Juanita Casey

Juanita Casey was born in 1925 in England and adopted at birth. Her true heritage has always remained in doubt. She was told her mother was an Irish traveller, Annie Mahoney, but her real father was shrouded in mystery, albeit rumours he was an English Romany.

Juanita was adopted into a wealthy Southampton-based brewing family by Gerald Haw Taunton Barlow (1878-1952) and his wife Mary (nee Bischoff) and named Joy Barlow. She remained in close contact with her extended family, especially an uncle, Andrew Walter Barlow, who had a farm in Herefordshire. Juanita always suspected he was her real father.

A fluent Romani speaker, Andrew Barlow introduced her to the world of the circus (which overwintered on his farm), steeplechasers, horse fairs, including those in Ireland, and Gypsy vans. He also took her sailing, kindling a life-long love of tall ships and the sail-carrying J-class.

Juanita Casey’s education included three boarding schools, among them Elmers Court in Lymington, Hampshire from which she was expelled. When the family moved to Branksome Park, Bournemouth, she attended art school there.

Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Juanita, aged 16, was working on the land in Cheselbourne Dorset. Here in 1945, aged 19, she met and married gentleman farmer John "Crusoe" Fisher. She had also become friends with the Powys brothers John Cowper Powys who she visited in Wales and Theodore with whom she often walked, reminiscing on his friendship with Thomas Hardy.

A sudden decision by Fisher to sell Place Farm at Mappowder and live on an ex-fishing boat, resulted in the purchase of a top rigged schooner, The Star (aka The Looe); a series of vessels followed including the famous Brixham trawler Provident [https://www.nationalhistoricships.org.uk/register/616/provident Brixham trawler Provident] which they sailed to Kinsale, Ireland. In between sailings from their moorings in Fowey and Penzance, their son William was born (in Bournemouth) in 1947.

Based in Cornwall, Juanita, an accomplished equestrian artist, began selling her work through Newlyn art galleries as well as in London.

It was in nearby St. Ives that she was introduced to the painter and sculptor Sven Berlin. With him she had another son, Jasper.

Berlin became disillusioned with the modernist movement and the influence of Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and others. Following their marriage in Penzance in 1953, the family travelled to the New Forest in a Gypsy wagon. They set up camp not far from Shave Green, one of the last compounds in the New Forest. A local farmer’s kindness allowed them to move off the Forest into a field and the couple continued to paint and exhibit their work; in 1956 they held an exhibition at the Bladon Gallery, in Hurstbourne Tarrant, Hampshire (opened by Augustus John and attended by numerous Gypsy families) while in the same year Juanita exhibited her monotypes at the Berkeley Gallery in London - her ‘straining, fiery horses…jumping out of their frames’ wrote her friend the author Denys Val Baker in 'Britannia & Eve'magazine. Her play 'Stallion Eternity' was transmitted by the BBC on 15 November of the same year.

When Juanita came into an inheritance it allowed her to buy Home Farm in Emery Down in the New Forest, where the couple set up a zoo. Here she kept and bred Appaloosas and endeavoured to breed a zorse (a striped horse) keeping two zebras among other unusual animals.

At the same time she was supporting Berlin in his efforts to continue his work as a writer and artist, finding little time for her own creativity.

Among the many friends and acquaintances who visited them in the New Forest were Robert Graves with whom she had a long correspondence, Denys Val Baker, Vaughan Williams and Augustus John as well as their neighbour John Boorman. Juanita appears in the 1961 Mai Zetterling film Lords of Little Egypt made about the Gypsy festival of Les Saintes-Maries de la Mer in the Camargue in which she acted as interpreter.

Juanita, aged 38, met Irish journalist Fergus Casey (27) when the Berlins employed him as a groom in Emery Down. Leaving Berlin and the New Forest they married in Cornwall in 1963 following her divorce - their witnesses were the Scottish poet W S Graham and his wife Nessie who lived in Mevagissey. Their daughter Sheba was born the same year.

Travelling with Fergus and Sheba around Ireland in the 1960s, she began writing seriously. Fergus was found drowned in 1971, leaving Juanita to raise her daughter, and she moved to Sneem in County Kerry. By now her poetry and short stories were being published, significantly by Liam Miller's The Dolmen Press, while she was working in the pottery decorating pots and plates. She was a regular at the Listowel Writers' Week .

In 1974 she returned to the UK where she joined Roberts' Circus as Horsemaster hoping for a more secure and settled life for herself and her children. Making her home in Okehampton, Devon, with her daughter Sheba, she continued to write poetry and is considered ‘the first in Ireland to write haiku as we know them’, as well as short stories and completing her autobiography Azerbaijan! She always maintained her profound interest in horses and sailing ships and her connections with the Romany people.

• Eternity Smith & Other Poems (Dublin: The Dolmen Press 1985);
• Numerous contributions to collections including:
• Our Shared Japan. Edited by Irene De Angelis & Joseph Woods. Afterword by Seamus Heaney. A collection of poems by Irish writers. (Dedalus Press 2007)
• The White Page/An Bhileog Bhan: Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets (English and Irish Edition) Joan McBreen, Salmon Poetry 1999

• Hath the Rain a Father? (London: Phoenix House Ltd.1966)
• The Horse of Selene (Dublin:The Dolmen Press; London: Calder & Boyars 1971; NY: Grossman 1972; rep. 1985)
• The Circus (Dublin:The Dolmen Press 1974; Nantucket, Mass: Longship Press [1974])
• The Seagull (short story) was set as course work for GCSE examination in 2005 in a comparison with Thomas Hardy’s The Withered Arm.
• Azerbaijan! (Autobiography) published in Limited Edition. Editor: Sonia Aarons. New Forest: Millersford Press:2008
• Many short stories, poetry and articles reproduced in:

Chicago Review, Readers’ Digest, Horse & Hound, Ireland of the Welcomes magazine, Irish Times, Western Mail and in anthologies of poems and short stories.

• A Grab-bag of Juanita Casey, Journal of Irish Literature, X, 2 (May 1981); Also published as Juanita Casey A Sampling. No. 3 The Proscenium Chapbooks. Proscenium Press, Newark, DE (1981)

• Stallion Eternity (BBC commissioned play, transmitted November 1956 )
• 30 Gnu Pence (a reading at The Abbey Theatre, Dublin 1973)

• Gordon Henderson, ‘An Interview with Juanita Casey’, Journal of Irish Literature (Sept. 1972), pp. 41–45;

• Freda Brown Jackson, ‘Juanita Casey’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Broccoli Clark Book 1983).

• Also see the discussion of Casey’s The Horse of Selene in the context of Irish Traveller women’s writing in Mary Burke ‘Tinkers: Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller (Oxford University Press, 2009) 209-31

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/juanita-casey-writer-artist-and-horse-breeder-who-lived-the-archetypal-bohemian-life-8382233.html