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The Remarkable Betty Scott
(Photo: James Fennell)
Vanishing Ireland
BETTY SCOTT
RATHVILLY, CO CARLOW
COOK AND ACTRESS
BORN NOVEMBER 1923
Betty Scott is standing at the gates of Lisnavagh House awaiting the return of ‘the young lad’. As the yellow bus screeches to a halt, she watches in dismay as this small, giggling mess of untucked shirts, biro-marked cheeks and irretrievably torn trousers clambers to the ground. It was only six hours ago that Betty washed and dressed him for school. She raises her eyes to heaven and says: ‘Lord bless us, what am I to do with you at all?’
A midwife brought Betty into this world in a small cottage in Ballybit on 17 November 1923. Her father William Scott was out breaking stones for Carlow County Council at the time. [i] He was one of thirteen children raised in that very same cottage by another William Scott and his wife. [ii] With a beard that flowed down to his waist, the senior William was an icon of Victorian Rathvilly. He helped build the houses along Phelan Row, carting the granite over the hills from Arklow.[iii] His wife dressed in colourful capes and bonny bonnets and died at a great age in 1936.
In 1921, 51-year-old William struck up a romance with pretty Elizabeth Abbey of Tobinstown. The youngest of seventeen children, she had been raised in the Convent in Tullow after the premature death of her father. There she learned enough household tricks to guarantee her work in the big houses of Russellstown Park and Duckett’s Grove before the Great War. During the War of Independence, she pedalled her bicycle around the county, delivering messengers on behalf of the IRA. Kevin Barry, the young Republican student executed by the British in 1920, was one of her neighbours.
On St. Valentine's Day 1922, William and Elizabeth married in Tullow and set off in a side-car to celebrate at The Fleece in Coolkenno. The Scotts broke with family tradition and produced just three children. Betty was the eldest, then came Nancy and finally ‘sweet little Billy’ in early 1930. Photographs of Nancy and Billy adorned the walls of Betty’s cottage but their story was a sad one. William caught pneumonia before he reached his teens. Nancy, an aspiring step-dancer, broke her back shortly after her 18th birthday. Both would have survived had it been today, says Betty.
'Come on outta that'.
It is probable that Betty never married simply because she felt so closely bound to her mother. She certainly took it seriously when a travelling gypsy counselled her that she would ‘never know happiness in marriage’. Betty sometimes wonders whether her life would have been better if she'd found herself a husband, a man who might even have been sitting over in the armchair puffing on his pipe as we spoke. But she didn't and that, as she said, was the long and the short of it. When Betty’s father died aged 81 in 1953, the bond between Betty and her mother tightened further still.
In 1937, Elizabeth Scott was employed as housekeeper at Lisnavagh. The new Lady Rathdonnell, matriarch of the house, was a liberally minded woman. She had lately purged the mansion of its dour and stuffy Protestant staff , replacing them with younger, fresher souls, Catholic and Protestant alike. Betty, at school in nearby Rathmore, helped her with the ironing twice a week.
On 4 March 1941, Betty started working full-time as a parlourmaid. The war was on and every morning the staff assembled to hear the butler read out the news, transcribed from BBC Radio bulletins.[iv] She was often entrusted with looking after the Rathdonnells children. A generation later, she was again on hand to help with the children, escorting them to and from the school bus, for instance. She worked at Lisnavagh for 64 years, becoming the principal cook in the 1960s.[v]
When not working in the big house, Betty enjoyed sport and drama. In 1948, she collected a clatter of camogie sticks from the Lisnavagh sawmills and distributed them amongst her Ballyhacket team-mates. Clad in white blouses, navy skirts and black stockings, the girls went on to win the Carlow County Final that same year and Betty has a 9-carat gold medal to prove it.
In 1960, Betty became an active member of Muintir na Tíre, the community development group set up by Canon Hayes in 1937. Rathvilly had a particularly strong community in those times, a fact which helped the small Carlow village win the National Tidy Town competition on three occasions. Betty’s focus was theatrical and she was one of the star players of the Rathvilly Drama Group. Indeed, she was voted Best Actress in Co Carlow for four years running and won a fifth prize in Dublin. ‘I didn’t have any lessons’, she says. ‘I just learned my lines and that was it’. [vi]
The Rathvilly Drama Group travelled the province of Leinster, performing their plays, night after night. ‘And the fighting!’ exclaims Betty of the behind-the-scenes antics. ‘Fecking auld ejats, you don’t know nothing, you went wrong, you can go to hell, you done no right’. She laughs heartily. ‘But of course I was the biggest devil of them all’.
One of her favourite roles was that of Maggy Butler, the elderly widow who leases Bull McCabe his four acres in John B Keane’s 1965 masterpiece, ‘The Field’.[vii] ‘We got a great few awards out of that play’, says Betty wistfully. ‘It was the talk of the country. D’you know, I wouldn’t mind going again’.[viii] She abruptly changes her persona. ‘Tis the field I came to see you about, sorr. My poor husband, God have mercy on him, said - sorr - that if I got into any trouble, I was to come to you’. Then, almost as suddenly, she metamorphoses into auctioneer Mick Flanagan. ‘Ah Maggy, you done right to come see me’.
‘I was carrying the stick when I played Maggy Butler’, says Betty. ‘But I’m carrying it for reality now’. In 2007, Betty’s legs seized up with a mystery aliment and she was rushed to hospital. Heavily sedated and on the very brink of death, amputation seemed almost certain. Through the haze she somehow managed to find a grip. ‘It was just a sudden moment’, she says. ‘And I thought come on Betty, don’t die like this, you know, don’t just die and not make a fight for it’. She attributes her subsequent remarkable recovery to a combination of ‘sheer determination on my own part’, and the careful attention of the staff of the Hillview Nursing Home where she now resides. ‘They have literally bought me back from the dead’, she says. ‘Sure I couldn’t even put a foot to the ground’.
When Betty walked into the main drawing room at the Hillview for the first time since her legs seized up, all those residents who could stand gave her an ovation and everyone else gave a resounding clap. She now walks a little more every day although her feet are still very tender.[ix] They keep her busy in the Hillview, painting, reading and playing bingo. Otherwise, ‘I’m just gabbling and giving out as usual’, she says. She misses her old life at Ballybit but, having lived alone for thirty years, she concedes that it’s good to have some company for a change.
FOOTNOTES
[i] This was not long after the establishment of the Irish Free State and only five years before Lord "Silver- Mugs" Rathdonnell inherited Lisnavagh. Her immediate mid-wife was one Mrs.McKenna, mother to Marina Somers and grandmother to all those wee Somers we were schooled with in Baltinglass.
[ii] The thirteen Scott children were reared in the same cottage but not at the same time. Betty’s father, the ninth child, was born in 1870, the same year his eldest brother Tom emigrated to work on the American railroads. In time, eight of Tom’s siblings would also move to the USA. None of them came home. It is extraordinary to think that Betty's uncle was one of those umpteen zillions who upped and left for the New World in the aftermath of the famine. It's rather like my late grandfather who, on hearing of Cordelia Crampton's first child, his great-great nephew, commented modestly that his great-uncle had fought at Waterloo. This is where one gets into the realm of asking oneself what life will be like on Planet Earth in 2170.The youngest of the Scots, Frank, died in 1949. Another was the mother of Rita Byrne, a great bingo pal of Bettys who I think is mother of Jim Dunne, Betty’s designated heir.
[iii] Betty has no recollections of her grandfather who died before she was born but by all accounts he was a genial old geezer with a full flowing white beard who lived to be seven hundred and eighty six. Both his cradle and his coffin lay in Rathvilly and, indeed, I am told that what is now Phelan Street (after the parish priest there in the 1930s) was formerly known as Scott's Row in honour of himself and his many siblings. The houses on Scots Row - which still stand - were built from rocks carted across by horses from Arklow.
[iv] ‘Old Mrs Drew was there then – the Woman in Black – a beautiful lady. None of the daughters took after her. She was lovely and lady-like and very gentle’.
[v] Betty says she adored the Rathdonnells. ‘They were so decent and good to me. She taught me how to read and write’. In October 1959, the young Lord Rathdonnell asked Betty to pack his bags as he was headed to hospital for a check up. He assured her that he would be returning in the morrow and she could unpack them again. ‘He came back alright and I unpacked his bags for him, but he came back in a coffin’. Betty always weeps when she tells this tale.
[vi] I was in Munitir na Tire which is still going I think in parts of Ireland. A priest started it and they were all over Ireland. There were these travelling groups going around. Rathvilly started it then. There was a drama group in Rathvilly going years back. I got involved in it. Never in a million years did I think I was going to get what – five Best Actress awards? From Carlow and one in Dublin.’ That said, she gives credit to Seamus O’Rourke of The Nationalist in Carlow who ‘gave a few tips’ along the way. ‘And you learned a bit from the adjudicators - what you should have done - so you’d know for next time’.
[vii] The Year of the Hiker was another play she enjoyed. ‘They were nearly all John B Keane’.
[viii] ‘Maggy Butler was the auld lady who owned the field. The Bull McCabe had taken it from her and she was trying to sell it. ‘Tis the field I came to see you about Sorr’, she said to the auctioneer. You know, that kind of thing. But she held out and sold the field to someone else. ‘My poor husband said Sorr that if I got into any trouble, I was to come to you’. And the auctioneer was nearly as big a swindler as the other lad was. ‘Ah Maggy, you done right, you done right’, you know! We got a great few awards out of that. It was the talk of the country. We had a great pull. Travelling all night and all day. We travelled everywhere’.
[ix] ‘There is no end to how good they’ve been. They have literally bought me back from the dead. Sure I couldn’t even put a foot to the ground’. She attributes her amazing recovery to ‘I suppose, sheer determination on my own part, number one, that when I come here and realised there was people a lot worse and that ‘come on Betty don’t die like this, you know, just die, not make a fight for it’. So I did. They can’t believe it here. I can walk all around now but I haven’t yet got the guts to put the feet to the ground. They’re still very sore, tender, very tender’.
Betty was still a regular feature of life at Lisnavagh until 2006. She was particularly well-know at ‘Shoot Lunches’ where her beef stew would warm the bones of the Lisnavagh Syndicate. She was never short of culinary tricks. If a plum pudding looked anemic, she’d add a dash of gravy browning. ‘It’s tasteless’, she says.
Mrs. Scott died on the 14th September 1977 shortly before her 91st birthday.
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