Notes on a French Wedding

Notes on French Wedding presented by Agnes Blake.

The booklet contains details of my wedding, but, I believe, it is an interesting insight into how the French organise their State.

France is a large country.  Like ours, it is divided into Departments – the equivalent of our counties, some of which are also extremely large.  I think, but am not certain, that, originally, the divisions were based on the Dioceses of the Church.

Each Department has a Prefecture where all the official administration is carried out – where you would get a new driving licence, or identity card, but since the Departments are so big, they usually have a Sous Prefecture (under) sometimes two, so that people don’t have too far to travel.

The Department where we married was La Dordogne.  The Prefecture for this is in Perigueux and the two Sous Prefectures are Bergerac and Sarlat.  Bergerac was closest for us.

However, each large town, small town and village of a certain size has another administrative centre, the Mairie.  They also have a council and a Maire, all voted in by the people of their community to serve for a period of 5 years.  They deal with issues which affect their town or village, so, for instance when we wanted to build a house in a village, we started off by going to the Mairie to talk to the Maire.  Our village was small with about 127 people, but we had a council and a Maire.

The councils would have a say on how the tax raised on property in their area was spent to the advantage of the inhabitants.  In our village, it would, naturally, be on a very small scale.  For instance, one item which springs to mind is that the churches in France are the property of the State and when the Church in our village needed a new bell rope, this item was raised at the council meeting.  The council was split on whether, or not, to spend the money on an expense like this and the Maire had the casting vote – and he voted against.  However, that night the Maire died and there had to be an extraordinary meeting of the council to pass the expenditure of a new bell rope to toll the bell for the Maire’s funeral.

The Maire will be at the Mairee usually one morning a week and he will be provided with the services of a secretary – the secretaries usually travel to a different Mairie every day and they know all the issues that might arise.  But, getting to the point of the story, another important aspect of what is done locally is recording births, marriages and deaths and, the Maire actually performs the wedding ceremonies because a church wedding is not legal in France.  The Church is separate from the State and only a Civil Wedding, conducted by the Maire, is legal.  This ceremony consists of reading out the Law to the couple involved and getting their signature on a document to the effect that they do, actually, understand the Law.

So, in our case, our Maire was the farmer who lived down the road.  He was farming on a very small scale with about four fields and six cows, and we were his very first wedding.  I must say, he did this in a very dignified manner.  He greeted us at the door of the Mairie, he lead us to his desk, donned his sash of office and read out the Law.  We signed the document, his wife, who attended, shed a little tear and Robert was left standing with a wedding ring in his hand and no mention of what to do with it, so, the Maire took it from him and put it on my finger.  (For ages after, I wondered if I had actually married the Maire!)

The Marriage Certificate is in booklet form and is called Le Livret de Famille, Book of the Family, and weren’t they way ahead of trends.  These days, so many people are interested in their lineage.  With the French, here is a little book containing so much information in one place about ours and, incidentally, it only allows room for us to have up to 8 children.  I suppose after that, you have to ask for another book!  The sequel, perhaps?

 

October 2016

Object: Royal Doulton Bowl

My Royal Doulton Bowl presented by Venie Martin

The Object I have brought along today is a Royal Doulton bowl with a picture of Rochester Castle. First I will talk about the object itself and then I will tell you how it came into my possession.

As you can see it’s a fine china bowl and on the bottom it is stamped with the emblem of the lion and the crown, Royal Doulton, Made in England, Rochester Castle. I know very little about porcelain and collectables, just a little from watching the Antiques Road Show and Bargain Hunt, so I looked up some information on the internet about Royal Doulton.

It’s an English company dating back to 1815, the year of the battle of Waterloo. It started out as a producer of salt glazed stoneware for sanitary purposes. It was originally a family company set up as a partnership between Martha Jones and her partners John Doulton and John Watts in Lambeth London. In 1853 when Jones and Watts left it became Doulton and Co. It then formed an alliance with the Lambeth School of Art and employed a team of designers and craftsmen and began to mass produce porcelain and collectables for the growing middle classes. In 1901 Doulton products came to the attention of the royal family and King Edward VII sold them the Royal Warrant allowing them to adopt the emblem and the name Royal Doulton.

The Lambeth factory closed in 1956 due to clean air regulations and the operation moved to The Potteries in Staffordshire. From 1971 many of the major English potteries were acquired by S Pearson & Son Ltd.  There was considerable merging and take overs up to 2005 when Waterford Wedgewood took over Royal Doulton.  Several renowned designers and chefs came on board and helped create a new image and new products.  Jasper Conran and Gordon Ramsey. Some items continue to be manufactured in England but most manufacturing is now in Indonesia. In 2015 the group of companies was taken over by the Fiskars Corporation (a Finnish manufacturer of home products).

A look at e-bay shows the huge range of collectables manufactured by Royal Doulton. In particular note the Toby Jugs, mantelpiece dogs, tea sets, decorative plates and bowls and figurines. Because they were mass produced, you can see that they are not very expensive items to collect, most priced in the 30-50 pounds range.

The bowl I have brought today is from a range called The Castle Series in which artists paintings of well known English castles such as Rochester, Arundel and Warwick were transferred to plates and bowls. It was probably made in the 1930s – but it could be earlier if the original owner bought it at an auction. The cracking on the glaze might indicate that it is older. I have tried to value it on-line and get figures from 35 pounds up to a thousand, if it’s one of the originals. Since I have no intention of selling it, I have not pursued the valuation.

For me, the most interesting thing about it is how it came into my possession.

My Father was a farmer in East Donegal in a townland called Ruskey which is three miles from Newtowncunningham off the road from Derry to Letterkenny. Farming in Donegal in the 1940s and 50s was difficult because of the struggling economy of the new Irish state and the earlier cutting off of the farmer’s main market in Derry. He supplemented his farm income by acting as a contractor for other farmers. He owned a steam tractor , a mill and a baler and in the harvest he would go to farms which did not own machinery and carry out the milling of oats and the baling of straw for them. The day the mill came to a farm was a big day and a large number of local farmers would come along and help each other. There was quite a party atmosphere and the farmer’s wife had a very busy time catering for everyone. We were a mixed denomination community in East Donegal and my Mother used to insist that our own milling did not take place in a Friday because she would have had to cook two different dinners – one for catholics and one for protestants!

This is a model of the type of steam traction engine used by my Father.

Anyway, when the contracting season was over and “all was safely gathered in” my Father did his round of the farms to collect his payment. He had a little boxy Ford car and sometimes he took my Mother and I with him for the ride. Some of the farms were in a hilly area and I remember his fretting about whether or not the car would make it up the hill and if the brakes would hold on the way down!

One of the farms he visited was at Gortinlieve and that is where the story of the bowl starts. The farmer there was a bachelor called Joe Lynch and he ran a mixed farm with a small dairy herd in addition to the arable. The dairy was run by two sisters, the older being Cissie Boyle. Joe lived in the farm house and the Boyles lived in a little cottage about half a mile up the hill. The set up was rather unusual and I have researched it a bit (excuse another small diversion!).

Apparently the farm at Gortinlieve was owned originally by a family called Fulton. They had farmed there since the 1600s. The last of the Fultons were a childless couple who, when they got old, employed Joe Lynch and the Boyles to work the farm for them. When they died they left the farm to the local Presbyterian Church. However Joe disputed the will because he was living in the house and there was some confusion about the location of the title deeds. The result was that he continued to live there for another 20-25 years. Eventually the farm was sold to a developer from Letterkenny who still owns it and lets it out.

This is a picture of the house at Gortinlieve which is now derelict.(August 2016)

As a child the house seemed very large to me – I think this is because it was a three storey house. I went back there to look at it a few months ago and you can see from the picture that it is now derelict. I found a reference to it in the Irish National Inventory of Architectural Heritage. It says it was built in 1860 and has some interesting architectural details. It’s one of those houses where I never saw the front because the back door opened on to the farmyard and it was the access used by everyone. When you went in the back door you found yourself in the dairy. Cissie and her sister milked the cows by hand and brought the milk there for straining and putting into aluminium cans for distribution. Some of it was kept in large bowls and the cream was skimmed off from time to time and made into butter. I remember Cissie was always dressed the same in a navy wrap around apron with red flowers o it that covered all her clothes and cut off wellington boots on her feet. There was a strong smell of cows and sour milk which I can still remember.

When you went through the dairy and into the house the living area was a large kitchen with whitewashed walls and a flagstone floor, a big dining table and a black range which was always lit. A black and white collie dog slept in front of it. Visitors sat on kitchen chairs in a circle round the range. It was a Spartan room, devoid of decoration or comfort.

When we arrived at the house to do the business, Cissie was always delighted and came out to the car saying “Look who it is Joe, Mr and Mrs Bryce and wee Venie!”. She would invite us in and my Mother always refused saying we didn’t want to trouble them as they must be busy. However, Cissie always prevailed and we would end up sitting round that range drinking tea and chatting.

One evening when we were visiting, Cissie invited my Mother and I to come upstairs with her. She lit a brass paraffin lamp with a wick, because there was no electricity, and led us up quite a grand wide staircase. It was really exciting for me as a small child to head off into this unknown part of the house. We followed her in the flickering lamplight to a room which she opened with a large key. What we saw inside was just amazing – an Aladdin’s cave full of treasures. I can only remember the impression of stacks of wonderful items such as two very large blue and white Chinese vases that were taller than me, stacks of plates and glasses , piles of paintings and even kitchen equipment still in boxes. Cissie explained to my Mother that they were left to her by the last Mrs Fulton and she had no use for them. It was traditional then to give a visiting child a little present and she looked around and her eyes fell on the Royal Doulton bowl. Even then I thought it was lovely  – the pink colour and the picture of a castle really appealed to me. My Mother and Cissie went through the ritual “You don’t need to give her anything “ etc, but in the end, I came home clutching my Royal Doulton bowl.

This happened around 1950 when I was five years old. The bowl was kept by my Mother until I had a home of my own and for the past 45 years it has stayed with me. I pick it up from time to time and when I do, I’m right back in that house at Gortinlieve with Cissie Boyle wearing her navy apron and wellies, the smell of milk, the heat of the range , the flickering lamplight and the room full of treasures. I do not know what happened to Joe, Cissie and her sister and all the treasures she had, but I am very happy to have this lovely bowl in my possession and will pass it on to my daughter and grand daughter and tell them the story about the very different times I lived in as a child.

 

11th October 2016

 

 

 

The Papier-mâché Tiger

The Papier-mâché Tiger  presented by Brian Caul. 

My chosen object is this papier-mâché tiger created by a craftsman in Nepal. It holds tremendous symbolism for me which I’ll try to explain.

For six weeks during November and December 2000, two friends and I went on a trekking journey in the Annapurna mountains in Nepal, which my wife compared to going over Niagara Falls without a parachute. John and I had recently retired from our demanding jobs, his as a senior customs officer and mine as Director of Student Affairs at the University of Ulster. John and our third friend Sean, also a member of the Customs Service, were experienced hill climbers, and we thought that this was the perfect way to mark the ending of long careers and the new phase in our lives. We thought it was also apt to sponsor Malcolm Sargent Cancer Care for Children – my nephew aged 7 had died tragically from a respiratory disease and my family became aware of their great work during David’s many spells in the Royal Victoria Hospital. I have to say I was a bit naïve about my staying power. Although I was a former squash player and reasonably fit, my only relevant experience was walking on gentle hills in Donegal over the years, and a couple of training trips with my friends to the Mourne Mountains.

After a heart-stopping descent into Kathmandu, flying over Mount Everest, we spent the first couple of weeks edging our way up to 10,000 feet, staying overnight in Buddhist villages and living mainly off chicken and noodle soup and dal bhat, a very nourishing Nepali dish of lentils and rice. These were entrancing experiences, arriving at the end of an arduous day to see the colourful prayer flags of the villages fluttering in the breeze, and enjoying the warm-hearted hospitality of the local people. We were blessed by a Buddhist priest who lived in the mountains, in return for a small contribution to village funds. At the level of 10,000 feet, however, we were given a dose of practical reality. At a makeshift medical centre, a volunteer doctor gave us a briefing on altitude sickness and a packet of pills. The advice was blunt. If you develop severe headaches and dizziness and the pills have no effect, get the hell out of it as fast as you can. Probably my worst night was in a windowless breeze block hut before we tackled the Thorong La Pass at the top of the Annapurna trail. As I huddled in my sleeping bag in extremely low temperature, I seriously wondered if I was mentally deranged. Luck was very definitely on our side, however, as we made our way through the pass at 17,500 feet the next morning and had a brief celebratory rest and photo call. Soon after we started our descent, a blizzard started and the mountainside became an impassable white-out. We made it to a shelter on the lower slopes just in the nick of time.  Another immediate learning experience was to follow. It is just as difficult climbing down a mountainside as it is climbing up. My knees juddered as I continually had to wedge my feet sideways on and negotiate the inclines with my trekking poles. Throughout, of course, the views were magnificent, and the international company in the overnight centres was most convivial. When we eventually reached our base at Pokhara, I celebrated with a Buddhist head massage and expert scissors haircut. Leaping ahead, this, combined with my weight loss, had an unanticipated effect. Sandra didn’t recognize me when I arrived back at Belfast international airport.

But to get back to the object, why a papier-mâché tiger? Well, we spontaneously decided to celebrate our successful trek by spending part of our last week in the deep south of Nepal, in the Chitwan jungle. A young Nepali lad in his late twenties led us, and we again stayed overnight at village centres. Elephants and rhinoceri loped around clearings and there was abundant free-flying wildlife. However we did note cautiously that our guide explained that he was not permitted by law to carry any guns or sharp metal objects and his only means of defence, ours and his own, was a tall wooden pole. He really alarmed us by describing how one of his guide colleagues had been severely savaged by the claws of a sloth bear because he had inadvertently come too close to her cubs. The dense humidity under the broccoli canopy was in absolute contrast to the chilly pure air of the Annapurna trail. And it was very eerie, with deep silences, intermittently interrupted by the chittering of rhesus monkeys.  We saw the tracks of bears and had to follow instructions very carefully every time we veered around a corner in the rough track. Then, several hours into the trek, the guide whispered to us all to crouch down and signalled absolute quiet. He huddled beside us and pointed into the undergrowth, murmuring that a stalking of a deer by a tiger was taking place a few yards away. I stopped breathing, mesmerized. The silence seemed to last for half an hour. Then there was a loud swishing in the long grasses and the panicked whinnying of the terrified deer, followed by another dreadful silence. Our guide whispered that the meat would be left there by the tiger to be consumed later by the family. We were nonplussed about what to do next – and the arms of the guide told us with their downward sweep. Stay low. Again the silence was long and tense bordering on unendurable. Then, just twenty yards down the track, the long grasses parted and a magnificent Bengal tiger bounded across. Its colours were even more glorious than this model and its sinewy strength and long stride were awe-inspiring. For a good twenty minutes, we lay prone, not moving an inch, until our guide signalled that it was safe to move on. I was shaking with a sort of frightened delight.

That night, we stayed in little wooden cabins, and were up at dawn to follow the procession of a group of Buddhist villagers and listen to their morning prayers and rituals. I still can visualize vividly our last farewell from Chitwan when we crossed the crocodile-laden waters of the misty boundary river in a dugout canoe.

The whole six weeks had become a deeply spiritual experience. Totally free of alcohol and even chocolate (which is not good for the blood at great heights), we had spent every day absorbing the wonderful scenery of the mountains and valleys and feeling very vividly alive.

On 24^th January, 2009, my dear friend John was killed alongside his brother by an avalanche near Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands, during an expedition which was an annual customs service event to celebrate Burns night. I have still not quite recovered from this shock and loss, but am a little consoled that, next to his love of his family, John was doing what he loved best in life.

So my little model tiger means all of this to me: the work of the Malcolm Sargent  Fund; the warmth, hospitality and resolute survival skills of Buddhist villagers; the true wonders of nature; the bonds of close friendship; and the importance of drawing on great memories to sustain you when times become hard and difficult.

11th October 2016