One of the obstacles you face in trying to find the origin and meaning of the word “jumper” – in its Irish religious sense, which we were discussing here earlier in the week – is the success of the indigenous knitwear industry.
Religious jumpers seem to have been largely associated with the far west of Ireland. But if you Google the terms “jumper” and “Connemara”, you will be deluged with advertisements for what Americans call Aran sweaters. Another problem is the word’s athletic meanings.
Search for “Connemara” and “jumper” in The Irish Times archive, for example, and the results are mostly about horse shows.
My thanks to reader Padraigín Riggs, however, who suggests that the religious term bears no relation to the English jump. “To my knowledge, the term ‘jumper’ is from the Irish verb ‘d’iompaigh’, [meaning] ‘turned’,” she writes.
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Indeed, I now see that this theory was also advanced in a 2008 book review elsewhere in these pages by Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, professor of history at NUI Galway. The book was Soupers & Jumpers: the Protestant Missions in Connemara 1848 – 1937, by Miriam Moffitt, to which we’ll return shortly.
“Jumper” in this sense does not appear in any dictionary I own, including Terry Dolan’s Hiberno-English or the Oxford Dictionary of Euphemisms, although both of those have “souper”.
So I was almost convinced by a number of readers who insisted that “jumpers” referred specifically to Catholics who converted twice. Or as one correspondent put it, to people “who took the soup and everything going with it, and then jumped back to Holy Mother Church when conditions eased”.
But in Ernie O’Malley’s newly published Mayo folklore collection, which started me on this subject, the implied conversions were sometimes permanent.
Among his stories, for example, is one called simply “The Jumper”, about a man who converts during the Famine but then has to leave his rural neighbourhood and move to Castlebar, where he marries a Protestant.
His brother later visits him there and hears the man’s wife saying harsh things about the Catholic Church.
But when he returns home and his wife asks whether he challenged the “hussy”, he replies that no, he said nothing because the woman was serving him a dinner much better than he was used to, so it didn’t seem right to complain.
Returning to Moffitt’s book, her title follows a custom dating back to the post-Famine years in using the words “Soupers & Jumpers” together. Nor, from my quick scan of the text, does it seem to differentiate between them.
Typical mentions of the j-word include a court report of 1851: “The Galway Mercury claimed that justice was also administered in an uneven manner at Cong, when the court fined Pat King for calling Michael Lally a ‘Jumper’ . . . but dismissed Fr Martin Coyne’s assault case against [Lally and others].”
The term also features in a directive from Archbishop John McHale of Tuam who, long before Captain Boycott gave his name to English, urged Catholics to:
“Separate themselves completely from intercourse with the Jumper...not to speak to them, not to lend or borrow from them; not to allow them into their homes nor upon their land ... [and] to sign themselves with the cross every time they met one in public or in private”.
Then there was Fr Patrick Lyons, parish priest of Spiddal, who in 1854 published a list of fifty-six “seceders from the Jumper camp”: ie people who had now returned to the Catholic Church.
The Protestant missions in Connemara provided not just food but also education, a big attraction at a time when the local Catholic church was opposed to national schools. But the great “Anti-Jumper Crusade of 1878-1884″ put an end to most of the proselytising.
In one notorious incident of 1879, a Father William Rhatigan from Clifden visited the Omey Island school of one William MacNeice (grandfather of the poet Louis), to reclaim lost members of his flock.
The result was a violent confrontation in which, according to rival reports, McNeice was beaten “with a heavy stick” while Rhatigan was “almost murdered”.
But the missionaries and their converts came off worse, usually. According to Moffitt, the Anti-Jumper Crusade expedited a tendency already in train whereby the missions henceforth concentrated on urban areas.
Anyway, after all that, the Diary is going to stick its neck out and suggest that “jumper” is merely a broader version of “souper”, equally pejorative but lacking the specific implication of conversion for food.
While we’re still on the subject, Padraigín Riggs also tells me of an Anglican church in Templemore, Co Tipperary, that because of its elevated site and association with local converts, became known as “Jumpers’ High”.
This is not to be confused with the “Jumping Church of Kildemock”, near Ardee, to which my classmates and I were brought on a first-ever school tour many years ago.
There, it was the ancient building itself that is said to have jumped, in the fully English sense, so that a gable wall now stands a metre or so inside its original foundations. Local folklore says it did so to exclude the grave of an excommunicated person buried under the floor. The scientific explanation was a freak windstorm in February 1715.