Writer & traveller

 Bloodlines

Chapter 14: John’s last will and testament

The week after Dad died, I took a copy of his last will and testament and a collection of financial documents to his accountant in the city. For 50 years or more, W.J. O’Grady & Sons relied on VJ Ryan & Co to look after the family’s financials, and Dad had left instructions for them to file his final return.

“You know the Irish have a proverb,” one of the partner’s said as we discussed matters arising. “You don’t know your brothers until you’ve administered your father’s estate.”

He wasn’t casting aspersions. He merely wanted to sound a caution.

I said we’d be fine. And we were. But as I found out later, previous generations had their troubles.

Laws and customs associated with inheritance have had a powerful impact on Irish families.

Traditionally, sons inherited the family farm in equal shares after their father’s death.

Often it was up to the youngest son to divide his father’s land into equal shares, while the eldest son had first choice of the allotments.

Women got a look-in only if the deceased was without sons. For example, daughters only shared in their father’s estate if they were unmarried. A married daughter was considered her husband’s responsibility. The widow of a deceased landholder never inherited the farm in her own right. She could live off the farm’s income but after she passed away, ownership of the family farm would revert to male kin on the husband’s side.

The tradition of having they youngest son parcel-up the land so that his older brothers could have first choice probably inspired the ‘you cut, I choose’ rule that was in place when we were kids.

It was useful for managing the division of any leftover potatoes. One sibling was responsible for cutting the potato; the other chose which half was theirs. It might sound fair, but in practice it was fraught, as Kieran and Marea discovered when anxious fingers on the one hand got in the way of a determined cutting on the other.

Was there bad blood between the siblings thereafter? No. But one of the parties (Marea) required a few stitches, and Kieran decided a bloodied potato was not that desirable after all.

It was a lose-lose situation, just as it was for Irish families who had to make a living from ever-diminishing plots of land. The division of farms into equal shares magnified the impact of the potato famine and left the door wide open for the English to consolidate their power.

In the 1700s, English lawmakers engineered a change to inheritance laws so that a first-born son in Ireland could inherit all of his father’s landholdings, provided he converted to the Protestant faith. The Catholics, meanwhile, were to continue with their old ways, divvying up their land between their sons and thereby diluting the size and influence of Catholic-owned estates.

In light of this history, you could say John O’Grady made a modern decision in his last will and testament.

John had six surviving children when he passed away. From oldest to youngest, they were: Maggie, Paddy, William, Mary Ellen, John (known as Jack), and Johanna (known as Cissy).

Instead of following tradition and leaving Oola in equal shares to his surviving sons, John left the family home at 64 Dalleys Road Naremburn to Maggie. She was the eldest of his surviving children and had lived under the same roof as John and Johanna all her life. In one way, bequeathing Oola to Maggie made sense.

I wonder, though, about Paddy. He also lived under the same roof as John and Johanna all his life. Paddy is said to have liked his drink and was often heard singing on his way home, long before he could be seen. Was he being punished for this?

John made a provision of sorts for Paddy and Jack. After giving Maggie the house, he instructed the rest of his estate to be shared equally “amongst my three sons Patrick, John and Timothy.” But there was nothing left in the coffers after Maggie inherited the house, so the bequest failed.

And what about John’s other adult children, William, Mary Ellen, Jack and Cissy?

John seems to have made his last will and testament while he was on his death bed. It was witnessed by two people: a local solicitor, A.E Whatmore, and a Mater Hospital employee by the name of M. O’Donnell. An accompanying certificate of valuation for Oola is dated 19 May 1928, which is the same day as John’s death.

What was going on?

The fact that Timothy is named as a beneficiary - even though he died four years before his father - suggests John might have been experiencing memory loss when he made his last will and testament. Either that, or it was prepared in such a hurry that some details were overlooked or mistakenly recorded, such as which beneficiaries were alive and which beneficiaries were not.

The question as to why John left nothing to William, Mary Ellen and Cissy troubles the notion that his will was a modern document. Mary Ellen and Cissy were married when John made his will, so in the old way of thinking, they had become ‘their husband’s responsibility’.

And you can’t help but wonder whether John excluded William because he was angry about his son’s relationship with an English protestant, Mary Jane.

If John expected his children to adhere to the strict Catholic code of behaviour and if he was as suspicious of England as so many of the Irish were, he would have disliked William and Mary Jane’s relationship. And he could have felt shame in relation to his son and grandson because of the religious judgments attached at that time to baby William’s birth.

When John died, in 1928, more than 25 years had passed since William and Mary Jane had their first child. But that quarter of a century is a drop in the ocean when you hear writer Frank McCourt talk about the way the Irish nurse their grievance:

People have their ways of not talking to each other and it takes years of practice. There are people who don’t talk to each other because their fathers were on opposite sides in the Civil War in 1922. If anyone in your family was the least way friendly to the English in the last 800 years it will be brought up and thrown in your face. There are families that are ashamed of themselves because their forefathers gave up their religion for the sake of a bowl of Protestant soup during the famine and those families are known ever after as soupers. It’s a terrible thing to be a souper because you’re doomed forever to the souper part of hell. In every lane [in Limerick] there’s always someone not talking to someone or someone not talking to everyone… [1]

The partner from Dad’s accounting firm who said ‘you don’t know your brothers until you’ve administered your father’s estate’ didn’t wish to cast aspersions on the family. Nor do I. I’m asking these questions of John in order to understand our past.

Answers don’t present themselves easily. Nor does living memory go back far enough to plug the gaps. Instead, I’m reading John’s will in ways that I imagine a fortune teller reads someone’s palm. As I do this, I become more aware of how the questions I ask and the assumptions I make determine the substance of this and many other histories.

The historian Anna Clark, granddaughter of Manning Clark, put it this way: history reflects the persuasions, politics and prejudices of its authors. Each version of our story reveals some of the past, but it also reveals our own concerns and perceptions. [2]

John’s will expressed his values: individual, religious, social and economic. He was a strict, we know that much. But I wonder if he was fair. Or is that an unfair question to ask?

In any event, Maggie stayed at Oola until she died suddenly from heart disease on 27 November 1929. Paddy stayed at Oola too, singing and drinking without judgment, I hope, until he passed away in October 1942.

Maggie and Paddy’s younger sister, Cissy, moved back into Oola after her husband Ben Jones died in 1934. That means Cissy and Paddy shared Oola for a good eight years until Paddy died, and Cissy stayed on for a further four years until her own death on 20 Juy 1946.

The Wall Street crash happened in October 1929, a month before Maggie passed away, and in February 1930, when William received letters of administration to manage Maggie’s estate, Oola was valued at 15% less than it was when John O’Grady died just two years earlier.

The drop in value was an unwanted development, for sure, given how hard John and Johanna had worked to buy Oola in the first place. And keep in mind, tumbling sharemarkets and falling house prices were just the beginning of the Great Depression. Worse was to come.

[1] Frank McCourt, op cit, p 133.

[2] Anna Clark, Making Australian History, Vintage Books 2022. p 10.