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044

A Manx Tale

Clarence James McCumiskey
The Wild Irish Rover
1837 - 1895

‘Why should I bother with what happens after I am dead and gone? I won't be around to be worried or involved with what goes on in the world - so to hell with it!  I’ve got enough to do worrying about my present preoccupations.
I’m still young! The last thing that I need is depressing grave-stones and dusty old books?

I cannot relate to it all. Family history doesn’t touch my life! It has no meaning for me.

Furthermore, why should I waste valuable time now whilst I am alive, digging into records, tiring my eyes searching for names and dates of long dead forebears on fuzzy microfilm reels? What has it got to do with me?

Now I realise that all this may seem an incredibly waste of time and be terribly boring to some people.   I will be honest - I'm only doing this research for a bit of fun - a kind of a hobby if you like.  Sadly, my mother has recently died at the age of 93. It was through her of course that I got most of my information

Clarence James MC CUMISKEY ( or ‘Jimmy’ as we shall call him), was born in 1834 in Kilkeel, County Down, Northern Ireland. He died on 9 Apr 1895 aboard his boat The Iona whilst anchored off Kinsale in southern Ireland. According to Irish experts the name Mc Cumiskey is from the Gaelic Cumascaigh which means ‘Confuser’ and the name originated in County Monaghan, but now is mostly to be found in County Longford, Cavan, and Westmeath. Our family account, passed on from mother to son over the years relates that his father’s name was John, and that he was by occupation a farmer The story goes that as a lad the young Jimmy was greatly abused by his cruel stepmother. One night he wrapped some crusts of bread in a rag and ran away to the harbour at Kilkeel. Under cover of darkness the little boy stole aboard a boat that lay at the jetty. He only revealed his presence when hunger forced him from his hiding place. The vessel was by this time way out to sea. He was dragged before the captain and threw himself on the deck before the skipper’s feet, begging not to be sent back home.

Captain Farragher of the Manx Fishing Boat, for that is what the vessel proved to be, took pity on the seven year old lad, especially when he saw the raw weals on the boy’s back where the lad had been beaten.

"Don’t you worry son," said the kindly Skipper, "You’ll never suffer cruelty like that again!”

The Manx seaman took the young McCumiskey boy back to his home in Peel, Isle of Man, and the boy was brought up alongside his other sons as one of the family.

Each year In early February , when the silver-grey mackerel began to swarm in the cold waters of the Irish sea the young Jimmy made his way down to the busy quayside of Peel harbour and helped make ready the boat and nets alongside his adoptive father. Mackerel fishing usually started at the end of February, and Peel would be alive with vessels making ready for sea. The Herring Fleet usually left for Kinsale in southern Ireland at the end of March. Peel's fishing peaked in the 1880's and employed
10000 men for nine months of the year. It was quite usual for small boys of as young as ten or eleven to sail out into the harsh and unforgiving waters of the traditional herring fishing ground. Jimmy plainly went along with this tradition, for much later in his life when he was the master of his own vessel, he can be met aboard The Iona at Kinsale in Ireland on Census night 1881 together with his two sons - James aged twenty-one, and Thomas, his youngest boy aged fifteen.

Now in our imagination, we can see Jimmy sauntering along the sea-front arm in arm with a pretty young woman. Around her slim shoulders she wears a thick knitted shawl, and she is dressed in the long dark skirts of the country girl. They are walking arm in arm around the crowded narrow streets of Peel. Maybe they talked about the great uprising or mutiny of the natives in India and the terrible massacres of the British soldiers and their families at Cawnpore, the relief of Lucknow and the capture of Delhi which had just taken place? More probably they were absorbed in their own thoughts of love, and the desire to be alone together in the future that seemed beckon them onwards towards their shared destiny?

The screeching cries of the seagulls as they dive and squabble over morsels of fish that had fallen from the fish-carts were an ever-present background noise and raucous entertainment in the bustling lanes. James and Anne would have continued together around to Peel Castle which dominates the harbour. They would have gazed at the solid massed flotilla of boats bobbing cheek by jowl in the harbour. Between stolen kisses their eyes would have taken in a swaying phalanx of tall masts that stretched from one end of the promenade to the other and right round the bay in a sweeping curve all the way from the Castle where they stood, to the headlands at the north of the town.

Herring formed a major part of the Manx people’s diet, and the fisheries had grown in importance as the century advanced. Peel fishermen regularly sailed off to various fishing grounds off the south of Ireland and to the Shetland islands, as well as around the coast of the Isle of Man itself.

Anne Moore 1837 - 1919.
The name of the slim, pretty young woman at Jimmy’s side was Ann Moore and she was born on Sunday ninth of February 1837 on her father’s farm at Cloughbane, Colby, which is in the Arbory District of Isle of Man. In later life she could not remember the actual year, but instead said that she was ‘born in the year of the short corn.’ We know nothing of her upbringing. By the standards of the time the farm was quite large, being 15 acres. Her father Thomas Moore was a tenant farmer and his wife Jane (formerly Kneen) was a local Colby - born girl.

Ann had but a little schooling and consequently was illiterate. At home on the farm they spoke in Manx Gaelic which became a dead language in the late nineteenth century but is today experiencing something of a revival, thanks to the activities of The Manx Language Society. We can imagine her helping out in the fields and assisting her mother in the farmhouse together with the other girls. They probably took the produce to market in Peel which lay about twenty miles to the north west of Colby. Perhaps it was there at the market that she and Jimmy met for the first time? Maybe on the other hand Ann was strolling along the quayside at low tide with a female friend , when, looking down at the boats below, she spotted the good-looking, bearded, young Irishman? It was a busy time for Peel in 1857, and some 300 fishing boats were based in Peel harbour. There would have been plenty of strong, single, lusty young fishermen employed around the dockside area to tempt two pretty girls to take their evening stroll in that direction. By 1881 the crewmen and boys on these boats was in excess of 2,500 with a further 700 working in ancillary trades such as sailmaking, ships chandlery, net making, rope, boat building, herring curers and buyers and transport agents.

Marriage and the Home in Lhergydhoo.
Jimmy and Anne were married on the 10th of June 1857 in the Parish Church of St. German in Peel. Anne Moore who was aged 20 at the time, and was three months pregnant. Their first child a girl was born six months later on the 29th of January 1858. They named her Mary (probably the name of Clarence James’ real mother?)

The Farm Cottage - Lhergydhoo
For the first fifteen years of their marriage they lived in Llergydhoo Farm Cottage, Peel Road, in the hamlet of Lhergydhoo just outside Peel. It is here in this cottage that seven of their nine children were born. Let us travel back as if in a time-machine and join them there on the night of Thursday the 25th of April 1861. The Census Enumerator knocks on the door of their small dwelling. James goes to the door and opens it. He is now 26. The stooping figure of the official laboriously scrawls with a stubby pencil on the record form. James is recorded as being an agricultural labourer and born in Kilkeel, Ireland. Ann his wife is 25 years old, and she stands shyly behind her husband holding little James a babe in arms just 1 year old. I have seen the diminutive tied agricultural worker’s property where seven of their nine children were born. it is little changed and is very atmospheric. The farm itself is now owned by the Clucas family (as of 1995)

James and Ann produced nine children. An average sized family by the standards of the times. The names of the children were very traditional and were as follows:

The Children of Jimmy Mc Cumiskey and Ann Moore

Mary 29th of January 1858

James Henry 15th of April 1860

Elizabeth Jane 4th of July 1863

Margaret 4th September 1864

John Thos.(Jack) 30th of Sept 1866 Catherine Leonora 11th of Dec 1868

William Edw. born 9th of June 1871 Robert Alfred 26th of Oct 1873

Alice Elizabeth 1st Dec 1876

Elizabeth Jane later became my grandmother. Mary married a man called Thomas Quilliam who was a fellow crewman on The Iona. Alice married a man called Cowley and died young. James Henry the eldest son, died young aged twenty-two in Peel without marrying. Jack married a Manx girl called Margaret and left with her to live in Liverpool. They had four children - Jack, Harold, Alice and Millie. Some of the offspring possibly emigrated to Australia?

William emigrated to America and became a tailor in Pasadena. Margaret was a spinster and died on the Panama canal. Catherine married her cousin, a man called Moore and lived in Cotswold Street, Liverpool, at which address her mother Ann went to join her after the death of Jimmy.

Ballagyr Cottage In 1872 they moved to the tiny Ballagyr Cottage in the small hamlet of Ballagyr which is situated slightly closer to Peel town. It was here that their last two children Robert  1873, and Alice 1876 were born. The family can be found here at the time of the 1871 census.

My 1994 Visit to Lhergydhoo.
Thanks to the kindness of Mr and Mrs Barry Cringle, the present owners of the property, I was allowed to look round their small but comfortable home on the 8th of July 1994 during a visit to the island. The Cringles occupy the old McCumiskey dwelling together with the adjacent cottage, for the two abodes have been knocked into one property now. A single downstairs room measuring 10 feet by 12 feet was where the whole family washed, cooked their meals and ate the food. Their diet would have consisted mainly of fish, but we can expect too that their would be a plentiful supply of fresh vegetables from their own small garden. An open ladder lead to a similar sized room above, and there the whole family slept. Light was provided by candles and a small oil lamp. Water was obtained from a small well by the roadside. I have drunk the clear, sweet, water which still bubbles forth. It is as sweet and clear today as it must have been over a hundred and fifty years ago. The cottage is situated in a very pleasant position. A narrow lane leads from the main Peel to Kirk Michael main road. The topography is one of gentle rolling hills. Llerygdhoo, which means ‘dark slope’ in the Manx language lies a mile and a half away in the opposite direction. Nowadays the land is mostly given over to cattle, although some arable farming continues in the area.

Jimmy had a four mile walk through the lush greenery of the Manx countryside to the harbour at Peel where his fishing boat The Iona was berthed along side of Peel Castle. In 1882 they suffered the dreadful loss of their eldest son James. He was only twenty two years old, and had been a constant shipmate of his father’s since he was a small boy, as well as a dutiful and beloved son. The family took his coffin to Peel cemetery which lies two miles outside the town centre on the road to Douglas, and said their last good-byes. After the death of their son the remainder of the family moved from Balagyre Cottage to 67 Cowley Terrace in Peel. It was at that address that Anne is recorded on the 1891 census as a fifty four year old Mariner’s wife. Elizabeth Alice is seen to be living with her mother, and is marked down as being a five year old scholar. Jimmy was obviously aboard The Iona that night together with his two sons. As the wife of a herring fisher, now that most of the children were older, Ann was involved in mending the nets and perhaps working in the kipper sheds where the famous Manx herrings were smoked and made ready for shipment to the mainland.

The Death of Clarence James McCumiskey
Clarence James McCumiskey was to join his beloved son in the same grave thirteen years later, when, exhausted by the hard life of a fisherman his heart finally gave out. They were anchored up in Kinsale to ride out the bad weather, when Jimmy was suddenly gripped by a vice-like pain in his chest. His sons tenderly lay their father on his bunk, and when the weather abated sailed back across the Irish sea with their father’s body. It was the final sea journey and the last homecoming for Jimmy to his adopted land. On a crisp April morning of Wednesday the 16th of April 1895 he was given a fisherman’s funeral. A large crowd of fellow men of the sea stood shoulder to shoulder with Jimmy’s large family to say their last farewells. They sang the hymn most beloved of seamen ‘For those in peril on the sea.’ After which the cortège clip-clopped back along the road to Peel and passed silently through the narrow lanes were thirty eight years previously Jimmy and his farmer’s daughter had walked together as young lovers.