Billy Patterson.chats with Nellie Gallagher, cook and friend of Henry McIlhenny, Glenveagh Castle. 2001
BP: This week I’m warming my toes at the fireside of Nellie Gallagher of Gartan who played an integral part in the life of the owner of Glenveagh Castle, Henry Mcilhenny. Thanks for agreeing to chat to meNellie. Now, when and where were you born?
NG: I was born in Dunlewey a long time ago – in 1929 – I went to school there and lived there until I was sixteen.
BP: We’ll stay in Dunlewey for the moment Nellie. Tell me about your parents.
NG: Well, my father’s name was Brian Gallagher, I didn’t change my name when I got married, (laughs) and my mother’s name was Margaret, and there were seven children in my family, five boys and two girls. I was the second child, and my younger sister died when she was two and a half, with whooping cough, so I was the only girl then in the family.
BP: What did your father work at Nellie?
NG: My father worked for the Donegal County Council and for the Forestry Department. My mother was Margaret McGeady, a Dunlewey woman. She was a housewife, but we used to make tweed like all the houses in the area at the time just to make a living. We had sheep so we cut the wool from the sheep, and dyed it, then you teazed it and you had a spinning wheel so you spun it and then sent it to the weaver to make the yarn and you made the tweed from that.
BP: Did you learn to use the spinning wheel.3
NG: Oh indeed we did, when we were young. All the young girls had to do it.
BP: Was it difficult to learn how to spin.
NG: To start from scratch, y’know, would we difficult, but when you grew up with it, it was no big deal.
BP: And that was to supplement the income Nellie. There wasn’t a lot of spare cash around. What were your schooldays like?
NG: Schooldays to me were very pleasant. I always like school. At that time there were very few people going on to secondary education because we didn’t have the school, especially in a place like Dunlewey The nearest English school to us would have been Letterkenny. Unless you could afford to go, there were very few scholarships.
BP: Do you remember your teachers?
NG: I remember my teachers. Both of them were McBrides, but they weren’t marriedto each other , just Mr. and Mrs. McBride, married to other people. There would have been about thirty in my class and maybe over a hundred in the whole school with only two teachers.
BP: Did you do the old ‘barefoot to school in the summer’ bit?4
NG: We did indeed. We were delighted when we could take off our shows going to school. Even though we left for school with the shoes on, we carried them in our hands on good days. There were no luxuries but we were never hungry. Everybody had enough to eat, and enough clothes to wear and we were quite happy with our lives.
BP: Did you go to dances in your young days
NG: We did. We had a hall in Dunlewey, still there but not used now, and that’s where we went from the time we were about fifteen I suppose.
BP: So that’s where you went to eye up all the talent.
NG: (laughs) For sure. They young people came from all over the place yeah. There wasn’t many cars in those days. People came on bicycles.
BP: That country around Dunlewy is very up and down, a tough ride on a bicycle.
NG: People were just used to it, and probably healthier than they are now.
BP: Aye, that stands to reason. If you spend your life sittin’ on your5 backside pushing a pedal in a car, it isn’t going to make you healthy.
NG: (laughs) That’s for sure.
BP: What age were you when you left school?
NG: I left school when I was about fourteen and a half and got a job in the castle when I was fifteen. It was my first and only job.
BP: We’re talking here about Glenveagh Castle a magnificient place on the shore of Lough Veagh. So what job were you given?
NG: I wanted to do dress designing and was planning to go to Dublin to do designing, but heard that they wanted a girl to work in the kitchen at the castle. I came there in May 1946, the first year Mr. McIlhenny came back after the war. He hadn’t been there since 1939. He had bought it in 1937 but had rented it for a few years before that from Mrs. Porter. Mr. Porter was lost, or he went missing on Inishbofin islanad in 1933.
BP: Was there anything ‘funny’ about that disappearance?
NG: I really don’t know. It might have been an accident, but people think otherwise. We can’t be sure. Some of the local people say he paid a boatman to take him off the island, but that might only be a rumour. But Mr. Porter went missing and his body was never found. So Mr. McIlhenny6 was a pupil of his at Harvard University, so he came as a guest of Mrs. Porters in 1934, he and his mother, and then as I said, rented the castle for a few years and bought it in 1937. But then the war broke out in 1939 and he had to back to America, to Philadelphia, and came back in 1946 the year I arrived in Glenveagh.
BP: So the dressmaking careet went by the by. (Nellie laughs) So what was it like working in the kitchen in the castle.?
NG: Well we had a big indoor staff, The housekeeper Mrs. Whiteside was from near Antrim town, and her husband was the butler. They had worked in Antrim Castle for Lord Massereene before they came to Glenveagh to work for Mrs. Porter. And they were well used to going to houses in London and houses in Scotland and other big houses they worked in . So it was just like ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ (laughs). She was the cook / housekeeper, so I came to assist her in the kitchen which was good as I always liked cooking as well. The kitchen was more modern than Victorian y’know. It was stone floors, solid fuel, a big range, we didn’t have any gas or electricity, so we had to light the fire very early in the morning to get the breakfast going. That was my job. We usually got up at about a quarter past six because the housekeeper and the butler had to have their early morning tea in their bedrom at seven o’clock, and that had to be taken upstairs to them. Then we had the staff breakfast at eight o’clock and the guests breakfasts were usually at nine.
BP: How many staff are we talking about?
NG: About ten indoor staff – cook, housekeeper, butler, a few chamber maids, house boys, hall boys, kitchen help, and the chauffeur. And that was a sit-down meal. Then we fed the house guests, maybe sixteen or eighteen people if the house was full. They would give their order the night before. Usually the ladies stayed in bed for breakfast on trays at whatever time they wanted, and the men came down to the dining room at 9.am. They would discuss whatever was going to happen during the day, fishing, driving or stalking or whatever.. Lunch was at one fifteen.
BP: Where did these guests come from?
NG: They came from all over the world. The men came mainly to stalk the deer, which was from August to October. Mr. Mcilhenny usually came in May and stayed till October when he returned to Philadelphia. . But during that time here, he would go to the Chelsea Flower Show in London every year. He went to Montecatini in Italy, the health place: he might go to the Greek Islands. He didn’t stay the full time at Glenveagh, only about sixteen weeks total every year. And then while he was at Glenveagh, he entertained his friends lavishly. That’s where I learned my cooking, from Mrs. Whiteside who was the cook at that time.
BP: Did he come down to the kitchen, Did you get to know him very well, did he know the staff, did the staff like him?
NG: We all liked him, yes. He was a very good employer and he was very easy to talk to. He liked everything done properly and he left that to the people who were in charge in the house. He didn’t give orders to everybody, just the Housekeeper or the Butler or whoever was giving the orders. He was very well liked in the locality as well, and I must say it was good employment for the Gartan, Churchill, Creeslough area. He had a lot of people employed and he paid them whatever the going rate was , which eveybody was very satisfied with. There’s about 30,000 acres inside the deer fence which is about 27 miles long . It’s mostly hills. There is very little arable land on the estate. I think there’s about 700 red deer inside the fence. I would say that he employed 40 to 45 people outside. He had stalking ghillies, and fishing ghillies, tradesmen and general workers.
BP: Had he a temper?
NG: Well, I must say Billy that I worked for Mr. McIlhenny from 1946 till 1983 when he left Glenveagh, and he and I never had a word in those 37 years, and that’s something to say. I can’t say how he was with others, but I never heard stories about a temper.
BP: I knew him, but I didn’t know him very well. . .
NG: . . . you certainly did. Nights you were out there dining and sometimes singing after it.
BP: The gardens were there before Henry bought the place weren’t they.
NG: Oh yes, the gardens were made by Mrs. Adair.
BP: This is ‘Cruel’ John Adair’s wife. The man who evicted his tenants and created a lot of misery in the area. But she was different.
NG; She was very well liked they say. After the war, Mr. McIlhenny got landscape gardeners, Jim Russell and Yannick Roper? and they planned the gardens in Mr. McIlhenny’s own style, and he brought plants from all over the world . He used to bring a lot from Tasmania and other places, and they seemed to grow there. They were well sheltered with a wall and native trees. I remember when the garden wall was built. There was n o wall around the garden in the beginning. He made several stone staircases up to the top of the hill.
BP: Did you live in the Castle?
NG: All the indoor staff stayed in the castle. Which was great because we had no transport problems, and you got all your food, everybody had a uniform, so it didn’t cost much to live.
BP: Did you have a room to yourself or did you share rooms?
NG: We shared rooms. I shared with a friend from Dunlewey. Her name was Mary O’Donnell, and a cousin of mine, Mary Ferry. It changed over the years with people coming and going. But we were like a big happy family. We worked long hours when Mr. McIlhenny was there – from early morning till ten or eleven at night.
BP: Any time off during the day?
NG: We’d always have a few hours off in the afternoon, when everybody went to rest for a few hours. When the work had to be done it was, but when Mr. McIlhenny went away for a few weeks everybody had lots of time off then. It balanced the good with the bád. There was no such thing as working forty hours a week, BP: Wasn’t it very lonely there for a young girl like yourself?
NG: Not really. We had our own fun there. I was always happy at Glenveagh, and still I am.
BP: Any what about boys and dances and things. Were they out?
NG: Oh no, no way. We went to local halls like Trentagh, Termon and Creeslough. But we couldn’t go out evey night in the week. We had to ask the housekeeper if we wanted to go to a dance. You couldn’t go every11 night in the week ‘cos first of all you’d be too tired to go every night on a bicycle. A young Greek movie actor, Theo Rabanis (?) came every year from the time he was 19 or 20, and every year after that he came and used to go to the local ceili dances with the staff, and even to the Devlin Hall in Letterkenny where it was waltzes and foxtrotts and those sort of dances. He became well known in the area. He loved the song Danny Boy and had to learn to sing it. The last year that we were in Hawaii in 1986, the year that Mr. McIlenny died, this man came for a week and he stayed for the month. Danny my husband was with us that year, and the man wanted to learn Danny Boy, so the two were playing and singing it every day, so we bought him the sheet music. Mr. McIlhenny loved that song, and it was played at his memorial service in Philadelphia.
BP: Now, Mrs. Whiteside was there for quite a long time and you were working under her.
NG: died in ’62. That’s right. She was there until 1961 and I took over then She
Before that in ’56 I went to America with Mr. McIlhenny in the winter time. I went for several years then as his cook.
BP: But surely he could have found a cook in Philadelphia without bring wee Nellie over?
NG: He could have found lots of cooks in Philadelphia, but my ambition was to go to America, and when he heard tale of that, he asked me if I12 would like to go to America and work for him. So I went in October and came back the following May. He had a lovely house in Philadelphia, in Rittenhouse Square, which was a big difference from Glenveagh, but he had a big staff there as well – seven of eight living in the house. It was nice for us all as we lived in, nice food, good standard ot living. We were near everything – living in the city centre – and I loved Philapelphia from the day I went to it.
BP: It was a big change for you . Do you know how Henry came by his wealth?
NG: Well, his great grandparents were from Milford. They were married in Ramelton. Then his great grandfather died when he was a young man and his widow and her son, Mr. McIlhenny’s grandfather moved to America to Georgia. It was his Grandfather who invented the gas meter, and that’s where the money came from.
BP: I thought it came from ‘McIlenny’s Tobasco Sauce’.
NG: That was another branch of the family, but the real money came from the gas meter. Then Mr. McIlhenny’s grandfather moved to Philadelphia and married into Society, and of course, money makes money. Mr. McIlhenny’s father then came back to Donegal about 1923 I think with Mr. McIlhenny’s sister and she graduated from college. She told me her father brought her to Ireland as he wanted her to see where her ancestors came from. I think that may have been one of the reasons Mr. McIlhenny came to Glenveagh. It was in Donegal as was Milford where his Great Grandfathe had come from.
BP: Now, you travelled a lot with Henry McIlhenny.
NG: I did. The first was Philadelphia in 1956 and I went every year except 1961 the year we got married
BP: Wait, houl’ on. (Nellie laughs) We’d better bring Danny into your story now. Where did you meet Danny? Was he in America?
NG: this . ..
No, I think I met him in Glenveagh. He was out fixing something
in the greenhouse – of course I knew his family for a long time before
BP: . . . Mmm mmmm – so you spotted this figure in the greenhouse in 1959.
NG: No, he spotted me. (laughs merrily) Anyway we got married in ’61.
BP: Aha, you’re cuttin’ that one short Nellie. For instance, what were you doing in the greenhouse in the first place? Hmm? Don’t answer that. For those of you who don’t know Nellie Gallagher, I can tell you that Danny Gallagher has an eye for a pretty girl. (Nellie laughs) Tell me about your family.
NG: We have four, three girls and one boy. They’re all up and away now Billy, so we’re like Darby and Joan, the folks who live on the hill. One of the girls is in Dublin, she’s married, another daughter lives in Glasgow and she made me a granny lately. We have one girl who is still in UCD and one boy who lives beside us. He built a house beside us. BP: Now, back to your travels . . .
NG: So after we got married we bought a house in Gartan, and I didn’t travel any then until ’77 when the children were reared, and the first place I went to then was Sydney in Australia. I think Sydney was the nicest place I have been to. Loved Sydney – we had a very nice house there. We were there for a month. I was cooking for him and his guests but he would get local help in the house everywhere we went; My brother Paddy went with me – he was Mr. McIlhenny’s butler. We went in the month of February and after a month there we went to Tahiti for a week. We stayed in a hotel, no cooking, that was a holiday. From that then we went to Los Angeles for a few days and then back to Philadelphia and back to Ireland. I was away about seven weeks that year, my first year since 1961. Then every year after that until ’86 he rented a house in Hawaii and I went with him to Hawaii. So I did quite a bit of travelling.
BP: So, did you have to learn lots of different dishes for these trips.15
NG: He had his own likes and dislikes. But you get the same food all over, everywhere you went in the world. We went to Austria as well, to the music festival in Saltzburg and I went there with him.
BP: So what did poor Danny think of this globe-trotting woman they saw occasionally.
NG: (laughs) My youngest girl went to Hawaii with me twice, once when she was eight and again when she was fourteen. And they went to Austria with me as well. He paid for everything. But of course they all worked, helping out in whatever house we were in, washed, ironed, made beds .
BP: Nellie, you probably knew Henry McIlhenny as well if not better than anybody else
NG: I did.
BP: Such men create controversy, interest, jealousy, so if I was a newspaper man and came to you offering you £50,000 for the full story, the facts, the gossip about Henry McIlhenny and his life, would you be tempted?
NG: No I wouldn’t. I don’t give interviews to anybody, (laughs) except16 you Billy. I have been approached by people. The first few years after the Board of Works took over Glenveagh, there were newspapers and others, all looking for the inside story, so I don’t really talk to anybody. BP: That’s the way it should be. You were in a position of trust, and because the man is dead is no reason to satisfy the curiosity of others. Well, Henry died there in 1986. He went in for a small operation in Philadelphia before going on a holiday with friends and something went wrong and he died on the operating table. You continue to work at Glenveagh because you’re running the tearooms for the Board of Works.
NG: I must say I enjoy it. I really enjoy working there now because there’s so many people coming in every day. We had over a hundred a day last year in 2000, last year. And Kieran O’Keefe who runs the place now is doing a good job, and it’s still good employment for local people.
BP: You’re still enjoying life Nellie, you’ve had a very good life
NG: I really have no complaints
BP: If this was Desert Island Discs I would ask you a few questions like would you be happy with your own company.
NG: Happy enough but I do like company.17
BP: Do you like to read and what books would you like to read over and over if you were stuck on a desert island for years.
NG: I’l like to have Robinson Crusoe to pick up a few tips on surviving, and one to keep me going would be Gone with the Wind.
BP: And a luxury?
NG: I like knitting and crocheting so plenty of wool and needles please.
BP: What music do you like?
NG: Well, one of Mr. McIlhenny’s favourite songs and one of mine as well is The Old House, sung by the Pattersons, if you ever heard of them (laughs) Songs like Amazing Grace, Danny Boy, for obvious reasons, The Hills of Donegal, Ave Maria, and of course Daniel’s Our House is a Home.
BP: you would change?
Now Nellie, if you had to do it all over again, are there any parts
NG: I’m quite happy with the way things went. I enjoyed my life amd with some luck I’ll enjoy it for a few years yet.
BP: I have no doubt you will. Nellie Gallagher, thank you very much.
NG: OK. Thank you Billy.