Power to the mighty Powers

FAMILY gatherings can be fraught with nervousness at the best of time.

This was a family gathering on a grandiose scale of the sort that I’ve never experienced before.

There were to be an estimated 300 members of the Power clan at an official “Gathering” for the gala event of a three-day Power fest. The location was Gardenmorris — a grand old house and estate near the village of Kill near Waterford City.

As I drove ever eastwards along the smooth Co Waterford roads, I wondered about what all these Powers would be like. Would any of them look like me? Are all these Powers going to come from every corner of the world or will they be mostly local? Would it be like walking sober into a pub where there was already a merry sing-song in full swing? Would the other Powers like me?

As it turns out, I needn’t have fretted. The Powers were found to be in great form when I drove into the estate with my brother and mother. There was a sense of occasion buzzing around the place. Ushers waved us into car spaces, the monster-sized barbecue was smoking impressively in the courtyard and the talk on everyone’s lips was about the strangely subdued Munster championship hurling match that had been played earlier on. Waterford — playing that day without the participation of any Powers — had been unexpectedly beaten. But amongst the Waterford-dominated accents, I could also detect some North American twangs. It suddenly dawned on me that half of the Powers here were from much farther west.

Even though I was brought up in Co Waterford, it was in the western part right beside the border with Cork. There weren’t many other Power families in Tallow and the main concentration of them was (and still is) in and around Waterford City.

The Powers first arrived on our shores back in the 1200s. A thousand years have come and gone since, during which there have been wars, political upheavals, revolutions, economic crises, emigration, immigration, floods and famine. Yet, after all that time, the Powers are still to be found mostly in the very area where they all started as Norman invaders under variants of De Poer, de la Poer or De Paor.

Today, I lived on the fringes of western Munster and I find myself living in a virtually Power-free zone. There is, however, another small pocket of Powers in West Cork on the Beara Peninsula in and around Castletownbere. Why is that, I wondered, and why now was I suddenly surrounded by representatives of hordes and hordes of Powers from Canada?

It turns out that the small pocket of Powers in Castletownbere and the huge concentration of Powers in Newfoundland is all down to the fishing.

Newfoundlander Olive Power tells me how up to 90% of all the people in St Mary’s Bay area could trace their roots directly back to an area within a 20-mile radius of Waterford City.

When I was young, my late father told me that we were related to Tyrone Power. He was never a man prone to lying. In fact, he was almost always honest to a fault. So when he did ever lie, it would be an absolute whopper, such as saying that one of the most glamorous films stars in Hollywood in the 1950s was our cousin.

I told many people about this — teachers, friends, acquaintances and total strangers alike, until I discovered that it wasn’t true. When I asked my dad why he had told us this falsehood, he had completely forgotten that he had ever said it and found the whole idea highly amusing.

“Did I say that?” he laughed.

From reading the official Power Clan Gathering brochure, I discovered that there were two other famous Tyrone Powers who were both actors of some repute, but the really famous one — the one that my father claimed was our cousin — was Tyrone Edmund Power; a man of legendary smouldering good looks and star of many swashbuckling American films in the 1940s and 1950s before he succumbed to heart attack on set in Spain in 1958 at the age of 44.

I often wondered if the strange lapse of lying on his part was just his way of expressing his pride at being a Power. I asked economist Jim Power — who had been drafted in as MC for the night — if he attached any special pride at being a Power.

“I’m very proud to be a Power,” he told me. Not only is Jim Power from a place with the name Power in it (Clonea Power), but he is 100% Power on both sides of the family.

“When I travel to America and security officials look at my passport, there’s always a strong reaction when they see the name Power on the passport. It goes down well with the Americans… It’s a powerful name!”

I flicked through the Power programme again and spotted at the bottom of the Tyrone Power page that there was a Tyrone Power present here today. He was one of the Newfoundland Powers and he was directly related to the Hollywood actor.

I went in search of him. One of the organisers said that he’d find him. This would be my chance to find out if there was any truth in the notion that we might be related to Tyrone Power. Two minutes later, the coach driver came back to tell me that I’d just missed him as he had left on the coach for the hotel only two minutes previously. He was an hilarious character, apparently: a man in his 70s who had been travelling around Waterford with the other Canadians, picking up kisses from women of a certain age en route, who couldn’t resist the claim that they had “kissed Tyrone Power”.

“But was he really related to the real Tyrone Power?” I asked.

The bus driver shrugged and said “Well, he says he was, anyway.”

That sounded like a true Power all right, I thought.

More Power to him.