Kathleen Mac Fadden née Nurse Kathleen Doherty on Inisheer in the 1940’s

This history was written by Dairine Mac Fadden with thanks to Declan Mac Fadden.

Dated 12^th July 1944 with the address of “ Cruise’s Cottage, Inisheer, Galway”, written with a black ink fountain pen, 700 words, sent over 70 years ago.   The sender is my mother Kathleen Doherty who at that time was the Public Health Nurse on the smallest of the Aran Islands.  She was writing to her older sister, Maureen, who lived in Falcarragh, Co.  Donegal, to thank her for the parcel of sweets and the “nice long letter” which had arrived on the Sunday. Opening a window into her life on Inisheer, she tells Maureen that there is a big crowd of visitors on the island, four priests, three doctors, two of them German, an author and “Gaetano and some of his friends”. She says that Gaetano has had a few dances on the strand since he came which she enjoyed immensely and that she is expecting them up “tonight”. She talks of the picnics which they could not have because of the weather.

The letter also carried news of the safe delivery of “Julia Connelly’s” little daughter and  of “Teresa” who had a case of Scarlett Fever which had cleared up and hadn’t spread to anyone else. She thanks Maureen for all the prayers and it is clear that Maureen knows about the cases which were troubling her at the time.

Inis Oírr Islander c 1944

My mother qualified as a midwife in March 1942 following her training in Holles Street in Dublin. We think that she would have gone to Inisheer as a Lady Dudley Public Health Nurse sometime in that year. She told me that on arriving on the island, she was brought to the house she was to stay in, that it was a former coastguard station with an outside toilet, a sitting room, a kitchen and 2 bedrooms upstairs. She said that to begin with she had an open fire and that the turf came in to the island from Mayo.

Photo of Kathleen bringing home the turf with two island boys.

She used to go out to the lighthouse and the lighthouse keepers would give her a cup of tea. She told me that when she first came to the island, she would walk along the rocks but the lighthouse keepers told her that this was dangerous. They also gave her a little dog, which she called “Rex”. It was against the nursing regulations for her to have a dog and she thought that she would be in trouble when one of the inspectors came to visit her but luckily for my mother, the Inspector took a liking to the dog and used to carry it around with her on her bicycle while on the island!

Galway hookers off the coast

My mother had a little surgery across the street from her house. The patients would come to her for dressings and the expectant women also came. There was no Doctor on the Island but there was one on the bigger island. She said that she never had to get him for a case. She told me that she had one case where a woman was giving birth to her first child which was a breach delivery. It was a long labour and she did send for the Doctor but by the time he came, she had delivered the baby.

She told me that in those days the women had to stay in bed for almost a fortnight after they gave birth. She would visit every day and take their temperatures and wash the babies. Often they would be up and about but would jump back into bed with their clothes on when they saw her coming. They had plenty of English and she spoke mostly English to them.

Her brother Patrick who was training to be a priest in All Hallows also visited her during her time on the island. The Priest on the island at the time was a Father Canning.

Kathleen’s brother Fr. Paddy with Islander and another.

I know a little of Gaetano De Gennaro, referred to by my mother in the letter. He was an Italian Artist who used to visit the Island.

He would have been in his early fifties at the time my mother was on the island and he died in 1959 in Sao Paulo where he was a professor of painting.

Article about Gaetano De Gennaro

We have a lovely portrait which he painted of my Mother in her nurse’s uniform in 1943 when she was on the Island and also of her sister Nan who was visiting her. He was lodging in a house and had an outhouse room where he used to do his work.  He also painted a portrait of Douglas Hyde the first President of Ireland and of Jack Yeats but these were probably done by him in Dublin.

Painting of Nurse Kathleen Doherty by Gaetano Gennaro in her Nurse’s Uniform on Inisheer Island, 1943

Gaetano also did paintings of some of the Islanders and exhibited these in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin from the 27^th November 1943 to the 18^th December 1943 in an exhibition titled “Studies of Inishere”.

Catalogue of the exhibition Studies of  Inishere by Gaetano De Gennaro

In advance of the exhibition the Spectator carried a report on De Gennaro and his works describing him as perhaps one of the greatest living masters of pastel and going on to say that in the view of the writer, he had never before “done anything so powerfully strong and pictorially perfect as these fisherman of the big bony limbs, the deep tan, a ruddiness of cheek which almost makes you feel the howl of the wind, these men with the deeply-lined faces, with the white stubble of a few days’ growth of beard, of the unruly hair, and of the tenderest limpid blue eyes whose gaze seems lost in far horizons”. The writer also describes the journey out of Inisheer by De Gennaro with his paintings as follows “Being rowed over to the boat for Galway with his precious harvest, the frail canoe glided down mountainous seas “comme une montagne russe” as he put it, which drenched the artist to the skin but slid off the oil-cloth-wrapped portfolio like the water from the proverbial duck’s back”.

Newspaper article about Gaetano Gennaro’s exhibition

A report in another paper praises his drawings of the men admiring in particular the strong face of the young fisherman in exhibit no. 26, the head of the old man in exhibit 24 “ a peculiarly Irish type, the eyes full of humour and the inevitable pipe”. However, the author of the  same report comments that the “women are less satisfactory, with the exception of the type in “ In the Chimney Corner” (19)”, saying that “the artist is inclined to a somewhat insipid idealisation, a slick prettiness, that should be guarded against in depicting feminine types-though the stiffly-posed little girl in 30 is natural and charming.”

These newspaper cuttings and the Shelbourne Hotel Catalogue were kept all down the years by my mother’s sisters in Donegal and I now have them.

Kathleen Mac Fadden nee Nurse Kathleen Doherty on the 26^th July 2017, on the day of her 100^th birthday.

 

My mother’s own story started on the 26^th July 1917 and she celebrated her 100^th birthday on the 26^th of July of this year, 2017.

She spent two years of this very long and eventful life on Inisheer which she left on her engagement to my father Jack Mac Fadden, who she subsequently married in 1945. She returned to live in her native Donegal and had ten children.  Although she was only on Inisheer for 2 years, her time there was an important part of her life and she never forgot it. She often told us stories about her time on the island, describing the colourful shawls and crios worn by the women, her walks down to the lighthouse, the hospitality of the islanders, the excitement of the summer visitors and recalling watching the hookers as they fished off the island. I hope that in my telling of this small but very important part of her life story, it will add to the story of the people of Inisheer and those who went before them.