—–

Other “Writings on the wall” sets:

http://comeheretome.com/2012/11/01/the-writings-on-the-wall/

http://comeheretome.com/2012/11/07/the-writings-on-the-wall-part-ii/

http://comeheretome.com/2012/11/22/the-writings-on-the-wall-part-iii/

http://comeheretome.com/2013/04/26/the-writings-on-the-wall-iv/

The first Indian restaurant was opened in Dublin in August 1908. This enterprise, which seemed to have only lasted a few months, predated by three years the first restaurant of its kind to open in London, the ‘Salut e Hind’. ‘The India Restaurant and Tea Rooms’ was opened by Karim Khan at 20 Upper Sackville Street and offered ‘real Indian curries’ served by ‘native waiters in costume’.

Dublin’s first Indian restaurant. The Irish Times, 17 August 1908.

It would be another 31 years until Dubliners and the Indian community could sample food like this again in a restaurant. Michael Kennedy points to the ‘India Restaurant’ (later ‘Mahomets’) opening in 1939 at 50 Lower Baggot Street. It closed its doors in 1943. It is safe to say that this must be the restaurant referred to this An Irishman’s Diary in September 1939.

Reference to a Indian restaurant being opened in Dublin. The Irish Times, 02 September 1939.

A year later, the same column, offered a fascinating (but brief) insight into the shape of ethnic restaurants (i.e. Indian) in Dublin at the time. The writer wrote that he had seen ‘several white students from Trinity ‘ dining while he was there.

The Irish Times, 17 August 1940.

1956 was the next big milestone in the Indian restaurant timeline with the opening of the ‘Goldien Orient’ at 27 Lower Leeson Street. This was the brainchild of Mohammed ‘Mike’ Butt, a Kenyan of Kashmiri descent and his Dublin-born wife Terry, a graduate of Cathal Brugha Street College of Catering. It served generations of journalists, students and Indians until 1984.  (A biography of the pioneering Butt can be read here)

Mike Butt pictured outside the Golden Orient. The Irish Times, 21 March 1986.

In 1966, the ‘Taj Mahal’ restaurant was opened by Mohinder Singh Gill (aka Mark Gill) at the corner of Lincoln Place and Clare Street. Gill, originally from the Jalandhar district in the Punjab, came to Ireland after spending a couple of years in Britain. In business to the mid-1990s, the ‘Taj Mahal’ became one of Dublin’s longest-lived Indian restaurants.

The Taj Mahal (Lincoln Place side) in 1979. Credit – Dublin City Photographic Collection

While the Irish Sikh and Hindu community now numbers a few thousand, many of the  first were brought over by Gill to work in the Taj Mahal in the early 1970s. A total of 10 families, some Hindu and some Sikh but all from the same Jalandhar region, made the move to Ireland in 1972 to work as chefs in Gill’s ‘Taj Mahal’ and another restaurant of his in Cork.

In the late 1980s,the restaurant gained fame through Larry Gogan’s ‘Just a minute’ quiz on RTE Radio 2. When asked ‘Where’s the Taj Mahal?’, a contestant famously replied ‘opposite the Dental Hospital’.

The Taj Mahal (Clare Street side) in 1979. Credit – Dublin City Photographic Collection

The ‘Taj Mahal’ was taken over by Sikander Khan, a retired major in the Pakistani army, in 1987. It closed its doors in the mid 1990s. Khan’s son Nasir opened the ‘Royal Tandoori’ on South King Street in 1991 and in 1997 moved out to Donnybrook where he established the ‘Khan’s Balti House’ which is still popular today.

Thom’s Directory for 1973 shows nine Indian restaurants in Dublin, including a cluster from South Richmond Street to Camden Street, including ‘Bombay Grill’ (South Richmond Street), ‘Calcutta’ (Camden Street), ‘New Delhi’ (Lower Camden Street) and ‘Punjab One’ (Upper Camden Street).

Punjab One Indian Take Away. St. Stephen’s Green, 1972. Dublin City Photographic Collection

As Michael Kennedy has written:

By the late-1980s Irish tastes in food had become more adventurous. Foreign travel, emigration, the rising popularity of vegetarianism, increased disposable income, urbanisation and reasonably priced ethnic restaurants all explained the development.

The opening of ‘Saagar’ (Harcourt Street, 1995) and ‘Jaipur’ (South Great Georges Street, 1998) was seen as the new dawn of top end, Indian restaurants in the city.

Dubliners love of Indian food and curries has continued to grow and we now have an abundant supply of top-class restaurants, take aways and late night eateries.

What was your first experience of eating Indian food in Dublin? Where do you rate in the city today?

Dublin Newsboy illutration: Luke Fallon.

Last night I read a piece on The History Show on RTE Radio One looking at childhood in Dublin in 1913. Interestingly, the piece focused on life in the city for children before the lockout. It was great fun to put it together, I particularly enjoyed the story of the young chancer who talked his way into an expenses paid trip abroad!

You can listen to the piece by clicking on the link above. It’s interesting to contrast the plight of working class and upper class children at the time. My thanks to the people at The History Show for the invitation to contribute something.

Connolly’s paper, The Workers Republic, was suppressed by the authorities in December 1914 and O’Cathain writes that it was the “Glasgow Anarchist Group that took over the printing of the paper … and smuggled it into Ireland”. Apparently, the police in Britain raided several anarchist printing presses, including London’s Freedom Press, but never caught the Glasgow group.

Picture of the Glasgow Anarchist Group in 1915. Credit – ibcom.org

In Donal Nevin’s fantastic biography of Connolly, ‘A Full Life’, there is a mention of Glasgow comrades taking over the printing of The Workers Republic. However, Nevin points to Connolly’s old colleagues in the Socialist Labour Party.  More specifically, Arthur MacManus who was the one who did the setting, composing, printing and then smuggled the copies to Dublin using the pseudonym ‘Glass’. (Belfast-born MacManus, son of an Irish fenian, later became the first chairman of the Communist Party of Great Britain and was buried in Red Square, Moscow after his death in 1927.)

As Nevin backs up his claim with a reference to C.Desond Greave’s book ‘The Life and Times of James Connolly’, the evidence stacks in his favour.

Speaking of Connolly, I’ve always liked the story of Antrim-born Anarchist and Irish Citizen Army founder Jack White traveling to the Rhondda and Aberdare valleys in South Wales to try bring the miners out on strike to save his life.

Jack White in ICA uniform, 1914.

On 25 May, thirteen days after Connolly’s execution, White was charged with trying to ‘sow the seeds of sedition in an area which had nothing to do with the grievances of Ireland either real or imaginary’ and at a time when ‘a peaceful settlement was being arrived at’. He was sentenced to two sentences of three months.

Perhaps the most famous example of an individual falling victim to a tarring and feathering. Boston Commissioner of Customs John Malcolm in 1774.

The process of tarring and feathering can be traced right back through history, as an often unofficial means of punishment or revenge, designed to shame the victim. Wikipedia notes that the first mention of the punishment appears in the orders of King Richard I in 1189. Looking in the archives, I decided to search for some examples of the use of the punishment form in Dublin over time.

While I expected to find many examples of people getting tarred and feathered in the revolutionary period of the early twentieth century, the late-eighteenth century also produced much, a time when there was massive political agitation in the city. Indeed, in a letter to the Prime Minister in 1785, the Duke of Rutland (then Viceroy of Ireland) complained that:

This City of Dublin is in a great measure under the dominion and tyranny of the mob. Persons are daily marked for the operation of tarring and feathering, the magistrates neglect their duty, and none of the rioters – till to-day, when one man was seized in the fact, have been taken…

Much of the tarring and feathering being done in Dublin at this time was, as Neal Garnham has noted, the work of “gangs of tradesmen and artisans” who targeted “importers of foreign goods, workers prepared to undercut the wages of their fellows, and those who informed on the actions of vigilantes.”

There was evidently a degree of popular support for the practice in Dublin. Padhraig Higgins has noted in his study of Irish politics in the late-eighteenth century that when Alexandar Clarke, a master tailor from Chancery Lane, fell victim to a tarring and feathering mob in June 1784 “a crowd of about three hundred from the Liberties” attacked his house, before dragging him almost naked to the Tenters’ Fields for the humiliating ritual.

The practice appears to have become much less common place throughout nineteenth century life in Dublin, or at least much less reported. Tarring and feathering in Dublin was not always restricted to just living people, as the hugely controversial monument of King William of Orange on College Green also fell victim. One publication wrote in 1898 of that statue, noting that “It has been insulted, mutilated and blown up so many times, that the original figure, never particularly graceful, is now a battered wreck, pieced and patched together, like an old, worn out garment.”

King William of Orange sits on College Green.

The Bureau of Military History statements (first hand recollections of those involved in the 1913-21 period) give insight into the use of the tactic by republicans, and it was reported in the media in May 1920 that “the houses of two newspaper editors were raided and one anti-Sinn Féin editor was tarred and feathered.”

In most cases of tarring and feathering in the subsequent decades, republican involvement seems clear. In December 1934 J.P McEnery, a barrister living in Killiney, was driven to Arbour Hill and left there tied to the railings at the church. He had acted as prosecuting council during recent cases before the Military Tribunal, and McEnery claimed to have been told that this actions had displeased the Irish Republican Army. If McEnery’s case was clearcut, just why William Flood was targeted for the same treatment in October 1935 is less clear. Flood, a former celebrated footballer with Bohemian F.C, was also connected with the Abbey Theatre historically. The attack on Flood occurred in Phibsborough not far from Dalymount Park, and baffled media at the time. Flood had recently returned from holidays to Germany, and a placard was placed upon him that read “DEFAMED IRELAND IN GERMANY.” Flood claimed not to be a political person, and believed that “local jealousy” was at the root of the assault.

The newspaper archives show a massive spike in incidents like this in Ireland in the early 1970s, most of which occurred in the north of Ireland and were related to the troubles. Yet Dublin also saw an increase in this activity, with claims by republican groups that such attacks were a direct response to anti-social behaviour. When two 17 year old teenagers from the north inner-city were tarred and feathered in April 1972, The Irish Times claimed that an anonymous call to the newspaper had claimed this to be the work of the Provisional IRA, as the youths had been “found guilty of violence and other crimes.” There were several such cases throughout the 1970s, and they continued into the following decade, when it was reported that a woman described by a judge as being involved in the Heroin trade “in a big way” was tarred and feathered in the Phoenix Park.

The shocking images of a alleged drug dealer tarred and feathered in Belfast in more recent times put this article idea in my head. For every incident of the kind that was reported, I wonder how many weren’t?

One incident that bypassed me until recently was the death of 78-year-old Anna-Maria Fitzsimons in June 1897 at an anti-Jubilee event in Rutland (Parnell) Square.

On 19 June, James Connolly and his Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP) organised an anti-Jubilee meeting, under the slogan ‘Down with the Monarchy: long live the Republic, in Foster Place which was addressed by Maud Gonne. She told the crowd that the queen’s reign “had brought more ruin, misery and death” than any other period. Students from Trinity attacked the meeting singing ‘God Save The Queen’ but were repelled by the crowd.

The following evening, the day of the Jubilee itself, Connolly and Gonne organised a funeral procession through the streets of the city as the United Labourers’ Union band played the Dead March. They carried a coffin marked ‘British Empire and a black flag inscriptions giving the numbers who had perished in the Famine and the numbers who had emigrated and been evicted during Victoria’s reign.

A convention of the ’98 Commemoration Committee was being held in City at the same time and the chairman, veteran Fenian John O’Leary, suspended the meeting so delegates could watch the procession. Some of them, including WB Yeates, joined in.

 George Hyde-Lees and WB Yeates, nd (Credit – coreopsis.org)

By this stage, several hundred people were following the procession and there was a small confrontation with police at College Green, where the statue of William III was wrapped with a green flag.

Mounted police reinforcements arrived from Dublin Castle and the DMP tried to disperse the crowd. Afraid that it would be taken by the police, Connolly ordered the coffin to be cast into the Liffey, shouting: “Here goes the coffin of the British Empire. To hell with the British Empire!”. At one stage, Trinity students tried to grab the crowd’s black flag but, as reported in the New York left-wing Daily People, ‘the proletariat drove the bourgeoisie home in disorder’. Connolly was arrested and taken to the Bridewell.

Afterwards, Gonne conducted an open air-slide show of scenes of evictions from a window in the National Club, Rutland Square onto a specially erected large screen opposite.

The Royal Procession passing through Rutland (Parnell) Square, 14 years later. Credit – NAI

A large group of women and children watched the show. Maud Gonne wrote in her memoirs, A Servant of the Queen:

We were having tea [in the club] when suddenly we heard outside and cries of the ‘The police!’. I rushed to the window. Some twenty policemen with batons drawn a few people, mostly women and children, were running in all directions; a woman lay on the ground quite still; a girl was bending over her; someone called out ‘The police have killed her’.

The dead woman was Anna-Maria Fitzsimons from Cabra Road.

At the City Coroner in Jervis Street Hospital the following Saturday, her daughter told the inquest that herself and her mother came into town to see the ‘illuminations’ at Rutland Square. They walked up from Nelson’s Pillar, crossed at Cavendish Row and up to Rutland Square. They saw a number of people carrying flags and coming up from the direction of Sackville Street. The police baton charged the crowd and Anna-Maria was knocked down in the disorder that followed. She died later in hospital.

Does anyone know of any other deaths at political demonstrations in the 19th or 20th centuries in Dublin?

Refs:
The Irish Times (3 July 1897)
Donal Nevin, James Connolly A Full Life (Dublin, 2005)
James H Murphy, Abject loyalty: nationalism and monarchy in Ireland during the reign of Queen Victoria (Cork, 2001)

This cartoon from the month of February focused on the issue of pay for DMP men. The role of the DMP in the dispute, and in particular the events of Bloody Sunday in August 1913, ensured that their place in Dublin folk memory would not be as a revered force. The paper staunchly defended the actions of Dublin policemen during the months of strife.

1 February 1914

In the same edition of the paper, this cartoon appeared, which called for a tough approach to be taken against the mob’s darling. This sinister cartoon draws parallels with the labour situation in South Africa, where military force had been used against the union movement there. A contemporary newspaper report on events in South Africa can be read here.

1 February 1914

The paper routinely attacked Larkin and other ITGWU leadership figures as leading dupes into battle. A cartoon posted in the last series we ran here showed a worker awakening from the nightmare of socialism, while here the ‘Wellvpaid Socialist Leader’ is seen directing the vote of a blindfolded worker.

11 January 1914

The theme of workers realising the error of their way and returning to work was commonplace in the paper. This cartoon shows a rather sinister looking fella, Syndicalism, looking on in astonishment at a Dublin worrker who has returned to work!

25 January 1914

The paper also looked at Irish nationalist questions in its cartoons. It should be remembered that William Martin Murphy, owner of the publication and several others, was a vocal Home Rule campaigner, and this was reflected in the cartoons of the paper even during the dispute. This cartoon showed John Bull and Pat in discussion, noting that 1914 would be the year when Home Rule became a reality for Ireland. The slaughter of WWI would kill that plan of course, and lead to a split in Irish nationalism. We will definitely return to these cartoons as a post of their own in the near future.

4 January 1914

From the organisers:

Seen by many as the first act of the Second World War, the Spanish conflict pitted the majority of Spaniards and their democratically-elected government against their own military, backed by troops, aviation and materiel from Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. A non-intervention pact arranged between the European democracies forced the Spanish government to rely on the assistance of the Soviet Union, however tensions between the disparate elements supporting the government and increasing military assistance from international fascism and global capital ensured the victory of Franco’s armies and the subjection of the Spanish people. The repression continued until the dictator’s death in 1975.

Inchicore is unusual because of its development around the railway works and for the multiplicity of religious faiths (and none) represented in its workforce. Perhaps as a result of this mixture of socialism and non-conformity, Inchicore had a unique concentration of volunteers in the ranks of the International Brigades. Of the six men commemorated, two came from a protestant background and all had republican or communist connections. Three died in Spain and one survivor was to write perhaps the most significant first-hand account of the early fighting (Joe Monks, With the Reds in Andulusia, London, 1985).

Those being commemorated are:

Tony Fox (1914-28.12.1936). From Goldenbridge Avenue, Fox was a member of A. Coy., 4th Batt., Dublin Brigade, IRA and was with the first organised detachment of Irish volunteers to join the International Brigades. He crossed the Pyrenees with Frank Ryan and his school friend and neighbour Mick May on 15 December 1936 and was killed in action at Lopera on the Córdoba front less than two weeks later. Fox had just finished dressing the wounds of two friends, John Gough and Seamus Cummings, when he himself was fatally wounded. His body was never recovered.

Mick May (1916-28.12.1936). Michael May from Connolly Avenue was also a member of Fox’s IRA unit. He was additionally a member of the Communist Party of Ireland. He died close to Tony Fox at Lopera on 28 December 1936 and was last seen alive, single-handedly covering the retreat of comrades, armed with a rifle.

Liam ‘Bill’ McGregor (d. 22.09.1938). McGregor was the Dublin secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland and the son of Esther McGregor, president of the Municipal Tenants’ Association. He attended the Lenin International School in Moscow and on his return volunteered to fight in Spain. He was killed on the very last day the XV Brigade saw action on the Ebro front, alongside fellow Dubliner Jack Nalty.

Joe Monks (1915-1988). Joe Monks came from Park Street and went to school in James’s Street with Tony Fox and Mick May. A member of the Communist Party he was one of the initial volunteers along with his two school friends. He was one of the defenders of Connolly House, headquarters of the Revolutionary Workers’ Group (forerunner of the Communist Party of Ireland) when it was attacked in March 1933 by a hymn-singing mob. Author of With the Reds in Andulusia, Monks was wounded in the chest at Lopera but was to see further action in March 1937 at the little known battle of Almadén. He was repatriated later in 1937 and was active with the Republican Congress before immigrating to the UK where he remained involved in radical politics until his death in 1988.

Paddy McElroy (b.1911). Paddy McElroy came from 20 Nash Street. His brother Christopher had taken part in the 1916 Rising. A mechanic with the TE&FU, he joined the XV International Brigade on 7 January 1937 and was seriously wounded at the battle of Jarama outside Madrid in February. He was repatriated on account of his wounds and after a brief stay in Dublin he appeared again in Cairo in 1939. Returning to Liverpool via Durban, he was curiously listed as a government official with an address in Southampton. He was subsequently involved in a wages hold-up at Amiens Street in March 1943 and was defended by Sean MacBride. From this point onwards McElroy disappears from the historical record.

Bill Scott (1908-1980). Bill Scott came from Ring Street and was a member of the Communist Party of Ireland. One of the Irish Citizen Army’s earliest recruits was his father, William Scott, a member of the Church of Ireland and an activist in the Bricklayers’ Trade Union. During the 1916 Rising, Scott fought alongside William Partridge in the College of Surgeons garrison, under the command of Michael Mallin and his deputy Constance Markievicz. His son was possibly the very first Irish International Brigade volunteer to fight in defence of the Spanish Republic, finding himself in Barcelona at the Workers’ Olympics when the coup broke out. He was elected political commissar for the English Tom Mann Centuria in September 1936, before joining with the German Thaelmann Battalion in the defence of Madrid. Bill went back to Ireland where he was withdrawn as a CPI candidate in a Dublin by election in favour of Frank Ryan. He returned to Spain with Ryan and received a serious leg wound and was sent back to England. Disillusioned with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, he left the CP for a period before re-joining in 1941. He then became a member of the Essential Construction Corps, building infrastructure throughout the UK. After the war he continued his trades union activities until his death in 1980.

 

I opened with a moody sunshine snap, so I’ll close with a moody night-time one. O’Connell Street came to a stand-still, with the backdrop of a near full-moon peeking out from the clouds behind the Spire.

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Other “Writings on the wall” sets:

http://comeheretome.com/2012/11/01/the-writings-on-the-wall/

http://comeheretome.com/2012/11/07/the-writings-on-the-wall-part-ii/

http://comeheretome.com/2012/11/22/the-writings-on-the-wall-part-iii/

In 1224 the Dominicans (the Black Friars) established St Saviour’s Priory by the present location of Inns Quay on the Northside of the Liffey. They took over possession a small chapel which had been built four years previously. The priory’s extensive grounds reached to the corner of Cuckoo Lane and George’s Hill.

Dublin, c. 1300. Saint Saviour’s Priory can be seen clearly on the map. From ‘Dublin to 1610: Irish Historic Towns Atlas’

They built a bigger, more suitable church in 1238 but this fell victim in 1304 to one of Dublin’s periodic fires.

The priory buildings were taken over in 1539 under Henry VIII for use at first as courts of law, and then as a hostel for lawyers under the title of “King’s Inns”. The lawyers retained a chapel within the former priory for their private use. In later years, apart from its brief restoration to the friars in the time of James II, the priory was used in turn as a barracks, a theatre, a publishing centre.

In 1786 the present Four Courts building was erected on the site.

In 1860 it was reported in an article, ‘On the Wells in or near Dublin, Attributed to or Named after St. Patrick’, published in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (1836-69) that:

It was in Mr Bailie’s Timber Yard, corner of George’s Hill and Cuckoo-Lane, in a vault, approached by a great flight of stairs, also leading to a vaulted chamber which appears to have been an ancient church.

The local tradition leads to the conclusion that these vaults extend to a great distance, south to the Liffey, and westwards to Thief’s Hole, near the Park Gate, which was opened about thirty years ago, when it was examined by the police, in consequence of a report that the body of a murdered female had been hid therin.

Another source (The Annals of Dublin, 1987) suggests that it was in 1890 that workmen found the 150 feet long tunnel heading for the Liffey. This was alleged to have been the ancient passage which ran under the river to connect with the crypt of Christ Church.

Cuckoo Lane where at the corner of George’s Hill, the entrance to the tunnel was found. Credit – ‘infomatique’

In the fantastic Life in old Dublin, historical associations of Cook street (1913), James Collins wrote:

The building of the Four Courts … has removed all traces of the Dominican Priory … save (those) still under ground, several of which are known to exist in the locality starting from North King Street towards the river.

One of the most interesting was up to some years ago in a good state of preservation, after a lapse of 700 years. It consisted of a series of lofty semi-circular and round arches, built on massive piers, which are approached by a descent of large steps built in what was, up to a short time ago, known as Bailey’s timber yard, George’s Hill.

Opposite to the steps and in the first vault is a deeply arched recess in which there is a well of the purest water, said to be dedicated to St. Anne, from whom the adjoining street derives its name. On the left of the entrance vault is a built-up opening, which closes a vaulted passage, and tradition tells us that this passage extended to Christ Church, being tunneled under the river, and used at a remote period by the monks for the purpose of attending the ceremonials of the Cathedral.

Here’s where the story converges:

It is said that fifty years ago a workman procured a large ball of twine and some candles, and proceeded to explore the passage. He tied the end of the twine at the entrance, unwinding it as he went along, until he reached, as he considered, as far as Ormond Quay, when he was obliged to return, being driven back by foul air. The entrance was closed up in consequence of this exploit.

So, while the dates are varying, there are three sources pointing to a tunnel being found at the corner of Cuckoo Lane and George’s Hill sometime between 1830 and 1890.

Map pinpointing location of tunnel. Source – Unknown. (If anyone knows where this map was first printed, please let us know)

Interestingly, there is a similar story about an underground tunnel from St. Mary’s Abbey to Christ Church. Richard Robert Madden, historian of the United Irishmen, wrote in 1843 about vaults in St. Mary’s Abbey where:

…there is some traditional record of their leading by a tunnel passage under the Liffey, to the vaults of Christ Church, a tradition which I believe was the subject of some inquiry about two years ago on the part of Earl de Grey.

In The Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy (1855) the “well-known tradition of an ancient communication between (the) Abbey and Christ Church” was mentioned in pasing

However, there is certainly a bit more evidence to suggest there certainly was a tunnel found in the grounds of St Saviour’s Priory (Four Cours area). Whether it ran all the way up to Christ Church is another matter.

Laurance Campbell at work on his great statue for Seán Heuston, which today sits in the Phoenix Park near the zoo.

Among the youngest of the executed, Heuston was born in 1891 into Dublin’s inner-city, known as Jack to his siblings and baptised John Joseph. Gibney notes that six of the sixteen executed were Dublin men, with Heuston joined by the Pearse brothers, Michael Mallin, Roger Casement and Joseph Plunkett. Heuston’s working class background is worth pointing out, in a rebellion too often spoken of as a middle class insurrection. Born at 24 Lower Gloucester Street, it is known today as Seán MacDermott street to inner-city Dubliners. This area of the city captures the rise and demise of Dublin better than any other for me. It’s fashionable eighteenth-century existence is very much at odds with what would follow, and as Gibney writes “Dublin has presented a number of faces to the world, but two of the best known go hand in hand, as the splendor of the eighteenth century gave way to the squalor of the nineteenth.” Thirty-two people died of tuberculosis between 1894 and 1897 on this once highly respectable street, and the family moved to Jervis Street, and later to Dominick Street, yet another tenement area. The search for employment was to take Seán out of the city however, and to Limerick, where he succeeded in gaining employment as a clerk with the Great Southern and Western Railway. This offered all kinds of benefits, not least an eight hour day, when compared and contrasted with the precarious nature of work for most young men in Dublin at the time.

Undoubtedly the most recognisable image of Heuston, this photo appears on the front cover of the book. It was popularised after the Easter Rising and his execution.

Any study of Heuston has to examine Na Fianna in some detail, and Gibney does that here. A fascinating organisation, it was in many ways “an Irish nationalist alternative to the imperialist ethos of Robert Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts”, who were becoming more and more active in Ireland. A small plaque on Camden Street until recently marked the location where the first meeting of this organisation occurred, though sadly the building was recently destroyed. Heuston joined this organisation in Limerick, later praised by Liam Mellows for his ‘herculean work’ in developing the organisation there. He returned to Dublin in 1913, but remained active in the movement.

So what of the Lockout? Interestingly, it doesn’t feature here. It’s not for any lack of research on Gibney’s part, rather that being in a reasonably secure position and unlikely to have been affected in any material sense, Heuston “left no indication as to his views on the Lockout.” It is important to remember that Arthur Griffith and other Irish nationalists were sometimes even hostile to ‘Larkinism’ (With Griffith famously stating that “Not the capitalist but the policy of Larkin has raised the price of food until the poorest in Dublin are in a state of semi-famine”), but for most the great political question of the day was the tug-of-war between Irish nationalism and unionism. Heuston would play an active role in the landing of weapons at Howth and in the Irish Volunteers movement following the devastating split brought on by the First World War.

The book has a couple of brilliant little anecdotes and quirky stories, one of which involves Heuston’s attitude to ‘G-Men’(political detectives from the DMP). It’s noted that:

On one occasion he drew a detective away from the Volunteer headquarters on Dawson Street by bringing a wrapped parcel resembling a rile with him around the city; Hueston eventually revealed to the luckless detective that he had wasted his time by throwing the parcel into the Liffey near Queen Street Bridge.

Another little gem comes from Easter Monday itself, with Michael Heuston describing young Sean at the family home.

He removed the boards and began to take out the ammunition from the place in which he kept it and to put it in a pile on the floor. ‘What are you taking out that for?’ said mother. ‘Wasn’t it alright where it was?’. ‘Well want it all for the parade’. I thought you weren’t going to take that till ‘The Day’? said Duckie; to which she received no answer.

The Mendicity Institution today (Donal Fallon)

Heuston and a small band of men were tasked with taking the Mendicity Institution, which would provide a means to cause havok for soldiers attempting to enter the city from the nearby Royal Barracks. A home for the down-and-out, Gibney sets the area in its historical context, detailing the strong connection to The Dead by Joyce. This position was held initially by a small force of just over a dozen Volunteers, later reinforced with more Volunteers who had arrived from Swords to partake in what they hoped would be a political revolution. Yet the outpost was largely by-passed by British forces, until attempts were being made in earnest to suppress the rebellion immediately. Still, the fall of the outpost led one Volunteer to remember:

We tried to find consolation as we thought of how long Heuston had held out against such superior numbers and that it was ridiculous to think that he could have beaten off such forces. There was nothing to be ashamed of in losing such a scrap, particular under such adverse conditions.

What followed next secured his place in history, with execution at Kilmainham Gaol. The Catholic Bulletin would write after the rebellion of young Heuston in glowing terms, noting his deep religious faith and the fact that his brother was then an ecclesiastical student and his sister a nun. One interesting effect of both Heuston’s youth and this religious dedication in the family is that unlike some of the other leaders today, not only are there are no grandchildren or great-grandchildren to the fore in commemorating Heuston, there aren’t even grandchildren from his siblings.

This is not the first book in the Sixteen Lives series to examine one of the men for the first time on this scale, indeed Brian Hughes’ account of Michael Mallin was also a very important addition to the historiography of the period. It’s in examining the lesser-known individuals that this series really shows its worth. We sometimes think everything is written on Easter Week and it’s time for historians to move on, but in reality there are some individuals, even among Yeats’ ‘Sixteen Dead Men’, still demanding attention.

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Sean Heuston by John Gibney is available to purchase here from the O’Brien Press, and in all good bookshops.

In addition to all this, a huge number of prop guns were seized from the production team at Dublin Airport upon arrival! What became of Mother Mafia’s Loving Fold? I’m unable to find any reference to the film online. John Murphy, producer of the film, described it in newspapers at the time as a send up of The Godfather and Hollywood gangster films of the 1930s.

Maud Gonne MacBride photographed around the time of the dispute, clutching a ‘Boycott British Goods’ placard on O’Connell Bridge.

In the early 1930s, republicans in Dublin and elsewhere waged a campaign of intimidation against publicans who sold Bass ale, which involved violent tactics and grabbed headlines at home and further afield. This campaign occurred within a broader movement calling for the boycott of British goods in Ireland, spearheaded by the IRA. Bass was not alone a British product, but republicans took issue with Colonel John Gretton, who was chairman of the company and a Conservative politician in his day.

In Britain,Ireland and the Second World War, Ian Woods notes that the republican newspaper An Phoblacht set the republican boycott of Bass in a broader context , noting that there should be “No British ales. No British sweets or chocolate. Shoulder to shoulder for a nationwide boycott of British goods. Fling back the challenge of the robber empire.”

In late 1932, Irish newspapers began to report on a sustained campaign against Bass ale, which was not strictly confined to Dublin. On December 5th 1932, The Irish Times asked:

Will there be free beer in the Irish Free State at the end of this week? The question is prompted by the orders that are said to have been given to publicans in Dublin towards the end of last week not to sell Bass after a specified date.

The paper went on to claim that men visited Dublin pubs and told publicans “to remove display cards advertising Bass, to dispose of their stock within a week, and not to order any more of this ale, explaining that their instructions were given in furtherance of the campaign to boycott British goods.” The paper proclaimed a ‘War on English Beer’ in its headline. The same routine, of men visiting and threatening public houses, was reported to have happened in Cork.

It was later reported that on November 25th young men had broken into the stores owned by Bass at Moore Lane and attempted to do damage to Bass property. When put before the courts, it was reported that the republicans claimed that “Colonel Gretton, the chairman of the company, was a bitter enemy of the Irish people” and that he “availed himself of every opportunity to vent his hate, and was an ardent supporter of the campaign of murder and pillage pursued by the Black and Tans.” Remarkably, there were cheers in court as the men were found not guilty, and it was noted that they had no intention of stealing from Bass, and the damage done to the premises amounted to less than £5.

A campaign of intimidation carried into January 1933, when pubs who were not following the boycott had their signs tarred, and several glass signs advertising the ale were smashed across the city. ‘BOYCOTT BRITISH GOODS’ was painted across several Bass advertisements in the city.

Throughout 1933, there were numerous examples of republicans entering pubs and smashing the supply of Bass bottles behind the counter. This activity was not confined to Dublin,as this report from late August shows. It was noted that the men publicly stated that they belonged to the IRA.

Irish Press. 28 August 1933.

September appears to have been a particularly active period in the boycott, with Brian Hanley identifying Dublin, Tralee, Naas, Drogheda and Waterford among the places were publicans were targetted in his study The IRA: 1926-1936. One of the most interesting incidents occurring in Dun Laoghaire. There, newspapers reported that on September 4th 1933 “more than fifty young men marched through the streets” before raiding the premises of Michael Moynihan, a local publican. Bottles of Bass were flung onto the roadway and advertisements destroyed. Five young men were apprehended for their role in the disturbances, and a series of court cases nationwide would insure that the Bass boycott was one of the big stories of September 1933.

The young men arrested in Dun Laoghaire refused to give their name or any information to the police, and on September 8th events at the Dublin District Court led to police baton charging crowds. The Irish Times reported that about fifty supporters of the young men gathered outside the court with placards such as ‘Irish Goods for Irish People’, and inside the court a cry of ‘Up The Republic!’ led to the judge slamming the young men, who told him they did not recognise his court. The night before had seen some anti-Bass activity in the city, with the smashing of Bass signs at Burgh Quay. This came after attacks on pubs at Lincoln Place and Chancery Street. It wasn’t long before Mountjoy and other prisons began to home some of those involved in the Boycott Bass campaign, which the state was by now eager to suppress.

An undated image of a demonstration to boycott British goods. Credit: http://irishmemory.blogspot.ie/

This dramatic court appearance was followed by similar scenes in Kilmainham, where twelve men were brought before the courts for a raid on the Dead Man’s Pub, near to Palmerstown in West Dublin. Almost all in their 20s, these men mostly gave addresses in Clondalkin. Their court case was interesting as charges of kidnapping were put forward, as Michael Murray claimed the men had driven him to the Featherbed mountain. By this stage, other Bass prisoners had begun a hungerstrike, and while a lack of evidence allowed the men to go free, heavy fines were handed out to an individual who the judge was certain had been involved.

The decision to go on hungerstrike brought considerable attention on prisoners in Mountjoy, and Maud Gonne MacBride spoke to the media on their behalf, telling the Irish Press on September 18th that political treatment was sought by the men. This strike had begun over a week previously on the 10th, and by the 18th it was understood that nine young men were involved. Yet by late September, it was evident the campaign was slowing down, particularly in Dublin.

The controversy around the boycott Bass campaign featured in Dáil debates on several occasions. In late September Eamonn O’Neill T.D noted that he believed such attacks were being allowed to be carried out “with a certain sort of connivance from the Government opposite”, saying:

I suppose the Minister is aware that this campaign against Bass, the destruction of full bottles of Bass, the destruction of Bass signs and the disfigurement of premises which Messrs. Bass hold has been proclaimed by certain bodies to be a national campaign in furtherance of the “Boycott British Goods” policy. I put it to the Minister that the compensation charges in respect of such claims should be made a national charge as it is proclaimed to be a national campaign and should not be placed on the overburdened taxpayers in the towns in which these terrible outrages are allowed to take place with a certain sort of connivance from the Government opposite.

Another contribution in the Dáil worth quoting came from Daniel Morrissey T.D, perhaps a Smithwicks man, who felt it necessary to say that we were producing “an ale that can compare favourably with any ale produced elsewhere” while condemning the actions of those targeting publicans:

I want to say that so far as I am concerned I have no brief good, bad, or indifferent, for Bass’s ale. We are producing in this country at the moment—and I am stating this quite frankly as one who has a little experience of it—an ale that can compare favourably with any ale produced elsewhere. But let us be quite clear that if we are going to have tariffs or embargoes, no tariffs or embargoes can be issued or given effect to in this country by any person, any group of persons, or any organisation other than the Government elected by the people of the country.

Tim Pat Coogan claims in his history of the IRA that this boycott brought the republican movement into conflict with the Army Comrades Association, later popularly known as the ‘Blueshirts’. He claims that following attacks in Dublin in December 1932, “the Dublin vitners appealed to the ACA for protection and shipments of Bass were guarded by bodyguards of ACA without further incident.” Yet it is undeniable there were many incidents of intimidation against suppliers and deliverers of the product into 1933.

Not all republicans believed the ‘Boycott Bass’ campaign had been worthwhile. Patrick Byrne, who would later become secretary within the Republican Congress group, later wrote that this was a time when there were seemingly bigger issues, like mass unemployment and labour disputes in Belfast, yet:

In this situation, while the revolution was being served up on a plate in Belfast, what was the IRA leadership doing? Organising a ‘Boycott Bass’ Campaign. Because of some disparaging remarks the Bass boss, Colonel Gretton, was reported to have made about the Irish, some IRA leaders took umbrage and sent units out onto the streets of Dublin and elsewhere to raid pubs, terrify the customers, and destroy perfectly good stocks of bottled Bass, an activity in which I regret to say I was engaged.

Historian Brian Hanley has noted by late 1933 “there was little effort to boycott anything except Bass and the desperation of the IRA in hoping violence would revive the campaign was in fact an admission of its failure. At the 1934 convention the campaign was quietly abandoned.”

Interestingly, this wasn’t the last time republicans would threaten Bass. In 1986 The Irish Times reported that Bass and Guinness were both threatened on the basis that they were supplying to British Army bases and RUC stations, on the basis of providing a service to security forces.

To me, the streets contemporary life as a market area with a strong multicultural atmosphere is also worth preserving. Below are a series of images from the protest today, and my thanks to Bas Ó Curraoin for permission to post them here.

With the year that is in it, Jer O’Leary performed his Jim Larkin routine before the crowd. Those who haven’t can see him do the same at the launch of a comic in honour of Jim this Thursday.

A 1922 advertisement for ‘useful cycling accessories’. No mention of a bike lock…

Twice now in recent weeks I’ve witnessed people frantically searching for a bike that just isn’t there any more in Dublin. Like any major city, the robbing of bicycles is somewhat commonplace in Dublin, and many cyclists will have lost a bicycle to more opportunistic Dubliners. There is nothing new about bicycles vanishing on their owners in Dublin of course.

Digging into the archives, I found that the theft of bicycles featured heavily in the Irish media in the early twentieth century. This was a time of course when there were many more bicycles in the city. In October 1919, the Irish Independent bemoaned the fact that Dublin was not a city in which a mans bicycle was safe, warning that:

Dublin is getting a bad reputation for the larceny of motors and cycles, in respect of some of which, at all events, the accused have come from across the channel.

“No man”, said the Right Hon. Recorder, “can leave his bicycle without keeping his hand on it in this city.”

The paper was reporting on a court case involving a seaman by the name of John A. Johnson, caught in the act. In court, he gave an address in Liverpool as his own. A seemingly endless cycle (pun intended) of court cases involving stolen bicycles appear in the newspapers of the period, with harsh sentences handed out.

Bicycles enjoying a beautiful day in Howth (Image by Ciaran)

In February 1936, it was claimed in The Irish Times that “hundreds of bicycles were disappearing daily in the city.” The paper claimed that they were “being taken morning after morning from outside churches.” The attitude of authorities was that this was a longstanding problem in Dublin, with six months hard labour seeming a standard punishment at the time for the offence. One judge remarked that “it seems easy to take bicycles, and just as easy to get rid of the stolen bicycles. I would be very happy to have any person charged with receiving stolen bicycles before me, as I consider that the only sentence for these offenders is imprisonment.”

Even guidebooks to Dublin discussed the problem of bike theft in the city. In G. Ivan Morris’ classic In Dublin’s Fair City (1947) he warned of the dangers for bicycle owners in the city, but he also noted that “the cyclists of Dublin are a sight to behold, especially during lunch hour and between five and six o’clock in the evening, when they appear in thousands amidst the traffic of O’Connell Street, and the numbers of them rival Holland and Denmark.”

Dublin’s problem of vanishing bikes pops up in That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War. In it, Clair Wills notes that:

In the spring of 1943 the unfortunate poor were hit by a pawn strike, which caused real consternation in the slum districts of the city. Rather than pawn the Sunday suit, families were driven to sell their bedclothes and then their furniture. Others may have been driven to make money through the stolen bike racket, which seems to have been highly organised. The number of bicycles stolen in Dublin in any one week ran to three figures, suggesting that Flann O’Brien’s famous stolen-bike sketch in his novel The Third Policeman owed as much to fact as imagination.

Wartime bicycle stealing was discussed in the Dáil, when Willie Norton of the Labour Party made the claim in April 1943 that:

It is perfectly true, of course, that a new type of crime has arisen in recent years. The shortage of bicycles and the impossibility of buying them, except at very high prices, has provided a temptation to steal bicycles. I definitely believe that this is a wartime vice which will probably subside when bicycles again come on the market and when they are within the purchasing power of the mass of the people who require them; but we nevertheless have a very serious situation—one in which economic conditions are contributing to make criminals of persons who formerly were honest citizens and one in which the shortage of certain types of commodities is producing a dishonest outlook and a dishonest frame of mind on the part of hitherto honest citizens.

‘Your Bicycle May Be Here!’

In September 1952, the Irish Independent sent a reporter to Kevin Street Garda Station, who told the reporter that “three or four rooms” in the station were taken up by recovered stolen bicycles, and that “in the first seven months of this year no fewer than 3,781 bicycles were reported stolen in Dublin.” The simple problem, Gardaí noted, was that people were careless and far too trusting.

By the 1970s, the stealing of bicycles in Dublin features less and less in newspapers.This interesting article from the Sunday Independent in 1972 notes that “in 1962 there were over 5,000 stolen machines in the stores of Kevin Street, while in 1970 the number had dwindled to 2,318.”

This post is just a tiny selection of the content buried in the archives as far as vanishing Dublin bikes go. What’s the purpose of the post you may be wondering? Well, the next time someone tells you “it would never have happened in my day”, be sure to tell them you were undoubtedly more likely to lose your bicycle in the Dublin of the 1930s or the 1950s!