Nesca Robb Groundbreakers

Northern Ireland has produced more than its fair share of world

class writers and poets, Nobel laureates and academics.

They have enriched our culture, examined our history

and drawn inspiration from the landscape they grew up in.

But there's one woman, a highly regarded academic,

writer and poet, whose work helped lay

the foundations for the success of those who came after her.

She isn't a household name and her contribution to the arts

and culture of Northern Ireland has been almost completely forgotten.

Her name was Nesca Robb.

In a life that spanned the launching of the Titanic to the

outbreak of the Troubles,

she witnessed history in the making, and what she saw

made her what she described as that anomalous thing, an Ulsterwoman.

Nesca Robb grew up at Ballyhackamore House in east Belfast,

the second daughter of a prosperous and influential Belfast family.

Her father's business, J Robb & Co,

was a city landmark for over a century.

But as well as wealth and privilege, Nesca inherited a rich

streak of independence from her Scots Presbyterian ancestors.

Nesca Robb didn't court publicity or notoriety.

I think she often found herself out of step with the society

she grew up in.

And yet, she was a trailblazer, so why do we know so little about her?

My name's Lesley Riddoch, I'm a journalist and broadcaster,

and as you can hear from my accent, I'm Scottish.

But until the age of 13, I lived here in east Belfast,

a stone's throw away from where Nesca Robb grew up.

I knew nothing about her then, but I'm going to put that right.

I'm going to find out who she was, what she did

and why Nesca Robb is a woman worth remembering.

At the Public Records Office in Belfast,

local historian Billy McCullough has been researching the Robb

family and he's discovered

a treasure trove of long-forgotten photos of Nesca,

her unpublished autobiography and notebooks full of her poetry.

If I'm wanting to find out about Nesca Robb, I've got to start here.

Yes. Anything that I or anybody else knows about Nesca is

basically contained within these pages.

There's, I think, part of her autobiography, there's poems.

There's different aspects of her life in each of the sections.

The very last section of them that we looked at were the poetry books.

And when you started looking in here, you didn't expect, did you, to

find this kind of literary heritage, tucked away amongst all the annals?

No. I wouldn't have gotten anything out of them

that would have enhanced my history of the family,

but they cover a vast selection of subjects

and she did issue two poetry books at a later stage.

-You've got a right stack of photos. What else is here?

-Well...

Oh, there she is.

-She's a chubby wee lass.

-She is a chubby wee lass.

As she gets older, she never regarded herself as being a beauty.

-Never. This is her sister, Mabel.

-So there's quite an age gap there.

It's obviously her before the christening

at Castlereagh Presbyterian Church. That's obviously a posed picture.

Only the well-to-do or better class people could have afforded that.

So, this photo here is Nesca.

This is at the Ballyhackamore House, is it?

That is correct, yes, this particular photograph is the only

photograph that I have seen with Nesca's father.

The pony is called Robin and this is Nesca, I think, at maybe four,

five years of age.

Strandtown Primary, my old school.

100 years ago, Nesca Robb lived just down the road.

In fact, the connections between us are almost scary.

We grew up in the same part of town, walked the same streets,

went to a Presbyterian Church, had Scottish links,

went to the same university in England.

To me, this school hasn't changed one iota.

But to Nesca, the whole area would be completely unrecognisable.

Then, Ballyhackamore had only just been

incorporated into the city of Belfast.

And was home to many of its wealthy merchants and businessmen.

Nesca's family home no longer exists,

but I'd like to see where it was.

Well, I know Nesca's house was down here, number 44,

but actually, CS Lewis lived on this corner.

Well, this is Nesca's house, Ballyhackamore House, in 1910,

and I think it was here.

Just right there, where those houses are now.

Ballyhackamore House was more than bricks and mortar to Nesca.

It was the place where she was happier

than at any other time in her life.

Nesca was growing up at a time of enormous change.

Belfast was growing rapidly and from a very early age,

she was fascinated by life beyond the garden gate.

I love her description of the tram journey into Belfast, past rows of

precise, identical red brick houses and on across the Albert Bridge.

The way she writes about shipyard workers steaming

home from work like a river in space

and mill girls with black shawls folded nun-like

round their faces, filling the air with high-pitched talk and laughter.

She wrote of a winter evening

when the early dusk seemed to brim the streets like floodwater,

the lamp lighters like uncouth pantomime fairies,

with star-topped wands, touched lamps into blurs of gold,

suffusing the foggy air with fugitive melting blue.

And she describes how the city fed her imagination.

A vast kaleidoscope, filled with a shifting human pattern.

It made me irrevocably its child.

Time and again in her writing, Nesca returns to the subject of place,

of how she feels shaped by the city and the hills around Belfast.

And she lived through some of the most significant

events in its history.

Remembering the collective pride people

felt at the launching of the city's most famous ship, she writes,

"Half the town seemed to be there, packing the riverside,

"for Belfast took a proprietary interest in its ships

"and this was our masterpiece of design and skill,

"the largest liner in the world, the Titanic."

Years later, Nesca wondered if the fate that befell the Titanic was an

omen of things to come, of political unrest in Ireland and war in Europe.

In her memoirs, she recalls, "Those were unquiet days in Ireland.

"Whenever my elders got together, the talk was of the threatened

"Home Rule Bill and of ways and means of resisting it."

Nesca, in her memory of all of this, is very excited about the prospect.

What was the atmosphere like in Belfast at that time?

It certainly was a period of feverish excitement in Ireland.

It was THE topic of conversation at every meal.

It was something that dominated the newspaper headlines,

something that dominated the public discourse.

During the period of the third Home Rule crisis, we see mass rallies

being organised, demonstrations vehemently denouncing Home Rule.

With the organisation of the Ulster Volunteer Force in January 1913,

we have a sustained campaign against Home Rule.

What was the Robbs' take then on all of this?

Well, the Robbs, like many people from a similar background, were

vehemently opposed to the idea of a devolved parliament in Dublin.

They were concerned that the parliament would be ruled

over by the Catholic Church

and they were fearful for their own civil and religious liberties.

They were also fearful for the economic position of Ulster.

Ulster had become wealthy in the course of the 19th century,

Belfast in particular was growing at an astronomical rate.

It was very much a city that was trading with many

parts of the world.

And the Robbs were among that Presbyterian middle class

merchant class,

who had done extremely well in the course of the 19th century

and early 20th century

and they were fearful that this would be undermined by Home Rule.

Nesca talks about waking up one morning to discover her own

family have been involved in what appears to be gun running.

What was that all about?

Well, the Ulster Volunteer Force needed weapons.

The Ulster Unionist leadership arranged to have guns

brought from Germany and landed, particularly at Larne,

but also at Donaghadee and Bangor, in April 1914.

There is some debate as to just how much was brought in at that

time, but you see figures of 25,000 guns

and three million rounds of ammunition.

The guns are landed, from Larne and other distribution points,

they are taken out across the province of Ulster.

In a sense, the authorities turn a blind eye to it.

One of Nesca's cousins was a dispatch rider with the UVF

and her father provided support for his staff

when they helped unload the cargo of guns in April 1914.

For Nesca, as a young girl, I mean, she would have been just

on the eve of her ninth birthday at the time of the gun running.

And so it would have been a formative experience for her.

I mean, something that she was extremely

conscious of growing up in that household,

in which they were fearful of Home Rule,

they were concerned about what the implications it would have

had for their family and for their economic and social position.

And so it does leave a deep, deep impression on her

and it does help to shape her thinking of her

distinctiveness as an Ulsterwoman,

so distinctive from the rest of Ireland,

but even distinctive from the peoples across the British

Isles, that the people of Ulster are separate people.

But the threat of civil war

and Home Rule was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War.

Nesca recalls, "From an upstairs window in the warehouse,

"we were to watch the division's farewell parade through

"the centre of Belfast.

"Sir Edward himself was there to see them off.

"And I nearly toppled headlong in my eagerness to see and hear him."

As the world around her busied itself with the war effort,

Nesca entered Richmond Lodge School For Girls.

But having been educated by a governess till she was 10,

she found it hard to fit in.

She was teased for her lisp and for having the wrong kind of shoes.

"Sometimes," she says, "nobody would speak to me, at others,

"they would only speak in insults."

Nesca found solace in books.

And by her mid-teens, she'd begun writing poetry.

Her inspiration came from the landscape of the Castlereagh hills and the Ards Peninsula.

And she drew on the words and language of the people who lived there.

English lecturer Kathryn White has been studying Nesca's

poetry and where it fits into the Ulster Scots tradition.

When you look at Nesca and think about, sort of, her story,

erm, she was very influenced by her Presbyterian grandmother.

She describes herself as being Scots to the marrow.

And when you think even about her roots, her family,

her ancestors were from the clan of MacFarlane,

who came over, and round about the 1620s, settled in Bangor

before eventually moving to the Castlereagh Hills.

So, that influence was very much there.

Nesca writes in standard English and she writes in Ulster Scots.

Is there any kind of rationale for what she writes when?

Yes, and I think it's interesting that she sort of goes between,

actually, the two languages.

But she turns to Ulster Scots and to the language, I suppose, of her

grandmother and her ancestors, when she has something important to say.

You can see this in a poem like Wishin', where Nesca

writes of an old man longing for home.

"All that's worth learnin', I got as a lump of a waen,

"In the loanins an' boglands an' fields."

So, the idea that she uses Ulster Scots

when she's writing about important points or important

periods of her life,

says a lot about what she thought of the language.

And that she thought Ulster Scots could perhaps express

something that couldn't be expressed in standard English.

"That there's no good in wishin's a thing that we all hae to learn,

"And it's no kind o' job for a man for to yammer an' girn.

"But the whins'll be out in the loanin and scentin' the air,

"And the lark mad wi' singin' o'erhead

"And I wisht I was there."

She says herself in her early poems, which she

was writing when she was very young, that she was sort of

experimenting as well with this sense of

the regional and the local.

And she describes her early poetry as a private indulgence.

Nesca's writing and her academic ability hadn't gone unnoticed

at school, where she was encouraged

to take the entrance exam for Oxford.

This was a time when few girls went to university.

As she said herself, "If a girl passed senior intermediate, she was branded clever.

"If she wished to go further, she was apt to be regarded as a freak."

Nesca's family were very supportive of her plans.

But in 1922, her home life was torn apart, as first her sister,

and then her mother, fell ill.

I'm looking through Nesca's notes of 1922.

She never included these in her autobiography.

And they're very hard to make out,

scribbled almost in some great haste.

But I see in March, 1922,

she records the death of her mother after a long illness.

She says, "Of the events of that day, most have vanished.

"But a few are as clear as yesterday.

"My father weeping speechlessly while holding me in his arms."

The loss of her mother, from whom she had inherited her

love of literature, was a terrible blow to Nesca.

But worse was to come.

And here, in July, she recalls,

"Auntie Katie entered with a troubled face.

"'Nesca,' she said painfully, 'it's your father. He's gone.'"

Just four months after burying his wife,

Charles Robb died suddenly of a heart attack.

The two girls are alone, Mabel and Nesca.

They are in St Leonards-on-Sea, a resort on the south coast

of England, where Mabel is recuperating.

Nesca recalls that she went out for a walk

and was greeted on her return by the hotel manager.

He says, "I'm very sorry, Miss Robb, but your sister..."

There was no need for him to say more.

So, in nine short months,

the three most important people to Nesca have died.

What an incredible loss in one so young.

She was just 17 and now all on her own.

Little over a year later, Nesca left Belfast to study modern languages

at Somerville College, Oxford.

It's strange retracing Nesca's footsteps, how often her world

and mine cross over, first in Belfast and now in Oxford,

where I went to university too.

I've come here to meet college archivist Anne Manuel.

She's discovered that in the archives of another student,

Margaret Mann Phillips, there are dozens of letters

and photographs relating to Nesca.

She met Margaret Phillips in their Hilary term,

which is the second term of college.

And it was after that that I think she then started

to settle into Oxford and make some more friends.

There was a rather poignant story, actually,

of when she met Margaret Mann for the first time,

when they started to become really quite close,

and it obviously meant a lot to Margaret as well,

because she's written about it,

and she talks about before she really got to know Nesca, what her

impression was, that she was rather, erm...

aloof, I think, and separate,

and certainly that's what her contemporaries thought as well.

So she writes, "In common room and dining hall, they had seen

"each other and Margaret had once told another girl

"in their year that she was asking Nesca to come for a walk,

"at which the contemporary had replied, caustically,

"you might have a more congenial companion."

-Right.

-Which is a little bit rude!

-Yes.

"This remark showed the attitude of most of the year towards

"the silent Irish girl, whose reserve, awkward figure

"too mature for her years

"and suspected intellectual power kept the others away."

She was a dark horse,

so she must have felt very alone, I think, in a strange country,

a strange environment, and with people thinking

-that she was, somehow, a bit different.

-Yes.

But Margaret took to the standoffish Irish girl,

who confided in her about the loss of her family.

The floodgates opened, she wept and wept,

they comforted each other for quite a long time,

and from that point on, they were the best of friends

and I think, from there, Nesca felt she had somebody to talk to,

and share her feelings and thoughts and spirituality,

I think this was a very spiritual time

for both Margaret and for Nesca.

That really is striking,

because we know that she has had such a terrible time

before she came to Oxford,

with her mother, father, sister dying one after the other,

and she's... There's no evidence of that in a lot of her formal writing,

later, about her time in England,

but it seems like this is the moment that the dam burst.

Yes, absolutely. Yes.

So here are some photographs of her and her friend Margaret Mann.

It's marvellous, because, actually, this is the first time we've

-really seen Nesca as a kind of adult woman.

-Mm.

Up till now, all the pictures of her have been just as a child...

-As a child, yes.

-..and with all her contemporaries.

Through Margaret, Nesca made many more good friends at Somerville.

She's got quite a lot of photographs in here

of her first few months at Somerville,

and some of the friends that she made while she was here.

I think there was a lot of humour in Nesca Robb, actually,

and her friends obviously saw that, because a lot of these photographs,

her friends are making odd faces at the cameras or smiling or giggling.

This was obviously a lovely afternoon

that several of them had on the river in Oxford.

Throughout her time at Oxford, Nesca continued to write poetry,

and the archive contains her published works

and evidence of how it was received by the literary establishment.

We have, in the collection, a couple of letters, one from TS Eliot.

-Really?

-Yes, indeed.

TS Eliot writes to thank her for the book of poetry that she sent him.

"It has given me great pleasure and I am much pleased, also,

"to have your book of poems.

"I have appreciated the poem about George" -

not quite sure who George is - "but I should like to add

"that other of the poems of the book have given me pleasure."

She was also in correspondence with Walter de la Mare.

"They have been a great delight to me.

"If only I mention a few in particular -

"those on pages eight to 36 -

"it is not because many others have not been a joy to me,

"but because I should tire you with too long a list."

And he even says at the end, look, there,

"I wonder if you'd do me the kindness

"of putting my name in your book", so he'd like an inscription.

-So these are accolades from people that know about poetry.

-Yes.

That archive was fascinating.

So much information that sheds a light on Nesca's personality

so far from home.

One thing's certain, though - she must have left this college

a very different woman from the grieving lass that arrived.

At Somerville, Nesca found friendship and literary endorsement,

and her PhD on the Italian Renaissance

became essential reading for Italian scholars.

But like so many other women,

she couldn't get a full-time teaching job,

so, in 1938, Nesca left Oxford for London.

Within a year, Britain was at war with Germany,

and eager to play her part, Nesca joined

the Women's Employment Federation, where she specialised in identifying

and recruiting skilled women for the war effort.

Once again an eyewitness to history,

she wrote of her experiences during the Blitz.

Later published as An Ulsterwoman In England,

it was well received, and Nesca was invited to join

the prestigious Royal Society of Literature.

But the book was as much about her cherished Ulster identity

as it was about London,

so perhaps it's unsurprising that, in 1947, Nesca returned to Belfast.

I've come to Cregagh Glen on the outskirts of east Belfast,

land that once belonged to the Robb family.

The council put up this plaque

as part of the Cregagh Glen Heritage Trail.

It is the only visible clue to Nesca, her life and her work.

It's an acknowledgement of Nesca's importance

as a writer and academic,

and also of her contribution to the National Trust.

For when Nesca inherited this land, and Lisnabreeny House,

from her uncle in 1937, she did something unheard of at that time -

she donated it to the National Trust.

Lisnabreeny was one of the Trust's very first acquisitions here,

and one of its most important.

But it was the income it derived from renting out the land

at Lisnabreeny that kept the Trust afloat in its early years.

Without it, we might not have the stately homes

and Areas of Natural Beauty

we associate with the National Trust today.

Nesca joined the National Trust Committee on her return to Belfast

and became a prominent figure in the arts community,

promoting Ulster writers and artists here and abroad.

She was working alongside well-known writers

John Hewitt and Sam Hanna Bell.

In fact, it was through John Hewitt that writer Patricia Craig

first became aware of Nesca.

I think I was first introduced to her little booklet

by John Hewitt.

He thought quite highly of her, and so did I when I read the book,

which was very humourless.

There was a lovely bit in one of her poems

where she has two old country people talking and discussing

the terrible pass that the world has come to

and they're saying how disgraceful it is,

all these young women bathing in July

and they weren't wearing as much as we'd dust a flute...

THEY LAUGH

..which was a nice Ulster expression!

You've been speaking about Nesca in the same breath

as some of the luminaries of Northern Irish writing.

Why was she the one who seemed to be forgotten?

It was to do with the times, I would say.

The '50s was male-dominated

and women had a very hard time trying to get anywhere.

She had a lot of professions, if you like.

You know, she was a scholar, she was a historian,

a poet, a woman of letters, and autobiographer,

a teacher and committee member,

and so she didn't really concentrate on any one of these

to the exclusion of all the others.

If you try to think of an outstanding woman writer

of the 1950s, it's just a blank,

you know, which is why I think, in a way,

that Nesca Robb might have filled that gap, if she had gone in more

for self-promotion or if she hadn't tried to do so many things at once.

So how would you place Nesca Robb's contribution, then,

to Northern Irish culture?

I would place her quite highly, actually.

I mean, she was ahead of her time.

I wish someone would publish her unpublished autobiography.

It is so interesting and so good and so well-written

that it's time that some attention was paid to this woman.

But by the mid-'50s,

Nesca was beginning to make a name for herself -

writing a radio play, books of literary criticism

and a biography of William III.

And in a rare interview for the Belfast Telegraph,

she revealed a little more of her personality.

She said she "loved all good things in life -

"friends, music, art and writing...and a good joke."

She hated "tripe, sweet tea, rhubarb and the bulldozer."

Nesca continued to work until her death in 1976.

Nesca Robb was a forthright and interesting woman,

who contributed across a whole range of the arts in Northern Ireland

and lived through some of the most momentous years

in European and Irish history.

And yet her own reputation here

seems to have been slightly forgotten,

and I think that's a mistake,

because Nesca Robb was, without question, an important woman.