My thanks to Dara McH for getting onto my Facebook page quick as a flash after the last post on the IFI screening of the Battleship Potemkin. Dara linked me to an interview with the oldest surviving member of the Potemkin, a famous adopted Dubliner by the name of Beshoff. “Dublin is missling a plaque” he wrote .Too right.
Sam has previously done some digging on the oldest restaurants in the capital, but the story of Ivan Beshoff is something in a similar field I hope one of us can get stuck into in future. I think he’s mentioned doing it before in passing, and it’s a fascinating tale worth the research.
Check this out, it’s “..an interview between Ivan Beshoff and international journalist Enzo Farinella produced for the Italian News Agency (ANSA) in 1987 and published in several Italian newspapers.”
In Ireland Ivan Beshoff made many friends. “I knew Eamon De Valera, Countress Markievicz, George Shannon and many others. All my life I had to suffer a lot. Immediately after the Civil War of 1922 I was arrested by the Fine Gael Government as a spy. George Shannon had me imprisoned for a month while my friend De Valera had me arrested in Galway in 1932, holding me at the prison in Limerick”.
“I worked at this time with oil products from Russia. At the beginning of the second world war the oil company had stopped working in Ireland. It was then that I opened my first fish and chip shop in North Strand Road that unfortunately was bombed by the Germans. From there I transferred to another place that now I have passed on to my son Anthony. For this reason we know the Italian community in Dublin well.”
Click on the book for more.
Click on the book for more.
Donal
Ciarán
Sam
Come Here To Me! 
Should say – it was Gavin G who passed the interview onto me. Will definitely try to make the film on Sat.
I was told this story in the mid 1990s, with few other details whose reliability I can’t guarantee. One is that Beshoff was also around the GPO during 1916, one of several foreigners, including apparently a portugeese sailor, all keen to pitch into a revolutionary effort. Supposedly he was living out past Coolock at the time.
The other part of the tale relates to his Russian oil dealings: it was said that Lenin had asked veterans of the Potemkin, who were scattered around the world, to set up companies to trade with Russia as they were in desperate need of foreign currency. The person who related this to me said that the firm ultimately became Ted Castle’s oil – fact or fiction? No idea.
What I do know is that somewhere in An Phoblacht in the mid-late 1980s there is a lengthy article about Beshoff, for which he was also interviewed.
Iv been looking for this interview in An Phablacht but cannot find it.. does anyone have the link for it?
Thanks 🙂