Valentine Vousden - "whom all old Dubliners will remember"
Valentine Vousden was one of Ireland's most well-known and best loved public entertainers. His career went up and down in roller-coaster style. He enjoyed tremendous popularity in his lifetime.
He was a singer, song-writer, actor, story-teller, comedian, mimic, ventriloquist, variety artist and occasional commercial traveller, perfoming in vaudeville and music halls throughout the land, and in England, New Zealand and the United States.
The Irish entertainer of Carlow, William McNevin, later adopted the stage name Val Vousden.
Valentine Vousden was born in 1819, and in 1844 he married Sarah Ann Hawthorn in the English Potteries (Stoke on Trent), Staffordshire. Both were of full age and both were resident at the time in Stanley, a small village some 5 miles from Stoke.
Valentine described himself as an "Artist", and gave his father's name and profession as Peter Vousden, Reporter. I believe this is the same Peter Vousden of The Morning Post who in Dublin in 1824 gave evidence in the trial of Daniel O'Connell, a leading Irish nationalist of the day, who was prosecuted (unsuccessfully) for inciting rebellion. [Dónal Ó Conaill (6 August 1775 - 15 May 1847; English: Daniel O'Connell), known as The Liberator, or The Emancipator.]
Sarah Ann was the daughter of Thomas Hawthorn, clock maker. The 1841 census has two Thomas Hawthorns living in Stoke who were clock makers, one at Slack Lane, Hanley, the other at Bleak Hill, Burslem. Living in the same house as the latter was Sarah Hawthorn, 20 years of age, an inn-keeper, and I think she is the future Mrs. Vousden.
We presume that Valentine was widowed and re-married, although we do not have details of either event, because between 1860 to 1872 Mary Ann Burgess was the mother of six of his children.
The International Genealogical Index on the LDS Family Search web site has five Vousdens born to Valentine Vousden and Mary Ann Burgess between 1865 and 1872, all in Dublin: Arthur Burgess (21 September 1865), Elizabeth Esther (21 April 1867), Mary Emily Burgess (5 December 1868), Agnes Margaret (2 January 1872) and Peter (28 July 1874). This is the same Valentine and Mary Ann (née Burgess) Vousden whose child Mary Ann was born in Stourbridge, Worcestershire, England in 1860, when Valentine described himself as a commericial traveller.
Valentine was performing internationally by at least 1866, for on 1 January 1867 the New York Daily Tribune carried a notice of that evening's performance at the Clinton Hall and elsewhere on the same page was an enthusiastic review of the previous evening's entertainment.
We know that Valentine Vousden was in north Wales in 1874, probably passing through on his way back home, for the Anglesey Easter Quarter Sessions were blessed with his presence. On 28 January 1874 he was tried at Holyhead for "interfering with the comfort of a fellow passenger on the London & North Western Railway". He was summarily convicted and ordered to pay 10/- plus 13/6d costs forthwith or be imprisoned at the county gaol in Beaumaris for 7 days. We do not know what choice he made.
Valentine Vousden was perhaps most well-known for his song "The Irish Jaunting Car", written in the 1850s, shortly after Queen Victoria visited Ireland and apparently rode in a jaunting car, also at the time of the Crimea War (both events are noted in the song).
The jaunting car is the Irish form of the sprung cart, a light, horse-drawn, two-wheeled open vehicle with seats placed lengthwise, either face to face or back to back. It was a popular mode of transport in 19th Century Dublin.
The original words to the song are debated and disputed. It was a time when songs were perhaps more for singing than for writing down, and probably the words were varied from time to time. However, the following is one version (rather English-sounding):
My name is Larry Doolan, I'm a native of the soil,
If you want a day's diversion, I'll drive you out in
style,
My car is painted red and green, and on the
door a star,
And the pride of Dublin city is my
Irish jaunting car.
CHORUS:
Then if you want to hire me, step into Mickey Mar's,
And ask for Larry Doolan, and his Irish jaunting cars.
When Queen Victoria came to Ireland her health to revive,
She asked the Lord Lieutenant to take her out to ride,
She replied unto his greatness, before they travl'd far,
How delightful was the jogging of the Irish jaunting car.
I'm hired by drunken men, teetotalers, and my friends,
But a carman has so much to do, his duty never ends;
Night and day both wet and dry, I travel near and far,
And at night I count the earnings of my Irish jaunting
car.
Some say the Russian bear is tough, and I believe it's
true,
Though we beat them at the Alma and
Balaklava too,
But if our Connaught Rangers would
bring home the Russian Czar,
I would drive them
off to blazes in my Irish Jaunting Car.
Some say all wars are over, and I hope to God they are,
For you know full well they never were good for a Jaunting
Car,
But peace and plenty - may they reign here
both near and far,
Then we'll drive to feasts and
festivals in an Irish Jaunting car.
They say they are in want of men, the French and English
too,
And it's all about their commerce now they
don't know what to do;
But if they come to
Ireland, our jolly sons to mar,
I'll drive then to
the devil in my Irish jaunting car.
"The Irish Jaunting Car" made an appearance in the American Civil War in the 1860s in the form of a famous song. Harry Macarthy, an Ulster born entertainer who billed himself as "The Arkansas Comedian", wrote a set of rousing patriotic verses for the Confederacy and set them to the tune of Vousden's song. Macarthy entitled his version "The Bonnie Blue Flag" in reference to the first unofficial flag of the Confederacy. However, it may be more correct to say that both "The Bonnie Blue Flag" and the "Irish Jaunting Car" are to the same tune as both seem to use the well known air "The Jolly Beggerman".
Other songs and ballads in Valentine Vousden's repertoire, mostly written and composed by himself, include: Are we fairly represented [Irish peasant song of '65, begins: "In these fine days"]; Contentment of Mind [begins: "Oh! Contentment is all that I ask"]; Good bye to ye Kitty; I've been to visit Erin's Isle; The Little Flower [begins: "To me a little Flow'r".]; Sarah Bell; Enough for the Day; and Man Know Thyself.
The Irish author James Joyce in his final work, Finnegans Wake (1939), weaves Valentine Vousden into his idiosyncratic narrative with the words: "since the Levey who might have been Langley may have really been a redivivus of paganinism or a volunteer Vousden". [Or was this a reference to William McNevin who appeared as a priest under his pseudonym Valentine Vousden in the film Irish Destiny (1926), a historical drama / love story set against the backdrop of the War of Independence?]
In "Castle and court house; being reminiscences of 30 years in Ireland" (published 1911), the historian (also author of The History of Ulster from the Earliest Times to the Present Day) Ramsay Colles in Chapter XIV Public Entertainers, says:
The first public entertainer I had the good fortune to see was Valentine Vousden the ventriloquist and variety artist whom all old Dubliners will remember. Vousden used to sing a song about the Irish jaunting car, in the character of the driver. One verse of it ran something like the following:
Do ye want a car, yer honour?
Och, shure, here's
the wan for you:
A rale Irish jaunting-car.
And it's painted green and blue.
The rest of the song was devoted to the glories of being "rowled out to Sandymount", "to pick cockles on the strand," or driving to "the strawberry beds and back to town again."
Vousden went through one or two fortunes. The last time I saw him was in January, 1900, when on the invitation of the Guardians, I visited the North Dublin Union with Mr T. W. Russell, M.P. Vousden was an inmate, and a very cheerful one, and I was able to shake hands with a man who had delighted me when I was a child.
The North Dublin Union was the House of Industry, that is, the workhouse for Dublin north of the River Liffey. Built in 1772 and adapted in 1840, the main building has now been demolished (since 2003). It was open to "poor helpless men and women", "men who should be committed as vagabonds or sturdy beggars able or fit for labour", and "idle, strolling, and disorderly women as should be committed and found able or fit for labour".
But Valentine did not end his days in the workhouse. Somehow he managed to leave Dublin and make his way to England again, where on 31 October 1906 he died of odema of the lungs and old age. He died at Nazareth House, a Roman Catholic convent and orphanage in Wrestwood Road, Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex.
News of Valentine's death spread around the world, a reflection of his fame, with the New Zealand Times reporting his passing in its issue of 1 June 1907.
An artist to the end, his death certificate gives his occupation as "Artist (Actor)".
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