Introduction

Konrad Peterson/Konrāds Pētersons (1888-1981) was a Latvian-born revolutionary, socialist and civil engineer who lived for most of his life in his adopted home of Ireland.

Konrad in Dublin, ca. late 1910s. Credit : Brady Collection via Sandra Bondarevska.

At the age of only 17, he participated in the Russian Revolution of 1905. Forced to flee to Dublin in its aftermath, he was active in socialist and Irish Republican politics in Dublin during his time living in the city from 1906 to 1919. Returning home to a newly declared independent Latvia, he was witness to the Nazi and Russian invasions of his home city during the Second World War. He returned to Ireland in the mid-1940s to work with Bord na Móna and lived in Athy, County Kildare where he died in his 90s.

Peterson’s story is a fascinating one that has largely been forgotten. Especially in labour history and republican circles in Dublin. Sandra Bondarevska within the Latvian community and local Athy historian Frank Taaffe has done much to help ensure his memory hasn’t been totally neglected.

Note: his first name is sometimes spelt ‘Conrad’ and his surname ‘Petersen’. For the purpose of continuity, I will spell it as Konrad Peterson which is the most commonly used form and the spelling which is on his grave.

Early life (1888-1905):

Peterson was born in Riga in the Russian Empire (now Latvia) on 15th October 1888. He studied at Tilo (Tilava) primary school and then at the Mangali Maritime school from which he was expelled for refusing to speak only Russian.

According to nekropole.info, his father ran a tavern in the suburb of Zasulauks outside Riga city.

Sandra Bondarevska in an unpublished history article states that Konrad had been been a member of Revolutionary movement in Latvia from a young age and had “had close ties with the famous social democrat and renowned poet Rainis, who had emigrated to Switzerland with his wife Aspazija after the events of 1905.”

During the 1905 Russian Revolution, it is believed that Konrad participated in two major events in Riga. The first was the 10,000 strong workers demonstration on 13th January in protest at the Bloody Sunday massacre. Three days earlier in St Petersburg, Russia, over 1,000 unarmed demonstrators were shot dead by soldiers of the Imperial Guard as they marched towards the Winter Palace to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.

In September 1905, Peterson was involved in the daring raid of Riga Central prison which involved the rescue of two imprisoned comrades. His involvement is in the revolutionary movement is covered in Fēlikss Cielēns memoir ‘Laikmetu main̦ā’.

John Langins (History of Science professor, University of Toronto) met Peterson in later life and retold in his memoirs how:

Conrad took part in the bloody demonstration in January. Jumping over the wall, one Kazaks tried to spear him (in the) the bottom but (the) spear (went through his) thick coat out the back.. (Konrad was) later was an active combatant in Riga and in the countryside. These revolutionary instincts remained with Conrad (his whole) lifetime.

In wake of the brutal repression following the revolution, Peterson was smuggled out of Riga in December in a cargo ship and traveled to Ireland via Scotland where he had family.

Langins memoirs elaborates how:

Konrad fled from the terror of the Tsar. (He) hid (in a) ship that traveled to Scotland with a few comrades. Some were concealed (amongst) potatoes and some Linos. Those (in) potatoes (were) found, and right there on the ship (were) shot, but those who had Linos, was moved to one (friendly) small cabin, where they spent several days and nights in meetings, motionless on one bed … When (they) jumped down from the board in Scotland, they almost could not walk and was accepted as heroes of the English trade unions.

Dublin (1906-1919):

Arriving in Dublin about 1906, he moved in with his uncle Charles Peterson, of the well-known pipe firm Kapp & Peterson, who lived on Leinster Road, Rathmines.

He was enrolled at Padraig Pearse’s famous school St. Enda’s in Rathfarnham. In the year 1908-1909, he is listed as being a pupil in Fourth Class, Division II.

Peterson would have been about 20 years of age in 1908 (!) but as he had only been in Ireland for two years, with presumably little or no English, it makes sense that he would be in a class for much younger children.

His english much have improved greatly as on 3rd May 1910, he is listed as taking part in a debate between the Irish Women’s Franchise League and the Socialist Party of Ireland.  The resolution was “That an adult Suffragist should support a Bill immediately enfranchising women on the same terms of men”. Speaking in favour were Mrs. Cousins, Mrs. Bac, Miss B. Bannister and Mr. Pike of The Nation newspaper. Speaking against were Mr. Ryan Loughran and ‘Konrad Petersen’. Presumably both were representing the Socialist Party of Ireland.

Whether Peterson actually believed in that viewpoint or was speaking against for argument’s sake is unknown.

Newspaper ‘Votes For Women’, 6 May 1910.

In the 1911 census, the Peterson family were living at 114 Leinster Road, Rathmines, Dublin 6. Konrad, aged 21, was listed as a scholar. He listed his religion as a “Free Thinker” as did his uncles Charles (60) and John (45), both pipe-makers. Charle’s wife was a Dublin-born Catholic called Annie Peterson (nee Forde).

Peterson family. 1911 census return, 144 Leinster Road. Via census.nationalarchives.ie

The Peterson family home was just a few minutes walk from ‘Surrey House’ at 49b Leinster Road, Rathmines. This was the home of Constance Markievicz and a hotbed of revolutionary activity. Markievicz became friendly with Konrad and his uncle Charles.

Around this time, he enrolled as a Engineering student at the Royal College of Science for Ireland (RCScI). This college later absorbed into University College Dublin (UCD) as the faculty of Science and Engineering.

Peterson continued his activity with the Socialist Party of Ireland and the milleu surround it. In 1911 he offered his advice and help to Irish Republicans organising protests against the visit of King George V and Queen Mary to Dublin. In her Witness Statement (No. 909) to the Bureau of Military History, Sidney Czira (aka ‘John Brennan’) recalled:

It was suggested to us by Conrad Peterson who was a student in the College of Science and who had some experience of shock tactics in Czarist Russia – he was from Riga – that we should adopt the methods used by demonstrators in Russia i.e. fold all the leaflets in two and catching them by the corner, fling them into air if we saw the police approaching. They would fan about the crowd and be picked up.

Sidney Czira (nee Gifford) was an officer of Cumann na mBan in Dublin and sister of Grace Gifford, the widow of Joseph M. Plunkett who was executed after the Rising.

He was certainly active in labour politics in Dublin in 1913 but it is not known to what extent he participated in the turbulent events of the Lockout.

In this wonderful picture from around 1913 published in Fearghal McGarry’s book ‘The Abbey Rebels of 1916: A Lost Revolution‘ you can see Konrad Peterson, Constance Markievicz, Helena Molony, Michael O’Gorman and George Doran dressed in costume for a performance or fancy dress party.

Peterson pictured in c. 1913. Fearghal McGarry, The Abbey Rebels of 1916: A Lost Revolution (Gill & Macmillan, 2015)

C.S. Andrews wrote that during this time Peterson:

formed close links with many of the literary and theatrical figures of Dublin … including, in particular, the famous Daisy Bannard and the man who she afterwards married, the Republican journalist Fred Cogley (‘Man of No Property, p. 188).

Peterson graduated in 1913 with an Engineering degree from the College of Scienc . Afterwards, as retold in CS Andrew’s book ‘Man of No Property’ (p. 188), he worked on a number of engineering projects. These included a survey, carried out by a group of private entrepreneurs before the First World War, into the possibility of harnessing the Shannon for Electricity Production. The project came to nothing and the idea remained dormant until revived by Dr. TA. McLaughlin in the 1920s.

On May 4th 1915, he was granted naturalisation by the British government. He was listed as ‘Konrad Peterson, from Russia. Resident in Rathmines, Co. Dublin’.

Around this time he married Helen Yeates from Dublin. From the process of elimination, I believe this is our Helen Yeates, born 9th February 1893 to Joseph and Bridget Yeates living at 10 Beresford Place. By 1911, eighteen-year old Helen was living at 107.1 Amiens Street.

Peterson was living and working in Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising and was friends with many of its leading personalities including Connolly and Marchievicz. According to The Irish Press (24 May 1951), Peterson “helped in the organisation of communications for the Rising”. But there is no more reliable sources or references to back up claims he took an active part during Easter Week.

Many will know the story of the Finn and Swede who fought in the GPO making references to Russian and British imperialism. Interestingly, there is also some evidence to suggest that a handful of Russian revolutionaries may have visited Dublin in the immediate aftermath of the Rising.

In February 1918, Peterson was present at large meeting that took place at the Mansion House to celebrate the Russian Revolution. The Irish Times (9th February 1918), reported that those present wished “to congratulate the Russian people on the triumph they have won for democratic principles“. During the proceedings, “The Red Flag” was sung and red and republican flags were waved.

Flyer for another 1918 event in the Mansion House. Credit – http://www.whytes.ie/.

The Irish Independent (5th February 1918) wrote:

Mr. Conrad Peterson who announced himself as a Russian Social Democrat spoke strongly in support of “the great struggle for peace, liberty and bread”.

Those present also included Cathal O’Shannon, Dr. Kathleen Lynn, Countess Marchievicz and Mrs. (Maud) Gonne-McBride.

In June 1919, Peterson was listed as a committee member of the ‘James Connolly Birthday Celebration’ in the Mansion House. Tickets were one shilling and all proceeds were to be devoted to the establishment of a ‘Connolly Memorial Worker’s College’.

Peterson listed second row in the middle. Republished in ‘Songs of Freedom: The James Connolly Songbook’ (PM Press, 2013), page 33.

Latvia and Sweden (1919 – 1945):

Peterson left Dublin with his wife Helen sometime after June 1919 and returned to his native Latvia which had been since declared an independent republic. Upon his arrival, it is believed that he was honoured as a hero of the 1905 Revolution.

One can only imagine the culture shock for a Dublin woman Helen Yeates to move from Dublin to Riga, with presumably very little Russian or Latvian, in 1919.

Konrad in Riga, Latvia pictured soon after his return from Dublin, c. 1919. Credit Brady Family via Sandra Bondarevska.

On 1st September 1923, Helen gave birth to a daughter Izeult Pamela Peterson.

[On an important side note, Konrad’s sister-in-law Annie Peterson (nee Forde) was an active member of Cumann na mBan in Dublin in the early 1920s. She lived with her son Conrad Henry and daughter Isolda at 53 Kenilworth Square, Rathgar. Éamon de Valera’s presidential office was moved to this address in 1921 when his house in Blackrock was raided. It was in this house that Arthur Griffith presented Lloyd George’s proposals for the Anglo-Irish Treaty to de Valera four days before the Treaty was signed in London.]

In 1929, Peterson visited Ireland with journalist Patrick Smyth (aka ‘Quidnunc’) writing in his An Irishman’s Diary column in The Irish Times (19 June 1929):

I happened to meet during the week a visitor to Dublin whose name will be remembered by many of his old associates in the College of Science – Mr. Konrad Peterson, who is now Director of Public Works under the Government of Latvia.

The piece mentioned that Peterson had previously lived in Dublin “and was for several years associated with Labour politics in this city”. Smyth obviously thought very highly of him as he remarked that his “cheerful and vigorous personality has had much to do with the extraordinary progress” of the Latvian economy!

While in Ireland, Peterson visited the Shannon hydroelectric scheme and took much interest in its progress as a similar project was under consideration for the River Dwina in Latvia. Peterson also lauded the progress made in “the construction of roads in the Irish Free State”. In regard to Latvia, he said the “political future” of the country depended on the “adoption of constitutional form of government by Russia”.

Image of Peterson in The Irish Times, 19 June 1929.

Peterson, then a high official in the Latvian government, visited Dublin again in 1937. The Irish Times (11th August 1937) stated that Peterson had a special interest Ireland’s peat industry and one of the factories under his control was the State Peat Works at Liepaja, Latvia which produced some of the country’s largest quantities of peat insulation plates.

During his time in Dublin, he met his first cousin Isolde. A daughter of his uncle Charles who had first put up him in Rathmines Road when he first arrived in Ireland thirty years previously.

(l-r) Konrad Peterson, Isolde Peterson (cousin), unknown, unknown. Dublin, c. 1936. Credit : Brady Family via Sandra Bondarevska

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Peterson was in charge of the Latvian government department dealing with bog development.

During World War Two, his country was invaded first by the Nazis in December 1941 and then by the Russians in October 1944.

When the Germans were forced to evacuate, he decided like thousands of others, to seek refuge in Sweden. Traveling with his wife Helen and daughter Pamela, their the hazardous journey across the Baltic in an open boat was safely accomplished with the help of two friends. (‘Man of No Property’, p. 188).

In Ireland, former IRA volunteer turned civil servant C.S. Andrews was put in charge of turf development when Fianna Fail had come to power in 1932 and in a few years later became managing director of the newly-established Bord na Móna .

In August 1945, Andrews was sent on a delegation to Sweden to learn more about their peat industry. He takes up the story in ‘A Man Of No Property’ (p. 188):

We were in the office of one of these peat moss factories when the discussion was interrupted by the arrival of a heavily built, middle-aged man who addressed us in a loud, cheerful voice speaking thickly accented English ‘Are you boys from Dublin? Do you know Daddy Or and the College of Science? We were astonished at this apparition. Daddy Orr was a legendary and eccentric Professor of Mathematics in the College of Science who was alleged to have believed himself to be the square root of minus one. It was surprising, to say the least, that his fame has spread to an obscure peat moss factory in a remote corner of Sweden.

Andrews had by chance bumped into Konrad Peterson. The Irish delegation took him and his wife to dinner in Malmo “and to say that his life story kept us entranced until the small hours would be an understatement” recalled Andrews.

During this time, Bord na Móna were developing a bog at Kilberry, near Athy, for peat moss production. As this was a specialised process in which the Irish government were inexperienced, Andrews asked Peterson if he would be wiling to move to Ireland to take charge of the project.

Peterson readily accepted and him and his wife and daughter moved to Dublin in circa 1946.

Dublin and Kildare (1946 – 1981):

The family first moved in with Peterson’s cousin Isolde who lived in a house ‘Allsa’ on Winton Avenue, Rathgar Dublin.

Isolde Peterson pictured in The Irish Times (16 May 1942).

On 4th March 1948 in The Irish Times, the engagement was announced between Konrad and Helen’s daughter Pamela Peterson and Dermot Murphy. Dermot was the second son of Professor and Mrs. J. Murphy from Glanville, Newcastle, Galway.

Later in 1948, Konrad Peterson spoke at the inaugural meeting of the Dublin University Fabian Society which was focused on the current political landscape in Eastern Europe. Described as a “Latvian refugee” in The Irish Times (2 November 1948), he told the audience that “in the police state there was no freedom of speech … There was one party – the Communist Party – and God help anyone who tries to put up an opposition”. He described the regimes in Eastern Europe as “new slavery” not “new democracies”.

Peterson in later life. via lv.wikipedia.org.

Peterson was obviously hostile to Stalin and the Soviet Union but a report in The Irishman’s Diary the following day is very interesting as it refers to Peterson being a member of “left wing party that was not Communist” in Latvia. So it does seem he retained some of his radical Left politics.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he was well-established as manager of Bord na Móna’s peat moss factory at Kilberry, County Kildare.

Peterson pictured in The Irish Press, 22 August 1956.

Konrad’s long-devoted wife Helen died sadly on 22nd November 1959 at St. Laurence’s hospital in Dublin and was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.

Grave of Helen Peterson, Glasnevin. Credit – Sandra Bondarevska.

In the early 1960s, Konrad’s cousin Isolde Peterson was a founding member of Amnesty International along with Sean MacBride, Helmut Clissmann, Sybil Le Brocquy and others.

Konrad finished his career in Bord na Móna’s “experimental research station, developing peat moss as a horticultural fertiliser. “

After his retirement, he moved for a time to Canada with his daughter Pamela and son-in-law Dr. Dermot Murphy before moving back to Athy where the three lived in White Castle Lawns.

Konrad in his 90s. Credit : Brady Collection via Sandra Bondarevska.

Konrad Peterson died in St. Vincent’s Hospital, Athy aged 93 years on 16^th January, 1981. He is buried in St. Michael’s Cemetery, Athy, Co. Kildare.

Conclusion:

No obituaries followed his death in any English-speaking newspapers that I could find. It is bitterly disappointing that he was never interviewed by any journalists or historians about his long life and the extraordinary world events that he was witness to.

As he had no grandchildren, that line of his direct family died out. His grave in Athy became neglected and it wasn’t until March 2013 that things began to change. A group of Latvians living in Ireland including journalist Sandra Bondarevska and Latvian ambassador Peteris Elferts organised a trip to St. Michael’s Cemetery to clean Peterson’s grave which by then was illegible.

He deserves nothing less. John Langins, who knew Peterson in Canada in his later years, wrote:

he loved Ireland and often told me about the English violence in Ireland. He believed that Ireland was the saddest example across the English colonial history, much worse than their behavior in Africa and elsewhere. He (also) compared the Irish and Latvian situation, considering (their) very similar colonial situations.

2013 grave cleaning of Konrad Peterson, St. Michael’s Cemetery. Credit : http://baltic-ireland.ie/

From a daring young revolutionary in the Russian Revolution of 1905 to managing a Bord na Móna’s peat moss factory in Kilberry forty years later – Konrad Peterson lived a remarkable and long life.

If anyone has anymore information, particularly on his time in Dublin (1906-19), please leave a comment or get in touch.

References:

CS Andrews, Man of No Property (Lilliput, 2001)
Frank Taafe, kildare-nationalist.ie (12 March 2013)
Entry on nekropole.info and lv.wikipedia.org
The Irish Press (24 May 1951; 22 Aug 1956)
The Irish Times (09 Feb 1918; 29 Sep 1923; 19 June 1929; 11 Aug 1937; 02 Nov 1948; 03 March 1948; 04 March 1948; 09 May 1951; 23 Nov 1959)
The Irish Independent (5 Feb 1918)
Votes for Women (6 May 1910)

Family Tree:

Konrad Peterson (1888-1981) m. c. 1915 Helen Yeates (1893 – 1959)
daughter Pamela Peterson (1923-1989) m. 1948 Dermot Murphy (?-?)

I was delighted to be asked to give a brief talk last night in Drumcondra Library on the life of Seán Connolly, the first rebel fatality of the 1916 Rising in Dublin. This talk was part of the Dublin Festival of History, which is a Dublin City Council initiative that grows with each year. While there are large events in the Printworks venue at Dublin Castle, there is also a full calendar of talks in DCC libraries.

Seán Connolly (1882-1916) was a trade unionist and cultural nationalist who was heavily involved in the language, theatre and sporting movements of the early twentieth century. Gary Holohan, a leading member of the republican scout movement Na Fianna, recalled that “the Connolly’s were the first Irish-Ireland family I ever knew.” Seán O’Casey, who also entered radical politics through the cultural movements around it, remembered the first time he met Connolly, as “in the lapel of the coat he wore a button badge, having on it a Celtic cross with the words The Gaelic League over it.”

From a family of committed Larkinites, some of Sean’s siblings were later central to the reorganising of the Citizen Army after Easter Week, with his brother Joseph holding the rank of Captain in the ICA until 1923.

I want to express my thanks to those who traveled to the talk last night with this unique banner, loaned by Catriona and John Malone. From 1918, the banner was produced for a local Cumann of the Sinn Féin party in Naas. It was made by Elizabeth Garry (nee Cahill) of Poplar Square in Naas, and looks remarkably well after 98 years:

1918 banner for Naas Cumann of Sinn Féin, dedicated to the memory of Sean Connolly. (Drumcondra Library,29 September 2016)

While the Connolly family home was on Gloucester Street (now Seán MacDermott Street) in Dublin’s north inner-city, the roots of the family were in Kildare, which may well explain the decision to name a Sinn Féin Cumann there in his honour. The family had a tradition in radical politics that stretched back to the days of the Land League, when the family were evicted from their land at Straffan. Seán’s grandmother, Eileen Connolly, was evicted for subscribing to the Land League funds, something that the landlord took exception to.

Produced just two short years after the Rising, the banner shows that some of those who died in the fighting in Dublin were already taking on enormous symbolic importance. Seeing such a piece of history up close also makes you wonder how many gems like it are hiding in attics!

In recent years, there has been a tremendous resurgence of interest in the work of Harry Clarke (1889-1931). Ireland’s most renowned stained-glass artist, the work of Harry Clarke and his studio team is to be found all over the capital and beyond.  HarryClarke.net provides an archive of his windows from Ireland and beyond, and The History Press have published Strangest Genius: The stained glass of Harry Clarke, a beautifully illustrated book that brings together the entire Clarke collection. For creative revisionists , there’s even a colouring book!

Mary Clerkin Higgins, a stained-glass artist and conservator, maintains that:

A complex window is like an orchestra playing a symphony. The colours must work as an ensemble; whether the artist intends them to hum a rich, beautiful melody or be a rambunctious chorus of hues, there has to be a basic structure, order and harmony….Harry Clarke was, above all else, a truly great colourist, one who could deftly combine a rich palette of colours to achieve dazzling results.

Personally, I have always hand a great fondness for Clarke’s book illustrations, in particular the rather haunting ‘The Last Hour of the Night’, which served as frontispiece to Patrick Abercrombie’s Dublin of the Future: The New Town Plan (1922). Published at a time when the city was emerging from the violence of the revolutionary period, the piece shows destroyed Dublin landmarks alongside the great shame of the city – its unsanitary and deathtrap tenement blocks:

‘The Last Hour of the Night’ (Harry Clarke, 1922)

A recent fundraiser for vital renovation and conservation works on a Clarke window in Ringsend reminded me of a damaged but ultimately salvaged Clarke piece on display today in The Little Museum of Dublin. Depicting Saint Brendan, this piece was rescued from a skip by architectural historian (and one of the real champions of Dublin history) Peter Pearson. As Pól Ó Conghaile has noted, ” Peter kept the panel’s shape by fitting it into an old bread tray. The tray remains as its frame today, with two words printed on its top side: Irish Pride.”

The odds of finding a Harry Clarke in a skip, damaged or otherwise, are slim to none today. The Little Museum of Dublin, who currently display the rescued piece, are hoping to expand their museum in the years ahead, which will allow them to display more artifacts like this one.

In January 2012, we had the privilege of sitting down and chatting with Terry Fagan, the driving force behind the North Inner-City Folklore Project. The Project has been responsible for a number of oral history publications, most recently a study of Dublin tenement life. The project have also put up several plaques in the north inner-city in recent years, marking the valuable contribution of the area to the struggle for independence.

Quite frankly, what Terry and the NICFP have gathered over time is one of the most important collections of artifacts of working class life and struggle on the island of Ireland.  For several years now, the material has been kept in a vacant flat at St. Mary’s Mansions on Railway Street. In recent days, the collection had a very lucky escape:

(Image Credit: Terry Fagan)

(Image Credit: Terry Fagan)

Terry notes that:

The residents of St Marys Mansions of Railway Street including local teenagers have watched over it for nearly two years to make sure nothing happened to it as it lay in the boarded up Dublin City Council flat. Only for the Council over the many years they have always helped me with a place to store the archive which keeps on growing as more artifacts are giving to me by some local people. The flat complex is not being pulled down, it is to be redesigned with the start of the art housing is to be in place for the residents when the return after moving out temporally.

The Halloween event is not too far away and the young children were out and about collecting all sorts of wood for the Halloween bonfire, they had it stored near where the archive is housed on the ground floor flat. They would tell me as I was going in and of the flat “We will make sure nothing will happen to it.”

I had them all in looking at the old black and white photographs, and some were pointing out their grandmothers and grandfathers. They were amazed looking at the old tenement artifacts; old gas lamps and oil lamps old valve radios, the old money and artifacts I found in the underground tunnels of what was old Monto.

During the night a group from another part of the area came in and set fire to the wood they had spent days collecting in preparation for Halloween. Thanks to Dublin Fire Brigade who where on the scene quickly and put out the fire which almost spread next-door to where the archive is housed. I don’t think they knew was stored next door to where the fire was, but they saved the history of the area. I thank them.

(Image Credit: Terry Fagan)

(Image Credit: Terry Fagan)

The plaque of the Hitschfeld Centre, part of a new exhibition at The Little Museum of Dublin.

On 6 May 1933, Adolf Hitler’s Brownshirts made their way into the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Studies) in Berlin and seized thousands of books and publications they deemed immoral. At the same time, bookshops and lending libraries were raided across the city, denounced as “literary bordellos” by  ignorant thugs.

Thankfully, the founder of the Institute, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, was on a speaking tour of the United States at the time the raiding party arrived. One witness to the raid on the Institute described how for three hours the raiders:

 …emptied inkwells onto carpets and broke, or vandalised, framed paintings and prints…They confiscated books, periodicals, photographs, anatomical models, a famous wall tapestry, and a bust of Hirschfeld. After music, speeches and songs outside at noon they departed but were succeeded at 3pm by SA men, who removed 10,000 books form the institute’s library. A few days later they carried the bust of Hirschfeld on a pole in a torchlight parade before throwing it on the bonfire with the books from the Institute.

A memorial plaque in Berlin’s Tiergarten today marks the location were the Institute stood. Unsurprisingly, Hirschfeld would never return to Germany. A Jewish sexologist stood little chance in Nazi Germany, and Hirschfeld lived out his final days in France. On his 67^th birthday, 14 May 1935, he died of a heart attack in Nice. Once dubbed the “Einstein of Sex”, he was just one of many intellectual leaders who suffered at the hands of Fascism.

Hirschfeld came to be honoured by LGBT activists all over the world, including here in Dublin. A new exhibition in the Little Museum of Dublin, Brand New Retro: Irish Pop Culture 1950-1980, sees the bronze sign from the front of the Hirschfeld Centre in Temple Bar on display to the public. This institution, which opened its doors in March 1979, retains a special place in the gay history of Dublin.  For many, seeing the sign will be a reminder of a different time entirely, both for Dublin and the Irish gay community.

 Temple Bar in 1979:

Writing in 1979, an English journalist said of the Irish capital:

Suddenly, Dublin has become a shabby city – shabby because its centre is peppered with crude concrete structures, flashy mirror-glass facades and other inappropriate schemes which have no connection at all with the spirit of the place.

There was a certain air of “tear it down and start again”, which was nowhere more obvious than in Temple Bar. Once a district synonymous with manufacturing and production, the wheels of industry had largely seized turning by the late 1970s, and urban decay was becoming a reality. In 1977, there was  a massive  proposal for the development of a new central Bus station in Temple Bar, which  would span the River Liffey, with development on Ormond Quay designed to complement that across the River. It was planned that a tunnel under the Liffey would join both sites, and it was also planned to incorporate the DART into at all. It would have spelled the end for Temple Bar as Dubliners knew it, and C.I.E (the bus company) were buying up huge chunks of property in the area – but leasing them out on short term leases, accidentally bringing a new energy to a district they wanted to demolish. Paul Knox has written:

Paradoxically, this triggered a process of revitalization. Activities which could afford only low rents on short leases moved into the district. These included artists’ studios, galleries, recording and rehearsal studies, pubs and cafes, second-hand clothes shops, small boutiques, bookshops and record stores, as well as a number of voluntary organisations. Together with the districts architectural character, the youth culture attracted by the districts new commercial tenants brought a neobohemian atmosphere to Temple Bar…

Thankfully never constructed, this was the proposed bus station development of 1977 (Image Credit: Archiseek)

Temple Bar was a district in transition, and which it seemed was up for grabs. Interviewed by Rabble in September 2012 Rabble in September 2012, historian and archivist Tonie Walsh made the point that:

It was on Fownes Street because it was so derelict. It made an ideal place for a gay community centre at a time when homophobia was endemic. It was important to get somewhere that wasn’t too in the public eye, that was a little bit discreet. Because of course you had to run the gamut of gay bashers, or people wanting to torch the place. I mean there were grills on it. A poet friend of mine from Finglas ,John Grundy,  used to refer to it as ‘Fortress Fownes’. It looked like it was totally grilled. Barricaded.

A new social centre:

The driving force behind the centre was the National Gay Federation, today the National LGBT Federation. It housed “meeting spaces, a youth group, a café, a small cinema and film club and it ran discos at the weekend where gay men, lesbian women and transgender people socialised.”In the years before this, it was clear such a premises was needed. In October 1975,  more than three hundred people attended the opening night of the Phoenix Club, HQ of the Irish Gay Rights Movement (IGRM) at 46 Parnell Square, and as the Irish Queer Archive have noted, this proved the “massive need for a dedicated queer social space in Dublin city.”

Fownes Street as it appears today. 10 Fownes Street is now occupied by Tola Vintage, beside Gourmet Burger Kitchen. (Image: Google Maps)

The plaque on the new Temple Bar premises was unveiled by Dr. Noel Browne, a TD who had bravely raised the issue of gay rights inside Leinster House in 1977, and who had clashed with conservatives forces in the past, most famously during the Mother and Child Scheme controversy.  On the day of the unveiling of the plaque, a speech heralded the centre as  “living proof of gay people’s new found pride…testimony to the fact that [we] the gay citizens of Ireland need no longer fear to be openly ourselves.”

The Irish Times reported on the opening of the centre that:

The four-storey building was once a warehouse, but has been renovated and equipped with fire escapes and fire fighting equipment as well as with more “fun” items like the massive disco speakers and imported record collection straight from New York’s most up-to-date record shop, and the brown wood-slatted cafeteria selling Bewley’s coffee.The cinema is already fully functioning.

It was reported that “NGF members will be able to get pink plastic triangles from the centre to wear on their lapels as a sign of membership” In explaining this, David Norris told the press that “Gays were the first to be interned in Nazi camps and also the first to be medically experimented on. And though half a million gays perished in the camps, both German Republics have consistently refused to compensate or even commemorate the fact.” Norris invested heavily in the new centre; indeed The Irish Times reported that it had been “very largely funded by David Norris…with money from selling his home in Greystones, Co. Wicklow, and he is resigned to the fact that he may not get his investment back again.”

As part of the new Brand New Retro exhibition in the Little Museum of Dublin, a number of contemporary handbills from the centre have been reproduced, giving a sense of the wide variety of functions played by the centre. This leaflet notes the disco nights which largely sustained the centre financially, as well as advertising the very important TAF (Tel-A-Friend) service, a “confidential information and counseling service for homosexual Men and Women”:

(Image Credit:Brand New Retro exhibition at the Little Museum of Dublin.)

Similarly, this leaflet advertises the Gay Switchboard:

(Image Credit: Brand New Retro exhibition at The Little Museum of Dublin.

Could anyone have predicted the immediate successes of the centre?  In a country that still criminalised homosexuality, hundreds came through its doors on the first night alone. David Norris recalled that:

The first night the Hirschfeld Centre opened there were three or four hundred people in the place, and when I went to check downstairs I could the floorboards were bouncing. A member who was also a structural engineer approached to say it could be dangerous, so I had the music switched off. I addressed the the throng and told them they could have a refund, or they could stay and chat to their friends and the coffee bar was free for the night, but there would be no more dancing that evening. I was booed and hissed at before one guy stood up and said ‘Hold on a minute, Isn’t it just as well there is someone who does give a shit about our safety?’ and the boos turned into cheers!

By the mid 1980s, there was a belief that Temple Bar had been rescued, and that life had been “brought back due to cheap short-term leases for shops and cafes.” The Hirschfeld was seen by many as an important part of this transformation, and in particular its nightclub component Flikkers, which was regarded as one of the most cutting-edge nightclubs in the city.  The name was taken from Dutch-slang for”faggot”. To the Times, it was “one of the liveliest and musically up-to-date [clubs] in town. Records are imported directly from London and, as a rule, are played months before they hit the radio and charts.” In a similar vein to this, DJ Paul Webb told Rabble magazine it was like a “whole new world”:

Coming into somewhere like Flikkers it was just a whole new world it was brilliant, how do you explain it? It was was like being reborn – when you are going out clubbing and you don’t want the same twenty clubs up on Leeson or Harcourt St all playing the same 20 songs, down here it was a whole new world. You could experiment there. I used to play 12 inch instrumentals of James Brown with people doing speeches or raps over it.

It’s fitting that one of the reproduced flyers in the new exhibition is taken from that dimension of the Hirschfeld’s existence:

(Image Credit: Brand New Retro exhibition at the Little Museum of Dublin)

Visiting the night, one journalist who was sent to investigate felt compelled to write that:

Though homosexuals have a reputation for voracious sexual appetite, there is little evidence of it here. In seating to one side of the room, two men were kissing….It is a surprisingly young crowd, most of whom appear to be in their early twenties. Most have businessman’s haircuts and wear moderately casual clothes. A few form to the traditional image of gays, floridly dressed, wearing necklaces and earrings and with their faces painted with lipstick and eye shadow.

Sunday Independent feature on Flikkers, 25 August 1985.

Some sinister forces worked against the centre; on a November night in  1985, Norris climbed onto the rood of the premises to discover “the asphalt-coated felt was on fire, and there was a milk churn full of explosives sitting there, surrounded by firelighters and two barrels of petrol. It was as if the whole roof was a giant petrol bomb, just waiting to explode.”

Two years later, in 1987, the premises was gutted by fire, which the National LGBT  Federation history notes was “presumed to be accidental.” In the years that followed Norris and other campaigners sought National Lottery funding for the Hirschfeld Centre project, but were blocked time and again. Gay Health Action, Tel-A-Friend, Liberation for Irish Lesbians and other organisations lost much with the destruction of the premises, though thankfully some important artifacts survived. In the true spirit of the man after whom it was named, the centre had begun the important task of correlating and collecting items relating to the history of the LGBT community in Ireland.

Today, Tonie Walsh maintains the Irish Queer Archive, a treasure trove housed in the National Library of Ireland, and which he often shares with the public via the IQA Facebook page. This year I had the pleasure of organising the walking tours for Dublin’s Culture Night, and the sheer numbers who attended Tonie’s walk of LGBT Dublin was a testament to the work he has done and the enduring interest in it.

While the original plaque is today in the Little Museum, perhaps it is time a plaque was added on Fownes Street, marking this important location in the history of Dublin and LGBT rights.

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The Hirschfeld Centre is just one part of the story told at the new Brand New Retro exhibition. It will run until January 2017. We congratulate Brian’s McMahon of the BNR blog on pulling it all together. On Satuday and Sunday mornings, I provide a walking tour of St Stephen’s Green that leaves from the Little Museum at 11.30. Be sure to drop in and see this wonderful exhibition while it runs.

illustration dated 12 June 1921. (Click to expand)

On 25 May 1921, Dublin’s magnificent Custom House was set ablaze by the 2nd Battalion of the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Republican Army. The centre of Local Government for the British administration in Ireland, the building was of enormous political and symbolic importance.

That the IRA succeeded in burning the building isn’t entirely surprising, owing to the level of collusion between the revolutionary forces and Dublin Fire Brigade, well-detailed in The Firemen’s Tale (Available at this link).Not only had the IRA sought advice on how to burn the building from republicans within the DFB, but on entering the burning premises firefighters did what they could to ensure the building was destroyed. DFB historian Las Fallon has written of how the Chief Officer of the Fire Brigade, Captain John Myers, did not seek any external help from other fire services (like those of Rathmines and Pembroke) who could have assisted in bringing the blaze under control, while firemen “made down their hoses with a marked lack of speed or urgency.” One firefighter who entered the building, Michael Rogers, recalled:

We had the building practically at our mercy. And I can tell you now that many parts of it that were not on fire when we entered were blazing nicely in a short while.

Firefighter Joseph Connolly was an active member of the Irish Citizen Army at the time of the burning of the building. Following the act, ICA Captain Michael O’Kelly was actually snuck into the building disguised as a firefighter to recover weapons, remembering that about 35 revolvers were salvaged, and that “we took them out and delivered them in Fairview that night in a Dublin ambulance.”

For the IRA, the ICA and indeed the DFB, it was all in a day’s work.  Five Volunteers were killed that day, and dozens captured, but the images of the destroyed Custom House which would make their way across the world did much to counter the lies that the war in occupied Ireland was little more than unarmed policemen being shot by thugs. The capacity of the revolutionary forces was clearly demonstrated before the world, in a way that was totally at odds with the cinema newsreels of 1921.

Fire was a weapon in the revolutionary period, more often deployed by crown forces. As Las Fallon notes, the burning of co-operative creameries and community services “as a general reprisal against a local population was possibly the most targeted use of incendiarism by the police and British military. In general they struck more widely, burning towns and villages…to strike fear into the locals.”

In France, this imaginative illustration appeared in the pages of Le Pelerin days after the burning of the Custom House. A few things should be noted; perhaps the illustrator was thinking too much of the events of 1916, as the scene is more reminiscent of the GPO than the reality of the Custom House. While men entered the Custom House armed with revolvers, here we see rifles being fired out of the windows. Note also the presence of women, perhaps Cumann na mBan activists, one of whom has had the misfortune of having her dress catch fire!  Looking out one window, we see a Dublin Fire Brigade firefighter hard at work too, pointing his hose inside the inferno. It’s quite funny to think, owing to recent historical research and revelations, that may be the most ludicrous or inaccurate dimension of the work!

I must confess, that from time to time I do buy books based on their covers alone. Sometimes, it can be because of who the illustrator is, and other times for what the books capture of Dublin past. I couldn’t resist Terence de Vere White’s A Fretful Midge (1957) recently when I stumbled across it.

The front of the book shows 12 Aungier Street, today home to JJ Smyth’s pub, and the birthplace of the poet Thomas Moore. There is a great blog post on Architecture Ireland about this building through the ages. The building once had a bust of Thomas Moore in its exterior, visible in the illustration above, but it is no more today:

On the 28 May 1779, the house became the home of Thomas Moore. His father, John Moore, was a grocer and wine-merchant and ran the business from the ground floor of the family home. Moore passed the first twenty years of his life in the house, where the ‘entertainments given by my joyous and social mother could, for gaiety, match with the best.’

12 Aungier Street as we see it today is a very different building from that of the 1780s, when Moore grew up within it.  As the Architecture Ireland post notes, the 1960s brought great changes to the streetscape:

However, the arrival of the sixties heralded a period of economic growth in Ireland and historic buildings all over the city were pulled down to make way for office blocks and housing complexes. Unfortunately, number 12 did not escape the destruction, and in 1962 it was largely demolished by Dublin Corporation, despite the pleas of those who wished to have it preserved. The following year it was reconstructed to appear as it had when Moore occupied it. Some of the original features were restored, including two hall doors, however, very little authentic fabric remains. The large paned Victorian windows were replaced with Georgian replicas and the bust of Thomas Moore was again removed from the façade.

This unfortunate demolition resulted in the loss of a historic monument. The house’s reconstruction failed to respect the layering of fabric that had built up over time, telling the story of the building. Today, it appears that the house has all but lost its connection to Moore, with only low-lying plaque in the wall indicating the site’s cultural significance.

`”Reconstructed in 1963″ – Plaque on the building today (Image: CHTM)

Now I’ve admitted to buying the book just because I liked the illustration on the front, I should give it its rightful praise. Inside, it has proven a great read.Terence de Vere White (1912-1994)  was a lawyer, writer, playwright and literary editor of The Irish Times from 1961 to 1977. The book has some very colourful insights on twentieth century Dublin, for example describing how a family that were loyal in their political convictions responded to the Rising:

We were living in Marlborough Road when the Easter Week Rebellion of 1916 took Dublin by surprise….That action, call it what you please, was resented by the vast majority in Dublin at the time. We went in broad daylight with our nurse to the barricades in Donnybrook and gave food to English tommies. All round us others were doing likewise. No one protested. It must have seemed the most ordinary and normal of actions or we would not have been allowed to go out with our nurse to perform it.

From the back windows of our house we could see the tower of St Mary’s in Haddington Road.From talk overheard I thought there were snipers up in the tower and I looked at it with awe as I was going to bed; with too, too,I hope, for the lonely men up there in the tower, now a dark shadow against the flaming sky of the city which a gun-boat in the bay was pounding to rubble.

Charles Patrick Donnelly. Poet, republican and UCD student. He died at the Battle of Jarama in Spain, 1937.

Next week, a series of lectures will take place in Dublin to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and to highlight the Irish dimensions of the conflict.

Over a number of nights, some of the leading historians on the Irish dimensions of the Spanish Civil War, such as David Convery and Brian Hanley, will be joined by international speakers like Emilio Silvia and Soledad Fox. The meetings take place in Liberty Hall and the Unite Hall on Middle Abbey Street, and are free to attend.

I’m delighted to speak on Thursday alongside Seán Byers from Belfast. My talk will look at commemoration in 1930s Dublin, and the frequently violent nature of it all. Events in Spain shaped much of this from 1936 onwards, and certainly contributed to anti-communist hysteria. You might be feeling all ‘commemorated out’ by now, but I promise this will all be rather different from what you’ve been surrounded by in 2016!

Our congratulations to Harry Owens on producing such a magnificent programme of talks.

Liberty Hall: A centre of political and cultural radicalism.

Earlier this year I gave a talk on the Fintan Lalor Pipe Band for a conference entitled Music in Ireland: 1916 and Beyond. The FLPB would come to be seen as the ‘band of the Irish Citizen Army’, and were in their own right an important part of Jim Larkin’s  cultural  vision. This is an edited version of that talk.

Studies of the Irish Citizen Army, the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union and other working class organisations in the revolutionary period have tended to focus on their political histories – examining events and themes such as the Lockout of 1913, the Easter Rising  and the political ideology of leaders like Larkin and Connolly.  There is still, I would maintain, much work to be done on the culture of the radical trade union movement of revolutionary Ireland.

What James Larkin attempted to do in Dublin from the time of his arrival in the city in 1908 amounted to more than political revolution –  there was an enormous social dimension to his project. Emmet O’Connor, Larkin’s most outstanding biographer to date, contends that Liberty Hall was the centre of a working class “counter culture.” It had a theatre, a printing press, a workers co-operative shop, food facilities and more besides. To the movement of Larkin and Connolly, culture formed an important component – and perhaps no aspect of it was more important than the Fintan Lalor Pipe Band, who would lead their movement through the streets.

Jim Larkin’s arrival in Ireland:

Jim Larkin’s mugshot from Sing Sing Prison, 1920.

Jim Larkin, born in Toxteth in Liverpool to Irish parents in 1867, remains the single most important figure – and one of the most divisive figures – in the history of Irish trade unionism and labor politics .He arrived in Ireland in 1907 as a trade union organiser with the National Union of Dock Labourers, sent to organise on the docks of Belfast,  where he succeeded in doing the unimaginable and defying the sectarian divisions there, something well-documented in John Gray’s study City in Revolt. Larkin was renowned for his deployment of the sympathetic strike tactic  – believing that an injury to one was an injury to all – undoubtedly one contributing factor that led to his sacking by the NUDL and his decision to establish his own union, the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union,  which he based in Dublin. This was a revolutionary union committed to the overthrow of capitalism, and modeled on the politics of syndicalism – that is a belief that workers’ could transform society through unified industrial action.  A journalist from The Times in Britain wrote of ‘Larkinism’ in 1911 that:

For the present it is enough to say that the object of Mr.Larkin’s Union is to syndicalise Irish Labour, skilled and unskilled, in a single organisation, the whole forces of which can be brought to bear on any single dispute in the Irish industrial world.

 Summing up ‘Larkinism’ himself, Jim Larkin stated:

“The employers know no sectionalism. The employers give us the title of the ‘working class’. Let us be proud of the term. Let us have, then, the one union, and not, as now, 1,100 separate unions, each acting upon its own. When one union is locked out or on strike, other unions or sections are either apathetic or scab on those in dispute. A stop must be put to this organised blacklegging.”

The rise of Liberty Hall:

Larkin based his new union in what he called Liberty Hall,  a former hotel which had fallen into rack and run. This premises offered everything an emerging movement could need;  as Emmet O’Connor has noted, it “offered rooms for band practice, Irish language classes, a choir and a drama society.” Liberty Hall would prove a tremendous resource to the labour movement, providing the location for a printing press for example, and as Christopher Murray has noted in his biography of Sean O’Casey its former life as a hotel proved invaluable on occasion, not least in 1913 when “the old kitchens were still usable in the basement.”

More than a trade union HQ: An advertisement from James Connolly’s The Workers’ Republic.

Much has been written of Larkinism in labour dispute –  little has been written of the culture that surrounded Liberty Hall.  Indeed, the Manchester Guardian was so moved by Larkin’s project, that they proclaimed “no Labour headquarters in Europe has contributed so valuably to the brightening of the lives of the hard-driven workers around it…it is a hive of social life.” For Larkin, there was an enormous emphasis on the self-respect and dignity of the working class, and in their visible orgnaisation and solidarity.James Plunkett, in an essay of remembrance, recalled that:

Torchlight processions and bands, songs and slogans and the thunder of speeches from the windows of Liberty Hall, these were his weapons, and he calculated than a man with an empty belly would stand the pain of it better if you could succeed in filling his head full of poetry. Those who previously had nothing with which to fill out the commonplace of drab days could now march in processions, wave torches, yell out songs…It was Larkin’s triumph to inject enough of it into a starving class to lift them off their knees and lead them out of the pit.

 An often overlooked but hugely important part of Larkin’s personality – and something James Connolly shared – was his commitment to a teetotal lifestyle. The public house was often denounced in the pages of his newspaper The Irish Worker, he denounced the popular politician Alfie Byrne as Alfie Bung for owning a pub, and even led the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union onto a temperance parade in 1911. As much as anything else then, Liberty Hall was designed to get men out of the pubs and to keep them out of the pubs.

This in the context in which the Fintan Lalor Pipe Band was born – the emergence of a ‘counter culture’ for the working classes, which brought learning, creativity and community into the doors of a crumbling old hotel, and invented Liberty Hall. Later, one newspaper would describe it as “the brain of every riot and disturbance” the city witnessed.

The birth of the Fintan Lalor Pipe Band, and the influence of an earlier radical:

James Fintan Lalor, Young Irelander and social radical.

The Fintan Lalor Pipe Band was born late in 1912, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Bob de Coeur, a union activist with the ITGWU, and chairman of its  No. 16 Branch, which was based at 77 Aungier Street,a premises shared with young radicals from Na Fianna Éireann, the separatist boyscouts. R.M Fox, a labour activist who would pen a well-received history of the ICA with the support of veterans, wrote of interviewing one veteran:

 He told me how one morning…he saw Bob de Coeur gazing into the window of a secondhand shop were a set of pipes was displayed for sale. Bob had an eager light in his eye. “I’m going to buy them” he said, nodding at the musical instruments. “We must have a Union band!”

R.M Fox maintained that Larkin induced the Union purse-string holders to advance £25 pound on loan to allow de Coeur to start the band, and a notice was placed in Larkin’s newspaper, The Irish Worker, appealing for players. The first piping instructor of this new band was a Scot, William M. Mackenzie, who the FLPB history notes was “a good player and teacher, who had recently begun making bagpipes in Bolton Street.” Young Fianna members seem to have been enthusiastic to join the new endeavor, some of whom would later join the ICA.

A 1916 advertisement for MacKenzie’s.

The naming of this new band, The Fintan Lalor Pipe Band, was enormously significant. In Lalor, radicals found someone who fused the social and the national questions of Ireland.  He was one of the Young Irelanders of the 1840s, though decades on his political philosophy was still influential: “Ireland her own, and all therein, from the sod to the sky. The soil of Ireland for the people of Ireland.”

 His words appeared on the mastheads of radical papers, and indeed it could be said his influence can be seen on the Proclamation. It maintains that “the ownership of Ireland belongs to the people of Ireland”, Fintan Lalor proclaimed that “the entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and down to the centre, is vested of right in the people of Ireland.”

Memorial card for FLPB founding member Bob de Coeur.

The Fintan Lalor Band would come to be seen as the band of the Irish Citizen Army. The ICA, a workers’ militia, was born in 1913 out of the horrific conditions of the Lockout – when 20,000 workers were locked out of their employment, and told to only return when they were willing to sign a pledge not to rejoin Larkin’s union. The strike was brutal, and marred by police violence which ultimately resulted in the deaths of several workers. Captain Robert Montieth, later to take part in Roger Casment’s 1916 expedition, remembered witnessing the death of James Nolan, killed by a baton outside Liberty Hall:

The horrible crunching sound of the blow was clearly audible about fifty yards away. This drunken scoundrel was ably seconded by two of the Metropolitan police, who, as the unfortunate man attempted to rise, beat him about the head until his skull was smashed in, in several places. They then rejoined their patrol, leaving him in his blood. For saying “You damn cowards” I was instantly struck by two policemen and fell to the ground, where I had sense enough to lie until the patrol had passed.

We have some memories of the band in its earliest days thanks to the Bureau of Military History Witness Statements – an impressive but faulted source, owing to the distance of time between the events of the revolutionary period and the collection of memoirs. One founding member of the band was Thomas O’Donoghue, he recalled that:

 When the 1913 strike took place, the workers were really hopeless, and one means of keeping up their enthusiasm was through marches of the Pipers’ Band.One Sunday we were coming from Liberty Hall to Aungier Street, and on turning into South Great Georges Street, some commotion took place at the rear of the band and I gave the order to halt in a very loud voice….

The band and the police exchanged verbals, and O’Donoghue claimed that that evening “Bob de Coueur called a meeting and proposed that hurleys be provided as a bodyguard for the band, and a man named Charlie Armstrong (reservist of the Royal Irish Fusiliers) was appointed to drill and train the members to act on whistle signals only. From the time the bodyguard was provided, we had no more police interference.”

An early image of the FLPB,Bob de Couer is standing at the back. This image was included in a recent collection of The Workers’ Republic, published by SIPTU and edited by Padraig Yeates.

The Fintan Lalor Band wore a beautiful uniform, as did the Irish Citizen Army, both produced by Arnott’s. The men and women of the ICA took enormous pride in this, and it is important to state they were drawn primarily from the ranks of unskilled and general labourers – so this put enormous expense on individual members.

It has been suggested, most notably by Sean O’Casey in his history of the Irish Citizen Army, that there were strong class divisions between the Volunteer and Citizen Army forces. O’Casey claimed that “the old lingering tradition of the social inferiority of what were called the unskilled workers, prompted the socially superior tradesmen to shy at an organisation which was entirely officered by men whom they thought to be socially inferior to themselves.” I believe O’Casey’s point to be somewhat exaggerated – there were skilled workers to be found in the ranks of the ICA and unskilled men in the IV – but there was still some truth to it.  It’s easy to understand why the ICA band were so protective of their instruments, given their social class and the fact the instruments were bought on borrowed finance.

The band was not entirely unique – it was unique in that it was aligned to labour, but there were other pipe bands with separatist credentials, including the Saint Laurence O’Toole Band. O’Casey was a member and Secretary of this band, which emerged from the activities of Gaelic Leaguers. This band frequently participated in the annual excursion to Bodenstown for example, to visit the grave of Theobald Wolfe Tone. As Christopher Murray has noted “it was bound up with the Irish language and with IRB interests.” O’Casey designed the uniform of “green kilt,flowing crimson shawl, brooches at breast and knee, and jaunty balmoral cap.” Veteran Fenian Thomas J. Clarke was made Honorary President, as a sign of respect and political commitment.  There was also the Black Raven Pipers of North County Dublin, of which Thomas Ashe was a founding member. A member of this band, Thomas Rafferty, was killed fighting at Easter Week, and Ashe would die on hungerstrike the following year.

The O’Toole Pipers, joined by Thomas J. Clarke.

In the aftermath of the workers’ defeat in 1913, Larkin departed for the United States, and James Connolly became the Secretary of the Union, and the de-facto head of Liberty Hall. Contrary to the popular belief today, there were very real tensions between these two men, Connolly regarded Larkin as difficult to work with and highly authoritarian, something he confided in his close friend and ally William O’Brien in private correspondence – O’Brien, detesting Larkin, later published these. Connolly  moved the Union towards a more nationalist political outlook, not least against the backdrop of the European War which he regarded as creating the opportune conditions for revolt, but culture remained an important part of the project.

The Fintan Lalor Band remained too, and there activities were documented in The Workers’ Republic, newspaper of Connolly. This paper lacked some of the bite of Larkin’s earlier The Irish Worker, but is a hugely important historic source, given that it was published right up until days before the Rising. Feis and competitive sporting, military and musical competitions were frequent occurrences – Volunteers and ICA men often participated in sporting and cultural events –  and the ICA traveled to Tullow in July 1915 to partake in a Feis, there were some attempts to stop them partaking  by members of the National Volunteers, supporters of John Redmond. Frank Robbins recalled that “Mallin marshaled the whole Army together and paraded right through Tullow, headed by the Fintan Lalor Puipe Band, which was part and parcel of the Irish Citizen Army.” Of the events, Connolly wrote that “the incident was disgraceful to those attempting to exclude our men, and it was just as well they were taught the lesson that the Citizen Army knows what it wants, and always means to get it.”

A poster for events at St. Enda’s School, Rathfarnham. This school was run by P.H Pearse. Not the participation of the FLPB. (National Library of Ireland Collection)

The band participated in the enormous funeral procession of O’Donovan Rossa in 1915, which was very much regarded by the watching ‘G Men’ intelligence police officers as a sign of the increasing collaboration between the forces of advanced nationalism and Liberty Hall.  They were present too at the highly symbolic raising of the Green Flag over Dublin Castle only days before the Rising in April 1916, when James Connolly entrusted young activist Molly O’Reilly with the task. Connolly would write himself that:

The Fintan Lalor Pipers’ Band is among the very first rank of the pipe bands of Ireland, but so anxious and prayerfully eager were the people that its fine music was scarcely heeded as the hearts of all beat rapidly with longing for the appearance of the flag upon its position.

What of the band in Easter Week?  Alongside Bob de Couer, a number of men from the Fintan Lalor Pipe Band took part in the occupation of St. Stephen’s Green. George Campbell, Ted Tuke, Michael Delaney, Tomhas O’Donoghe, Christy Crothers and Tommy Crimmins were among the members of the band to mobilise for Easter Week activities.  Of Crothers, an excellent biographical sketch has been penned by Hugo McGuinness of the East Wall History Group.

The Irish Citizen Army, Croydon Park.

When the ICA seized the Royal College of Surgeons, Tom O’Donoghue of the band took delight in finding a set of bagpipes, which “I got out in the yard at the back of the College of Surgeons for a little recreation with them.” Music formed an important part of the experiences of men and women in different garrisons – the Soldiers Song and God Save Ireland were often sung with gusto, but the ICA were surely the only garrison to enjoy a bagpipe session.

Tom O’Donoghue and Bob de Couer of the band were particularly hostile to the idea of surrender when it was discussed in the Royal College of Surgeons, even contemplating disobeying the orders of Michael Mallin, their military superior.  When eventually agreeing to his order, they wished to surrender with the band leading the garrison. To quote O’Donoghue:

I asked Mallin for permission to take one of the sets of bagpipes and play it at our head as we marched through the streets of Dublin as prisoners, but Mallin would not agree to this, adding that they were not our property and to take them out of the College of Surgeons would be tantamount to looting.

The Fintan Lalor Pipe Band remained active throughout the War of Independence and later, though that is a story for another day. For bands, the revolutionary period brought its own risks; on one occasion, instruments would be destroyed by the Black and Tans during a raid of Liberty Hall, and later seized by the CID Police of the Free State during the Civil War. They remained a feature of republican commemorative marches in the decades that followed, and today the band still exists – based in Lucan in County Dublin. While no longer as explicitly political or bound to the Union movement, they continue to take part in commemorative events for the ICA, and wear ICA insignia on their uniforms.  Their music, and their very existence, must be seen as part of the project of Larkinism, designed to lift the poor of Dublin and to give them a cultural identity in a city where they owned little and were given less.

David Garrick, the most celebrated actor of his time.

This week, I used my ‘Hidden Histories’ slot on Newstalk to look at David Garrick (1717-1779), arguably the first modern actor and a man who attracted huge crowds when he performed at Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre in the role of Hamlet. When the poet Alexander Pope saw him act  for the first time he was so moved that he commented, “that young man never had his equal as an actor, and he will never have a rival”

More importantly to this piece though, Garrick was one of the main forces in reforming 18th century theatre. Reforming acting was one thing, but reforming audiences was another entirely!  With  varying degrees of success, men like Garrick and Thomas Sheridan (manager of Dublin’s Smock Alley)  sought to change the way people engaged with theatre, ensuring that most of the action happened on the stage and not off it.

Anyway, here it is:

The ‘Red Dean’ Hewlett Johnson meeting Fidel Castro during a visit to Cuba. (Image Credit: University of Kent Special Collections)

The Round Room of the Mansion House has witnessed many historic gatherings, but also a few good scraps in its time. In January 1947, the Reverend Hewlett Johnson visited Dublin and spoke there on the subject of religion in the Soviet Union. Known as the ‘Red Dean’,  Johnson’s lecture was interrupted by student protestors and broke down into physical violence, with arrests and plenty of column inches following. The meeting had been called by the Irish-Soviet Friendship Society, who enlisted supporters as bouncers on the night, with some coming from the ranks of the IRA. One of the bouncers was none other than Brendan Behan.

The Dean of Canterbury was a somewhat unlikely supporter of the Soviet Union, and his visit to Ireland attracted significant media attention. Months before his arrival, The Irish Times reported Johnson’s views in detail, including his claim that Josef Stalin “has nothing of ruthlessness in his face, nothing of dominance in his manner.” The Dean had met Stalin for almost an hour privately during a visit to Moscow, and was enthusiastic about all aspects of the Soviet Union.

One of those who showed up to disrupt the meeting was Ulick O’Connor, who later became a biographer of Brendan Behan, on the other side of the debate that night! In his biography of the writer,O’Connor wrote:

On the night of the meeting, the street outside the Mansion House in the centre of the city was packed with police and members of the public.Brendan had been hired as a chucker-out and he shouted cheerily to members of the Special Branch as he marched into the meeting: “it’s good to see you here protecting us instead of attacking us for a change!”

O’Connor remembered that half way through the speech, “a group of students rose in the balcony and, walking down the stairs, announced they were leaving as a protest against the meeting. The bodyguards sprang into action and, in the melee which took place as the students left, some of them were taken to an ante-room and beaten up.” While O’Connor stressed these students were not part of any right-wing group, he did note that there were “right-wing groups present who came with the object of breaking up the meeting.” The Irish Times reported on the presence of Nazi flags, along with shouts of “Up Franco!” and”Down with the Jews!”

Brendan Behan wasn’t involved in the melee between the students and event security (though he would later boast otherwise), but on leaving the venue he was apprehended by the familiar face of a Detective Officer from the Special Branch. On  Behan’s suggestion the two quickly found themselves in the Dawson Lounge opposite the Mansion House.

While Behan was a bouncer that night, another great Irish writer was an audience member. Seán O’Faoláin, editor of The Bell, sat beside Patrick Lynch, a young contributor to the journal. Lynch later remembered that the ‘Red Dean’ had clearly forgot to amend his speech for an Irish audience, informing the crowd that the people of the Soviet Union were “praying for the British Empire.” This led to “laughter, indignation, exasperation and dismay.” On stage, the chairman of the meeting, Peadar O’Donnell, “buried his head in his hands.”

One newspaper said that the Dean had “brought his wares to the wrong market”, attacking Russian divorce laws, which they claimed made it easier “to obtain a divorce than a new pair of boots.”

Days after the madness, students met at University College Dublin to protest the rough treatment of the student protestors by event organisers. Hearing of the meeting, Behan himself arrived and delivered a speech which O’Connor described as “a tour de force which lasted twenty minutes and ended by the audience cheering him loudly for five minutes after he sat down.”Seán Callery, who was there at the student debate, remembered things differently. In his account, an “unkempt but handsome Brendan roared from an elevated tier at the rear of the amphitheatre and demanded to be heard…he was loudly denounced on all sides and, if memory serves, forced to leave.” O’Connor would give evidence at the trial of two men sentenced for attacking the students, something Behan wouldn’t forgive; on being introduced later in Davy Byrne’s pub, he announced O’Connor to be a “effing informer”.

These were mad times in the life of Behan. Mere months after the Mansion House debacle, he was imprisoned in Manchester’s Strangeways Prison, having violated the terms under which he was released from the British Borstal system by returning to Britain. Separating fact from ‘lore with Behan can be difficult, but his night as a bouncer for the ‘Red Dean’ is certainly one strange story from an always interesting life.

Capel Street is certainly one of Dublin’s most diverse streets, mixing long-established family businesses with new migrant restaurants and supermarkets, not to more hardware and camping shops than any city could ever really need. Architecturally it throws up a few gems,and warrants looking up and paying attention when you walk down it. Dublin City Council’s Architectural Conservation Area (ACA) report for the street, available to read in full here, rightly describes it as “one of the most historically significant streets in Dublin city.”

Passing it today, I noticed a little plaque that reminds us that it is people at much as buildings that make streets and give them character. While you could easily miss it passing by, this little plaque remembers Aidan McElroy, who spent “most of his working life” on the street. It is rare to see such a memorial to an ordinary Dubliner in the city,  and it’s a touching reminder of the strong sense of community that plays a part in making Dublin what it is.

The location of the plaque, beside 31 Capel Street.

On a spring evening in 1942 in the North Dublin suburb of Clontarf, a tragic shooting led to the deaths of Una Ennis (aged 19) and her boyfriend John Prendergast (aged 30).

Nearly seventy-five years later, here is the story retold for the first time online. We understand this is a sensitive topic for the two families concerned and hope the chain of events can be recounted in a compassionate, factual way.

Headline in The Irish Times, 13 April 1942.

Ennis family

Una Ennis was born around 1923, worked as a typist and lived at Whitefields Lodge with her family in the grounds of Phoenix Park. Her father, retired Major-General Thomas Ennis, was superintendent of the Park.

A little bit about his background.

Thomas Ennis (1892-1945) joined the Irish Volunteers in 1914, fought in the G.P.O. during the 1916 Easter Rising and was interned in Frongach, North Wales. Upon returning home, he helped re-organise his Irish Volunteer company from 1917 onwards. He was active with E Company, 2nd Battalion, Dublin Brigade, IRA between 1919 and 1922 during which he was a founder-member of Michael Collin’s ‘Squad’.

As Oscar Traynor’s second-in-command during the burning of the Custom House in 1921, he was was shot twice in the leg and badly wounded. Joining the Free State Army in February 1922, he was in command of Government Troops as they battled anti-Treaty IRA volunteers during the Battle of Dublin (28 June to 5 July 1922) marking the start of the Cvil War. He resigned from the Free State army in May 1924 and later became superintendent of the Phoenix Park.

Major-General Thomas Ennis (with Thompson) and Commandant McCrea disembarking from the S.S. Arvonia at Victoria Quay, Cork City during the Battle of Cork (July-Aug 1922). via NLI

His brother Peter Ennis was also a veteran of the 1916 Rising and War of Independence. He became Chief of the Republican Police and during the Civil War was Chief Superintendent of the State’s Intelligence Department (Oriel House).  At the foundation of the Garda Síochána, he became the first superintendent in the Detective Branch and retired from the force in 1941.

Prendergast family

John ‘Jack’ Gerald Prendergast was born on 11th May 1911 to parents Thomas and Margaret (nee O’Sullivan). They lived at Dock House, Spencer Dock, North Wall where Thomas worked as a lock keeper.

He was known to his friends as ‘Jack’ but also ‘Sean’ or ‘Jimmy’.

Prendergast enrolled at University College Dublin (UCD) to study engineering in 1930 but left in his first year to join the Civil Service.

Several newspapers reported that he traveled to Spain and fought with the International Brigades in the Civil War for a period of three years. More on this later.

Tragedy

On Sunday 12th April 1942, John Prendergast left his home in North Wall at 12.45pm. His father said he “appeared to be in normal spirits” (Irish Independent, 14th April). 

Maureen Ennis, sister of Una, said that John Prendergast called to their house in the Phoenix Park about 3pm and stayed for an hour. Maureen had known Prendergast “for some time” and “knew that he was keeping company” with her sister. She believed the couple “appeared to be in the best of spirits” (Irish Examiner, 14 April)

The couple probably took a bus or a tram some of the way to Clontarf where they were spotted walking together about 5pm. It’s a distance of over 9km and it’s unlikely they would have been able to walk it in an hour.

They were seen stopped and talking together on the Howth Road near the junction with St. Lawrence’s Road.

Witnesses then heard two shots ring out.

Howth Road near the junction with St. Lawrence’s Road. via Google Maps.

John had taken out a Luger ‘Peter the Painter’ pistol from his coat and shot his girlfriend Una through the heart killing her instantly. He then turned the gun on himself and a bullet pierced his left chest.

An eye-witness Miss Mary Hogan, 2 Fleming Road, Drumcondra saw Sean “stagger towards the girl and let himself down on the path beside her”.

Another witness, unnamed, told The Irish Times (13 April 1942):

I heard a shot, looked around, and saw a man staggering – apparently it was the second shot. The man fell, and then I saw the woman lying on the pathway near him. I ran over, and saw that both of them were finished. A gun was lying beside them. It was a parabellum a German make which was used a great deal during the ‘Black and Tan days’.

Passerby placed the girl’s handbag under her head and an ambulance was called for from a nearby house.

In an eerie sense of coincidence, Oscar Traynor, Thomas Ennis’ former IRA comrade, was passing in his car immediately after the shooting. Traynor, the then-Minister of Defence, was on his way home from a semi-final football match. He saw “two people lying on the ground with a cluster of people around them” (Irish Times, 13 April). He immediately stopped his car to see if he could be of any assistance. It is unknown whether he knew the girl was his old comrade’s daughter.

Officers from the Detective Branch, Dublin Castle arrived on the scene and took charge of the gun and spent shells. Two unexploded cartridges were found in Prendergast’s coat pocket.

The couple were rushed to Jervis Street hospital but were pronounced dead on arrival.

It was later revealed that Una’s parents did not approve of John and did not give their blessing for any possible engagement.

Scene on the Howth Road, 1942. The Irish Independent, 13 April 1942.

Howth Road today near St. Lawrence’s Road. via Google Maps.

Aftermath

At the subsequent inquest, John’s father Thomas Prendergast said his son’s health had not been good since he had returned from fighting in the Spanish Civil War. In The Irish Examiner (14 April 1942), he was quoted as saying his son “was worried that he could not gain weight” and that he suffered from depression and a bad case of pleurisy.

The verdict returned by the jury was that Prendergast “was of unsound mind” when he killed his girlfriend Una and himself. The coroner offered his deepest sympathies to both families.

Una’s funeral took place on 14th April 1942. Mass was celebrated by Rev. John Meagher at the Church of the Nativity, Chapelizod followed by burial in St. Fintan’s Cemetery, Sutton.

Amongst those in attendance were W.T. Cosgrave T.D.; Joseph McGrath (businessman and politician); Michael MacDunphy (secretary to the President); Lieutenant-General Daniel McKenna and Lieutenant-General P. MacMahon.

John’s funeral took place on 15th April 1942. Mass was celebrated by Rev. J. Doherty at St. Lawrence O’Toole’s Church at Seville Place, North Wall followed by burial at Glasnevin Cemetery. It was noted in the newspapers that “many University students attended”.

All in all it was a dreadful affair. Two young lives ended on a quiet suburban road.

Jack Prendergast and Spain

A number of newspaper reports reported that Jack Prendergast fought in Spain.

The Irish Times (13 April 1942) wrote : “During the Spanish Civil War, he fought for the Basques on the side of the Government, and reached the rank of Captain in the International Brigade”. The following day’s edition wrote : “How a young Dublin student, a former member of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, shot his sweetheart on the Howth Road, was told yesterday”.

The Irish Press (14 April 1942) reported that his father told the subsequent inquest that “except for a visit to Spain (he) had always lived in Dublin” and that his ‘Peter the Painter’ pistol had “been brought home from Spain”.

However, I have been unable able to find any corroborating evidence to support any of these claims. I have contacted several historians with a particular interest in the Irish who fought in the Spanish Civil War and am looking forward to their responses.

A James ‘Jim’ Prendergast from Dublin did fight with the International Brigades but he was born four years later and lived until the mid 1970s. It’s definitely not the same person.

James ‘Jim’ Prendergast entry into Fighting for Republican Spain 1936-38 by Barry McLoughlin. This Prendergast died in 1974 so can’t be the same individual involved in the 1942 shooting.

Leslie Daiken (1912- 1964)

In Ireland, there is a tendency to view the 1930s in an overwhelmingly negative light, not least when it comes to culture. Yet in spite of sometimes suffocating conservative attitudes and a censorship regime that presented real obstacles to creativity, remarkable talents did find some space in Irish life. Celebrated names like Liam O’Flaherty, Harry Kernoff, Seán O’Faoláin and others worked hard at their craft, often in a hostile political environment. Indeed, looking at it now, the 1930s was arguably something of a golden age for Irish progressive talent in the arts.

One figure who is now largely forgotten from this period is Leslie Daiken, though his contributions to it are deserving of real credit and analysis. Born in Dublin’s ‘Little Jerusalem’ in 1912, Daiken would collaborate with some of the most interesting artists of his time,  while also involving himself in radical politics. In later years, he became a  historian of childhood play and toys, even opening a museum of toys and childhood in the basement of his 1950s London home. He collected the street games and rhymes of children, and never lost touch with his home island and city. Daiken was active in the London Dublinmen’s Association, and a frequent contributor to newspapers like The Irish Democrat in London, as well as a founding member of London’s Connolly Association, which still exists today. Known to friends as Yod, he was remembered at the time of his passing  as “a lover of children and the child-mind, [and] as a loyal friend and a cosmopolitan Irishman. Yod has made his contribution to his country and his time.”

 Little Jerusalem Beginnings:

Leslie Herbert Yodaiken, later to become known as Leslie Daiken, was born into Dublin’s Jewish community in 1912. The district known as ‘Little Jerusalem’, located in Dublin’s Portobello and South Circular Road area, had been attracting Jewish migrants in significant numbers since the 1890s. Largely composed of those fleeing religious persecution in Tsarist Russia, the Jewish population in Ireland stood in the region of 4,800 people by 1901, mostly concentrated in Dublin.

In the area which would become known as ‘Little Jerusalem’, most of the housing had been constructed by the Dublin Artisan Dwelling Company in the 1870s and 1880s. These distinctive red brick houses (also to be found in places like Stoneybatter across the Liffey) were built by what was a semi-philanthropic body, keen to improve public housing and public health. Rent for the homes was above what an unskilled labourer could generally afford, and the DADC houses tended to attract skilled and craft workers.As Cormac Ó Gráda has noted, “the brand-new houses in Portobello came on the market at exactly the right time for clusters of Jewish migrants ready to pay the 6s to 8s weekly rent.”

For children growing up in the area, life was good and the sense of community was strong, something captured beautifully in Nick Harris’s memoir Dublin’s Little Jerusalem. Many of the Jewish children attended St Peter’s National School in Bride Street, and Daiken would immortalise its headmaster, Joe Sleith, in a 1960s publication:

Auld Joe he is a bo,

He goes to church on Sunday,

He prays to God to give him strength,

to bash the kids on Monday.

Daiken was educated at St Andrew’s College and Wesley College, before attending Trinity College Dublin, where he was an award-winning student specialising in linguistics. Daiken involved himself in the Dublin University Socialist Society, and attended the Sheffield Youth Anti-War Congress in August 1934 as a delegate. Some of Daiken’s earliest poetry appeared in TCD student publications, in particular T.C.D: A College Miscellany.

Daiken continued to involve himself in socialist and anti-fascist politics after his student days, knowing that fascism posed an enormous threat to the Jewish community in the 1930s, and not only on the continent. Paddy Belton, a 1916 veteran and a TD prone to anti-semitic hysteria, told one gathering of his Irish Christian Front that “the Jews are the propagandists of Communism and it is time there was restriction or even prohibition on undesirable immigration”,  while on another occasion the crowd at a Christian Front rally were told that a “renegade Jewish gang in Russia” were seizing power in Spain and could do likewise in Ireland.

Yet the greatest threat of violence at the time came from those opposed to his politics and not his faith. 1930s Dublin witnessed some ugly mob violence directed against communist and socialist organisations. In March 1933, the Saint Patrick’s Anti-Communist League and other defenders of faith and morality laid siege to Connolly House on Great Strand Street, the headquarters of the Revolutionary Workers’ Groups, which was a forerunner to the Communist Party of Ireland. Days later, they attacked the Workers’ College at 63 Eccles Street. Patrick Byrne, a young radical in the Dublin of that time, remembered that “the house was a great six-storey Georgian mansion that had seen better days.” He recalled that “the attack followed the usual pattern, hymn singing, swearing and missile throwing. Leslie Daiken assumed command of the defence.”On that occasion, the mob weren’t successful.

Gardaí inside Connolly House, which wasattacked by a mob in March 1933. Not long after this, Daiken took part in the defence of the Irish Workers’ College on Eccles Street.

After a short spell working as a teacher in Dublin, a young Daiken departed for London in 1935. It was not the end of his activism.

Goodbye, Twilight and Goodbye Dublin:

In 1936, a Daiken edited the collection Goodbye, Twilight: Songs of the Irish Struggle, which brought together poetry from a generation of up and coming Irish writers, mainly drawn from radical political backgrounds. The work had a clear political purpose, arguing that:

Here is the authentic voice of the people, peasants, workers and intellectuals, united in the common aim of the struggle for freedom; political and economic freedom.

Patrick Kavanagh was among the writers to contribute, while the book also included beautiful woodcut images by Harry Kernoff, another political radical to emerge from Dublin’s ‘Little Jersualem’. While the standard of poetry was wildly uneven, Goodbye, Twilight was an ambitious undertaking. The Irish Press described it as “forty young poets…with blazing eyes and clenched fists.” The great poet Louis MacNeice described the book as a “collection of proletarian poems – some communist, some Irish republican, and all written in a defiant spirit of opposition … a violent reaction against Yeats and all that he stood for”.

One of Harry Kernoff’s woodcut images from Goodbye Twilight.

By the time of the publication of Goodbye,  Twilight, Daiken was well-established in London.  There, he was actively involved in radical politics with the London branch of the Republican Congress. Established in 1934, the Republican Congress was an attempt to bring together all strands of republican, socialist and anti-fascist thinking in Ireland into a broad front. Former leading IRA figures, including Frank Ryan, Michael Price and Peadar O’Donnell, were all centrally involved in this initiative, and so were a number of young female activists including Nora Connolly O’Brien (daughter of the executed James Connolly) and Cora Hughes, goddaughter of Éamon de Valera, who would be remembered as “a beautiful and determined Joan of Arc figure in the slums, who, within a few years, would be dead from tuberculosis contracted in the hovels where she exercised her vocation.”

At its inaugural meeting in Rathmines Town Hall, the Congress split on the question of what direction it should take. It would be easy to dismiss it as a failure outright, but in truth it struggled on in a variety of forms and on a number of fronts, and was particularly successful in leading opposition to slum landlords and the tenement shame in Dublin. The London branch appears to have been particularly active, and Daiken was centrally involved in its cultural efforts.  In December 1935, it was reported that his dramatised version of Patrick Pearse’s work The Rebel was performed in Camden Town. The Irish Times praised Daiken’s work, and the manner in which he “carries Pearse’s theme beyond his idealistic conclusion to the revolutionary viewpoint of the Irish workers.”

10 December 1935. Newspaper report on Daiken’s dramatised version of Pearse’s The Rebel.

In London, Daiken edited The Irish Front newspaper with Charlie Donnelly, a young poet and radical from Dungannon who had also been active in radical politics in Dublin at the same time as Daiken. Donnelly was a student at University College Dublin, though he failed to graduate, and having spent some time imprisoned in Dublin for his involvement in a trade union dispute, Donnelly left Dublin feeling somewhat demoralised in 1936. Daiken remembered that that Donnelly arrived in London one morning “straight from the Euston train, and before the milk…thinner, paler, more set at the cold eyes” and told him”I just had to get out of that bloody place.”

In a 1987 talk on Irish and Jewish Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War which discussed Daiken’s relationship with Donnelly, Manus O’Riordain quoted from Donnelly’s own assessment of Ireland in the 1930s. While Eoin O’Duffy is today seen as something of a joke, Donnelly recognised the potential for a fascist movement to grow here:

The germs of Fascism are present in Ireland; organisations, institutions and sentiments which could be welded into a fascist movement … General O’Duffy may seem a joke at present. The joke is merely that he is without a paymaster… If the General can create a movement worth taking over, his unemployment may be only temporary.

The young poet would die at the Battle of Jarama in the Spanish Civil War, something which had a profound impact on Daiken, who would remember his lost friend and comrade in verse:

I too have heard companion voices die –
O Splendid fledglings they, in fiery fettle,
Caudwell and Cornford and Cathal Donnelly
Stormcocks atune with Lorca, shot down in battle!
Young Charlie’s cenotaph – Jarama’s olive trees.

There remains a lot of work to be done on The Irish Front. Historian David Convery has slowly but surely been tracking down editions of the paper.  The contribution of the Irish to radical politics in 1930s Britain is an area that deserves more attention, and something that recently came to the fore with the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, a showdown between Oswald Mosley’s fascists and an East London community that included many Irish migrants. Daiken’s paper heralded the day as one when the working class “dealt a blow to the aspirations of fascism.”

Beyond editing the paper, Daiken was also a regular speaker in London’s Irish community, speaking in December 1936 on “rebel Irish poetry” before the Roger Casement Sinn Féin Club in December 1936 for example.  Though out of Ireland, Daiken remained a commentator on Irish life in the years that followed his departure, and frequently returned home, even volunteering with the Civil Defence during the Second World War. Writing during that conflict in a Belgian journal, Message: Belgian Review, he took aim at Fianna Fáil for its “policy of Cultural Isolation, with the avowed aim of keeping Éire morally pure, of immunising her to radical,scientific or agnostic ideas emanating from an utterly Immoral Universe.”

If proof was needed that Daiken was regarded as a part of the fabric of Dublin life, it came in 1940,with the Alan Reeve cartoon ‘Dublin Culture’. This appeared for the first time in The Irish Times, and it shows the great and the good of Dublin society (including Harry Kernoff, Paddy Kavanagh and Flann O’Brien) sitting and standing around the backroom of The Palace Bar on Fleet Street. Fittingly, there is a copy of it to this very day in the back of that great pub. Listed among the names for the men sitting at one of the tables is Leslie Daiken.

‘Dublin Culture’ by Alan Reeves

Daiken’s work on childhood, play and toys:

In the post-war years, Daiken came to public prominence for his work as a historian and folklorist of childhood, play and toys. Today, there are museums of toys and childhood dotted around Britain, for example Edinburgh’s excellent Museum of Toys,  but this was an almost totally new endeavor in the days when Daiken began.

From Children’s Games Throughout the Year (1949)

Daiken would publish a number of books on childhood and play, including Children’s games Throughout the Year (1949), Children’s Toys Throughout the Ages (1953), Out She Goes: Dublin Street Rhymes with a Commentary (1963) and World of Toys (1963). Out She Goes was well-received in Ireland, with the Sunday Independent reprinting one well-known verse of Dublin childhood:

Tell tale tit,Your tongue will be split

.And all the dogs of Dublin town.

Will have a bit of it.

Janey Mac, me shirt is black.

What’ll I do for Sunday

Go to bed, and cover me head.

And not get up til Monday.

His work on childhood brought him back to Ireland on occasion; in December 1958, he brought a BBC team to Kerry specifically to record young ‘Wren Boys’, a Christmas tradition. Some of Daiken’s work is available on YouTube today, uploaded by the BFI. Here we have an excerpt from 1957’s One Potato, Two Potato:

Filmed over a 12-month period by Leslie Daiken, this study of children’s games played in London streets and playgrounds stands out for its freshness and spontaneity, and records the bomb sites that pockmarked London and provided many urban children with a place to play. This extract captures the post-Halloween rituals of 5 November – Guy Fawkes Night – including the once familiar call of “penny for the Guy”.

Daiken began building a museum of childhood and toys in his London home, but by April 1959 it was too much to house there. The Irish Press reported that the collection numbered some 20,000 items, including Irish materials. The earliest toys in the collection dated from the early eighteenth century.

His work was by no means restricted to Britain and Ireland, as he also published research on Jewish children, including the book Let us play in Israel. Of Israel, a place to which he felt a strong affinity and traveled on several occasions, Daiken would state that “the parallel between the Hebrew war in Palestine and the Irish war against the Black and Tans is striking.” He repeatedly drew such parallels between Ireland and Israel, even stating that “the bitter flood of Israel’s tears, that in myriad cascades have ceaselessly swept down the steep decline of the ages, has ever exceeded the flow of [Ireland’s] woes.”

The death of Leslie Daiken:

In October 1963, Daiken took up a position with the University of Ghana in Accrea, taking up the organising of a new department in the Faculty of Education. He had been invited there by the Vice Chancellor, Connor Cruise O’Brien. Sadly, Daiken died in 1964 during a holiday visit home to London, at a time when his plans for his position in Ghana were still at an early stage, though Africa had already opened new research opportunities. As Paul Rouse notes,”shortly before he died, his film The Piano, which documented the educations of white and black children in an African school, had been premiered at the Cork Film Festival.”

He was survived by his wide Lilyan and their two daughters, Melanie and Eleanor. As a ‘Proletarian Poet’ and a collector of folklore, he left much behind him. His work on childhood and play was pioneering, and his contribution to Irish radical politics in London more than significant.

Note: My thanks to Dr. David Convery for providing some interesting insights and material for this post, including the image of Daiken. David is editor of the collection Locked Out: A Century of Irish Working Class Life (Irish Academic Press, 2013). Not for the first time, I’m indebted to David for sharing some of his own research.

Thanks also to Manus O’Riordain for uploading the text of his speech at a recent commemoration for the Battle of Cable Street in London, in which he quoted Daiken’s poetry and The Irish Front. The work of Cormac Ó Gráda and Ray Rivlin on Jewish Dublin was useful too, and Paul Rouse’s entry to the Dictionary of Irish Biography.

Destruction in Hammond Lane. Image from Trevor Whitehead and Tom Geraghty’s ‘The Dublin Fire Brigade’ (Dublin City Council,  2004)

Saturday, 27 April 1878, was a devastating day for Dublin, when death and destruction made their presence felt in one of the poorest districts of the city.

One newspaper called the day “a catastrophe, perhaps exceeding in its calamitous nature and deplorable consequences, any event which happened in Ireland within recent years.” The death of fourteen Dubliners in Hammond Lane, the result of an industrial accident, shocked the city and altered the street forever, with tenements, public houses and industrial buildings reduced to rubble or dragged down in the days that followed. Today, there is no memorial at the site of one of the worst industrial accidents in the history of the city.

Hammond Lane,located just off Church Street. This nineteenth century map comes from Swilson.info.

In the late 1870s, Hammond Lane and the streets around it were heavily populated. Situated beside Church Street, and in the vicinity of Smithfield, the narrow street was home to several tenement houses, but also some industrial buildings, with the foundry and ironworks of Messrs. Strong a significant local employer. One contemporary source described the street, and not in a flattering manner:

On one side of it was a public house kept by a name named Patrick Duffy, while on the other side was a private dwelling house inhabited by several families. Tenement houses occupied by people of the labouring classes interspersed with a few shops of extremely humble pretensions formed the rest of the narrow, long, dirty street.

At one o’clock on the day of the tragedy, the bells of the foundry rang, the sign to discontinue work. Men had gone to their dinners, and the lane was described as “deserted, save by a few passers-by and some children playing in front of the ill-fated walls.” Some men made their way into the neighbouring Duffy’s pub to enjoy a pint on their break, but little time passed before tragedy struck:

Scarcely however, had half an hour elapsed, than, while about twenty persons were taking some refreshment in Duffy’s public-house, a dreadful explosion was heard, and the houses in the immediate neighbourhood were shaken as by the shock of an earthquake, while simultaneously, the boiler burst with terrific force, one of the front walls of the foundry was rent into pieces, and literally blown into the street.

One newspaper described how “the public-house and the factory, instantaneously giving away, fell with a loud crash, amid blinding clouds of dust, down into a mass of ruins and debris.”

When the large twenty-foot boiler of Strong’s exploded, a portion of it was thrown across the street, “violently hurled into a gateway opposite. Had it struck one of the houses filled with alarmed men, women and children, a terrible addition might have been made to the dreadful calamity.”

In their history of the Dublin Fire Brigade, Tom Geraghty and Trevor Whitehead described the madness of the scene:

Many people were buried in the debris of their collapsed homes, while others stumbled out with varying degrees of injury, trauma or bewilderment. The scene,  which a few seconds before was one of life, activity and neighbourliness, was turned into a virtual  battleground, with everywhere the pleading cries of people seeking immediate help for themselves or those they knew who were now buried or lying amidst the carnage.

Quickly arriving at the site, Dublin firefighters got down to the business of trying to save lives, calling for help from the nearby Royal Barracks. One hundred men from the 91st Highlanders arrived, and assisted the firefighters in removing debris. Geraghty and Whitehead have described Duffy’s public house as “a shambles, having collapsed like a pack of cards, burying those inside.” The body of Mr. Duffy, the owner of the pub, was removed the rubble, along with two of his daughters who also perished.

A list of the dead from The Irish Times, two days after the tragedy.

The manner in which bodies and survivors were discovered in the rubble was reported in detail in the press:

…a man named Patrick Dunne was found by the firemen wedged in among some beams of wood in the cellar of the public house. He was alive, but severely cut and otherwise injured. When the greater part of the rubbish had been removed from over his head and shoulders, it was found that two women were lying over him in such a position as to utterly prevent him using his arms and legs.

The tragedy was widely reported beyond Dublin. In Ulster, one regional newspaper reported that “bricks thrown up the explosion” were to be found on the roof of the nearby Four Courts:

Amongst the many extraordinary incidents connected with the explosion is the escape of a country woman who had come to town to do some marketing. She had completed nearly all her business, when she stopped her donkey and cart just opposite the foundry, while she crossed the road to buy some few articles. She had only gone a couple of yards when the explosion occurred, and donkey and cart were buried in the debris. Bricks thrown up by the explosion were on Sunday to be seen on the dome of the Four Courts.

In such a heavily populated area, the tragedy brought great hardship onto people who already had little. Days later, the press were reporting that families were reduced to destitution and seeking outdoor relief. The tragedy could have been much greater of course. Being lunchtime on a Saturday, the foundry was manned by a relatively small staff of a few dozen men. At the height of the working week, more than a hundred would be on the premises.

When the tragedy came before the Coroner’s Court, details of how the fourteen had lost their lives emerged. Twelve had suffocated, while two were killed by crushing, and more than thirty people were injured in the blast, some maimed for life.  Geraghty and Whitehead note that:

The engineers report stated that the boiler was not properly maintained and was weakened by corrosion. No independent engineer had examined the boiler in the previous two years…There were no statutory regulations under the Factories Act 1875 for the inspection of boilers, although such provision had been demanded from parliament by engineers throughout the United Kingdom.

In the end, nobody was found negligent. Instead, it was found that “the explosion was the result of a defective condition of one of the boiler plates, which was externally corroded to a dangerous extent…We cannot attribute any criminal negligence to the Messrs Strong, who appear to have taken all reasonable care to keep the boiler in effective condition.”

Hammond Lane today, Google Maps.

These kind of tragedies happened (and happen) in other cities too, where industrial boilers also proved lethal. In New York, fifty-eight people were killed in March 1908 when the boiler of the Grover shoe factory exploded, destroying a four-story building. Mere weeks ago, a boiler explosion in Bangladesh, claiming the lives of many workers.

In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, there was an outpouring of support for the families of the victims. The profits of performances in Dublin theatres were donated to the bereaved and injured, and Dubliners were generous in supporting the relief fund. Still, the tragedy quickly disappeared from the pages of Dublin newspapers, leaving the people of Hammond Lane to put the pieces back together again.

My thanks to Terry Crosbie, who has done much to protect and promote the history of the area in question, for pointing me towards this story.

This recording of The Smiths in November 1984 at the SFX comes and goes online, but it seemed time to upload the 12″ vinyl for convenience sake, and perhaps for a nice nostalgic buzz for a few of you. While the sound recording isn’t the best, the crowd noises and singalongs are great too at times. This was a band on the ascent, and the crowd are loving every minute of it.

The most popular LP bootleg of these gigs is known as ‘Blue’, and the cover of the bootleg shows Elvis Presley.  I don’t like it, so here’s a new one that feels a little more fitting. Brendan Behan was referenced by name on Morrissey’s last LP, World Peace is None Of Your Business, and an image of the Dublin writer appeared on screen during his 2014 show at the Point Theatre. Brendan is shown here in discussion with Lucian Freud at the Mansion House.

The bootleg includes the following tracks:

Side A:01 Reel Around The Fountain
02 Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now
03 Rusholme Ruffians
04 This Charming Man
05 How Soon Is Now?

Side B: 06 Barbarism Begins At Home
07 I Want The One I Can’t Have
08 Miserable Lie
09 Hand In Glove
10 What Difference Does It Make?

The files are downloadable.

In May 1984, a journalist at the Irish Independent tried to give readers an idea of just what The Smiths were all about on the eve of their first SFX gigs, writing that:

The Smiths consist of a rather weird young gentleman named Morrissey on vocals, Johnny Marr on guitar and rhythm section,Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce on bass and drums respectively… There are some who see The Smiths as a sad throwback to the days of pretentiousness and drug induced senility. But The Smiths are a whole lot more than that.

Of course, the “rather weird young gentleman” went on to become quite important indeed, with his band achieving phenomenal success in their five short years together. By the time they returned to Dublin in November, they had built an enormous following.

Praise for the band came from the most unlikely quarters in Ireland during 1984. Sinn Féin newspaper An Phoblacht delighted in reporting Morrissey’s word after the Brighton bomb, when he claimed “the sorrow of the Brighton bombing is that she (Thatcher) escaped  unscathed. The sorrow is that she’s still alive.” The paper noted that “Morrissey himself is perceived as some kind of guru of the disillusioned, dispossessed and disgusted youth of today.”

Morrissey’s connections to  Dublin are well-documented, not least in his own memoir, Autobiography. Describing himself on stage in 2004 as being “ten parts Crumlin and ten parts Old Trafford”, he was by no means unique in The Smiths with such strong Irish heritage. Marr was born John Patrick Maher in 1963 to Kildare parents, and has always firmly described himself as “Mancunian Irish”. This week sees the release of his own long-awaited autobiography, Set The Boy Free.

Did you see The Smiths in Dublin at any of their gigs here? If so, be sure to leave a comment.

Dominic Behan (Illustration by Luke Fallon for CHTM)

On Kildare Road in Crumlin, a small plaque above the door of number 70 tells passers-by that it is a home of historical importance. The plaque shows the face of Brendan Behan, alongside the years of his birth and passing. Brendan was a giant of Irish literature of course, but this house was a home in which the sound of music and the typewritten word emerged from all rooms.

The children of Stephen and Kathleen Behan would, in their own unique ways, come to reflect the rich literary interests and political passions of their parents, and the contribution of Dominic Behan to the worlds of stage, song, politics and literature deserves greater recognition. A committed republican of a socialist variety, Dominic would publish his first poems and prose in the pages of the journal of Na Fianna Éireann, and in time would become a writer celebrated by voices as diverse as James Plunkett and John Lennon, not to mention clashing in dramatic style with Bob Dylan.

Russell Street Beginnings:

The Behan boys were products of the inner-city, to whom Russell Street was home.

Stephen Behan, Dominic’s father, was a veteran of the War of Independence, and took the Republican side in the Civil War which followed. Stephen was educated by the Christian Brothers on North Richmond Street, a school which produced more than 1916 participants than any other, proudly boasting of 134 participants between students and graduates. By trade,Stephen worked as a signwriter, a trade his son Brendan would briefly follow him into. Stephen married Kathleen in July 1922, as the country was in the midst of Civil War. Kathleen had previously been married to John Furlong, a  1916 veteran who died two years after the insurrection. Her brother was Peadar Kearney, author of The Soldier’s Song, who took the Pro-Treaty side in the Civil War divide. Not long after his wedding, Stephen was himself imprisoned. Family lore had it that Brendan Behan would first see his father through the railings of prison.

Certainly, the Behan family lived in working class surroundings, but Brendan Behan in particular could be prone to exaggerate the working class pedigree of the family. Kathleen came from  strong middle class stock, even if it had since been greatly reduced,  and the family lived in a home owned by Christine English, grandmother to the boys who owned several homes in the vicinity.

Dominic Behan was born in October 1928, into a family for whom republicanism was still a pillar of life and identity. Kathleen in particular shaped the world view of the Behan boys; a as Ulick O’Connor detailed in his biography of Brendan, she would bring them on walks through the city, showing them not only places associated with the battle of Irish independence, but the houses of Shaw, Swift and Wilde too. Dominic found his heroes in the Irish revolutionary tradition; he would particularly come to admire the Protestant and Dissenter radicals of the United Irishmen, and Big Jim Larkin of the Lockout, of whom he would write later:

Larkin gave a new meaning to Christianity when he decided to fight his cleric critics with their own cannons – a Bible and a plea for a true brotherhood of man. When they accused him of being a red menace, he threw back the suggestion that they were un-Christian, but it was in Larkin’s mouth more than a suggestion, it was an indictment of the Christian soldiers who were prepared to stand by and see the children of Christ starve.

Dominic remembered Russell Street fondly, recalling that “the native industries of Russell Street were drink and cleanliness, represented respectively by the Mountjoy Brewery and the Phoenix Laundry.” With a greengrocers, bookmakers and public,Dominic joked in his memoirs Teems of Times and Happy Returns that there thus existed no reason for anyone to leave the confines of the street, unless off to work. It was far from the worst of tenement Dublin, with Dominic recalling how “Russell Street was the extreme tip of a jungle of north city tenements: Georgian, red-bricked, strait-laced, and, at this time, complete with closed hall-doors and mahogany railed staircases. Even a few of the windows were still intact.”

No Suburbia, Only Siberia:

70 Kildare Road,photographed by me in 2013.

The 1930s would see many inner-city families moved into the new expanding suburbia, and in 1937 Kildare Road became home to the family.  Brendan would quip that there was no such thing as suburbia,only Siberia. Dominic would recall that:

They could’ve built flats in the centre of the town for us and kept reservations like this for them that come in from the country.Home from home it would have been. But us! And the only grass we ever saw we were asked to keep off it.

Kathleen remembered that “Crumlin was a desperate place when first we went there: no schools,nos hops, nothing, except (as Brendan said) plenty of desolation…There was a spirit in Russell Street that you could hardly imagine in Crumlin.” Still, the family quickly turned it into a home of song and debate, in the same spirit as their inner-city dwellings.

Republicanism was at the heart of the Behan family. As a youngster, Dominic would join Na Fianna Éireann, the republican boy-scout movement that had been founded in 1909 by Countess Markievicz and Bulmer Hobson, and which remained a part of the republican movement into the decades that followed the birth of the Free State. He would remember taking part in Fianna displays in his memoirs.

He worked on a number of building sites with Brendan in the 1940s, with one foreman complaining to their father that they were “the greatest bastards I’ve ever come across.One wants the men to strike for an incentive bonus so that the other one can bring them down to the pub to drink it.” While there was a socialist dimension to Brendan’s Republicanism too, Dominic delivered a much sharper class consciousness. In the late 1940s,  he was close to the Irish Workers’ League, of which International Brigade veteran Michael O’Riordan was Secretary. In his history of the Communist Party, Matt Treacy details an occasion in July 1949, during which an IWL meeting was besieged by hundreds of protestors who had read of it in the Sunday Independent. Dominic denounced the mob as “fascist bastards” after they rushed the platform. His political activism would land him in trouble in the early 1950s, with his role in agitation for the movement against unemployment landing him in prison for a period.

A young Dominic Behan (Life,1962)

Glasgow and other adventures:

Following his release from prison, Dominic departed Dublin for Glasgow, a decision which would transform his life on many fronts. He would meet Josephine Quinn,the woman he would marry, and who also came form staunch revolutionary stock, strongly aligned to the Communist movement in Glasgow.  In Scotland, Dominic lodged for a period with Hugh MacDiarmid, a “lifelong supporter of both communism and Scottish nationalism”. When George Orwell would compile his infamous list of suspected communists for British intelligence officers, rightly described as a “snitch list”, Hugh MacDiarmid made the cut, along with Peadar O’Donnell.

The late 1950s brought considerable success for Dominic, then primarily living in London. His first play, Posterity be Damned, was performed to great reviews in Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre in September 1959. While the reviews were kind, the crowd sometimes weren’t. Some felt that Dominic portrayed the IRA as “misled idealists”. When asked by a reporter when he himself would produce a play owing to the success of his sons, Stephen Behan quipped “why should I produce plays when I produce playwrights?” Other acclaimed plays would follow, including The Folk Singer in 1972, dealing with the worsening situation in Ulster.

As is human nature, there was plenty of competition between the Behan siblings. In addition to Dominic and Brendan, Brian was also a writer, and barbed insults sometimes flew. When Brian’s writings were being translated into Japanese, Brendan quipped that it was a “good fucking job – nobody else would understand them.” There were real tensions between Dominic and Brendan too, but also a genuine respect.

What was the extent of Dominic’s involvement within the republican movement? In 1962, he wrote an article for Life magazine in which he claimed to have taken part in border raids against sentry positions as a teen, though he ended the piece:

It was shortly before I was born – nine months to be precise – that my loving mother dedicated my life to “the great and glorious cause of Ireland’s freedom.” Forgive me, mother of memory, I have never died for you – not even once.

Dominic was close to a number of prominent IRA men, including Seán Garland and Cathal Goulding. In The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party, Dominic enters the narrative occasionally, for example telling one Republican function in Philadelphia that “we are over here looking for money to buy guns and to spread the revolution.” He was a prominent supporter of the ‘Official’ Republican Movement, penning a poem in memory of OIRA leader Billy McMillen, who was killed in a bitter Belfast feud with the INLA. Dominic would dedicate the first Irish edition of Teems of Times and Happy Returns to McMillen and Malachy McGurran, the Vice President of The Workers’ Party who died of cancer in July 1978.

Good insight into Dominic’s political views come from a 1958 edition of Socialist Review, in which he denounced British and Ulster socialists who made no reference to removing partition, arguing that “the occupation of any part of Ireland by a foreign army is wrong! Two ‘separate’ Socialism’s is a false, dangerous argument… designed by jingoists to betray the Irish Workers’ Republic. The only truly progressive slogan for us can be Unity and Socialism.”

A Better Class of Folk Artist:

Dominic made a number of important contributions to folk music in this islands, both as a song writer and a broadcaster. His Scottish television programmer, ‘A Better Class of Folk’, managed to shine a light on some of the finest up and coming talents in folk music. Dominic also wrote a number of hit songs and folk classics, some of which delivered chart success for other artists. In 1966, The Ludlows had a number one with Dominic’s ‘The Sea Around Us’

Two foreign old monarchs in battle did join
Each wanting each head on the back of a coin
If the Irish had sense they’d drowned both in the Boyne
And partition throw into the ocean.

There was also ‘Liverpool Lou’, a song that Yoko Ono would select during her Desert Island Discs appearance, reminiscing of how John Lennon would sing it as a lullaby to their son. In one interview, Lennon himself would state his fondness for Dominic, despite the fact he found most folk music “completely middle class…’I worked in the mine in Newcastle’ and all that shit. There was very few real folk singers.”

Dominic wrote a wide variety of songs dealing with Irish revolutionary history, but most famously of all there was ‘The Patriot Game’. The song dealt with the IRA Border Campaign and a raid during which two Volunteers lost their lives. One of the men was Seán South, the other was a young Monaghan Volunteer named Fergal O’Hanlon. The song is written from the perspective of O’Hanlon. Dominic’s good friend Seán Garland was one of the IRA men involved in the raid across the border that night, when  Brookeborough’s RUC barracks came under attack.

In America, The Clancy Brothers achieved considerable success with the song. It also clearly had an influence on a young Bob Dylan, as his ‘With God On Our Side’ borrowed significantly from it. Dylan was a great admirer of The Clancy Brothers, later remembering them as “these musketeer like characters.” To Dylan, there was “no fear, no envy, no meanness” in their eyes, and he would later invite them to perform at his 30^th anniversary concert.

A rather nasty war of words began after the release of Dylan’s song, with Dominic accusing Dylan of plagiarising his work. Liam Clancy made the point though that the actual tune predated Dominic:

 ..he had taken a popular song by Jo Stafford, ‘The Nightingale’, popular in the 40s and 50s, and wrote ‘The Patriot Game’. Then Dylan borrowed the melody and wrote ‘With God On Our Side’. It went on all the time. That’s folk music. The song was originally an American tune, so it’s come full circle.

There’s a great scene in Don’t Look Back, the documentary of Bob Dylan on the road, where Dominic Behan is mentioned and Dylan retorts pretty quickly that “I don’t wanna hear nobody like Dominic Behan man!” What was remarkable about the bitterness was how long it went on; Dominic was interviewed in The Guardian in the 1980s, and said that “Bob should know all about piracy. My song The Patriot Fame, Dylan’s God On Our Side takes my music lock, stock and barrel, and very nearly the words, the song is a complete parody.”

Rows with Dylan aside, many of the songs Dominic penned are still widely known and sung today.  He also released an important collaboration LP with Ewan MacColl, ‘The Singing Streets: Childhood Memories of Ireland and Scotland’. A great piece of social history, it captured the spirit of working class childhood on both islands.

Streets of Song LP. Image via Ewan-MacColl.info.

Behan is an important if often overlooked part of the history of The Dubliners too, something recounted in the pages of Ronnie Drew’s autobiography.He remembered that Dominic “sold us as an international folk group and it worked. We were soon booked for more television, more tours abroad and success at the Albert Hall.” Introducing the band in that very venue, he would describe them as “the only group capable of performing Irish music with guts.” Ronnie recalled Dominic opening many doors for the group, who would perform a number of his songs over the years, including the great ‘McAlpine’s Fusiliers’.

As a producer,Dominic worked on Christy Moore’s first LP, Paddy on the Road, in 1969. Only 500 copies of this LP were produced, and it is a highly collectable item today. When interviewed on this blog in 2014, Christy remembered Dominic:

I first met Dominic “Domo” Behan in Shepherd’s Bush London in 1968 when we both sang at a concert in aid the Irish Civil Rights Movement. Dominic was pure Dublin to his very core.He mesmerized me with an enormous repertoire of songs, reflections and poetry. Himself and his wife Josephine were very kind to me. Like myself back then,he seldom put the cork back into the bottle. The sessions went on ’til the bitter end.

I learned so much from Dominic Behan. He took the time and trouble to organize my first recording session. He set up the musicians and created the deal with Mercury Records. Sadly, we fell out “in drink” but I remember him fondly and always acknowledge the help he gave me and the hospitality I received in his home.

And therein lay one of the great problems of Dominic’s life. On more than one occasion, drunken altercations landed him into the newspapers at home, and like Brendan it had the ability to stop him reaching his full potential at times.

Behan died in Glasgow August 1989, far from an old man at sixty years of age. He was survived by two sons, Fintan and Stephen, and his beloved wife Josephine. His ashes were scattered on the Royal Canal in Dublin, and an oration delivered by his friend and comrade Seán Garland. He would be remembered in the pages of The Irish Times as “a funny man, garrulous, brilliant, infuriating, angry,lovable but never boring.”

As a songwriter, broadcaster and writer, he left a great legacy of work. He should be remembered as much more than the brother of another fine writer. Folk songs, Dominic maintained, were “not the special preserve of the few, but the undeniable heritage of the many.”

ADW At Work. (Image Credit)

This Thursday, our friend ADW is opening his new exhibition, Born To Create, in The Kemp Gallery on South Frederick Street.

If you made it to our ‘Dublin Songs and Stories’ event in September 2015, you would have heard ADW talking about his work. As we said before that event, “He has used the city as a canvas over the years, and his work is thought-provoking and humorous, just how we like it.”

His work has gone from strength to strength since 2008, and this is a chance to see some of his latest offerings. A limited edition screenprint, based on the reworked city coat of arms, will be available on the night and would look good on the wall of any CHTM reader

“Happy is the city where citizens obey” – a reworked city coat of arms (Image Credit: ADW)

“I see his blood upon the rose” – A tribute to Joseph Mary Plunkett (Image Credit: ADW)

Car on bricks (Image Credit: ADW)

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948)

One of the most puzzling little stories of 1930s Ireland has to be Antonin Artaud’s arrival here in 1937. The French poet, dramatist and theatre director is remembered as one of the major figures of the avant-garde art movement of his time, but to the people of the Aran Islands, and to the confused Gardaí of Miltown in South Dublin, he was a total mystery.

Arriving in the country in August 1937, a troubled Artaud was convinced he carried with him the staff of Saint Patrick, which he felt he had to return to its rightful home. To him, this was a spiritual mission of sorts, and the staff possessed magical qualities. Along with the staff, he carried a letter of introduction from the Irish Legation in Paris, who were unaware of the nature of his pilgrimage. He would end up in Mountjoy Prison for his troubles, before being deported as a “destitute and undesirable alien.”

Who was Antonin Artaud?

While the name Antonin Artaud means little to the Irish public, things are certainly different in France. Born in Marseilles in September 1896, Antonin endured both physical and psychological illness in his youth. At the age of only four he was diagnosed with spinal meningitis, and as one biographical entry notes:

His health did not improve as he matured and for most of his life he was beset with ill health, pain and nervous depression. He was continually admitted and discharged from hospitals and sanatoria and developed addictions to hallucinatory and pain-reducing drugs like opium. His addiction and abuse of these substances began to have permanent effects and his mental health gradually deteriorated.

He was inducted into the French armed forces in 1916 when war was raging in the country, but quickly dismissed on health grounds. It was in 1920, following the end of the horror show that was the First World War, that a young Artaud arrived in Paris, at a time when the city was redefining culture in its own unique ways.

Ian Buchanan maintains in his Dictionary of Critical Theory that Artaud “never had a proper career. He lurched from one thing to another seemingly at random, but apparently with the constant aim of challenging the perception of reality.” In Paris, he studied under Charles Dullin, theatre manager and bold director, and appeared in a number of French cinematic productions, including La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, a beautifully shot 1928 silent film in which he played the role of Jean Massieu, the Dean of Rouen.

Artaud in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc.

For a period, Artaud was a core part of the Surrealist art movement in Paris, contributing to and editing publications that explored this new approach. Surrealist art was colourful, playful, and often very political. Salvador Dali said that “Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.” In time, Artaud drifted from the Surrealists, in part owing to the political direction of the art movement, but he still made important cultural contributions in France. One such contribution was the Theatre of Cruelty, his desire to “reject form and inject chaos” into theatre. He wanted a new approach, with lights, noise and setting all playing new roles. As Lee Jamieson has put it, “by turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them.”

The appeal of Ireland:

So, what brought this puzzling artist to Ireland?

In 1997, the sociologist Peter Collier wrote a fascinating article, Artaud on Aran, which tried to understand the thought process of Artaud at the time. In short, he had become convinced that a walking stick he had acquired from a friend was the staff of Saint Patrick,  and reading texts like the Confessions of St. Patrick and parts of the Annals of the Four Masters only further increased this belief.

This was a mentally unsound individual, convinced he had the Bachal Isu (or ‘Staff of Jesus’)in his possession. As Rachel Moss has noted,”from the 1180s until its destruction in 1538 [the Bachal Isu] was kept at Christchurch Cathedral Dublin as one of its most prized relics.” It was destroyed in 1538 in Skinners Row in Dublin, following the Protestant Reformation, on the basis that it was a “superstitious relic.” Yet Artaud believed he had it, and was obliged to return it.

A curious file in the National Archives, held in the collections of the Department for External Affairs, explains more. Much of this file has been published online by the excellent Dublin Review.  The file opens with a short note from Artaud to the Irish Legation in Paris, explaining to them his reasoning for wishing to travel to Ireland. He outlined that his visit to Ireland was concerned with research, but that “this isn’t a literary project, nor that of an academic or museum curator…It is vital that I reach the land where John Millington Synge lived.” In return he received a letter of introduction from Art O’Briain, the Irish Minister Plenipotentiary in Paris:

This letter will make known to you Monsieur Antonin Artaud from Paris.

M. Artaud is about to leave for Ireland in search of information concerning ancient Gaelic customs and other matters relating to ancient Ireland, her history and so forth.

He himself would be very grateful for any help that you can give him.

In addition to this letter of introduction, Artaud was provided with a list of individuals who may be appeal to help him in researching ancient Irish traditions. Susan Sontag,editor of some of Artaud’s writing, has noted that he was “in an extremely agitated state before his departure for Ireland.” The Frenchman would arrive in Cobh clutching this letter of introduction, but without a visa. It proved enough.

Traveling across the countryside:

Artaud spent slightly more than six weeks on the island of Ireland, passing through the Aran Islands and Galway city before arriving in Dublin with almost nothing to sustain himself. From Ireland, he sent numerous postcards and letters home to France, writing to friends and former art collaborators. In one, he made his feelings clear:

The cane I possess is the very same one of Jesus Christ and, knowing I am not crazy, you will believe me when I tell you that Jesus Christ speaks to me every day, reveals all that is going to happen and arranges for me to do what I am going to do.Therefore, I came to Ireland to obey the exact orders of God, the Son, incarnated in Jesus Christ.

His biographer, David A. Shafer, has described the letters he sent from Ireland as “a bizarre admixture of spiritual prophecies and political rantings.” The French, he wrote, “whether identifying with the Right or Left, are all idiots and capitalists”. He also poured scorn on the Spanish Republic, Jews and just about everyone else.

On Inishmore, locals seemed more confused than anything by his arrival there. Bridget O’Toole, 20 at the time of Artaud’s arrival, recalled later:

There was something in the stick. I was always play acting to get it off him. My mother would shout after him – `Stop chasing with that one as she’s only married’. . . but I was not afraid of him. The only thing was to keep away from the stick but I suppose I was a divil, like himself.

Her neighbour Mary Gill had similar memories: “I thought he looked like a recluse or whatever you call it…I often told my friends that when I was going up to the cows I had to go past him sitting up between the rocks. I made a detour so as not to disturb him because he was so much private in himself.”

He left the islands, owing locals a significant sum of  money for lodgings, and departed for Galway city. He would lodge in the Imperial Hotel, sending confused postcards (depicting Eyre Square) home, but again departed owing money.  He arrived on Dublin on 8 September, a man with little English struggling to communicate with anyone he encountered. In the capital, he would spend a night at the Saint Vincent de Paul’s shelter for homeless men at Back Lane, while also seeking out some of the people who he had been pointed towards in Paris. He introduced himself to the publisher Richard Foley, who later beautifully described meeting him: “Máire Ní Daboinean, my assistant editor, knows French very well and spent a good while in France. We came to the conclusion that our visitor was traveling light in the upper storey.”

The Jesuit college in Milltown, where Gardaí confronted Artaud. (Image Credit)

Artaud would arrive at the grounds of the Jesuit College in Milltown, convinced of the need to speak to the Jesuits, but Gardaí were called to have him removed from the grounds. Seán Murphy, Assistant Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, would write to the Irish Legation in Paris about this:

 Since his arrival in this country Artaud has failed to pay his hotel bill in Galway and has had to be removed from the grounds of Milltown Park, where he called to interview some of the members of the [Jesuit] community. On being informed that the priests were on retreat and that he could not be granted an interview, he refused to leave the grounds. The Gardaí had to be called by the Milltown Park authorities to have him removed. As he is destitute he has had to be confined in Mountjoy Prison awaiting the Order for his deportation.

For a man in his mental state, Mountjoy must have been traumatic. To compound confusion, his walking stick was lost in the fracas with Gardaí, and never recovered. Deportation came on 29 September, when the S.S Washington set sail from Cobh. Murphy noted that:

On arrival at Le Havre, Artaud was sent to the Havre General Hospital in a strait-jacket. He was later transferred from that hospital to the Departmental Insane Asylum at Rouen. It is understood from the latest information available that this man is not in a fit condition to be questioned.

Artaud’s journey to Ireland has caught the imagination of many. Aidan Mathews dramatised the story for RTE Radio, while Artaud in Ireland was performed at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in 1999. Artaud would die alone in a psychiatric clinic on 4 March 1948, having spent the final phase of his life in numerous asylums.

Colley and Cole memorial, Yellow Road (Image Credit: Eirigi DNE)

On Yellow Road in Whitehall, a small memorial amidst terraced houses honours the victims of an atrocity. This memorial marks the spot where the bodies of Alfred Colley and Seán Cole were found on 26 August 1922. Cole was a 19 year old electrician, while Colley was a 21 year old tinsmith. They were both members of Na Fianna Éireann, the republican boy-scout organisation, and were killed because of their political affiliations. It happened mere days after the death of Michael Collins at Béal na Bláth, yet unlike that event it has been largely forgotten.

 While history has recorded that seventy-seven political opponents were executed by the Free State during the Civil War (the figure now appears higher),the number of unofficial killings was significantly higher still. Bob O’Dwyer’s study Death Before Dishonour, a labour of love drawing on primary source materials, points towards a figure of more than 120 such killings, with some bodies discovered in ditches and back alleys. There is no denying that the bitterness of this Civil War cast a long shadow over the new state. Dr. Noel Browne remembered the bitterness that still existed in the 1940s, on his entering the Dáil:

I recall my shock at the white-hot hate with which that terrible episode had marked their [older TD’s] lives. The trigger words were ‘seventy-seven’, ‘Ballyseedy’,  ‘Dick and Joe’ and, above all, ‘the Treaty’ and ‘damn good bargain!’. The raised tiers of the Dáil chamber would become filled with shouting, gesticulating, clamoring, suddenly angry men.

The stories that (almost) got away:

 In recent years, family researchers and historians alike have devoured the Witness Statements of the Bureau of Military History. These first-hand accounts of the Irish revolution have proven to be invaluable (though flawed) sources, providing first hand testimonies of key events like the 1913 Lockout, the Easter Rising and the subsequent War of Independence. We have drawn on them quite extensively, for example in this piece on looting during the 1916 Rising. The Bureau was established with the explicit brief to “assemble and co-ordinate material to form the basis for the compilation of the history of the movement for Independence from the formation of the Irish Volunteers on 25th November 1913, to the 11th July 1921.”

Some republicans refused to engage with the BMH in any form, believing it to be a project tainted by association with the Free State. Crucially, the BMH stopped short of seeking reminisces of the Civil War, no doubt fearful of opening old wounds. In spite of this however, there are still some references to the Civil War from participants who insisted on discussing those events, which have thankfully been included in the digitisation of the memoirs. One such republican to discuss the Civil War was Alfred White of Na Fianna Éireann. He talked of the deaths of Colley and Cole in the aftermath of events in Cork, describing what happened as murder:

 The unfortunate death of Michael Collins from a stray bullet removed the one man who would have had the strength to control them, and sharpened by their desire for vengeance. Their first victims were two unarmed Fianna boys, Seán Cole and Alf Colley, whom they captured at Newcomen Bridge (the military uniforms were clearly seen by witnesses under the disguise of trench coats), brought away in a car and murdered.

He was not alone in linking the deaths of the young activists to events in Cork. Frank Sherwin, another prominent member of Na Fianna who later served as an Independent TD, detailed in his memoir how he felt histories of the Civil War overlooked these connections:

Several books have been written about the Civil War. They deal largely with events leading up to the attack on the Four Courts and the fighting up to a period when Collins was killed, but they gloss over the remainder of this tragic event. When Collins was killed the ‘Terror’ began.

Sherwin, like White, did not mince his words. To him,”murder gangs” were to blame, while “men were found riddled with bullets all around the outskirts of the city. All over the country, similar murders took place and went on not only for the duration of the war but for months after it ended.”

The Oriel House Gang:

While the republican press presented Colley and Cole as ‘boys’, they were senior figures in Na Fianna. Colley held the rank of Vice-Brigadier of the Dublin Brigade, while Seán Cole was a Commandant. Most sources suggest they had joined the organisation in 1917 and 1918 respectively, in the period between the Rising and the outbreak of the War of Independence. Their senior positioning within the body would have made them political targets, but to whom? The task of monitoring and neutralizing political opponents fell largely on the shoulders of the CID (Criminal Investigation Department), based at Oriel House, a building which stands on the intersection of Westland Row and Fenian Street.

Oriel House today (Image Credit: Wiki Commons)

As Eunan O’Halpin has noted in his study Defending Ireland: The Irish State and its Enemies since 1922, the behaviour of the CID during the Civil War was “highly controversial”:

Allegations soon surfaced not only of widespread ill-treatment of suspects, but of killings – a British army intelligence resume of 9 September [1922] spoke of the “murder of a number of prominent republicans…Certain of these…are laid to the door of Oriel House”

Oriel House was a somewhat doubtful institution, and a good many suggestions were made that its methods were too like the worst we hear of the American police. However, the American police operate under peace conditions, whereas Oriel House at the time was carrying on under war conditions, and if investigators were sometimes somewhat tough with prisoners, I should say that the circumstances were such that tough methods were not only excusable but inevitable.

Padraig Yeates, author of the masterful A City in Civil War: Dublin 1921 – 24, has detailed the manner in which the CID became “probably…the most effective counter-insurgency unit working for the Free State.”  Under the stewardship of Joe McGrath, the body operated on multiple fronts, with a “Protective Officers’ Corps that was dedicated to guarding Ministers, important government supporters, public buildings and some commercial premises.” There was also a “Citizens’ Defence Force…which included about a hundred British ex-servicemen as well as former IRA Volunteers and some women.”  The CID utilised informers and agents in the ranks of the IRA, and unsurprisingly the building was physically attacked on multiple occasions. In the autumn of 1922, four mines were planted in the basement of the CID building, though only one exploded. Simultaneously to this, republicans opened fire on the building, firing “fifty or sixty rounds”, but leaving when the CID returned fire.

The bodies of Colley and Cole.

A little before six o’clock a large motor car came from the direction of the city at high speed, traversed Puckstown Road and turned into Yellow Lane. Five or six men wearing trench coats and hats, which they had pulled down over their eyes, sat in the car. There was some commotion in the vehicle and two men appeared to be struggling frantically to escape from it, but the others prevented them from doing so. A few people at the cross roads, attracted by this unusual occurrence, stood watching the men, when one of them drew a revolver, and in a threatening manner ordered them off.

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Funerals went to Glasnevin Cemetery. Soldiers in green uniforms marched, with arms reversed, after bands playing the ‘Dead March’, following their dead. Our men were buried quietly; women mostly as mourners. The CID were nosing for men. Cumann na mBan girls in uniform, some with eyes shut and faces screwed to one side, fired a volley over graves with revolvers or automatics.”

So today let us carry from these graves a message of hope to Ireland.  We will carry no bitterness for their murderers.  We of the Fianna still stand by the old chivalrous ideals of the Gael.  We will say, as our two martyrs would say, in the words of Christ, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”