A veiled tradition

26/02/2020

As a child, I would rummage through my mother’s sewing basket. It was a bright orange plastic box with a removable tray divided into little compartments. I was always curious about the contents collected over time. On one occasion, I asked my mother about a strip of beautiful beading sitting in the tray. She told me it was from her wedding dress, made by her mother. Years later, the memory of the beading was recalled sharply when a saleswoman suggested I could add embellishments to the shoulder straps of a wedding dress I was trying on. Tears stung as I thought of this beautiful, silent nod to my mother, whose absence was going to be keenly felt at my wedding just eight months after she died.

Traditions and weddings go hand in hand. To pay homage to family traditions requires knowledge, and usually the family elders are the keepers of that knowledge.

Beading from my mother’s wedding dress

But knowledge of traditions is not always passed on or remembered. Traditions become outdated, or significance wanes over time. What was once cherished becomes lost to time. However, history can sometimes play a part in reigniting old family traditions, or at the very least, restoring the knowledge of what was once a tradition.

If the family traditions and customs were not passed down through the generations, surely the superstition of wearing ‘something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue’ has been responsible for weaving historical family threads into each wedding in some form or another? I was researching the connection between the Wharton family and an outback-pastoral station when I came across an account of a wedding in 1919 in the newspapers. Written by “Queen Bee” for the Ladies Page in the Australasian, a lengthy account described the ‘charming and picturesque’ Meagher-Wharton wedding at Cliveden Mansion in East Melbourne. Queen Bee wrote that Mrs Simon Fraser had loaned her white and gold brocade court train to each of her girlfriends as they were married. The bride, Lynne Wharton who was marrying my grandfather’s eldest brother, Leo, also wore a ‘Limerick lace veil of finest texture and workmanship … lent by Miss [Mary] Meagher, sister of the bridegroom.’[1]

Lynne Wharton on her wedding day 1919 – Venn Brown family collection

Apart from ‘something borrowed’, we can only speculate what the inclusion of the Limerick lace veil in the bridal outfit meant to Mary or the wider Meagher family. It does speak of the Meagher family’s Irish origins, and my own sentimentality makes me wonder if it too was a silent nod to the family’s matriarch, Catherine who died unexpectedly in 1911.

Something borrowed

This tradition of loaning the Limerick lace veil is reported in the newspapers for four weddings of the six Meagher brothers. Mary, the only surviving daughter in the family died in 1929, aged 29, and at that stage Leo and Lynne’s daughter Patricia Meagher was the first child of the next generation and she inherited the veil.

Two decades later in 1940, my grandparents, Jack Meagher and Dorothy Donovan’s wedding was described in the papers as: ‘The bride’s gown was of cloth of silver made on classical lines, and the beautiful hand-worked veil, lent by the bridegroom’s family, was arranged with tiny arum lilies in Mary Stuart style. She held a sheaf of St. Joseph’s lilies. ‘[2]

Dorothy Donovan and Jack Meagher on their wedding day 1940 – Meagher family collection

Three years later, Leo and Jack’s brother Lux married Muriel Feil. ‘A Limerick lace veil, which has been in the family for years, lent by Miss Pat Meagher was held to the head with a court coronet of gardenias and stephanotis, and similar flowers were carried.’[3] In another article, perhaps an ominous sign, the veil was described as old.[4]

In 1946, Pat Meagher was finally able to wear the veil that she had generously lent to her aunts-to-be. ‘For her marriage yesterday with Lieutenant Felix William Venn-Brown; eldest son of Mr. and Mrs. Colin Venn-Brown, Sydney, Patricia Lynne, only child of Mr. and Mrs. Leo Meagher, Toorak, wore a satin striped moire gown, with an old hand-made Brussels lace veil which – had been worn by her mother, and carried a bouquet of gardenias.’[5]

The veil did not feature in all the Meagher brother’s weddings. Vin Meagher’s bride, Kathleen McDonnell, opted for a modern style, wearing a ‘short veil of tulle … held in place with a topknot of gardenias’ in 1938. [6] Newspaper accounts for the weddings of the two other brothers, Frank and Wilbur, do not exist, nor have I been able to locate any wedding photos. The veil was last mentioned in the papers for Pat’s wedding in 1946. Her mother Lynne moved to Sydney from Melbourne after Leo died in 1955 to be closer to Pat and there were no other weddings in the next generation of the Meagher family until the late 1960s. No one wore the veil and today the Venn Brown family does not know the whereabouts of this family heirloom, nor do Dorothy and Jack Meagher’s children recall any stories about their mother’s wedding veil.

Four brides wearing the same veil could never have been determined from the photographs alone. Each photograph shows a different angle of the veil revealing sheer netting beautifully embroidered with bows, flowers, foliage and swirls of delicate fern fronds forming a softly scalloped edge. So often a picture reveals more than words can, but no one would notice that the beaded detailing on my dress is the same as my mother’s dress, and certainly there was no Queen Bee reporting on the beautifully art deco beaded purse I borrowed from my matron of honour, Rebecca Page.

art deco purse

Even if the lace veil had survived, it would be very fragile now. Threads sewn in Limerick all those years ago unraveling or disintegrating at the slightest touch. And it would seem, the story of this Limerick lace veil has proven just as fragile, only remnants gleaned from the newspapers have alluded to the tradition of this family heirloom, and as it turns out, is all that remains.