Francis (Frank) McGahern and Susan McManus’s marriage

The marriage of Francis (Frank) McGahern and Susan McGahern was formed through a long courtship and a seven-year engagement, but marriage did not bring them into a consistently shared life. The account follows a striking pattern: Susan’s patience and practical care held the relationship together, while Francis’s prolonged absences, affairs, and insistence on authority shaped its terms. Their story moves from carefully supervised Sunday meetings to a household in which the children lived under Francis’s rigid discipline while Susan was away in hospital.

Courtship and Social Conditions

Their courtship began in the early 1920s, when Francis came to Ballinamore as a young sergeant and Susan, who had previously taught at a convent, was working at Lisacarn School, a mile outside town. The social conventions of the time sharply restricted where a young woman teacher and her suitor could meet without inviting scandal. One acceptable setting was Kelly’s house near the school, where Susan’s cousins hosted them on most Sunday evenings. The gatherings combined tea and cards with solemn discussion of local and national affairs. Francis enjoyed them and, through his physical presence, usually dominated the room.

The account places this courtship within a society in which sexual knowledge was often absent from marriage, while the Catholic Church’s teaching elevated celibacy and treated sexuality as suspect. Those conventions constrained the couple’s public opportunities to meet, but they did not make their relationship equal in practice. Francis was severe and strict with others; the theft of his expensive black Crombie overcoat from the porch at Kelly’s prompted extensive inquiries and searches, though the coat was never recovered. The narrator presents the incident as one small glimpse of the forcefulness that would also mark Francis’s conduct within the marriage.

The Engagement and Its Reversal

Political unrest repeatedly moved young guards between stations. Before Francis’s transfer from Ballinamore to Burtonport in Donegal, he and Susan became engaged. The commitment then lasted for seven years while he was posted around the country and had affairs with other women. Susan remained in Ballinamore, teaching at Lisacarn School and helping Maggie in the shop. Although she had admirers, she regarded the engagement ring as binding.

In May 1932, the year of the 1932 Eucharistic Congress, Susan returned the ring. The narrator cannot establish a single cause: rumours of Francis’s other relationships, the possibility that Susan herself had an interested suitor, and pressure from relatives and friends over the engagement’s extraordinary length may all have contributed. What is clear in the account is the consequence. Francis, who had often found reasons to postpone visits, arrived in Ballinamore the very next day and stayed until Susan agreed to marry him in August.

Letters Susan wrote from Ballinamore to Francis at Shanaglish in Galway provide the surviving record of the months before the wedding. Much of their content is practical: the documents Francis needed, the wedding venue, the honeymoon, clothing, and guests. Yet the letters also convey Susan’s happiness. She listened to a broadcast of the Eucharistic Congress from a convent and made a pilgrimage to St Patrick’s Purgatory on Lough Derg to ask for a blessing on their marriage. Her account of feeling low after the vigil, then happy, preserves both the physical difficulty of the pilgrimage and the hope she attached to the coming wedding.

Francis was incensed and shaken by the returned ring. Once Susan had agreed to marry in August, he wanted to give it back immediately; she refused, explaining that they would marry and that he would then give her a plain gold wedding band. His reaction also brought out a recurring pattern in their exchanges: when put on the defensive, he shifted his criticism to a subject on which he thought he had greater authority. After seeing a jar of powder on Susan’s dressing table, he accused her of extravagance. Her reply clarified that the powder belonged to Maggie, that she used only a little on her hands, and that she would not use it again without Francis’s approval. The small dispute over the jar reveals how readily even an ordinary purchase became a matter of permission and control.

Wedding and Separate Lives

Francis wanted the wedding held in Dublin because he feared Susan would invite too many people in Ballinamore. She argued that Dublin would cost more, including the priest’s travel and hotel, and promised to keep the guest list small; August holidays would also mean that many local teachers would be away. They married in Ballinamore that August, left the wedding breakfast by car, and caught a train to Dublin from Belturbet. After their honeymoon, they returned to Shanaglish, where Francis remained stationed.

Their immediate arrangements did not establish a shared home. Susan returned to Lisacarn School and to the shop by the railway station on High Street when the school holidays ended, while Francis stayed in Shanaglish. They spent the long summer holidays together in the barracks, but outside those periods he saw the family when he chose, arriving in the blue Ford. A story he later told about the eve of his wedding gives an image of his apprehension about married life: in Galway he bought two dozen oranges, sat on a park bench, and ate them all because he feared he would not be able to afford oranges after marriage. The narrator notes that, in the early years, this fear was largely imagined; Susan’s salary was higher than his.

Susan became pregnant a year and a half after the wedding. As children arrived in successive years, Francis retained his car and continued living in the barracks, with a woman coming in each day to cook and clean for him. Susan’s salary supported the family. The contrast between her continuing work and responsibility for the children and his relative freedom makes the marriage’s practical imbalance visible without requiring a dramatic separation: their lives remained divided even as the family grew.

Household Authority and the Children

When Susan entered hospital, the children arrived at the barracks with Bridgie McGovern. Francis’s earlier anxiety about the costs and burdens of marriage seemed, in the narrator’s recollection, to have come home to him. He responded by imposing a strict household routine. The children ate silently at a table beneath the window on Coote’s Archway while he sat apart, facing the large sideboard mirror. A quarrel or noise drew a look of warning; before school, they lined up for inspection, and he often checked behind their ears.

The day ended with the Rosary. Francis knelt at the table where he had eaten, placing a newspaper on the cement beneath him, while the children knelt around the room. The prayers included one for their mother, though they did not know where she was or what they were praying for. Each child then approached Francis and kissed him goodnight. The ritual gave the household a fixed religious order, but its daily repetition also made Susan’s absence palpable: she was present in prayer as the children’s mother, not in their everyday care.

Later, at the family home in Aughawillan, Susan’s letters show that decisions about repairs, improvements, purchases, and workmen were deferred to Francis. Animals and farm equipment were acquired over many months, despite the narrator’s childhood memory that they had all appeared at once. When something seemed to have been done without Francis’s consent, trouble followed. The marriage’s unequal authority thus extended beyond money and the children’s routine into the management of the home and farm. Across the account, Susan’s work, correspondence, and efforts to accommodate Francis coexist with his distance and his demand to control decisions; the surviving evidence traces that tension without claiming to settle the marriage’s ultimate course.