I've had a lovely email from Jennette (Byrne) Gest of Queensland, Australia. Jennette is named after her great-grandmother who was George's aunt.
It appears that George became a really well known musician in London in the 1930s and 40s. He played with the famous Bert Ambrose Orchestra alongside Ted Heath and Sid Phillips. He played the Saxophone - both alto and tenor, the clarinet and even the flute.
At that time he went under the name Joe Jeannette.
[Joseph was his middle name - even though he used George Kevin when he got married]
Jennette included two photographs which you see below.
Bert Ambrose Orchestra with Joe Jeannette third from right
The Bert Ambrose Orchestra again, it's fairly easy to spot George
We launched the blog this afternoon in IADT. It was very well received.
The year 3 Modelmaking students (David Murphy; Pauric Conroy; Almants Auksconis) gave a demonstration of their digital representation of both the inside of the Industrial School and of the soldiers drilling and doing firing practice on the lawn. It was a great addition.
Deed map of the Carriglea Estate dated 1880 Note the house and the extensive orchard [Courtesy: IADT Dun Laoghaire]
Speculative Visualisation of the troops at Carriglea 26th April 1916, courtesy John Buckley
Two independent sources make note of the fact that two battalions of the Notts and Derby Regiment (the Sherwood Foresters) overnighted on the grounds of Carriglea Industrial School before marching to Dublin help quell the Easter Rebellion.
Carriglea Community House
Annals (these were kept by the Brother Superior in Carriglea). Note that His Majesty (sic) Forces was subsequently scored out. Courtesy: Christian Brothers Archive
The author seems to be confusing the 2/7th and 2/8th battalions who went directly from Kingstown to the engagement at Mount St Bridge with the 2/5th and 2/6th battalions who stayed at Carriglea
Youtube video - Sinn Fein rebellion account 1916 - Christian Brothers annals
David
Quin has been working hard on the production of 7 animated collages, featuring
stopmotion, CGI, documents and interviews.
The other source is the diary of Company Sergeant Major Samuel H. Lomas of D company, 2/6th Sherwood Foresters. Lomas records the arrival of two battalions of the Sherwood Foresters at Kingstown at 9.30 pm and their assembly at the town hall square. There two day's rations were issues to each man and 'a hand cart commandeered to carry 4000 rounds of ammunition and surplus rations'. At 1am in the they moved off and arrived an hour later at 'an Industrial School for boys 11/2 miles from Kingstown'. He further notes that 'the whole Battn were allowed to use the dining room and the school room to sleep'. [Source: Mick O'Farrell, The 1916 Diaries of an Irish Rebel and a British Soldier, Cork, Mercier, 2014]
Youtube video - Samuel Henry Lomas account 25th April 1916
David Quin has been working hard on the production of 7 animated collages, featuring stopmotion, CGI, documents and interviews.
The Carriglea School Band was much in demand in Kingstown - then the gateway to Ireland from Britain.
As a member of the band George was a witness to some of the major events of these pre-revolutionary days.
King George arriving at Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire) in 1911 NLI
According to the Dublin Daily Express of 13 June 1891 a residence at Carriglea Park, Monkstown was to be offered for sale. It would appear that the owner Mr Garrett Byrne, a Home Rule MP for West Wicklow had been declared bankrupt and in order to return to solvency he would have to dispose of his numerous properties.
In 1893 the property was purchased by the Congregation of the Christian Brothers of Ireland to be used as Industrial School for boys - a 'second Artane' for the south side of Dublin.
Daily Nation 27 Aug 1898
By 1898 we find the band playing at the Kingstown Regatta and later that year at the Excelsior Grand Bazaar which took place at the Rotunda in Dublin City.
Soon they were performing regularly, giving annual concerts in the Pavilion Theatre, in the school concert hall and the school grounds but also playing at many local venues, Blackrock Park, the East Pier, the People's Park, Sandycove Seafront and numerous fates and garden parties. Some of these concerts explicitly advertised that: 'The proceeds will be devoted to clearing off the debt on Carriglea.'
In July 1911 King George V paid a visit to Ireland. Naturally he came and left via Kingstown, equally naturally the Carriglea Band was there on each occasionand of course George was a member of the band. The Daily Express reported that a special section of the stand 'sheltered from the torrid rays of the sun' was set aside
The Royal party in the skiff. NLI
for the 150 boys of the Carriglea Industrial School whose band enlivened the proceedings with a 'selection of sprightly music'. We wonder if it was the boys or one of the military bands who played 'God save the King'. The King promised that he would return soon and the royal party were pushed off in the landing skiff to the strains of the Carriglea boys singing 'Forward Gaily' Together'. This was the last entertainment that a British monarch was to receive in Ireland until the visit of Queen Elizabeth II exactly 100 years later.
Within a month the boys were involved in a controversial and overtly political incident at the bandstand on the nearby East Pier. According to a letter to the Daily Express from Major Willoughby Forth, a member of Kingstown Urban District Council, the Carriglea Band, which
Daily Express
had been engaged by the Entertainments Committee of the UDC, on 23rd and 25th of August performed a programme 'which on both occasions not only omitted the national anthem [God Save the King] but substituted in its place 'A Nation Once Again'. Major Forth mentions that when the Loyalists in the crowd attempted to sing the National Anthem the band played 'A Nation Once Again' once again to 'emphasise the offence'. This led to 'conflict and fighting on the pier and disturbances and rioting in the streets of Kingstown'.
Youtube video - Carraiglea Boys Performances, Nationalistic and non Nationalistic
David Quin has been working hard on the production of 7 animated collages, featuring stopmotion, CGI, documents and interviews.
Less than a year later George was present with the band playing 'musical selections' at the
Redmond as Hypocrite,
Irish Citizen, 15 March 1913
arrival of Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister, at Kingstown. A small chartered sailing boat was cruising around the harbour in which four suffragists - led by Mrs Finnegan - with red parasols on which were emblazoned the words 'Votes for Women' and shouting through a megaphone. However, this 'Suffragette Ruffianism' came to nothing according to the Daily Express as when the steamer Leinster entered the harbour the sailing boat had been blown over to the East Pier while the ship docked on the west side of the Carlisle Pier and they could not be heard. On disembarkation, Mrs Asquith was presented with a bouquet of flowers while the Carriglea band played 'Come Back to Erin'. There to meet Asquith were Birrell, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, and MPs Redmond, Devlin and Dillon. The coming years would not be kind to any of them
Youtube video - The Pavilion Performances - from Irish Times reviews January 1914
David Quin has been working hard on the production of 7 animated collages, featuring stopmotion, CGI, documents and interviews.
Four years later in 1916 Asquith would land at the same spot from the RMS Ulster - the same ship which had carried the Sherwood Foresters to help quell the Easter Rising - but this time there would be no flowers.
We first came across George performing on the stage of the Pavilion Theatre in Kingstown
(now Dun Laoghaire) in 1914
Youtube video - Master George Jennett plays as Wallace - The Knight of Ellerslie
David Quin has been working hard on the production of 7 animated collages, featuring stopmotion, CGI, documents and interviews.
George was born in central Dublin in 1898; from the census of 1901 we know that his father was a butcher and his mother a weaver.
His grandfather had also been a butcher. So while they were far from well off, they probably did not experience the appalling levels of poverty which their neighbours had to endure.
How had it happened that George had moved from relative security in 1901 to being resident 61of 158 boys (aged from only six to 15 years) in Carriglea Industrial School in 1911?The answer lay in the records of his sister Kate - just four years old in 1901. We found her in 1911 as a resident in St Vincent's Industrial School for girls, Goldenbridge, now aged 14 - for company she had her three younger sisters Eliza was 9, Margaret was 7 and little Mary was only 4.
Kate and Eliza had been admitted to Goldenbridge on 21 September 1907 by order of a Dublin Police Court under the Industrial School Act of 1868. The reason given was that they had been found 'wandering, no means of support'. Katie was ordered to remain until 1912 and Eliza (who was just 6 at the time) until 1917. The younger girls were admitted a few months later and for the same reason - remember little Mary would have been just a few months old. The sad key to all this was in the addresses recorded for their parents; Mary, their mother was living in Kevin St., but their father, John, was in the Royal Hospital for Incurables in Donnybrook - a ferocious name if ever there was one. [Information courtesy: Mercy Congregational
Archives]
Hospital for Incurables. Source: National Archives of Ireland
George's father John Isaac Jennett died two years later of Dropsy - what we would now call Oedema - a very painful accumulation of fluid in the soft tissue.
Youtube video - The Death of John Isaac Jennett
David Quin has been working hard on the production of 7 animated collages, featuring stopmotion, CGI, documents and interviews.
John Isaac Jennett certainly could not have been working in 1907 and probably not for some time before that. For a family in early twentieth century Dublin this was a disaster - with an insufficient means of support the only alternative was the disease riddled workhouse.
Youtube video - The Jennett Family
David Quin has been working hard on the production of 7 animated collages, featuring stopmotion, CGI, documents and interviews.
Perhaps the most important actor in the Jennett family was their mother, born Mary Fox, she used an X instead of a signature when she registered Katie's birth in 1896.
But she was nothing if not resourceful - she managed to place all of her surviving children in Industrial Schools until she had the means to support them. The records show that she organised for Katie to be discharged in 1911 (just a few months after the census) to come to work with her and Katie's namesake aunt, Catherine, in 18 Anglesea St in Dublin city centre where they were tailoring. The report says that Katie was 'getting on well'. Eliza was also released two years early in 1915 presumably to join the women in their work.
After Carriglea
The two medals which George would have been awarded - as noted on the 'medal card' below. Left, the Victory Medal and right, the British War Medal. The actual medals above were awarded to my great-uncle, Peter Doyle, they now belong to my son, Peter Doyle - courtesy of his grandfather Peter.
George, however, remained in
Carriglea until he was sixteen. And, as with so many other former residents of Industrial Schools at that time he volunteered for the Army. He enlisted in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and went to serve in Belgium and France. Here is a copy of his medal card.
Parliamentary Papers of Ireland, 1915 Showing the number of boys from Reformatories and Industrial Schools who 'joined up'.
Of the 2598 boys who had joined up in the first year of the war: 128 had been killed, 231 wounded 38 were prisoners of war, 1 had been 'mentioned in despatches' and 2 had been given commissions.
www.ssmaritime.com/Kaisar-I-Hind.htm
In 1926 George sailed from Plymouth bound for Bombay (Mumbai), India on board the P&O ship Kaisar-I-Hind (Empress of India). His 'Profession, occupation or calling' is recorded as 'Musician' a skill he had learned in Carriglea. Interestingly he had been living at Loftus Rd. London W12, just around the corner from Ellerslie Rd.
The key to the next stage of George's life lies in his baptismal entry - a record we have already seen; in order to be married outside of his birth parish George would have had to obtain a 'letter of freedom' from the parish priest. The priest would record that the letter had been issued. (Because the mortality rate was so high some
clergymen recorded the issue in tiny script so that another entry could be made if the spouse died.) In George's case the record shows that he married Mabel Elizabeth Roberts, at St Mary's, RC church Bayswater in London on 10th May 1930 when he would have been 31 years old.
The following information came from Jennette (Byrne) Gest of Queensland, Australia. Jennette is named after her great-grandmother who was George's aunt. It appears that George became a really well known musician in London in the 1930s and 40s. He performed with the famous Bert Ambrose Orchestra alongside Ted Heath and Sid Phillips. He played the Saxophone - both alto and tenor, the clarinet and even the flute.
At that time he went under the name Joe Jeannette.
[Joseph was his middle name - even though he used George Kevin when he got married]
Jennette included two photographs which you see below.
Bert Ambrose Orchestra with Joe Jeannette third from right [Information courtesy of Jennette (Byrne) Gest]
George again
From the Electoral registers it would appear that George and Mabel lived in the Willesden area of North London until at least 1965. At some stage they moved to Felixstowe on the coast where Mabel died in 1984 aged 82 and George passed away two years later in 1986 aged 88. Not a bad age for someone who had such a tough start in life.
