Come Here To Me!

Are you a trade union member or are you a
resident of an area or a member of a family with
strong connections to the 1913 Lockout?

Are you interested in recording and preserving
stories of the Lockout and analysing its importance
one hundred years on?

Would you like to contribute to an oral history of
the Lockout to be published in 2013?

It really is time to get the ball rolling as far as 2013 goes, and the centenary of the Lockout gets closer and closer with each day. As part of the centenary plans from the 1913 Committee, an oral history group will be established. Few events hold the folk memory of the Lockout in Dublin, and if your family were involved in the dispute and a stories have been passed down, it’s time to get them on tape. This project is FETAC accredited and runs for six weeks from 15 September. All the info is in the PDF flyer below, click the link under the image for more.

Click here to access the flyer for the Oral History project

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The images below form part of a great series of Dublin images taken in 1867 by Frederick H. Mares. Today, they are held by the British Library. They were part of his work ‘Photographs of Dublin’. The below images and their descriptions come from the British Library digital collection.

“The Castle of Dublin is divided by a range of buildings into two courts or yards, the upper and the lower, into the former of which the principal entrance from Castle-street leads. The Lower Yard contains the Birmingham or Record Tower, the only remaining portion of the ancient fortress founded in 1205, and completed in 1220, by Henry de Londres, the notorious archbishop, whose name has been handed down to posterity with the unenviable sobriquet of ‘Scorchbill,’ from his having treacherously burned the writs and papers by which his tenantry held their houses and farms.

In close proximity to this rough and rude specimen of the fortifications of feudal times is the beautiful Chapel Royal, built on the site of an older structure (taken down in 1808), from the plans of Mr. Francis Johnson, at an expense of £42,000.

This beautiful edifice is seventy-three feet long, and thirty-five broad. The exterior is ornamented with no less than ninety heads, including all the sovereigns of England…The chapel was opened for worship in the year 1814.”

“The General Post Office stands on the west side of Sackville-street. It is 223 feet in front, 150 in depth, and three stories, or fifty feet, in height, to the top of the cornice. In front is a grand portico, eighty feet wide, of six fluted pillars of the Ionic order, four and a-half feet in diameter. The frieze of the entablature is highly enriched, and in the tympanum of the pediment are the royal arms. The pediment is surmounted by three statues, representing Hibernia,…Mercury,…and Fidelity…

A handsome balustrade surmounts the cornice, giving an elegant finish to the whole. With the exception of the portico, which is of Portland stone, the whole is of mountain granite. The building is after a design of Francis Johnston, Esq., and the foundation stone was laid by his Excellancy Earl Whitworth, on the 12th August, 1815, and was completed for about £50,000. The board-room contains a white marble bust of his excellency, over the chimney-piece.

Near the Post Office is situated Nelson’s Pillar. It consists of a pedestal, column, and capital of the Doric order, which is surmounted by a statue of Lord Nelson, leaning against the capstan of a ship. The entire height of the column and statue is 134 feet. There is an internal stair, by which the top can be reached, and from which a view of the city, bay, and surrounding country is obtained.”

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Michael O’Riordan (1917 – 2007), International Bridgade veteran and former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland, ran for election six times from 1946 to 1973.

His last campaign in 1973, running in the Dublin Central constituency for the 20th Dail, was captured by RTE for their current affairs programme ‘Tangents’, which was broadcast after the main evening news from 1972 to 1974.

In this short two minute clip, O’Riordan is first seen outside an Unemployment Exchange canvassing people for his vote using a microphone attached to the car.

Secondly, in presumably the CPI’s office, O’Riordan is interviewed by John O’Donoghue of RTÉ and is asked about the public’s attitude to the Communist Party and whether more people will vote for him this time around.

O’Donoghue describes the event as “first person to stand for the Communist Party in a general election since the 1930s” but I am confused by this as he had run a number of times in the 1950s and 1960s?

During one memorable election campaign in the 1960s, left-wing folk singer Luke Kelly did his best to help O’Riordan. As the story goes:

We had met on his return from Britain and shared a personal-political friendship. When I stood as a party candidate the help of Luke in his artistic capacity was invoked. We billed our public appearance at the then waste ground across from Christ Church Cathedral. That evening a big audience turned up and Luke performed his overture of working class and national rebel songs. The crowd grew even bigger and then with a rousing finale he stepped back to give the floor to the candidate. I went to the microphone, glancing down to straighten my speech notes, and then looked up to find that 90 per cent of the crowd had evaporated in the wake of Luke. When next we met I greeted him as ‘Comrade Pied Piper of Hammelin’.

O’Riordan passed away in 2006 and his funeral was attended by over a thousand mourners.

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A fascinating and well-made three and a half minute mini-doc focusing on the history of the Irish LGBT community in film and TV. It wad directed and produced by Anna Rodgers for the GAZE Dublin International LGBT Film Festival which takes place between the 2nd and 6th of August.

Some interesting screengrabs:

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We do not want contraception, abortion, divorce, homosexuality, secular schools or any of the trappings of an uninspiring secular Ireland.

So summed up the politics of Úna Bean Mhic Mhathúna in a letter to The Irish Times on 4 May 1976.

Una*, along with her friend and fellow campaigner Mena Cribben, is another colourful character in the world of reactionary Irish politics. She has been a dominant figure for over forty years as a founding member of Mna na hEireann (c. 1972 – late 1970s) and the Irish Housewives Union (c. 1980 – early 1990s). She has also been active with the Council for Family Rights (1980s), the Anti-Abortion Campaign (1983), the No Divorce Campaign (1996/97), Friends of Youth Defence (1990s) and Cóir (2000s).

Una grew up in Gurranabraher on the north side of Cork city. Her brother Larry White, a leading local activist with Saorise Éire (offshoot of Saor Éire), was shot dead by the Official IRA in 1975.

Una’s mother Mrs. Mary White was also a devout Catholic as this 2001 obituary illustrates:

Una married Seamus, a renowned folk singer from West Clare who has worked with Conradh na Gaeilge and Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, in the late 1960s.

Along with Áine Ní Mhurchú,  Una formed Mná na hÉireann (‘Women of Ireland’) in 1972 to fight against “the legalisation of contraception, abortion and divorce.” In an interview with Irish Times journalist Mary Leland the following year, Una proclaimed that:

a handful of women in Dublin … claim to be speaking for the majority of women in Ireland we believe that it’s not a majority opinion at all. The same number of women are always involved, and some of them, the most vociferous are foreigners.

Una also spoke fondly of “when Ireland was truly Ireland when we had our own language, culture and religion (and when) we were a moral nation”. She told the journalist that “abortion and contraception, as far we’re concerned, are one and the same” and went on to say:

We don’t believe that anyone makes the conscious decision to to use artificial contraception; they do it under the pressure from propaganda. If they were to make a conscious decision they would have to know all the aspects of whatever method they were using and therefore they would be making a conscious decision to kill a child. And that’s murder.

In April 1974, Mná na hÉireann distributed leaflets outside Catholic Churches in Cork which proclaimed that “Ireland could easily support 40 million people and that the Billings method of Birth Control was 100% sure and safe”. It transpired that some local parish priests had given the group permission to distribute the leaflets and put up posters.

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In his classic Dublin Made Me, the War of Independence and Civil War veteran C.S Andrews remembered the day of his Holy Confirmation by writing:

Anyway, on the great day, my mind was more preoccupied with football than with religion because my father had promised to take me to a cup match that afternoon between Bohemians and Shelbourne at Dalymount Park and I was afraid that the ceremony would not finish on time!

While all Dublin clubs are working class institutions, some stretch back into the nineteenth century with Bohemians founded in 1890 and Shelbourne in 1895. All clubs in Dublin seem to have club historians who as a labour of love dig deep and share their findings in club programmes and the like, but what every club could do with is a oral history collection. Dublin city Library and Archives have recorded a fantastic series of interviews with Shels officials, fans and players which will appeal to all League of Ireland fans.

I enjoyed all of the interviews, which come with a blurb detailing some of what is recalled in the conversation. Below is an example.

Track 8 – Sands, Chris: Born in 1937, Chris Sands is a life-long supporter of Shels. He talks about the early history of Shels from its foundation in 1895 as a “Dockers team”, club rivalry with Shamrock Rovers in the 1940s, the failure to purchase Shelbourne Park, and attending the Olympic Dancehall after matches. He also talks about his involvement with Shelbourne Supporters Development Group in recent years and his views on Ollie Byrne.

It’s likely most Shels fans are familiar with these interviews being online, but that other LOI supporters haven’t stumbled across them. Hopefully, Dublin City Library and Archives will roll this project out to other clubs in their area.

By interviewing both fans and players, the oral history aims to extend the history of Shelbourne FC beyond the traditional perspective of events on the pitch and to show the inter-relationship between sport, culture and everyday life in Dublin. The oral history records the impressions and emotions attached to the activity of playing for and supporting Shelbourne FC, as well as details of the playing pitches, players, managers, and traditions of a by-gone era. These memories will be preserved at Dublin City Library and Archive, and made accessible to historians and future generations to come.

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The Asia Chinese Restaurant, 71 Lower Leeson Street, was the first of its kind to open in the city in January 1957.

Patrick Campbell, a journalist who used the pseudonym Quidnunc in The Irish Times, wrote on 05 January 1957:

“(of being) invited to the opening of Dublin’s first Chinese restaurant and found it in a house in Leeson Street. From the hall, it wasn’t too clear where the restaurant was situated in the house, so we opened the first door we saw, to find ourselves looking into the kitchen…”

It was noted in October 1957 that Dublin had “three oriental restaurants” – the Asia Chinese, the Cathay at 19 Kildare Street (opened the previous month) and the Golden Orient at 27 Lower Leeson Street which Mac Con Iomaire has described as actually providing “Indian food …with Kenyan influence”. The three restaurants pulled together that month to help feed the fifty-strong cast of the Chinese Classical Theatre which was in town.

The Asia China was subsequently described in December 1960 as “the first Chinese eatery opened in this town”. The article also mentioned that “Dubliners have of late shown quite an increasing preference for the delicately-cooked and served Chinese dishes, and the number of Chinese restaurants has now increased from one to three.” This advertisement for the Asia Chinese was included in the Garda Directory (1959):

The Cathay was opened in Kildare Street in September 1957 by a 30-year-old Chinese businessman ‘Casey’ Chang from Malaya. After living in London for three years, he came to Dublin on a holiday and loved it so much that he decided to relocate here with his family. He brought over a chef and two assistants from Hong Kong and a Chinese stove, saucepans and food from London to start up the restaurant.

The Luna opened sometime between January 1958 and December 1960 by Mr Chan. Ed-meister, whose paternal grandfather helped open The Luna, has written online:

“It was established by my paternal grandfather with his business partners in the late 50s/early 60s on Dublin’s premier location, O’Connell Street. During that time, my grandfather was one of the handful of the first Chinese immigrants to Ireland. It was the first time Dubliners could savour Chinese food, and whereas nowadays it is normal fare, back then it was considered extremely exotic. Favourites included curry and ‘sweet & sour’ dishes. My grandfather told me how long queues would form outside as Irish people were tempted to try a new, exotic foreign cuisine.”

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In January 2011, we featured a post here on the site about Joseph Edelstein, who was a one time leading businessman in the Jewish community in Dublin who fell on hard times. Edelstein had been an active Home Rule campaigner, active with the Judaeo-Irish Home Rule Association, and was the author of the hugely controversial text ‘The Moneylender’ in 1908. That text proved divisive among Dublin’s Jewish community, with some feeling it reinforced negative stereotypes.

Below is the books cover, as on display today in the Jewish Museum here in the capital.

Philip Blake was the artist responsible for the cover of this book, though precious little is known about him. The Irish Comic News blog are appealing for information on Blake, and have an interesting post on him on their site at present. It’s a fantastic read, and details some of Blake’s work for the Freeman’s Journal newspaper.

Anyway, Blake seems like an interesting character, but I haven’t been able to find out much about him. In the 1901 census he was 32 and living alone in a flat at Leeson Street Lower, Mansion House, Dublin, his occupation is given as “artist, cartoonist, newspaper illustrator, black and white” and his birthplace as Co. Meath. The Mormon genealogy site has a Philip John Blake, born in Castletown, Meath, on 19 January 1869, son of Philip Blake and Elizabeth Martha Cogan, as well as an older brother, Richard Thomas Blake; I’ve found the family in the 1901 and 1911 census, and Phil’s not at home either time, but Richard Thomas is there in 1901, so this looks like the correct identification.

However, There’s no sign of Phil in the 1911 census. I’ve tried the England and Wales census and the Scotland census, but no luck there either. He’s either died or gone somewhere else. And I’ve found, formerly advertised on AbeBooks, an edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem The Cloud, published in Katoomba, New South Wales, Australia, about 1915, illustrated with photographs and “illuminated by Phil Blake & Co. Artists”. The chin of the female figure on the cover, below, suggests that this is our man.

One of my favourite books in recent times was the collection of cartoons from the late Ernest Kavanagh, whose work appeared in The Irish Worker during the revolutionary period before his death on the steps of Liberty Hall during the Rising. While certain cartoons from our political past have become well-known, the artists themselves haven’t. If you know anything about Philip Blake, pop over to Irish Comic News and let them know.

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