm and measured terms. The book contains statistically analysis classifying both the dead and those responsible for the deaths by religion and other categories. Yet, one can well believe that the authors “shed tears while researching and writing” the book (p. 13) and I cannot imagine any reader failing to be moved by some of the stories which are told in these pages.

This book could be read as a sociological, historical or political document and reviewed accordingly. However, for readers of Ambrose Merton, I wish to draw attention to the fact it contains a great deal of material bearing on the popular culture of Northern Ireland. The deeply felt traditional beliefs which are part of the conflicts in Northern Ireland are in certain respects obvious. They had to be taken into account by David McKittrick and his fellow authors when preparing the book:

“We produced a style guide which, with its regulations and examples, grew into a 12,000-word document. We tried to avoid contentious or disputed words, seeking always usages which would give offence to no one. In this context Northern Ireland’s second largest city defeated us, and we sought refuge in a mixture of an uneasy compromise and random use. In introducing victims we use the word L/Derry; after that, we simply use Londonderry and Derry interchangeably” (p. 19).

The problem they faced was that “Londonderry” is the name favoured by members of the Protestant, Loyalist community and “Derry” is preferred by the Catholic, Republican community. The point may seem trivial to outsiders but not to many of the inhabitants of Northern Ireland. A cultural dispute of this sort lies on a continuum which includes a belief, testified to by many of the cases in the book, that merely to be a member of one or other of these communities would make a person a legitimate target for an assassin.

Many of the entries take for granted an awareness of the assumption made by paramilitary groups that they had a right to enforce “law and order” in their communities. Some deaths appear to have been “punishments” for activities such as drug-dealing or informing. The small photographic sections includes a number of commemorative murals, this form of outdoor art being a prominent feature of the Northern Ireland troubles. There is also a striking photograph of a wake for a man killed while attending a funeral. {Murders committed while the victim is mourning or worshiping have a particular cultural resonance.) His coffin is open and a young child is being shown the corpse.

One of the first victims described in the book (Case No, 3, pp. 28-29) was Matilda Gould, a 77 year old widow, who was a Protestant. It appears that members of the Protestant para-military group, the Ulster Volunteer Forces, intended to set fire to a Catholic owned bar. However, they accidentally fire-bombed the home of Mrs Gould, who happened to live next door. A statement attributed to a man convicted of the murder of a Catholic barman is worth close examination. He was reported as having later pointed to the bar next to Mrs Gould’s home and saying:

“That’s a job I done, but I done a funny wonder. I threw a petrol bomb through the wrong window and an old lady got burned. That’s the window, I put it through there.”

Here we have him acknowledging responsibility for a death. It seems probable that he knew that she was a member of his own religious community. Yet his language habits are so taken for granted that he can use the rhyming slang “funny wonder”, meaning blunder, to refer to his own actions.