Tallanstown is probably one of the prettier villages I’ve come across in my travels around Ireland. In the town square, is a statue of a man, who I would guess very few people in that country know of; yet they owe so much to him for his selfless devotion to the education of Irish children in the late 19th Century and beyond. The sculpture in question faces the well preserved building that was Tallanstown National School, founded by Foster. The following is the story, much edited for space, of this remarkable individual.
l’oubli de soi-même
(forgetfullnes of the self–selflessness)
“He was courtesy and geniality themselves. Endowed with no inconsiderable fund of humour gifted with great natural intelligence, an excellent raconteur of the good things, garnered in a very wide experience of the world of men, he was indeed a charming companion. His contact with the world left him quite unspoiled, his genuine kindliness pervaded his whole character.”[1]
—friend of Vere Foster, on the occasion of his death
To look at the portrait of a middle-aged man with mutton chop whiskers and slightly downturned mouth, you would see nothing extraordinary to mark him out as one of the most generous benefactors of Irish education. Only when you look at his eyes and see in them a light of kindness transforming his face.
It wasn’t just education that Vere Foster gave most of his life and wealth to. Tens of thousands of Irish Americans today owe their comfortable lifestyle to the help he gave emigrants during and after the famine years. Generous to the point where, although born into a wealthy family and having all that wealth made available to him, he died penniless and obscure.
But let’s go back a bit—it’s interesting, you’ll find.
No fault attributes to the reader if the name of Vere Foster does not ring a bell. But perhaps the name Diana Spencer—Princess Diana—does? Before you get too excited, Princess Di and Vere are not related, except by an intriguing ménage à trois.
The story begins with two clergymen. The first was the Reverend Dr. Thomas Foster, rector of Dunleer who got married in 1743 to Dorothy Burgh, and had a son, John Thomas. In his twenties John developed an interest in politics and was elected representative for Dunleer, County Louth in 1776.
The other clergyman was Frederick Hervey, Bishop of Derry, a genial and generous man, who went a bit daft in his latter years, though no one held that against him. He married Elizabeth Davers and they had four sons and three daughters.
One of the girls, Elizabeth (Bess), was wooed by John Thomas Foster for two years until she eventually consented to marry him. They lived in the opulent family residence at Glyde Court, close to Tallanstown. Attractive and vivacious, Bess enjoyed a happy marriage at first; a year after they were wed, she gave birth to a baby boy, Frederick. But as time wore on John Thomas’s duties in the Irish Parliament took up more and more of his time and he began to spend longer periods away from home. One cannot help but wonder if it was entirely his duties to the good people of Dunleer that took up so much of his time, but that would be judgmental and unfair. There was also a rumor that John Thomas had a liaison with one of the house servants, allowing the namesake member of his anatomy to rule against his better judgement. Be that as it may, they lived relatively happily together for five years before Bess became increasingly restless and dissatisfied. She finally left the family home, but not before she was pregnant with their second son, Augustus. Bess then went to live with her mother in Surrey.
When they separated, her husband took custody of their two sons, and she never saw them until 14 years after John’s death.
Bess—who was Vere Foster’s grandmother, by the way—had all the while continued to live her own life, and while visiting Bath, met the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, William Cavendish and the former Lady Georgiana Spencer[2]. Bess developed a strong friendship with the Lady Georgiana, who introduced her to her husband and managed to secure her a position in the family as governess to the Duke’s illegitimate daughter. Unfortunately, the Duke also developed strong affections for the Lady Bess, which matured into a love affair.
It was in this manner that the three of them lived together, and indeed appeared together in society, for the next twenty-five years. On the unexpected death of Lady Georgiana, at the early age of forty-eight, Bess and the Duke got married.
Thus it was that Vere Foster’s grandmother became the Duchess of Devonshire.
***
Copenhagen, 26th April, 1819.
Albinia, wife of the British Minister to Denmark, Augustus Foster, had delivered a baby boy following a long and arduous labor. She and her husband had hoped for a daughter, having already given birth to two sons, Frederick and Cavendish, however, as they sat with the little bundle cradled in Albina’s arms, all was forgiven.
Thus, Vere Henry Louis was welcomed into the Foster family.
The little lad was given the name Vere, a traditional family name, and Louis after his godmother Louisa, wife of the British Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool.
When Vere was five years old, his father was appointed British Minister to the Court of Sardinia, and Turin became his home for the following sixteen years. However, at the age of eleven he was sent to Eton, where both his brothers were being educated. After finishing, following some private education in Turin, he then entered Christ Church, Oxford.
The family was extremely well connected, and this proved useful in obtaining Vere diplomatic positions after he finished college—finish being the correct term, as he never did graduate. Life was too full of good fun for this young and spoiled playboy to bend to the rigors of studying. He spent a couple of years in Brazil and then Uruguay with the diplomatic service, and in fairness, took his job very seriously, though the position was an unpaid one.
After his father’s passing, his elder brother, Frederick, with whom he had a very close relationship, gave up his work in the diplomatic service and left for Ireland, where the family had large estates in County Louth. He proved to be a beneficent landlord and tried to help those on his estates as best he could.
Frederick became acutely aware that the problem with the Irish peasants was lack of education, which was denied them, especially in the area of agriculture.
Meanwhile, Vere, who had been very close to his father, went into a deep depression after he died, and his diplomatic career began to crumble. Ultimately, he joined his brother in Ireland. During this time, they toured around the South and West of the country witnessing the appalling conditions, the hunger and disease afflicting the Irish peasants and farm workers. He developed the idea of getting his own farm in the West of Ireland “in the hope of making myself useful by falling in with any practicable scheme for giving increased employment to the people, and for providing against a recurrence of similar destitution in the future.”
In the years prior to the famine, education was denied to the Catholics, but with the introduction of the Act of Union in 1800, it became necessary to resolve this situation. The outcome was that, in 1831, education in Ireland was put in the hands of a multi-denominational commission (Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenters). The Commission of National Education was pledged to provide education on a national basis, acceptable to all religions. In fact, religious instruction was given to the different groups, outside normal school hours by clergymen of their own persuasion. Part of the commission’s responsibility was to provide agricultural education especially in the rural areas to help the tenant farmers improve their productivity. To this end, in 1837, a farm was procured in Glasnevin, a small village outside Dublin. This became one of the first Agricultural Colleges established in Ireland.
In 1849, Vere decided to join the college in Glasnevin prior to purchasing his farm in Connaught; he hoped to learn methods of farming there that he would pass on to other farmers in the area. He was 30 years old at the time and jumped into the new experience of farming with his usual vigor and enthusiasm.
Nothing much transpired regarding the farm, but after graduating the college in 1851, Vere began to devote his time and considerable personal fortune to the emigration of the Irish people. It was obvious to him that there was no future for them in Ireland, only poverty and starvation. He personally funded the tickets and expenses for a group of Irish women on board an American emigrant ship called the Washington. To observe the conditions that the emigrants were exposed to on emigration ships, he decided to travel on the voyage and was horrified at the dreadful conditions for passengers. They were treated brutally by the crew, and on arrival were further exploited by ruthless landlords.
This is not the place for discussing the horrors of Irish emigration, but suffice to say that the trip almost permanently damaged Vere’s health.
Over the next seven years, he managed to assist over 1,500 emigrants to leave for America and spent over £10,000 of his own fortune in doing so—a huge amount in those days.
After his brother died in 1858, Vere turned his attention to education. At the time, schools were in terrible disrepair, or non-existent, in rural areas, teachers were badly paid, and educational levels were dismal. Vere made an offer to pay for one-third the cost of any schools built in the County of Louth as may be necessary[3], and also to pay the entire cost of housing for the teachers. The schools would be vested in the Commission. The only stipulation was that “the buildings were to be the best specimens of what school-houses should be, with a yard and playground together with a teacher’s residence and garden.”
Vere estimated that there would be about twenty such schools needed. This was a huge request—and was refused by the Board of Commissioners.
Most of the opposition was from the Catholic Church who, realizing the importance of education as a weapon of control, did not want the Commission (on which Catholics were underrepresented) to have jurisdiction over the schools. Vere proposed building a school at Tallanstown. Once again the church objected.
In a letter to his brother, Cavendish, a clergyman in England, he reported that “the Catholic Primate had refused to consent that any Catholic priest should be manager of any new school to be vested in the Commissioners of National Education[4].” Again, his plan was rejected.
Not to be defeated, Vere set himself next to refurbishing the dilapidated schoolhouses in the poorest parts of the country—particularly in the South and West, those areas most affected during the famine. It must be noted that he totally supported the idea of the schools being vested in the Commission, the regulations governing them being very strict. His rationale for this was that if the clergy had jurisdiction over the schools, they could be used for proselytizing by whatever denomination ran them.
One aspect of education in particular was “penmanship”. The standard of writing was terrible, and in the poorer schools, the children were left to their own devices to copy a headline from the blackboard, if indeed they even had a blackboard.
Calling on what he’d observed in America, and consulting with a number of teachers, and indeed with the British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston[5], he produced his first copy books in 1865. Needless to say, he bore the entire cost of producing the books himself. Wisely, he had these books accepted by the Board before publishing. The books were sold to the teachers at one penny each, and the first batch of 50,000 quickly sold out. The design was just as careful as the content, which was a printed headline that the child had to copy. They were kept wide and short so the child could easily see the headline as he or she progressed down the page. There were 13 series altogether, beginning with “Strokes, Easy Letter and Short Words”. They progressed up to numbers 8 and 9. which contained sentences in the form of “proverbs”—which stuck in the minds of hundreds of thousands of users, including Vincent. Proverbs such as “The good is the enemy of the best”. The writing paper was very high quality, to enable high quality script. The cover was adorned with a truism that exists today: “A Nation’s Greatness Depends Upon the Education of its People”.
A great deal of thought had gone into the design of the books—such as instructions on the first three pages as to the art of calligraphy, tips on writing such as keeping a piece of paper under the hand to avoid smudging, advice as to nibs and so on—and Vere supplied ink and inkwells, pens and pencils. The books became so popular that they sold throughout the English-speaking world.
When the printing of the books was taken over by Marcus Ward and Co. in Belfast, Vere became very friendly with the brothers who were partners in the firm, in particular John Ward.
On event of the death of his mother in 1867, Vere decided to permanently move his base to Belfast.
The spectacular success of his writing book led him to produce a drawing book based on the same model. One, a book on horses, showed drawings of a Clydesdale, a dray horse, a mule, an American trotter, an Arab, a hunter and so on. The sales of the copy books brought in huge profits, all of which Vere ploughed right back into helping the education of children.
This kind and generous man, who helped countless Irish children get a decent education, who also assisted over 22,000 Irish people to emigrate to a better life in America, who was a constant supporter of the Royal Hospital in Belfast, died almost penniless[6] on December 21, 1900.
At the time of his death, he was staying in cheap attic lodgings at 115 Great Victoria Street, Belfast.
Many years earlier, his grandmother, Bess, the Duchess of Devonshire, wrote to her son Augustus:
“… a really true enthusiastic mind will never want an object for its enthusiasm: you may be an enthusiast in friendship, an enthusiast in love, in the forming of one’s character to the practice of ever virtue and the fulfilling of every duty: and enthusiasm is in fact what, well directed, leads to the attainment of every virtue, and enables the possessor of it to walk out of the common track of common characters who rest satisfied with doing what is required of them but never are equal to that most generous, most rare of all qualities l’oubli de soi-même; it leads also to a great indulgence for others, and a great severity to one’s self.”[7]
In writing this sound advice to her son, she in fact summed up the core character of her grandson, Vere Foster.
[1] McNeill. M. Vere Foster 1819-1900; an Irish Benefactor. Davis and Charles. Newton Abbot. 1971.
[2] If this topic is of interest, do watch the film “The Duchess” which recounts the saga of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire and the Lady Bess.
[3] The Commision paid the other two-thirds of the cost of the school buildings, but they didn’t make any provision for building a house for the teachers.
[4] McNeill. M. Vere Foster 1819-1900; an Irish Benefactor. Davis and Charles. Newton Abbot. 1971.
[5] Lord Palmerston was a great supporter of future diplomats being able to write well in particular and in general of children learning good handwriting in school.
[6] When he died, his assets were valued at £178 8s 6d. It is estimated that the money he laid out to help emigrants alone, amounted to over £55,000.
[7] McNeill. M. Vere Foster 1819-1900; an Irish Benefactor. Davis and Charles. Newton Abbot. 1971.