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8 2 23 20120411 23 … Called “Alley Croker.” This lady, a cele- brated beauty in her day, was the youngest daughter of Colonel Croker, of Ballinagard, in the county of Limerick. The lover whose re- jection has immortalised her name is not known; but she married Charles Langley, esq., of Lisnarnock. She died without issue, about the middle of the last century. … 18 Crofton Croker mentioned this note in his 1831 review, where he confused Alice’s father, ‘Colonel Croker’, with the long-lived John Croker of Ballynagarde (1624–1717), her great-grandfather. 19 Alice’s date of birth is not known, but the dates associated with her strongly suggest she was born in the early 1720s. Such a date is supported by the claim in the ‘Limerick Buck-Hunt’ that the belles cel- ebrated were aged ‘from fifteen to a score’ [twenty], which means that they were born be- tween 1721 and 1726 if, that is, the song does date from 1741 and Alice was the ‘Miss Cro- ker’ toasted in it. Alice did marry Charles Lan- gley (1720–93) of Lisnamrock (not ‘Lisnarnock’), co. Tipperary (not co. Kilkenny), in May 1744. She was not child- less, as claimed – she had at least seven chil- dren – and died between 1791, when her husband named her in his will, and 1793, the year of his death, when her own will was proved. 20 Alice Langley, then, could not have been more than seven or eight when Grogan died in 1728/9. Obviously, if Grogan did write ‘Ally Croker’ about an Alice Croker of Ballynagarde, then she belonged to earlier generation of the fam- ily. It is always possible, as well, that the song had nothing to do with the Crokers of Ballyna- garde originally, but was instead an ‘Irish’ song written for the London stage, and was attracted to the Crokers by the coincidental occurrence of ‘Alice’ as a woman’s forename in the fam- ily. Of course, the problem of attribution could always be disposed of by dismissing it as an example of Crofton Croker’s manipulation of material he collected and published. Yet there seems to be no obvious reason why he should have made it up. After all, he did identify Larry Grogan correctly, apparently without drawing on previously published material. Grogan had been referred to as a piper in 1756 by Thomas Amory (c.1704–1788), who recalled him (and Jack Lattin) from Dublin of the mid-1720s. 21 He is described again as a piper in the Grogan Pedigree of 1807, and there is a slight chance that Crofton Croker had access to this docu- ment (or one of the sources from which it was compiled). The wording of his 1839 identifi- cation is faintly reminiscent of its title and of the entry for Larry, and it is worth comparing the two, with the shared words italicised: [1807] Pedigree of the ancient and respectable family of Grogan of Johnstown in the County of Wexford. … Laurence Grogan / a celebrated player of the Bagpipes. / Born 11 th . March 1701. Died at / Barbadoes. 22 [1839] Larry Grogan … a celebrated amateur piper, of the family of Grogan of Johnstown Castle, in the county of Wexford … .23 Naturally, the resemblance could be simply a coincidence but there is a chance that it is not. If the song was indeed about Alice Langley, there is the extremely remote possibility that the writer was a later Grogan who was subse- quently conflated with the piper. The forename ‘Laurence’ occurs in later generations of the Johnstown family, younger sons like Larry himself, but none is known to have been a mu- sician and rake. Mistakenly identified twice as the piper was a Laurence Grogan, merchant, who died in 1777, the third son of his older brother, Edward (pp. 44–5) of Ballytrain, an- cestor of the Sir Edward Grogan mentioned in part I. The grave of an earlier namesake, buried in Rathaspick Churchyard beside Johnstown Castle, was recorded in 1910: ‘Here lies the body of Lawrence Grogan Esqr. who died 17 March 1756’. This man is not noticed at all in the Grogan papers, a lack of information that raises the possibility he was a natural son. The

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2012-04-21T00:00:00

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