Friedrich von Raumer, a visiting Prussian historian, gave an interesting account of Dublin in 1835. It is to be found in Eoin Bourke’s excellent compilation Poor Green Erin, an anthology of German travellers’ accounts of Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century. Here are his early impressions of the city:

In Dublin, a large city with streets like in the West End of London and well-designed public buildings, everything is apparently composed and all in one piece. Apparently, for here the English, Scottish and Irish live in enmity with each other rather than merging into one society. As well as that, one’s feeling of uneasiness is compounded by figures the likes of which I had never seen before. On Sundays, while crowds of well-dressed people cheerfully stroll through the streets, just as many hordes of beggars swarm about – and what beggars! Spectres of this kind usually stay in their dens until the light of day has faded and the dark of night has fallen; here the sun has to give witness that Europe, too, has its pariahs. No, not Europe, but Ireland alone. For in contrast to these images of misery and horror, every form of mendicancy that I had encountered in Switzerland, the Papal States or even in Southern Italy paled into insignificance.

Some aspects of local culture amazed the visitor:

On my way to Mr.W. I saw a gathering of people in the distance and thought that I had once more found a street preacher. But it turned out to be no Scottish sermoniser but rather, as someone called it, “an Irish amusement.” Two lads, naked to the waist, were involved in a fight, neither like noble Greek wrestlers in Olympia nor even like skilful boxers in a match, but rather in a monstrous punch-up. After they had beaten one another black and blue and almost to a bloody pulp, one of them collapsed unconscious into the filth of the gutter. Within no time he was grabbed by the arms and legs, his mouth prised open and half a quart of whiskey poured in and a bucket of water dashed over his whole body. Then the two crazed fighters were set upon one another anew like mad dogs. Meanwhile the two Masters of Ceremonies were engaged in an astonishing and uninterrupted action. To make room, they hit out at the spectators with big whips in such a way that no-one in the first three rows escaped the worst imaginable lashes, a single one of which I would not have recovered from in four weeks. There it seemed to make no more impression than if one of us were to say: “Please be so kind as to step a little to one side.”

The Halfpenny Bridge

Georgian iron and treacherous timbers,
slime covered and slippery up and down;
a pox on the ferryman’s earnings
by those who dare to cross
from mean street to Venetian passage,
this is the Ha’penny bridge

Leaning on both North and South,
owned by neither, both,
a no-man’s land
twixt Norse and Brit,
chained to the granite quays.

On its crest
its pinnacle,
the luckless Lord Mayor of Dublin;
the toll gatherer-beggar,
with his bowl forever sits,
selling poverty for a pittance,
and redemption for avoiding eyes

The royal barge,
the chieftains byre,
bananas from Bolivia,
they all have passed
beneath this throne,
this crown of Anna Livia.

From the collection Change in the Wind by Niall O’Connor

Romantic opportunities for students of Trinity College were quite limited in the years before the First World War. The effects of this deficiency may have been greater than one would suspect. Female students had been admitted to the college and there were indeed three hundred on the rolls, but they were corralled in a remote quarter and had to be outside the college gates by 6pm. A young man would have to have been pretty quick on his feet to waylay a female student at the gates and get a productive line of conversation going before her tram came.

Eda Sagarra, in her recent biography of Kevin O’Shiel, tells us that Trinity students had to resort to the music halls to enjoy what she calls “a virtual female reality”. Apparently student digs were decorated with postcard pictures of stars such as Ellen Terry, Gladys Cooper and Naughty Marie Lloyd.

Unlike many students O’Shiel, who was from Omagh, had some useful social contacts in Dublin. These came via his two doctor uncles and his father’s legal contacts in the city. If students lying on their beds in their suburban digs were induced to delirium contemplating Gladys Cooper’s wonderful pre-Raphaelite hair or Marie Lloyd’s frills, what they really wanted was an invitation to one of the exclusive private dances held in large houses in Rathmines and Rathgar.

O’Shiel, through his family connections, was invited to some. A great favourite was the Highfield Road house of JW Hanrahan, Clerk of the Crown and Justice of the Peace for County Fermanagh. He had several daughters, “bright and clever girls” according to O’Shiel. The dress code on these occasions was non-negotiable and involved no small expense. Full tails and white gloves were required and indeed some mothers inspected the young men’s gloves at the front door. One of the purposes of the gloves – perhaps their main purpose ‑ was to prevent any skin to skin contact with the young ladies. In our more relaxed age the pleasures of these dances might seem almost as virtual as those of the music hall. On the other hand a gloved hand could still squeeze a gloved hand, a breakthrough which possibly made the long walk back to digs in Phibsborough or Cabra worth it.

O’Shiel went on to join Sinn Féin and played a leading role in building the new state, which he served until his retirement in 1963. Of course, it is a bit of a stretch to link his productive life with his more rounded experience (talking to girls) in college. Whatever the explanation, he had no truck with the more politically negative activities common among the student body.

One such indeed took place with the tacit approval of the college authorities. As Sagara tells us, relations between Trinity College and the city were strained, a fact which became very evident on St Patrick’s Day. When the Lord Mayor’s carriage would pass the front gate on that day, it was invariably attacked by students who gathered there for that purpose, their youthful energies finding an outlet in attacking elected luminaries of the Irish Parliamentary Party.

In his unpublished memoirs O’Shiel records that this annual unprovoked attack enraged the citizens of the metropolis, who frequently attacked the college in response, charging at the gate and breaking windows. He describes one occasion when an “enraged mob … headed by the famous Jim Larkin, burst through the iron gates, knocking students over wholesale”.

Is it possible that the simple measure of a regular Saturday night dance might have promoted civic harmony and allowed Big Jim to concentrate on organising the working classes of the city?

Kevin O’Shiel, Tyrone Nationalist and Irish State-Builder, Eda Sagarra, Irish Academic Press

PORTOBELLO BRIDGE

Twice a day I carry my soul over water.
The seedy canal blackened by car exhaust.
When first I came to the footbridge
at the lock, as a child
with fishing net and pinkeen pot,
it was through Little Jerusalem:
the avenues of exile,
past the synagogue that is now the mosque.

On the long road with dome
and campanile, steps to the doors
and life above the shops,
the town clock faces four ways at once,
chimneys sprout weeds
and windows reveal
lodging-rooms with lanterns
of papier-mache.

Twice a day I cross the bridge
at Portobello, look to the hills
or leave them behind
in their morning glory beyond Rathmines.

From A New Tenancy by Gerard Smyth, published by Dedalus in 2004.

A little counterfactual history: if Daniel O’Connell and his Catholic merchant friends had won a repeal of the union in the 1840s and had their bourgeois revolution, the nineteenth century would have been different. The prayer of late twentieth century lefties “Oh why can’t we be like everywhere else, why can’t we have class politics?” would never have been necessary. The O’Connellite bourgeoisie would have produced and exported and they would have had a muscular attitude towards their workers. The workers would have flexed their own more modest biceps and a standard sort of class politics would have emerged. There would have been sufficient fat to allow the workers a small share. Life would have been ordinary. What we got instead was fudge ‑ a national sweetmeat which many ideologues in our own era have found hard to digest.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the national question predominated in Dublin politics, with a major division largely along confessional lines. It was pretended that, as far as politics was concerned, social class barely existed and, that where it did exist, it was of no importance compared with the overriding necessity for solidarity within the opposing blocs.

In Dublin the Protestant fudge involved a pretence that all Protestants, whether bankers or semi-skilled labourers, were essentially gentlemen and that if they were not then they ought to be. The Catholic fudge was inverse in character and was that middle class Catholics and their politicians were greatly concerned and aggrieved by the condition of the city’s poor.

Out of this peculiar swamp a certain kind of nationalist local politician emerged in Dublin, one of the hallmarks of whose style was great and public hand-wringing over the condition of the poor combined with resolute pursuit of their own business interests.

JP Nannetti, who has featured previously in this blog, and who made a brief appearance in Ulysses, was one such. The son of an Italian sculptor, he began his political life as a Fenian and, according to Ciaran Wallace, claimed to be close to the leadership of the IRB. A printer by trade, he was involved in the trade union movement in Liverpool and Dublin, where he was a founding member of the Dublin Trades Council, serving as its secretary and president.

At the same time as the Joyce family was in social decline and constantly moving to always inferior housing, Nannetti and his family were conducting the opposite manoeuvre ‑ from Juverna terrace on the Finglas Road to St Anne’s Terrace in Clontarf and finally to Whitworth Road, Drumcondra. An upward social trajectory was not the norm at the time.

Nannetti was elected to the corporation in 1898 with the support of the skilled craftsmen of the DTC. In his essay on Nannetti in Leaders of the City, Wallace explains: “Initially, Nannetti upheld labour policies.” This did not last as “[n]ationalism swamped the (labour) movement inside and outside the council chamber”. Labour candidates had to support the nationalist programme, which consisted of Home Rule, a Catholic University and freedom for political prisoners. Meanwhile, as Wallace tells us, “their IPP opponents claimed to represent the working man”. In 1900 Nannetti became Irish Parliamentary Party MP for the College Green constituency, an office which apparently brought him significant business opportunities, including the position of trustee with the Royal Liver Assurance Company.

A change was taking place in Dublin working class politics around this time. The stage was being set for the great confrontation of 1913, a moment when the fudge dissolved ‑ only to return when the workers were effectively starved back to work some months later.

Ulysses, Joyce’s great Edwardian novel, is a poor guide to the class politics of the time. The author may have had socialist sympathies, but his soul was consumed by the doings of the largely IPP Catholic middle classes, a class which did not particularly rate the political concerns of their social inferiors.

Leopold Bloom remembers Nannetti’s father hawking statues house to house: “Nannetti’s father hawked those things about, wheedling at doors as I.” Bloom clearly saw his job selling small ads for the Freeman as similar. In depressed Dublin, social rank was jealously guarded. Knowing the origins of all was important information to be used in asserting one’s own status. JP Nannetti was one of the few who successfully swam against the current and rose socially. Bloom was an atypical Dubliner in that he was not inclined to make an issue of Nannetti’s modest origins.

Dublin was a poor city, lacking a prosperous bourgeoisie and a solid working class. There was a constant struggle for resources within and between the social classes. Naturally enough, when it came to the struggle between employers and employees, the property owners were better positioned to win. And they did. As William Martin Murphy said, his shareholders would still enjoy three meals a day through the lockout.

The ultimate point seemed to be that in depressed Dublin workers would not be permitted to improve their living standards at the expense of the middle classes no matter how well organised they were and no matter how charismatic their leaders. Notwithstanding the hand-wringing of the IPP, the desperately poor would remain desperately poor.

From 1905 to 1913 the new wave of Labour councillors condemned the IPP as a party of slum landlords and publicans. Double-jobbing Nannetti was one of their targets. He was elected lord mayor in 1906 with the backing of the IPP and against the opposition of labour councillors who accused him of profiting personally from his position and merely paying lip service to the cause of labour. James Connolly described him as a “nationalist labour poseur”.

The labour movement was routed in 1913 following its one heroic stand. Socialists like Connolly realised that the O’Connell agenda of gaining economic control was what mattered. But this time it would not be entrusted to sclerotic parliamentarians but won through rebellion, a rebellion in which socialists would engage under their own flag.

Leaders of the City: Dublin’s First Citizens, 1500-1950, Ruth McManus, Lisa-Marie Griffith (eds)

http://www.drb.ie/blog/dublin-stories/2012/12/07/curates-and-counterjumpers

A ghostly character from Joyce’s Ulysses ‑ one who had a real life existence ‑ was indirectly responsible for a radical deterioration of the river bank along the Dodder as it approaches Londonbridge. Since the sloblands of the area were drained in the 1790s, the river featured pleasantly sloping banks which caught the westerly sun and an opposite bank of thickets, undergrowth and birdsong, a type of covering which is still common further upriver where, as it happens, the young JM Synge practised his ornithological pursuits a few short years before the alterations lower down took place.

Overreacting to a murder by drowning in 1900, the Commissioners of the Pembroke Urban District Council ordered the bank to be walled and a protective fence added, turning that section into a cold and bleak stretch along an otherwise charming river. Indeed it remains somewhat harsh to this day despite the recent commendable efforts of the city fathers to render it less dreary by adding curvy railings and a plaque.

The ghostly character in question was of interest to Joyce because his conduct pointed towards radical approaches to life’s challenges and, in particular, approaches to the sort of challenges which confronted Leopold Bloom. While these possibilities were quite beyond Bloom’s emotional range, it seems Joyce wished to make an oblique gesture of acknowledgement towards them by giving this individual a small part in his hero’s life.

As an initial observation, we might acknowledge the widely accepted fact that there are plenty of differences between Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses. The connection is, to say the least, on the loose side.

When, for example, Odysseus returned from the (presumed) dead to discover that his wife had attracted a considerable number of suitors, the ancient hero ‑ notwithstanding the fact that none had actually gone horizontal with his lady ‑ formed the view that they should all be slaughtered, which task he then set himself to. That’s the sort of no nonsense individual he was.

The case of poor Poldy Bloom was a little different. When Bloom saw Blazes Boylan, his wife’s lover, on the street, he ducked into the national library to avoid an encounter ‑ well that’s the sort of chap he was. Bloom is sensitive, intelligent and likeable and most people would undoubtedly be quite happy to take a drink with him. Nevertheless, while we are aware that the Odyssean approach is impractical, we often wish that Bloom had some of Stephen Dedalus’s ruthlessness. Of course, we wouldn’t want him to be as tightly wound as the “young genius”; we’d like to think there was a middle road, a via media.

Joyce seems to say there isn’t. He knew his hardworking hero was unlikely to thrive in the harsh world, still less in the sinking ship that was Edwardian Dublin. (A question which sometimes arises in the reader’s mind ‑ at least in this reader’s mind ‑ is whether Bloom would have had better luck elsewhere; would things have been better for him for example in Belle Époque France, in, say, the world of Seurat’s La Grande Jatte with its well-turned out bourgeoisie strolling along the banks of the Seine. Perhaps, but the likes of Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès might well have been on his case, along with a bunch of others who would have made the Citizen’s anti-Semitism look like a pre-dinner cocktail.)

High-octane Stephen Dedalus is not the only alternative Joyce offers to Bloom’s unfortunate entrapment. There are others.  One of the least known but most interesting has but one foot in the text; it is Bloom’s nom de plume Henry Flower, in a sense his nom de guerre.

Henry Flower was a Dublin Metropolitan Policeman and in the year 1900 was keeping company with Bridget Gannon, a parlourmaid at 124 Lower Baggot Street. It seems that Miss Gannon greatly pleased the big policeman (he was a good six feet) because after a period he proposed matrimony to her. Bridget, it was reported, returned to him some time later saying she had consulted with a local priest who had advised her against the marriage as Mr Flower was a Protestant man.

A little later Ms Gannon wound up lifeless and floating in the Dodder near Londonbridge. When she was taken unidentified from the water she was simply described as “a sturdy female”. Later she was identified and Henry Flower was charged with her murder. We will return to this tragic drowning, but in the meantime it has to be said there is something odd about this account. Something has been left out, I suspect, something which would have been very obvious to contemporaries.

By 1900 a very large number of Protestant men had married Catholics. All you had to do to marry a Catholic was renounce the religion of your forefathers and sign up with the other side. In the first decades of the nineteenth century the traffic was in both directions but by the fin de siècle the Catholics in Dublin had decidedly won the numbers game and the conversions were flowing in their direction.

All Constable Flower would have had to do to secure Miss Gannon was to agree to a sort emasculation through conversion. It seems he declined to do this and offered matrimony as he was, thirty nine articles and all. Bridget broke off all contact, presumably with an eye to her eternal felicity.

Leopold Bloom was more accommodating than Flower. He had fallen for Molly Tweedy and in order to marry her had converted to Catholicism. Conversions of this sort were usually nominal in that they were not accompanied by a sincere embracing of the Catholic position on the transcendent and man’s relationship with same through the sacraments. This was certainly the case with Bloom, who appears to have regarded the whole Catholic thing as a bit of a racket. Conversion – however nominal ‑ did cut you off from your former milieu, with the result that the person you converted for and your children were likely to become the central focus of your life, if you didn’t choose the bottle. Thus when we first meet Poldy Bloom he is running up and down stairs with trays of tea and bread – the kind she liked ‑ for Molly to have in bed. That’s all very fine but, to cut straight to the point, there was no sex! And it seems there hadn’t been for a full ten years of Molly’s prime. Not a recipe for contentment!

Bloom’s daughter Milly had left home and was making her living as a photographer’s assistant in Mullingar and starting a courtship with a student. There is plenty of jizz about Milly and a fulfilled future does not seem out of the question. Their other child, Rudy, died after eleven days, leaving an emptiness in Bloom’s soul and an unwillingness to have sexual relations with his wife. So if Molly sought intimacy elsewhere, she can hardly be blamed.

Bloom sees himself as an emasculated failure. He understands why Kitty O Shea took up with Parnell: her husband couldn’t satisfy her and Parnell was more of a man. And in an involuntary fantasy Boylan tells him that if he wishes he can apply his eye to the keyhole and play with himself “while I just go through her a few times”. The future did not at all look good for Bloom. It was not impossible he would end up as his father did.

Leopold bloom’s father, Rudolf Virág, after whom Rudy was named, came to Ireland some time in the second half of the nineteenth century. He came to a country locked under the frozen maw of empire where one of the few activities which energised the populace was the competitive counting of Protestants and Catholics and their material assets.

Naturally Virág sought a woman and a relationship to make life worth living and fell for Bloom’s mother, Ellen Higgins. Miss Higgins was a Protestant Christian and in order to proceed Rudolf had to convert to that brand of Christianity, having changed his name to Bloom. Like his son’s conversion, it was a nominal business and he remained essentially Jewish. But like his son he also became psychologically dependent on his wife, who may not have been faithful. When she died, he suffered from depression and eventually took his own life by consuming poison in a hotel room in Ennis, leaving a poignant note for his only son, Leopold.

Leopold Bloom’s compensating sexual activities were on the squalid side and were autosexual in character. Seeking arousal, he commenced a correspondence with Martha Clifford, a lady who answered his advertisement in The Irish Times for literary assistance. Martha appears to have had him on the back foot, pleading to meet with him and demanding to know what perfume his wife wore. One feels that had they met she would have had the whip hand. When he wrote to Ms Clifford, Joyce had Bloom employ the nom de plume Henry Flower whose presence perhaps gave Bloom the strength not to yield to her importuning. Bloom was no doubt thinking Flower an amusing pun on his own (false) name whereas Joyce was conscious of an additional psychological steel.

In real life Flower insisted on having it out with Miss Gannon. He importuned her over a period, pleading for a final meeting. She refused until he hit on the idea of saying she could bring a companion. This she did but ‑ clever Henry ‑ he also brought a companion, a fellow constable, who was charged to entertain Miss Gannon’s companion and keep her at a distance. The foursome walked from Baggot Street to Northumberland Road via Haddington Road and from there down Lansdowne road to the New Bridge on the Dodder. It seems the constable friend did his work well because at that point he headed down Herbert Road with Bridget’s companion while the original couple headed along the river towards Londonbridge.

There are a great many interesting facets to this case, including an anonymous burial, a suicide, an exhumation and an unconfirmed tale of a sworn declaration to a solicitor son of Michael Cusack– the Citizen ‑ decades later in a tenement house in Gardiner street which exonerated Henry Flower. These facets of the case will have to wait for another day in order to allow us focus on the Joycean connection.(The editors of the drb insist on “a clear narrative thread” and I do not wish to offend on that score.)

In anyway, as they say, in due course Constable Flower was arrested and charged with the murder of Miss Gannon. To the surprise of many, the authorities found he had no case to answer. Flower promptly quit the DMP and left the country never to be heard of again. Dublin was very much of the opinion that he had done the deed and Joyce seems also to have held that view. The Nosey Flynns of the city maintained he got away with it because he was in the “craft”, an accusation also levelled at Bloom.

Joyce picked Henry Flower as Bloom’s pseudonym deliberately. Indeed it seems he knew that stretch of the Dodder well. The river Swan, which wends its way down from Castlewood Avenue in Rathmines, where the Joyce family paused on their journey to penury, enters the Dodder about halfway between the New Bridge and Londonbridge. Joyce celebrates this effluence in Finnegans Wake on page 248:

Shake hands through the thicketloch! Sweet swanwater!

Looks like a nod to Moore, and possibly also to Burns; he continues with significance to our theme:

My other is mouthfilled. This kissing wold’s full of killing fellows kneeling voyantly to the cope of heaven.

This, I think, puts the tin lid on it.

Many readers over the years of Bram Stoker’s famous work have been surprised, if not astonished, by Count Dracula’s feeding habits. Scholars have pored over the records of European and Irish folklore searching for clues, but to no great effect.

It may be that they have been looking in the wrong places and perhaps asking the wrong questions. While a full understanding of Stoker’s sources may elude us for decades, if not indefinitely, the recent publication of his commonplace book reveals material which points in a promising direction.

When the dullish ‑ some would say very dull ‑ solicitor Jonathan Harker arrives at Castle Dracula he immediately sticks his nose into his books. Given the Count’s plans, he would have been better off getting the measure of the man and the place.

Dracula himself is amused: “It was the better part of an hour when the Count returned. ‘Aha!’ he said, ‘still at your books?’ Clearly, he did not feel the earnest Victorian posed much of a threat: “‘Come; I am informed that your supper is ready.’ He took my arm, and we went into the next room, where I found an excellent supper ready on the table.”

This passage is interesting. The Count was undoubtedly aware that the predictable Harker would bow before the convention which separates the actions of eating and working. Dracula, of course, transcends this polite Victorian dogma to the degree that eating is his work. Turning to the hapless Harker he excuses himself and, with characteristic Transylvanian understatement, adds the information that he has “dined out”. No point in explaining too much to the visiting imbecile!

The dramatic juxtaposition of wild Carpathian freedoms and Victorian sensual atrophy is Stoker’s genius. But the question remains: where on earth did Stoker, a former civil servant from Dublin, find the inspiration. The answer may well be far removed from either Irish or Romanian folk beliefs; indeed it may lurk instead deep in the interior of the Dublin civil service and in particular in some practices associated with overtime.

A recent essay published in Béaloideas, the journal of Irish folklore, discusses Stoker’s notebooks, which were written during his time in the Dublin civil service and which were recently published for the first time. From these we can infer that the horror of the civil service canteen was quite unknown to Stoker and his colleagues and that there was no artificial division between the place of work and the eating place.

Not only did Stoker and his colleagues eat in their workplace; they ate with passion and utter disregard for the type of decorum Harker depended on for very life. Judge for yourselves:

Most of Bram’s career was passed in the Department of the Registrar of Petty Session Clerks, where he proved to be an able and energetic official, being promoted to the rank of Inspector of Petty Sessions in 1876. (…) It seems to have been a common practice that, whenever there was extra work dinner was prepared in the office, under the supervision of one of the senior clerks, who himself did most of the cooking.

Stoker records how:

One day there was a big dinner. The table was covered with a cloth made of sheets of blotting paper gummed together. Eight sat down. The dinner consisted of hare soup, a roast of turkey with forcemeat (this was carved in a wash hand basin) two teal, several snipe, potatoes, carrots, turnips, salad, fried plum puddinvg, sherry, beer, champagne, moselle, port, claret, curacon, a cup of coffee, punch.

So what we have is a glorious feast in the workplace with scant regard for bourgeois niceties. Perhaps it is not all that surprising that a man from this background could imagine the character Renfield, who feeds on spiders, birds and other small creatures, and the delightful Lucy, whose mouth is stuffed with garlic prior to being beheaded. A short step remains to having the Count feed on Miss Murray’s blood and with aristocratic panache offering her some of his own.

Brian Earls’s essay “‘The mother in hoors and robbers’: Bram Stoker as Urban Folklorist” was published in the 2012 issue of Béaloideas: The Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society.

Brian Earls’s essay on Stoker in the Dublin Review of Books is here.

Memory, they say, can play tricks on you; but then again so can the lack of it, even more so perhaps. I remember a few decades ago seeing an Abbey production of O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. Bessie Burgess was played as a Northern unionist with a thick Belfast accent, whereas O’Casey of course wrote the character as a Dub. Apparently the director felt his audience would find it easier to believe in a unionist from high-employment Belfast living in a tenement in depressed Edwardian Dublin than to accept the idea of a native Dublin Protestant working class unionist. By the 1970s, Dublin had quite simply forgotten that it once had a sizeable Protestant working class.

Dubliner Martin Maguire has written extensively on Protestant working class culture and his account of the Dublin Conservative Workingmen’s Club reveals a world quite distant from the stiff propriety of the Victorian middle classes. The club was based in a large Georgian building in York Street, on the site now occupied by the extension to the Royal College of Surgeons. Maguire has examined its accounts and calculates that between nine and eighteen hundred pints of porter were consumed there every week. This, and the associated culture, upset some proper elements of Protestant middle classes, for whom porter was ‑ as one still living clergyman has put it ‑ “the devil’s buttermilk”, and who felt that no day should be Arthur’s day, especially for people who were paid weekly.

In 1888 the Church of Ireland Temperance Society decided that it would extend its campaign for temperance and Sunday closing to the working classes. As part of its new drive against the bottle it passed a resolution criticising the goings on in York Street. Resolutions were also passed by the Dublin, Glendalough and Kildare branches of the society. This campaign of resolutions provoked Paul Askin, a club patron, to complain of “false and malicious charges”. However, the club’s response did not involve in any way curtailing the availability of alcohol, which is perhaps why it was again “attacked by the Rev. Professor Joseph Allen Galbraith in 1889 and later became a particular target of the Rev. Gilbert Mahaffy, a member of the Representative Church Body and the Dublin Diocesan Synod and a strong temperance campaigner”. None of this made a blind bit of difference to the conservative working man, who continued to enjoy his pint of plain. Moreover, the club bar remained open on Good Friday and every Sunday.

The CWC was originally set up by prosperous Dublin Protestants whose hands it may be assumed were entirely free from anything resembling a callus. Many, such as Lord Iveagh (yes, he of James’s Gate, against whom it seems the temperance societies did not pass any resolutions), held honorary positions in the club, whose membership was supposed to be confined to “Protestant men of good character”, which means people who behaved like the middle classes.

It was a big ask. As Martin Maguire comments, “the intentions of the Conservative establishment, the original sponsors of the CWC, to ‘improve’ the working class were subverted by the unapologetic attachment of members to more popular forms of culture. For the majority of members social and recreational activities meant beer and billiards.”

Billiards was highly popular, though the game tended to erode the exclusively Protestant ethos of the club. Competitive games involved contact with other, mainly Catholic, workingmen’s clubs. “Inter-club billiard tournaments between the CWC and the Trade Hall, James Street Work-men’s Club, York Street Workmen’s Club, Wellington Quay Club and Inchicore Workmen’s Club were popular though contentious events.”

Unruly behaviour, frequently associated with alcohol, was a common problem on club premises. More surprisingly – perhaps even movingly ‑ there were numerous financial crises provoked by soft-hearted club officials supplying members with drink on credit. Gambling was also common. Martin Maguire writes that “as well as a weekly lotto, the club regularly ran profitable sweepstakes on horse-races, an illegal practice which brought them under police notice”.

Rowdy behaviour was common and dealing with its consequences took up a great deal of the committee’s time: “the minutes of club meetings are filled with graphic accounts of fights and disagreements”. “In November 1887 six members, including the vice-chairman, Thomas May, were expelled after a riot in the club.” Expulsion was rare and usually only followed particularly serious aggression. “An apology and a gesture of contrition were all that was usually demanded, though if none were forthcoming, a suspension of membership was usual. Following a four-cornered fight in the bar in 1901, three of the belligerents were contrite and no further action was taken, but the fourth, a Mr Martin, said he would do the same again and ‘would drive any man’s head through the window who should interfere with him’.” These strong views brought him a suspension.

The same ‘hard cases’ recur frequently. “William Dobbs, an officer of the club, a political activist and the man who vehemently opposed any contact with Catholic clubs, was a persistent offender, though his aggression was usually verbal. Another was a Mr Purdie, who was reprimanded for attacking the house steward, cheating at cards, bad language, calling an English member ‘a bloody English scut’, molesting the house steward’s wife ‘in the absence of her husband’, and calling the management committee ‘a lot of swindlers’.”

Middle class Dublin Protestants recoiled in horror at these goings on but for a lengthy period were powerless to prevent theme. In the end, however, they won out. De-industrialisation, Maguire tells us, continued to erode the working class Protestant population in late nineteenth century Dublin and over time the club became less working class, dropping the designation from its name altogether in 1927. He does not say if the consumption of porter also declined.

“The Organisation and Activism of Dublin’s Protestant Working Class, 1883-1935”, by Martin Maguire, Irish Historical Studies, Vol 29, No 113 (May 1994), pp 65-87.

March 29th, 1967 saw Philip Larkin in Dublin at a library conference. He wrote to Monica Jones:

Late, after dinner in Trinity, everyone else falling about but I thought there wasn’t enough to drink. Or eat …
Well, the crossing was all right ‑ very rough indeed, but pitching not rolling, & it be the rolling that do do for I. No puking: 2½ pints in the bar (the ½ was to see what it was like) & then a cold, sleepless but otherwise untroubled night. All the same conferences are hell. We are stranded out in some godforsaken suburb, no stamps, no pub, no papers, miles even from the hall we meet in – I have no stamps yet, but hope to find some tomorrow. Radio Eireann rang up tonight to do a short interview tomorrow: fame. […]
Dublin is fascinating in its horribleness ‑ I can look at it for hours: sat looking out the window of some law library watching the nuns & begging children & broken fanlights. Meantime K. Humphreys found a backless 1st ed. of Endymion on the open shelves. Dublin!
Love, darling ‑ wish you were here. P.

It is not so much that one thinks that Dublin in 1967 was like Paris or New York. But surely it must have come up a bit from the 50s. Remember, this was from a man familiar with Belfast and Hull.

29/03/2013

Karl Gottlob Kütter, a parson’s son from the inland town of Wiedemar in Saxony was greatly impressed by Dublin Bay and the river Liffey when he visited the city in 1783.He described the sight in a letter to his friend Schenk:

If I had to live permanently in this city, one of my greatest and most pleasant pastimes would be to stroll in the mornings along by the Liffey out to the harbour, especially when the tide is in. You could hardly imagine anything more appealing particularly when the weather is fine enough to be able to see far out into the bay. The sight of the sea and the mountains that enclose the bay on both sides, as well as of the several hundred ships near and far that are always to be seen, are things that swell the heart and defy description.
From Essex [Grattan] Bridge onwards the Liffey is sometimes so full that one can walk from one ship’s deck to another and cross the river as over a bridge. Throngs of people are partially at work on the ships and partially in countless boats between the ships where, although there hardly seems to be any room whatsoever, boatmen manage to wind their way through. The sight of the masts that look like a forest, some with their sails struck, others with them set, with English, French, Spanish Dutch or Scandinavian flags flying; the varied sizes and shapes of ship with 10,15,20 or more cannons or none at all; the arrival of some, the departure of others; the hustle and bustle of some being loaded and others unloaded; the diversity of figures, costumes, languages and many other things would often occupy me for many hours in a row.
I walk slowly down the river, which becomes broader and broader and finally loses itself in the bay. There the view is more grandiose and sublime and the ships, which previously moved at a slower and more restricted pace, now show themselves in their full majesty and, released from all confinement, take their free, rapid and stately course.

23/03/13