with Catholicism, and he decided churchgoing was no longer for him.
Feeling trapped on all sides, he followed his brother, Joe, to London where he worked as a house painter and undertook a range of construction jobs, sometimes labouring alongside Joe. It wasn’t long before Gerard learned his older brother was also gay. But it was a topic they didn’t discuss, and Joe denied Gerard access to his gay circle. Gerard later confided in George Campbell that he felt Joe did not want to be responsible for him. Joe was either reluctant to encourage Gerard’s homosexuality or feared Gerard would outshine him in his social milieu. The latter was probably closer to the truth because one of Joe’s boyfriends left him for Gerard soon after they were introduced. The loss, or ‘steal’ as Joe saw it, hurt him deeply and encouraged him to build a fence round his private life.
As soon as Joe returned home to Belfast, Molly and Gerard moved into the same building. They had separate apartments because Gerard wanted his privacy. Life near Molly turned out to be more than he bargained for, and the small price he paid her for his apartment cost him his privacy. Since he was her tenant, she felt she could arrive in his place unannounced, pour herself a drink and sit down. If he was relaxing with a friend in the garden, she would often open her window upstairs and eavesdrop on their conversation. She might make obtuse observations about a bird or a strange cat on the garden wall as a way of inserting herself into their discourse.
Eventually, he managed to escape her clutches by renting an apartment in a quiet, upscale part of London. It gave him more privacy, but it did not reverse his tendency to conduct many of his sexual encounters in the shadows. He also continued to work hard, mostly doing odd jobs. Though he didn’t have much money, he saved what he could to buy paints and canvasses and to travel to the West of Ireland, a place he fell in love with on his first visit there in 1944. After experiencing the Blitz of London, the exquisite landscape of Ireland’s rugged west captivated him.
On 13 October 1944, he wrote a letter to Madge Connolly, a friend in London, containing illustrations. It is a letter I treasure. In it he described a trip he made to Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands, with his friend, the artist George Campbell:
Well pet, I got to the Aran Islands for three weeks – my God it was the most glorious holiday I’ve ever had, I think. What a change away from the world, complete and absolute peace, living a very natural, almost primitive life from day to day, not knowing what day of the week it is, hearing no news except a scrap when the boat arrived from Galway once a week … I painted life on Inishmore and had there good luck to sell two watercolours to visitors to the island. It helped me along. We stayed with Pat Mullen who has a lovely house on Frenchman’s beach. He has plenty of books naturally, and some lovely records – the New World Symphony – lots of Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius and others and scores and scores of Irish dance music and ballads. We had a few dances in Pat’s during our stay. It was not unusual for Pat to come home at 12.30 a.m. and drag us out of bed to have a dance – bringing along with him a young island girl. There is no woman in the Mullen house – just Pat and his son, PJ, who is a male edition of Barbara. He is great fun and was a wonderful companion, very simple and childlike – with a wonderful sense of humour. He is absolutely unspoiled tho’ he has been in the Merchant Navy.
There was a genuine innocence in the way Gerard described dancing in the early hours to recordings of Irish music. It was something he inherited from his childhood. He liked nothing better than a traditional Irish get-together with music and people reciting passages from their favourite plays. All his life, he had a love for Irish folk ballads and classical music. It was a passion he shared with his brother, Joe, and with George Campbell, who played guitar like a true flamenco musician. In another part of the same 1944 letter, he explained why the West attracted him:
Travelling nowadays is the only drawback. It takes the train (a 3rd rate train too, very uncomfortable) 6 to 7 hours from Dublin to Galway – and later it took the Steamer nine and a half hours from Galway to Inishmore. Of course it was a wonderful experience. They (the islanders) were getting ready for the yearly fair in Galway. The steamer stopped at Inishmore first because it cannot go into the coast because the water is too shallow. So it was wonderful to see the huge Aran men rowing those very fragile curraghs out to the boat – two men rowing and one at the back swimming with a cow – holding on to its horns – poor cow looked so pathetic being dragged through the waves. Then a big rope was placed round their bellies and they were hoisted on board – then another and another. The curraghs came as quickly as they could and no sooner was a cow on board than off they went to make room for another curragh and another cow. And the excitement of the men all shouting to one another in Irish. It was like a foreign country indeed – and their queer mode of dress. Then the same performance at Inishmann (an adjoining Aran island). Some of the Aran men and women came aboard with their belongings to go to the Fair at Galway.
There was a terrific bit of excitement at Inishmann when everything was on board and all the curraghs had gone back but one. It overturned with one man in it and the sea was very high. It looked like the end of it as he was washed away to the back of the steamer, a long way off. These men live in the sea and by the sea, yet they cannot swim. He kept cool and held an oar under each arm – so it kept him up on top. The islanders on board started to keen (wail) and cry in despair, calling loudly to the island where the curraghs had gone back. Then there was a wonderful race by other curraghmen out to rescue him, which they did. So the steamer sailed on to Inishmore. The first few days we felt strange in Pat’s because he didn’t expect us until the end of September. So we did the next best thing – we looked after ourselves with PJ’s help. The islands are desolate – all rock – small, very small fields and stone walls and terrific grey cliffs facing the outer Atlantic – 300ft high – with mountainous waves thundering over them.
Gerard loved the simplicity and ease of the people of the Aran Islands and the community on the tiny island of Inishlacken where he lived with George Campbell. Inishlacken not only captured his imagination but served as an inspiration for some of his most significant paintings. To get a complete understanding of what lay at the heart of his love of the West, one has to look either at his paintings or at his letters, including this unpublished one from 13 October 1944. In it, he both sketched and described the appeal of Connemara’s rocky landscape:
The stony parts are the parts for me. If you closed your eyes and suddenly opened them, you’d think you’d been transported to the moon. It looks as if some strange gods had been playing stone throwing games, like children do, with an old tin can as a cock-shot, until all around is strewn with stones. These god-like stones are huge boulders standing up all over the place, with here and there peeping behind them little cabins and long cottages, white, stark and elfin-like intruders in this strange stone world. The light is wonderful here. Rocks, stones and boulders change colour all the time. Sometimes they are blue green, other times pink, violet, creamy white and cool grey. Behind and around everywhere, the Twelve Pins (Mountain range) tower up to the rolling clouds. They are forever changing colour too, one peak at a time, so that you can see at times a green peak, an orange-brown one, blue black, purple and grey peaks – it’s terrific … a changing landscape … It’s the difficulty to paint this place that makes it so fascinating. It has so much to give. The fields are small and irregular, marked off by lace-like stone walls. Each field can be a different colour. A field yellow with a violet stone fringe, a brown field with a creamy white border, an emerald one with a grey-green wall and so it can go on and on endlessly.
Deep down, Gerard was a romantic, imbued with a deep love of nature and idealism. Had he not been an artist, I believe he would have been an established poet or short story writer, and the West would have featured prominently in his writings. My father had some of his short stories, one of which brilliantly described life in Lower Clonard Street. Sadly, after my father’s death in 2007, those short stories somehow vanished.
My uncle’s landscapes confirm how much he adored the wild, natural simplicity of Ireland’s west and how it contrasted sharply with his depictions of a desolate Belfast and London in the 1940s and 1950s. Decades later, these paintings were the most sought
