David Hennessy spoke to London- Irish artist Bernard Canavan and the other people involved in a new documentary about his life that began with being taken away from his birth parents, spending time in an orphanage and being fortunate enough to be adopted into a loving family. His latest series of paintings, Theocracy, deals with the emigrant experience and also Ireland’s shameful past with the vice- like grip the Catholic church had on Irish society.
A new documentary will tell the story of the life of London- Irish artist, Bernard Canavan.
Bernard was taken from his biological mother and father immediately after he was born and dumped into Saint Patrick’s Guild, an Orphanage in Dublin, run by the Sisters of Charity.
It didn’t matter that his pregnant mother and her boyfriend had decided to marry. He was still a child born out of wedlock.
Neglected there for three and a half years, Bernard was rescued when a 47- year- old woman then chose to raise him as her only son.
In fact it was more of a purchase as adoption did not exist at the time.
With that nurturing, Bernard would learn to read, develop a talent for artistry and eventually win scholarships and build a reputation as an artist.
But it could have all been very different.
He says Mrs Canavan saved his life as he was not going to survive in that orphanage.
Bernard has since discovered the truth about his birth family.
These issues feature in Bernard’s first ever series of paintings to be exhibited in Dublin, Theocracy.
Theocracy deals with the vice- like grip the Catholic Church held Irish society in for so long.
They reflect his own story but also seek to speak for all of the thousands of voiceless victims who suffered abuse at the hands of Ireland’s Catholic Church.
Film director Sé Merry Doyle has been delving into the life of the artist to make a documentary also called Theocracy.
Sé has already filmed several sequences with Bernard in London and produced a pilot of this material to illustrate the power of Bernard’s life story which was recently screened at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith.
Some people in attendance found this screening so moving that they offered financial support, this allowed Sé to take Bernard back to Ireland.
Sé took Bernard back to his home place, Edgeworthstown in Co. Longford.
Bernard also returned to the site of St Patrick’s Guild, the orphanage where Bernard spent the early years of his life.
However, more funds are needed to complete the film. To raise funds there is going to be an auction of paintings, including one of Bernard’s own, that have been kindly donated by their owners to raise funds for the Theocracy campaign.
The Irish World met with Bernard Canavan recently at The Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith.
Bernard told The Irish World: “My early years, my first four years were in this orphanage.
“They (my parents) were just too young, a young couple.
“Not terribly well educated, no money.
“He just met this girl and they struck it off.
“Eventually they had everything set up for a wedding.
“The two families were in agreement.
“But of course when you’re only 18 you want to experience all the great things that you’re going to experience and maybe do it a bit before the time, and the next thing was I appeared.
“And then all of the bottom fell out of the whole world and the two sides began to argue.
“They said it was her fault.
“She was a very good looking girl, she later became a model.
“I knew nothing about her because I didn’t discover any of this until I was 60 because when you’re taken in by somebody, you don’t say anything.
“You wouldn’t say, ‘I want to know who I am’, because they make you who you are in a sense.
“You’re part of their lives now so that was a big problem.”
As he says, Bernard was fortunate enough to be rescued from the orphanage by a loving family.
“It’s extreme luck.
“I moved from an orphanage in Dublin where I was clearly on the way out.
“They wouldn’t be able to sell me abroad because my head looked like an apple on a gate post.
“I looked very ill.
“I was very ill because malnutrition was running wild.
“One writer said that they fed the cattle better than they fed the children.
“The new state that was formed by the ‘37 constitution had God and man squeezed together and the Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid and de Valera had fused this into a single thing.
“There was no place for children.
“They weren’t interested in children.
“I don’t know anything about my very early life but they were having sex with children and these were men with outlandish suits and strange hats and people believed they were conducting miracles.
“Mothers wanted their sons to go and become a priest because that way you had a sure way, a stairway straight up to heaven.
“They were abusing children that they were supposed to be paving the way to heaven for.
“She (Mrs Canavan) didn’t really have much grá for the Ireland of de Valera and McQuaid.
“My pictures are essentially secular pictures about what happens when you believe in something so outrageous and so impossible.
“I mean, what kind of a man was God, the Father that he would send down his Son to be crucified in the most terrible way possible because he wasn’t happy with what happened in the Garden of Eden.
“I mean this is nonsense, absurd.
“A lot of my paintings, a lot of my passions, are in Theocracy.”
Life as an adopted child in Ireland of that time was tough.
This was particularly true in a small town like Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford where Bernard lived with his new family.
“Everybody in the town realised I was an outsider.
“People didn’t know much about adoption, and they couldn’t stop having babies themselves because Archbishop McQuaid and de Valera had forbidden contraception or any form of birth control coming in so they didn’t know where I was coming from.
“And they were slightly sneering.
“What was more extraordinary was they used to say to my mother in the shop, ‘where did you get him out of?’ referring to me.
“And she would say, ‘I found him under a cabbage head’.
“She had a good sense of humour.
“Mrs. Canavan was an outsider.
“She was an Irish woman born in South America and that’s why she took me in, because she wasn’t subject to the same kind of prejudice the Catholic Church instilled in everybody.
“They said sex was dirty even though the priests were gasping for sex themselves and in the confession were asking girls all kinds of things that really they had no business asking them.
“So Mrs Canavan taught me to read.
“I had come out of this so called orphanage and I couldn’t read.
“I didn’t know my ABC.
“I didn’t know any nursery rhymes.
“Even more extraordinary I didn’t know any prayers even though I was with nuns all the time.
“I spent 10 years with this woman and, in a way, I became Mrs. Canavan.
“I got an interest in literature as well as drawing.
“It was the drawings that everybody in Edgeworthstown was very interested in.”
His adoptive mother instilled a passion for learning in Bernard.
“You have to be driven. I didn’t know who I was.
“I was there (the orphanage) for three and a half years and then this very tall woman and her husband arrived and said, ‘Would you like to come out to Bray?’
“We went to Bray, to the seaside: Ice cream and all the other things that, as a small child, I was learning for the first time.
“I came to live with her, live with both of them in 1948.”
Although he was born Power, Bernard would take on the name of Canavan.
“She said, ‘Wouldn’t it make more sense?’
“I said, ‘I was (Canavan)’.
“She said, ‘That’s my boy’ and also, I didn’t want to have to be bothered with all the business of trying to tell this story that I’m now telling you because when you’re young, what does adoption mean?
“What does it mean not to be the person with whom you are with, the family?
“I had to learn what it was to be a son.
“And Mrs Canavan had to learn what it was to be a mother.
“She wasn’t very impressed by me when she got me home because I knew nothing and also I wet the bed all the time because the children were never taught to even control their body functions.
“They would just throw the mattress out in the morning.
“The nuns were very, very aloof and very serious people who were interested in sin and God, and they reckoned that they had a direct line up to heaven and all the rest of it.
“Mrs. Canavan had lived a very interesting life and she had gone to a very good convent school in the middle of Ireland, Moate.
“The interesting thing about Moate was there was two dioceses that joined one another in this little village and one side of the road was a fee paying school which did a very good job of teaching English literature and the other side was a mother and baby place where the girls were kept in there, beaten by the nuns and their children taken from them and sold abroad, sold to America.
“So when she was a young woman, she learned about this, she got some appreciation.
“I think maybe that’s why she took me in.
“I was on death’s door.
“I couldn’t be adopted at all.
“There was no adoption.
“She simply wrote Canavan at the end of my birth cert.
“My birth cert was a load of fiction anyway which my (birth) mother had thought that she might be able to get the story going that she was really married.
“She wasn’t married.
“They split up.
“Her boyfriend was paying for me.
“He was very unusual in that he didn’t do what an awful lot of young men did and that was deny all knowledge of it and went off to England quietly, everything was dropped.
“I didn’t make connections with any of these people until I was 60 and then I found my family in America.
“I didn’t make connections with the family, I didn’t know who I was.
“I didn’t know anything about my story.
“Mrs. Canavan didn’t know who I was and at times I would get on her nerves and she would think, ‘Who is this child altogether?’
“And of course there was prejudice in Ireland against tinkers or travellers and she said, ‘Maybe it’s a traveller’s child’.
“But they were very important.
“I mean, they made me the kind of person I am.”
Bernard Canavan left Ireland as a young teenager to live in the Cotswolds.
He worked in a sawmill. It was his first taste of life as an Irish emigrant.
He earned himself a scholarship at Ruskin College in Oxford later studying politics, philosophy and economics at Worcester College.
He returned to Ireland briefly in the 1960s but would return to the UK and this time to London where he has remained ever since.
He got freelance artistic work for a variety of underground papers and magazines producing illustrations, cartoon strips and political satire for the likes of OZ, Peach News and International Times.
He later went on to establish himself as the great painter of the Irish diaspora.
His collections of paintings of Irish immigrants have been exhibited all over Ireland and the UK and are considered a to be a vital record of the Irish immigrant’s story of the 1950s and 60s.
“Eventually there was huge emigration from Ireland.
“1000s and 1000s of people were getting the boat.
“They were getting the Princess Maud, the cattle boat.
“The cattle were on the top deck and we were on the bottom deck.
“We had never been out of the country before.”
Later in life Bernard finally traced his birth mother.
His biological mother, Helen Power, became a model in London in the 1950s. Her picture was all over the newspapers, magazines and the tube in the city he called home for most of his life. She had passed away before Bernard got to meet her but Bernard managed to visit her grave and meet his half-sisters.
“I wanted to know my medical history because doctors asked you, ‘You’ve got something wrong with you, have any of your family ever had the same thing?’
“And you have to say, ‘I don’t know. I’m adopted’.
“When I found my family in America, I went to see them.
“My parents were both dead.
“My mother was killed in a car crash in America.
“We’ve left a few stepsisters.
“Unfortunately when you reconnect after a long time separation, you are never going to get the years back.”
It is only in recent years that Bernard’s work has received the plaudits it deserves including the acknowledgement of President Michael D Higgins.
“I was coming out of Kilburn tube station and my phone rang.
“I said, ‘Hello’. And they said, ‘This is the Irish Ambassador. The President wants to give you an award and we want to know if you will accept it?’
“I said, ‘Of course I’ll accept it’.
“I’m very grateful to him.
“De Valera and many other politicians didn’t give a damn about the people that left the island.
“De Valera never came to a centre.
“He went to the archbishops. He never came to talk to the people who on whose money, 10% of the Irish economy depended upon, us and postal orders.”
The rough cut of Theocracy will screen at 2pm at The Irish Cultural Centre this Sunday 25 May. There will also be a fundraising auction.
To make a financial contribution towards the completion of the film Theocracy please use the following bank details… PAY Loopline Film T/A Merry Edits Bank of Ireland Lower Baggot Street Dublin IBAN IE66 BOFI 9014 9071 9922 11 BIC BOFIIE2D
