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| James
Nash, the Waterford hedge schoolmaster has long been regarded as one of
the greatest of that profession. The Hedge Schools date back to
the time of the Cromwellian Settlements but they flourished from the
beginning of the 18th century when the English laws against Catholic
education in Ireland made teaching an extremely dangerous
profession. The law forbade schoolmasters to teach so they,
perforce, had to teach in secret and, because it was also an offence to
harbour a schoolteacher the latter had to resort to the hills and the
remotest parts of the terrain. The 'school' was a sunny side of a
hedge or a bank of earth and, with one pupil stationed as a look-out (to
give a warning of the coming of soldiers), the schoolmaster sat on a
rock teaching his young pupils who lay on the grass round him. The
schoolmaster depended on the generosity of the people of the locality
where he taught (he moved from place to place) and sometimes he worked
on the farm to supplement his meagre income. Later, when the laws
were relaxed, slightly, the schoolmaster taught in a barn or shed.
The standard of teaching in those schools was of a high order,
generally, and the reputation of the Munster hedge schools was very
high. The curriculum included reading, writing, arithmetic and,
depending on the teacher's qualifications, book-keeping, navigation,
geography, history, Latin and, sometimes, Greek.
Nash was a
constitutionalist in politics and, although he was a great friend of
Meagher, he was dispproving of Meagher's ideas on the use of force to
gain Ireland's freedom. Meagher described Nash thus:
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The
schoolmaster was full of humour, full of poetry, full of gentleness and
goodness; he was a patriot from the heart, and an orator by
nature. Uncultivated, luxuriant, wild, his imagination produced in
profusion, the strangest metaphors, running riot in tropes, allegories,
analogies and visions. Of ancient history and books of ancient
fable he had read much, but digested little. He was a Shiel in the
rough. Less pretentious than Phillips, he was equally fruitful in
imagery and diction, and more condensed in expression. |
Nash knew Greek,
evidently, for his utterances are peppered with Greek allusions. In
one of his political speeches he said
Let
them come on, let them come on; let them draw the sword; and
then woe to
the conquered! - every potato field shall be a Marathon,
and every boreen a
Thermopylae.
Nash once said to
Meagher (tongue in cheek, no doubt): "My school is below there, and
I flog the boys every morning all round, to teach them to be
Spartans." P.J.Dowling, in his
book The Hedge Schools of Ireland remarked that "The
extent of the punishment which the gentle old Nash would
administer is not actually known, but ... he would evidently take no
excuse for neglect of study." Dowling described Nash as being
"gifted but eccentric, patriotic but opposed to extreme measures in
politics" and Thomas Francis Meagher wrote, on the death of the old
schoolmaster
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Like all the
poor, honest, gifted men - the rude bright chivalry of the towns and
fields - who thought infinitely more of their country than of themselves
- he died in utter poverty, companionless, and nameless. |
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