Ballynahinch’s French connection

Ballynahinch’s French connection

24 July 2019

ON Saturday the Rowallane and Slieve Croob Community Twinning Group will stage a charity fundraising garden party at the home of Hugh and Violet Hawthorne, opposite the Dairy Lake on the old Belfast Road, Ballynahinch. 

Special guests will include seven visitors from Lamorlaye in northern France, and interestingly, the Lamorlaye/Ballynahinch partnership celebrates its 21st anniversary this year, dating back to 1998.

Connections between Ballynahinch and France are not new; some actually existed in the heady days of the Seven Years War and the French Revolution. In 1760, as part of an ongoing world war between France and Great Britain, a substantial French force led by Commodore François Thurot invaded Co Antrim, and captured Carrickfergus Castle. The French sustained 19 dead  and 30 wounded. 

Two of the wounded French officers, Brigadier Flobert and Major Brajelon, were treated with extraordinary kindness while in Ulster. They convalesced in comfort at Moira Castle in Co Down, before being repatriated to France. 

It is thought that part of their welcome was owing to their membership of the Freemasons – Lord Moira being a Mason himself. Around 1760 — at the same time he was entertaining the French — Moira planned to move his family headquarters to Ballynahinch, and was busy building his new Montalto House there.

Thirty years later Lord Moira’s son Francis – by now a resident at Montalto — was rather less friendly towards the French. In December 1793, as a British Major-General, he led a military expedition to the Royalist département of La Vendée, with the intention of reversing the French Revolution. In June 1794, he was back on the Continent, in a successful operation against the French in the Low Countries.

With the 1798 rebellion now looming, Francis (now second Earl of Moira) was warned his own home town was a hotbed of sedition. Nonsense, he famously declared in the Irish House of Lords: “No town is so loyal as Ballynahinch!”. He was wrong there. In fact the military committee of the United Irishmen, meeting in Armstrong’s Inn on Ballynahinch Square, was busy plotting a French invasion of Ireland. 

The rebel planners communicated with French generals via their Co Down emissaries, Alexander Lowry and Bartholomew Teeling.

Lowry hailed from Linen Hill in Katesbridge — his house is still there — and Teeling was from Twinbrook. They were now resident on the continent along with their close associate Wolfe Tone. British military intelligence knew all of these details perfectly well, and Armstrong’s Inn was one of the first buildings to be burned down after the Battle of Ballynahinch.

On August 22, 1798, General Jean-Joseph Humbert landed a small French expedition in Killala, Co Mayo, on the west coast of Ireland. This was in direct retaliation for Lord Moira’s earlier intervention in La Vendée. Humbert’s force was too small and too late, and achieved little. The rising in Ulster had been extinguished two months earlier.

As late as Emmet’s Rebellion in 1803 there were rebel hopes — always disappointed —that a French army would arrive in Co Down. 

The poem, The Man From God Knows Where, reads: 

‘For a wheen o’ days we sat waitin’ the word to rise and go at it like men, but no French ships sailed into Cloughey Bay and we heard the black news on a harvest day that the cause was lost again.’

Horace Reid will give a 30-minute slide presentation of these tales on Saturday afternoon. Karen Patterson will provide a fluent French translation for European visitors. The garden party lasts from 2pm to 6pm, with an entrance fee of £7.