Fascinating radio doc on forgotten author with Omeath link to be aired this weekend

A fascinating radio documentary is set to be broadcast on LMFM radio next Monday on an internationally famous author with links to Omeath, Co Louth.

Whatever Happened to Gertrude Page?, a new radio documentary by Chris Nikkel for Little Road Productions Ltd, will broadcast at 12noon on Monday October 31 2022 on LMFM Radio.

Gertrude Page has been called the Maeve Binchy of her day. She’s also been called, ‘the Kipling of Rhodesia’, the country she lived out the last two decades of her life. Her 20 books sold 2.5 million copies worldwide, making her a household name in Britain and Ireland, and as far away as New Zealand, South Africa and Australia. Her most famous novel, Paddy the Next Best Thing, set in her favourite village of Omeath, in Co Louth, sold more than 300,000 copies.

So popular was Gertrude Page, that when she died in 1922, the play-adaptation of Paddy the Next Best Thing was on a record-breaking run at the Savoy, in London—the following year the Irish story hit the silver screen as a British-made silent film, and then was subsequently remade as a Hollywood blockbuster starting Janet Graynor and heartthrob Warner Baxter.

Few writers could top the success of Gertrude Page in the early 20th Century. The question is: Whatever happened to Gertrude Page? Today, not one Gertrude Page book is still in print. The silent version of Paddy the Next Best Thing is lost, along with film-adaptations of two of her other books. Only the 1933 Hollywood version of Paddy the Next Best Thing survives, and though it was one of the most successful films of that year, today it can only be considered as obscure.

Gertrude Page grew up in England, but married an Anglo-Irish land agent with a Big House in Omeath, Co Louth.She fell in love with Omeath, and so set Paddy the Next Best Thing in Omeath around the time she herself lived there at the turn of the 20th Century. And it is in this novel that we get our first sense of why Gertrude Page slipped into obscurity. The title of the novel reveals the main theme of the story.

Paddy is the daughter of a wealthy Omeath merchant who always wanted a son, but instead had two daughters. Paddy, his youngest daughter and a tomboy, becomes ‘the next best thing’ to a son. The story shows Paddy and her sister with archetypal 19th century roles and characteristics: they are entirely emotional, and in the language of the times, hysterical.
In contrast, the men are universally reasoned, methodical and logical. This depiction of gender roles is outdated and simplistic—not a theme that carries easily into the 21st Century.

But it is the world of Omeath that is perhaps even more unpalatable to a contemporary audience. Gertrude Page portrayed the social class in which she lived—an Anglo-Irish world that was still very much intact and powerful in Ireland when she wrote the novel. Irish servants waited on landlords. Money stayed in the hands of an Anglo-Irish elite. Omeath, located near the merchant port of Newry, was filled with Anglo-Irish merchants such as Gertrude’s husband, George Alexander Dobbin, whose father spent much of his life in India, a Captain in the British Army fighting for the British Empire.

While Paddy the Next Best Thing was published in a time when this elite Anglo-Irish world was still accepted, its existence would largely disappear after Irish independence fifteen years later. This fact would alienate her story, her themes and the stereotypes she used—once again, Gertrude Page was on the wrong side of history.

As a firm believer in the British Empire, George Alexander Dobbin decided to try his luck abroad, moving to the South African British colony of Rhodesia, leaving Omeath to be cared for by the hired help. On arrival, he and Gertrude Page acquired a 21,000 Acre farm and immediately named it Omeath—now located in the country of Zimbabwe, the area is still called Omeath to this day.

From this farm, Gertrude would write over a dozen books, becoming the voice of colonial Rhodesia, a country named after the now controversial Cecil Rhodes. Gertrude Page would die in Africa aged just 50, buried alone on a hill on the farm she’d named after her favourite place in Ireland.

But just like in Ireland, her success as a Rhodesian writer would become overshadowed by politics in the decades that followed. In the wake of the collapse of the British Empire, and more recently the growing critiques of the colonial endeavour—most keenly highlighted in the Black Lives Matter movement—the writer once called ‘the Kipling of Rhodesia’ has become a symbol of the power imbalance inherent to colonisation.

The Gertrude Page books set in Rhodesia show a racist relationship to the local black population and an exploitative nature that make them unreadable today. As Stephen Donovan, the foremost scholar on Gertrude Page has written: “Like the British empire which she championed so passionately, Gertrude Page has been relegated to the dustbin of history.”

Whatever happened to Gertrude Page? is the story of one writer who scaled the heights of fame and fortune, only to have her legacy dismantled just as quickly because the inevitable shifts in historical and political perspectives. It is a cautionary tale, but also an illustration of a how easily history moves on from the convictions and beliefs of the past.
The documentary was funded by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland with the Television Licence Fee.