Ernest Kavanagh, born in Dublin in 1884, was a political radical aligned to Liberty Hall. He worked for the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, and as a cartoonist with a biting wit, he frequently lampooned the establishment in the pages of Jim Larkin’s newspaper The Irish Worker. Dublin employers, constitutional nationalist leaders like John Redmond and those who opposed extending the franchise to women were among his most frequent targets. His work, signed E.K, nicely complemented the style of Larkin’s paper. The publication poured scorn on its enemies; Dermot Keogh has described the paper as “vitriolic and scurrilous”, with certain editions a “libel a line”. To John Newsinger, it was the ferocity of the attacks on “slum landlords, sweat-shop employers, lying journalists, various scabs, corrupt politicians” and more besides that made people want to read the paper. Larkin “was out to diminish them by ridicule, to cut them down to seize and show them up as moral pygmies.” Kavanagh’s cartoons were one of the most powerful weapons at Larkin’s disposal in this task.
Masthead of the Larkinite newspaper, The Irish Worker.
In recent years, Kavanagh has achieved some much-deserved recognition, thanks to historian James Curry, who compiled a collection of Kavanagh’s cartoons under the title Artist of the Revolution: The Cartoons of Ernest Kavanagh. Of his subject, Curry has written:
During the Lockout he viciously attacked William Martin Murphy and the Dublin police on a regular basis. The latter were frequently portrayed as brutish, bloodthirsty, drunken tyrants who were controlled by politicians and employers and all too ready to administer a beating to the city’s working class population with their batons, especially if the unfortunate recipient happened to be a woman or child.
On the opposing side, the Irish Independent and Sunday Independent newspapers attached to Murphy produced their own cartoons. While lacking the satirical edge of The Irish Worker, they were nonetheless part of a propaganda war; they aimed to present Larkin as well-fed and content, at a time when Dublin workers suffered hardship.
Of all the Kavanagh cartoons, one has always intrigued me, because it’s a little out of theme with much of his work, depicting an internationally famed piece of art. An ancient and celebrated Greek statue, the Aphrodite of Milos, better known as the Venus de Milo, is today on display in the Louvre of Paris. In 1912, Kavanagh found himself drawing her wrapped in a coat, in contrast with her semi-naked form in Paris:
Ernest Kavanagh – ‘Venus, as the Alleged Moralists would have her.’ (The Irish Worker)
On 4 July 1912, a curious report of window breaking in Dublin appeared in the Freeman’s Journal:
In the Southern Court of Tuesday, Mr. Swifte, KC, had before him a man named John McMahon, described as a house painter, 2 Fleet Street, who was charged with willfully and maliciously breaking three panes of glass in the windows of Morrow’s Library, 12 Nassau Street, on the previous evening by deliberately throwing stones at them. the damage was estimated at £14 15s 2d.
The paper noted that Morrow’s had received anonymous postcards objecting to the presence of a postcard of Venus de Milo in their window display, and that someone had even taken it upon themselves in the past to smear their windows in mud, no doubt in the hope they would remove the image. They didn’t, and in July 1912 it seems their windows paid the price for this stand. It was all a bit mad, and Kavanagh captured the absurdity perfectly.
The attack on Morrow’s came on the same night as a meeting in the Mansion House, “under the auspices of the Catholic Young Men Society, in connection with the crusade against objectionable literature.” According to one newspaper, “there was an extremely large attendance…thousands were unable to gain admission, and an overflow meeting was held. A notable feature of the proceedings was the large attendance of clergymen and ladies, and the presence of distinguished persons of different religious beliefs.” In the weeks before this conference, one journalist asked if it could “be contended that the sale of poisonous publications, which have nothing to recommend them, save their filthiness and indecency, are less harmful to the public than the sale of, say, diseased meat or unwholesome fruit?” Kavanagh and others evidently believed there was a connection between this gathering and the windows of Morrow’s. One Irish newspaper found space for a joke at the expense of Venue de Milo in 1912:
At the art museum, the sign ‘Hands Off’ was conspicuously displayed before the statue of Venus de Milo.
A small child looked from the sign to the statue.
“Anybody could see that”, he said dryly.
What became of Ernest Kavanagh? on 25 April 1916, he was shot dead on the steps of Liberty Hall. According to Curry, he “seemingly called to Liberty Hall in order to offer his services to the rebels due to feeling guilty for not joining the Rising at its commencement the day before.” Unaligned and unarmed at the time of his death, he compromises part of the list of 257 civilian causalities from Easter Week. His passion and wit was a great loss to the movements he had supported in life.
Ernest Kavanagh, only days before the Rising. This remains the only known surviving image of the cartoonist.
