The Sunday Telegraph, 3rd January 1993

Neo-Nazi leaflets found in gracious ladies' academy where caning was on the
curriculum
Inside the secret world of the sisters of St Bride's

by Richard Pendry and Helena de Bertodano


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Victorian values reigned at St Bride's, the Donegal home of the Silver
Sisters. The ladies said they had never heard of George Bush and though
someone had once spoken to them about Margaret Thatcher they knew nothing
of the troubles in the modern world outside. The writer Candida Crewe,
visiting the house for the Telegraph magazine, said she felt she was
stepping into a Gothic novel where a "single candle blinked behind a lace
curtain" and guests were invited into a parlour heated only by a "feeble
coal fire". A young girl dressed in a Victorian maid's uniform answered
knocks at the tradesman's entrance and the mistress of the house greeted
here guests wearing a long black dress and white lace collar. Miss Clare
Tyrrell, who appeared to be in her forties, peered through horn-rimmed
glasses, her hair plaited into two buns above each ear. "Like all Romantics
we share a disdain for modern life. Everything is so jaded and we love
style and elegance," she explained. The house had a damp and eerie feeling.
The hall was dark with black stairs and banisters. The parlour table was
covered in a sombre carpet cloth and on the walls hung 1840s prints of
women in bonnets. A woman who called herself Miss Langridge, one of the
permanent guests, claimed she would not read any book published after 1939
and considered James Joyce "rough talkin'". Guests looking for a little
entertainment could go into a dusty room with a wind-up gramophone, where
they drank sherry. For a nostalgic look at one's childhood, guests could
spend time in the schoolroom upstairs writing lines for the teacher and
catching up on their homework. Though visitors of like mind were welcome,
Miss Tyrrell and Miss Langridge kept themselves to themselves. Locals only
joked, in hushed tones, about "getting a bit of a smack in the schoolroom".
Candida Crewe was not happy there. "I hurtled away from the place that
afternoon like - as the apt cliche goes - a bat out of hell," she wrote.
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For 10 years, St Bride's Academy for Young Ladies seemed a harmless if
eccentric educational establishment where traditional values reigned
supreme.

The imposing principal, Miss Clare Tyrrell, said she had created a romantic
retreat in the tiny fishing village of Burtonport, on the west coast of
Ireland, where 19th-century values of strict discipline, dress-making and
politeness were preferred to the tawdry modern world. They wanted to be
"gracious and demure Victorians".

Behind the lace curtains of Kincasslagh House, "unaesthetic" modern
appliances such as the refrigerator and the electric light were eschewed
and the four or five women residents, the self-styled Silver Sisters, took
tea by gaslight and listened to the wind-up gramophone as they sat in long
black dresses with white lace collars. They took in paying adult pupils who
were interested in experiencing the virtues of an old-fashioned childhood.

Now the house's contents are to be sold and the outside world is to have a
glimpse into evidence of sado-masochism and far-Right politics going on
behind the prim facade.

The sisters have fled, St Bride's appears deserted and the owners are
picking over the extraordinary secrets of Kincasslagh House. A blackboard
still stands before rows of tiny desks, bamboo canes propped neatly to one
side. A page from an exercise book on which a pupil has written 30 times "I
must pay attention to my mistress at all times" stirs in the draught from a
fireplace holding the cold ashes of a traditional turf fire.

There has always been talk about the mysterious activities of the sisters.
Two years ago, Miss Tyrrell - under the name of Mari De Colwyn - was found
guilty in a local court of caning a girl on the buttocks.

The landlords say they attempted to regain possession of the property after
the sisters stopped paying the rent. Over Christmas, two members of the
Atlantis Therapy Commune, who own the property, climbed in through a window.

Anne Barr, 36, and Mary Kelly, 40, found material produced by neo-Nazi
organisations and the sado-masochistic sex industry. Anti-Semitic
periodicals from all over the world lay in piles on the floor, alongside
fetishistic magazines featuring women in gas masks and suspenders and price
lists for equipment such as handcuffs and leg-irons. Titles strewn around
included National Front News and the British National Party's Spearhead.

To judge from printed forms called "Caning Recommendations", education in
St Brides seems to have involved regular beatings with cane, birch and even
nettles. The sisters used desk-top publishing to print their own magazines
- some of them admired in literary circles - such as The Romantic, a
whimsical publication illustrated with silhouettes of ladies with parasols
and columns such as "Pippa's Pipsie Page" and "Parlez-Vous Romantique?".

Most surprising, among letters from Irish farmers enquiring whether bondage
and domination were on offer at the academy, was evidence of a two-year
correspondence from the British National Party leader, John Tyndall, who
seems to have found much in common with the sisters' dislike of the present
and who put them on the mailing list for the BNP magazine Spearhead.

In one letter, Mr Tyndall, talking about politics, says: "I admire and
respect what you are doing to the point of fascination" and says he agrees
entirely that there should be secession from the modern world. Of himself,
he says he is "spiritually with one foot in the 19th century and the other
in, perhaps, the 17th and 18th".

The house in St Bride's was bought by the Atlantis commune - known locally
as "The Screamers" - in the 1970s to use as a base for their primal
screaming therapy. After complaints from the neighbours about the noise,
they moved to an island off the coast and let the house to Miss Tyrrell.
Anne Barr says they were originally sympathetic to the sisters because they
were women and seemed to be a bona fide community.

The locals remain unfazed. "I always knew there was something weird going
on up there, but they lived very quietly; they never bothered us and we
never bothered them," said Caroline Reilly, 24, in the post office.

The sisters have moved to Oxford, where attempts to question them are
hampered by their habit of assuming alternative identities.

A woman calling herself Laetitia Linden Dorvf, installed in north Oxford in
a house she calls The Imperial Embassy, was cagey about Miss Tyrrell. Her
people could not be categorised under individual names. She acknowledged
the court case but claimed the girl was caned as part of a disciplinary
session to which she "quite voluntarily agreed".

But she denied that the sisters had links with the publications found in
their house. "We do not endorse any of them as they are all collaborating
with the degeneration of the late 20th century. We simply receive them as
part of an exchange subscription. One of our girls was in correspondence
with the National Front and we may have a copy of National Front News in St
Bride's.".

She claimed the sisters still inhabited St Bride's, although witnesses say
they all left before Christmas. Jim Campbell, a local journalist who
visited the house, met one of their members, Miss Maureen Evans, just
before she left. He said she had just come out of the bathroom after
locking herself in for 24 hours when the house was repossessed.

One of the sisters has now set up an 0898 phone line that offers men and
women lessons from a lady teacher carrying a cane at £75 and hour.
Describing the activities, a "Miss Partridge" says: "I shall not hesitate
to tell you to stand up and bend over the desk if I am at all displeased."
She adds: "It is not in any way a game. There is nothing in my lessons
which is immoral, immodest or improper." Yet Miss Linden Dorvf said the
sisters loathed everything connected with the late 20th century. "We have
totally seceded from this period. It is a howling desert. We don't watch
television or read newspapers. We considers the output of BBC1 to be
totally lewd and unsuitable."

So what about the tape? The phone number did, she said, correspond to her
house. "It is not my department. I would like to stress that what is being
offered would not involve any sort of immorality. We condemn any sexual
activity outside marriage."

Miss Partridge, the enthusiastic disciplinarian could, Miss Linden Dorvf
said, be "many people".

Was it possible that she, Miss Tyrrell and Miss Partridge were one and the
same? Certainly their voices were similar.

She neither confirmed nor denied it. "We like to cultivate different
personalities here, you see."

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