Come Here To Me!

In 1936, the Irish Press newspaper launched a major exposé of the Dublin slum problem, with articles and photographs from the slums of Dublin designed to highlight the appalling conditions many Dubliners were living in. The articles and photos sparked real discussion on living conditions at the time, and the newspaper collected some priceless oral testimonies from people living in hellish conditions. At the time, the paper claimed that 30,000 families were living in squalor in the inner-city, and it called for ‘war on the slums’.

The paper refereed to the slums as a “tragic British legacy”, shifting the blame from homegrown landlords and domestic greed, claiming that British policy in Ireland “left to the Free State its inheritance of slumdom”. This article will republish some of the shocking images from that campaign, and show how others also campaigned at the time for radical improvements in inner-city living conditions, choosing to blame domestic forces for the state of the city.

The series attempted to gather personal stories, such as that of Winifred O’Rourke, a young mother from the inner-city who lost five children to ill-health, and who was herself suffering greatly. The paper noted that the children they visited in one inner-city complex pointed out rat holes, and spoke of their terror of the “big roof rats who periodically invade the rooms”.

Coincidentally, October 1936 saw the single greatest tragedy in the history of the Dublin Fire Brigade, when three firefighters died in a fire on Pearse Street. This put considerable focus on fire safety in the city, and the Irish Press noted that in tenement Dublin the flats were like fire-traps, noting “It may be said that practically all slum dwellings are fire-traps. Worst of these, of course, is the type of building that has no exits at the rear, but merely the hall door at the front.”

The health of children featured prominently in the campaign, with the paper noting that the infant death rate for the entire city of Dublin was 79 per thousand births in 1934, but in parts of the north inner-city this rose to a staggering 119 per thousand. The paper insisted that “until the rookeries of the tenements are pulled down and their occupants transferred to airy and roomy homes, little improvement in the public health of the city can be looked for.”

By talking of individual cases, the newspaper struck a strong emotional chord with many Dubliners. The story of Carmel Stapleton for example told readers of how a once healthy child, runner-up in a baby competition only years previously, was suffering to ill-health as a result of life in the slums. “I need a home for them, I’m getting desperate. Look at them, the poor little children”, Carmel’s mother pleaded to a visiting journalist.

Among those who pledged support to the campaign of the newspaper to highlight the slum problem was Maud Gonne MacBride, who hoped that, at the very least, the campaign would “end the ignorant cry of Communism raised against those of us who, from public platforms, protested against the unchristian conditions in which so many of our fellow countrymen are forced to live.”

The lack of a clean water supply in many of the homes was highlighted on many occasions, and this image showed a young Dublin child who carried water up stairs from the communal tap of her tenement home.

The newspaper campaign encouraged readers to donate towards a fund on behalf of those living in the slums. One reader noted that he was donating as someone who “believes in practicing – not preaching – Christianity.” Some families who were featured in the paper were only saved from eviction thanks to the generous donations of newspaper readers. A reoccurring theme was the unchristian nature of the living conditions, and there existed a fear that tenement slums were fertile ground for communism to grow in from those on the right. The Christian Front noted that the slums were one of the single greatest threats to Irish society, while a conservative letter writer told the paper that “there is little good in parties or governments condemning Communism in other countries if they are prepared to tolerate the evil that gave birth to that Godless doctrine elsewhere.”

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It may be just me but I think it’s cheeky beyond belief that the people behind Bad Bobs 2.0 in Temple Bar have recently proclaimed a part (!) of their pub as ‘Temple Bar’s Oldest Pub’. With a lick of paint and some Ye Olde knickknacks in the window, they hope to fool and no doubt pull in some of that Yankee dollar.

I took this picture during the week of the ‘The Snug Temple Bar’:

As you can see, they got a painter to recreate an old-style Dublin boozer sign above the door. For added measure, they even have the ‘Licensed To Sell Tobacco, Ales, Stouts & Spirits’ blurb. To make it even more of a joke, you can’t get into the ‘The Snug, Temple Bar’ without going through the main Bad Bobs entrance!

But as we know, before it reopened as Bad Bobs in March 2013, the Purty Kitchen was just another bland, crappy tourist trap. Nothing historic about it whatsoever. It’s been through countless name changes and been sold and bought by various business groups over the decades.

This is what it looked like exactly a year ago. The part of the pub on the on left hand side (beside the two people) is now the self-proclaimed oldest pub in Temple Bar. What difference a year makes.

The premises, situated between 34 and 37 East Essex Street, has been known as Nugents (1960s), The Granary (late 1970s) and Bad Bobs (1984-2006). It was bought in 2006 for a whopping €12 million by Conor Martin, a publican who owned The Purty Kitchen in Dun Laoghaire. At the time, it was the property of Liam and Des O’Dwyer of the Capital Bars group who are behind Cafe en Seine, the Dragon, the George, Break for the Border and a number of hotels. It was renamed Bad Bobs in March of this year.

There’s no denying that the address is historic. An Irish Times article from 8 November 2006 stated that there has been a pub on the premises since 1728. But during that time there has been numerous name changes, auctions and buy outs. There’s no doubt that interior as been gutted and renovated three or four times at least.

Finally, where on earth did they pull that 1694 number from?

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In his classic work The Destruction of Dublin, published in 1985 and now like gold dust to stumble upon, the journalist Frank McDonald quoted a powerful piece penned by a writer in The Observer newspaper. Writing in 1979, the journalist said

Suddenly Dublin has become a shabby city – shabby because its centre is peppered with crude concrete structures, flashy mirror-glass facades and other inappropriate schemes which have no connection at all with the spirit of the place.

Certainly there is much in the city today from this period which some still regard as architectural crimes against Dublin. Some controversial plans from the time however never made it to fruition, and one example is the proposed Central Bus Station in the heart of Temple Bar. This huge development, which would have seen construction projects undertaken on both sides of the River Liffey, was one of the most divisive proposals in terms of city planning in Dublin in the 1970s and 80s.

Temple Bar, by the nineteenth century, was fulfilling a role for Dublin as a manufacturing and industrial centre for the city. Indeed, in the living memory of the city today many can remember Temple Bar as a district of factories and warehouses, although urban decay became a factor in the district throughout the twentieth century. The idea of constructing a central bus station in this district had long been considered, owing primarily to the areas location, bordering some of Dublin’s prime retail districts. By the 1970s the state-run Coras Iompair Eireann was purchasing property in the area with one-eye to future redevelopment, while simultaneously renting out these properties at low-cost. This is perhaps the single most important transformative moment for Temple Bar, and as Paul Knox has noted:

Paradoxically, this triggered a process of revitalization. Activities which could afford only low rents on short leases moved into the district. These included artists’ studios, galleries, recording and rehearsal studies, pubs and cafes, second-hand clothes shops, small boutiques, bookshops and record stores, as well as a number of voluntary organisations. Together with the districts architectural character, the youth culture attracted by the districts new commercial tenants brought a neobohemian atmosphere to Temple Bar…

In 1977, the following proposal for a Central Bus Station was put forward. Designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP, this development would span the River Liffey, with development on Ormond Quay designed to complement that in Temple Bar. Looking at Dame Street and Wellington Quay on the map, the sheer scale of this proposal is apparent. It was planned that a tunnel under the Liffey would join both sites, and it was also planned to incorporate the DART into the site.

A feel of the changing nature of the district can be captured in a 1984 article written by Maurice Haugh for The Irish Times. This once dying part of Dublin had come alive he noted, stating that “It’s a happy uncongested area whose natural character has been preserved from the developers’ touch, and has only been exploited recently.”

The picture Haugh painted was of a vibrant, liberal area. He wrote of the Hirschfeld Centre, an openly gay community centre at the heart of Temple Bar, describing its disco as “one of the liveliest and musically up to date in town. Records are imported directly from London and, as a rule, are played months before they hit the radio and charts.” This centre had opened in 1979, and contained among other things a social centre, cinema and meeting place for Dublin’s LGBT community.

Some of the artistic endeavours of the time are still to be seen in the area today, for example the Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, which emerged in 1983 when a disused shirt factory was rented from CIE by Jenny Haughton and given to a collective of artists. As the history of the Temple Bar Gallery and Studios notes:

The early 20th-century industrial building, which extended through a block from Temple Bar to the Liffey quays, provided the framework of spaces for artists to work in, although the conditions were problematic and at times hazardous. The activities of the artists – studios, exhibition space, cafe, sculptor’s annex – influenced the atmosphere of Temple Bar in the 1980’s, establishing the area’s reputation as a cultural hub and contributing to its regeneration as Dublin’s Cultural Quarter.

No journalist campaigned as strongly for the area as Frank McDonald, a constant opponent of bad planning in Dublin. McDonald reported on Council meetings on the matter, and gave space to alternative voices, such as An Táisce, who believed the area had a future if properly preserved and encouraged. In 1986 he noted that a decade is a long time in city planning, as:

Ten years later, all of this looks like so much pie-in-the-sky. In the first instance, the commercial property market in Dublin is in a state of almost total collapse, with the demand for new office space, not to mention shopping and residential- down to not much more than zero. And secondly, the lynch-pin of CIE’s scheme – the underground central station for DART – is looking more and more like a pipe-dream.

It was not until July 1987 that CIE’s plans for the district were well and truly destroyed, with elected Councillors voting for the preservation and redevelopment of the area. By this stage the issue had become a mainstream debate, with Charlie Haughey vowing before the upcoming election that he would “not let CIE near” Temple Bar. By the early 1990s, the area enjoyed a sort of ‘official backing’, with Temple Bar Properties established with strong government funding, and the aim of organising the development of the area.Eric Zuelow notes in his history of tourism in Ireland since independence that £2 million was spent on the area in 1993 alone, with much of this money drawn from European Union development funds.

Many (including this writer) would argue that the area has drifted far from its cultural and offbeat qualities in the years of protest. Yet while the Hard Rock Cafe, McDonalds and others may have moved in, it should be remembered that some of those who championed the cause of Temple Bar over 20 years ago still call it home.

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As part of this years Dublin Book Festival, and to promote our own book ‘Come Here To Me: Dublin’s Other History’, we are carrying out walking tours with the DBF team on November 16th and 17th. These tours will look at unusual aspects of Dublin’s history, as featured here on the blog over the years. Tickets for the tours can be booked here. There are a whole series of great events being organised to promote new and established Irish authors, and the entire festival programme can be read here.

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The Croppies Acre memorial in Dublin commemorates the United Irish rebellion of 1798. It has been closed to the public for quite some time now, owing to anti-social problems.

This park serves a memorial to many young revolutionaries who were at the backbone of the first Republican movement in Ireland. Many were said to be buried here following their executions, though the claim is sometimes disputed. In a 1998 article about the memorial site, Aengus O Snodaigh noted that:

The most famous names to be recorded in the sad saga of Croppies’ Acre are those of Bartholomew Teeling and Matthew Tone, both hanged at the Provost Prison on Arbour Hill after the Battle of Ballinamuck on 8 September 1798. Bartholomew Teeling was a brother of Defender and United Irish leader Charles Teeling. Having come under suspicion himself he fled Ireland in 1796. Bartholomew was commissioned into the French Army at the instigation of Theobald Wolfe Tone, who also arranged a commission for his own brother Matthew, and took part in the failed expedition of General Hoche in December of that year….

The term ‘Croppy Boy’ was said to emerge from a hairstyle popular with revolutionaries of the day, their closely cropped hair a fashion adopted from French revolutionaries, associated with the anti-wig tendency in France. For many years this incredible site was unmarked, but the contemporary memorial at the site was erected in 1985, and includes some words from Robert Emmet:

No rising column marks the spot
Where many a victim lies
No bell here tolls its solemn sound
No monument here stands.

The site has been in the news in recent times for all the wrong reasons. In September 2012 the OPW, who are tasked with maintaining the site, made the decision to close it to the public. A recent article in the Irish Independent addressed this, and noted:

The Croppies Acre in central Dublin – described as “sacred ground” – has turned into a no-go zone because authorities say they can’t cope with drugs users and dirty syringes that litter the historical site.

Today some photographs from the memorial have emerged that demand attention. Posted to Facebook by the Sean Heuston Dublin 1916 Society, they reveal the extent to which the park has been abandoned by authorities. This particular image is shocking, but deserves a wider audience. Dublin is a city which suffers greatly to the scourge of addiction and drugs, and there is of course a need to provide for those suffering as a result. Yet this memorial park should not be allowed remain as it is, and there is an onus on the OPW and the city to maintain it.

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While Temple Bar is today populated by dozens of bars and restaurants, some would say to its detriment, the area has a long history of taverns and boozing. This post will look at some eighteenth century taverns in the Temple Bar area. Many of these taverns were frequented by certain political movements and groupings, while for many others taverns fulfilled an important social role. In some cases, the names of these historic taverns have been adopted by modern pubs, though in others they are now totally forgotten. One of these taverns is commemorated today with a plaque. The entire axis of the city has shifted substantially since the eighteenth century, but as historian Pat Liddy has noted at the time Temple Bar could almost be described as Dublin’s dockland district, with the Custom House sitting where the Clarence Hall is today.

The Elephant on Essex Street took its name from a rather bizarre incident in the history of the city. On 17 June 1681, an elephant which had been taken to Dublin for display at an exhibition was to meet a tragic end, when the stable he was being kept in at Essex Street caught fire. This spectacle brought huge crowds onto the street, and as Frank Hopkins has noted “when the fire was extinguished they proceeded to take parts of the elephant away as souvenirs.” In the aftermath of this incident, An Anatomical Account of the Elephant Accidentally Burnt in Dublin was published. The elephant was dissected by Allan Mullen, from Trinity College Dublin, who published his findings, including several illustrations.

A high quality scan of this work was posted by the National Library of Ireland to Flickr some time ago:

From historic sources it also appears that The Elephant served as a meeting place for the first Catholic Committee in the 1760s, a forerunner of the influential Catholic Association of Daniel O’Connell in the nineteenth century.

Also located on Essex Street was The Globe, which has been described by the Dublin historian J.T Gilbert as one of the most important taverns of the period, noting that “this house was the chief resort of the Dublin politicians during the reign of George II”, and that it attracted “merchants, physicians, and lawyers” among others. Gilbert quoted from a poem about the tavern, in which it was said

Sometimes to the ‘ Globe’ I stray,
To hear the trifle of the day ;
There learned politicians spy,
With thread-bare cloaks, and wigs awry ;
Assembled round, in deep debate
On Prussia’s arms, and Britain’s fate ;
Whilst one, whose penetration goes,
At best, no farther than his nose,
In pompous military strain,
Fights every battle o’er again :
Important as a new-made Lord,
He spills his coffee on the board….

An interesting character by the name of ‘Blind Peter’ comes up in many accounts of this pub. A shoe black, he was described in one publication as “of hideous aspect, he had but one eye, was most inveterately pitted with the same pox, and his face completely tattoo’d with the scars he received in the various battles he had fought.”

We’ve briefly touched on The Bear Tavern before on the site, as it featured in Crane Lane. This pub was kept by a man named David Corbet until his death in 1787, and he was described by J.T Gilbert as a Freemason, as well as “an excellent musician, and leader of the band of the Dublin Independent Volunteers.” While taverns were hugely popular meeting spots for Volunteers and political activists, historian Padhraig Higgins has noted that publicans were no doubt active in these circles “no doubt for a mixture of patriotic and more self-interested motives.”
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Many people leave a lasting impact on Dublin, becoming a part of its very fabric and remembered as characters of the city. Recently I stumbled upon one very interesting Dublin character of old, remembered for posterity with a brief mention in Me Jewel and Darlin’ Dublin by Éamonn MacThomáis, but otherwise largely forgotten. This character is the black boxer Joseph Warren, who was widely known as ‘Cyclone’ Billy Warren in the first half of the twentieth century. In the words of MacThomáis, Warren “came to Dublin, fell in love with the city and its people and never left.” He was a very familiar face at the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, where he tended to spend his time engaging people in conversation. Warren, who retired in this city, also appeared on screen as an actor and he may have even been painted by Sir William Orpen.

Who was this black boxer who landed in Dublin in the early twentieth century, and what was his background? Information on him is scarce and often seemingly inaccurate, but I’ve tried to piece together the various bits of information out there. There is even disagreement over his nation of origin, with some claiming that Warren was born in Australia, while others insist he was American.The Irish Digest in 1959 wrote of Warren as “Billy Warren, whose father had been born in slavery on a cotton plantation”, yet others would refer to him as Australian in the Irish media. Regardless of origins, it appears Warren would box in Australia, the United States and right across Europe over the course of his career. According to the Irish Independent at the time of his death in March 1951, the “negro boxer, who had been a familiar figure to O’Connell Street crowds for nearly half a century” was 74 years old. It was stated that before settling in Dublin he had married a “Wolverhampton girl” and that they lived in a small one-roomed home on Nelson Street, from which he would emerge and walk down to O’Connell Street daily. His seemingly exotic past and career in the boxing ring, coupled with the relatively unusual fact that Warren was a black man in the Dublin of his time, made him stand out from the crowd.

In a June 1946 interview with the Irish Independent, Warren gave some detail of his life and career, claiming that as a 27 year old in 1907 he had boxed with the famous Jack Johnson, the first African American world heavyweight boxing champion. “I was pretty green myself then”, he told the paper. “I didn’t know much about covering up and defence, but I could take a good beating without swallowing the anchor.” However Box Rec, dedicated to recording the histories of boxers who have stepped into the ring, casts some doubt on Warren’s tale of fighting Johnson, noting that:

Claims he made after his career of fighting both Jack Johnson and Peter Jackson have not been proven, and may just be exaggerations by the “Cyclone.” But Warren did square off with Sam McVey, a great black fighter of the era, losing by a second round knockout. “

The Box Rec website has also attempted to correlate a list of Warren’s appearances in the ring, though like with all aspects of his story details are sketchy in places. References to Warren boxing in this city begin to appear towards the end of the first decade of the twentieth century and continue from there. In 1910 for example he was advertised as boxing in the Theatre Royal:

Even earlier, in August 1909, there is reference to Warren fighting Wexford man Jem Roche for the Championship of Ireland in Belfast and later in Dublin. Warren would succeed in beating Roche in Belfast. Interestingly, the Australian Auckland Star heralded this event, praising “the Australian boxer” for his talents. Not long after this success, Warren would lose the title in Dublin to Roche. Some argued that as a non-national he should never have been allowed compete for the Irish Championship at all. (more…)

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Introduction

The social life of a gay man in Dublin in the early 1970s was summed up as such by one contributor in the book Coming Out (2003):

As for most of us, being gay in those days was a very lonely experience. There weren’t many opportunities to meet gay people, unless you knew of the one bar – two bars, actually, in Dublin at that time, Bartley Dunne’s and Rice’s … They were the two pubs and if you hadn’t met gay people, you wouldn’t have known about these pubs; there was no advertising in those days, and it was all through word-of mouth.

Bartley Dunne’s and Rice’s proved to be critical points of social interaction and first emerged as gay- friendly pubs in the late 1950s and early 1960s. George Fullerton, who emigrated to London in 1968, was quoted in Dermot Ferritier’s book Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland (2009) as saying that:

In 1960s Dublin the [gay] scene basically consisted of 2 pubs – Rice’s and Bartley Dunne’s. I never experienced discrimination as such, probably because we were largely invisible.

There are no traces left of either establishment. Rice’s, at the corner of Stephen’s Green and South King Street, was demolished in 1986 to make way for the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre. While Bartley Dunne’s, on Stephen’s Street Lower beside the Mercer Hospital, was torn down in 1990 and replaced with the Break for the Border pub and nightclub.

On a side note, some people may be surprised to hear that gay taverns in England date back to the 1720s (Molly houses) while more ‘modern’ establishments like Café ‘t Mandje in Amsterdam have been open since 1927.

Many in both the gay and straight community have described Rice’s and Bartley Dunne’s as deserving the title of being the city’s first gay friendly pubs. Why these two particular pubs though?

Most people point to the fact that both were in close proximity to the Gaiety Theatre and St. Stephen’s Green which at the time was a popular gay cruising area.

Paul Candon in Gay Community News (February 1996) labeled Bartley Dunne’s as “the first gay pub as we know it in the city” and also referenced Rice’s. He said there was a total of five regular gay-friendly bars to choose from in the 1960s in the Stephen’s Green/Grafton Street area. The other three being the short-lived Kings (opposite the Gaiety Theatre), The Bailey and Davy Byrne’s, both on Duke Street.

Rosemary Flowers told me via Facebook (20 Oct 2015):

My memories are from the mid 1960s but my dad worked in Renshaw’s opposite Mercer’s Hospital from 1955 and he was aware of the gay clientele in Rices, Dunne’s and The Bailey. In Rice’s. when I knew it, most of the gay men were in the front part. The ‘arty’ crowd mostly stuck to Rice’s and the younger crowd to Dunne’s. The Gardaí for the most part left them alone as they included some very famous names. The odd time they hassled the younger men in Dunne’s. Bruxelles was also a gay -friendly place for soldiers & a recruiting ground for mercenaries who were thrown out of the army. It was a much ‘butcher’ crowd in the Bailey and Bruxelles. Rice’s and Dunne’s had a very middle-class clientele.

Kevin Myers wrote in The Irish Times (18 May 1995) of his student days in UCD in the late 1960s and how he discovered that “Rice’s … (was) in part a gay bar … Bartley Dunne’s was another”. Furthermore Bartley Dunne’s was described as “the most famous and oldest gay bar in Dublin'” by Victoria Freedman in The cities of David: the life of David Norris (1995).

One contributor to Coming out: Irish gay experiences (2003) talks about coming up to Dublin in the late 1970s from the country and spending “vast amounts of time in Rice’s, Bartley Dunne’s and the Hirschfield Centre”. Patrick Hennessy made a similar comment on an Irish Times article about the death of early LGBT campaigner in Christopher Robson in March of this year:

Yes farewell to one who fought the good fight back in the days when young and not so young men would come round to the Hirschfeld Centre nervously asking for info. Or sitting in circles exchanging their first tentative views in public about being gay. And then a few weeks later you might see one or two of them sipping a drink in a corner of Bartley Dunne’s or Bobby Rice’s.

The 1971 edition of ‘Fielding’s Travel Guide to Europe’ described “the historic Bailey, entirely reconstructed” as being full of “hippie types and Gay Boys”. It went onto say that neither it nor Davy Byrne’s would be “recommended for the “straight” traveller”.

Bartley Dunne’s, 32 Stephens St Lwr

In 1940, Hayden’s pub (“a well known seven-day licensed premises”) on Stephen’s Street Lower was put on the market after the owner James Bernard Hayden declared bankruptcy. In a related series of events, it was reported in the Irish Press (26 September 1940) that Gardaí had objected to renewing the pub’s licence on the grounds that the premises was not being conducted “in a peaceful and orderly manner'”. It had only closed one day the previous year.

The licence was taken over in August 1941 by Bartholomew ‘Bartley’ Dunne. A native Irish speaker from Kilconly, Tuam, County Galway, he had returned to Dublin after nearly 40 years of living and working in Manchester where had been prominent in the United Irish League and the Banba Branch of the Gaelic League. Bartley Dunne’s pub could “boast a distinguished clientele” in the mid 1940s according to the Nationalist and Leinster Times (23 Nov 1946). Popular with “cross-channel visitors, it frequently affords glimpses of such celebrities” as Dylan Thomas (Welsh poet); Sorley MacLean (Scottish Gaelic poet) and Valentine McEntee MP.

I assume Bartley Sr. retired sometime in the 1950s. He died on 25 June 1961 aged 85. His two sons – Bartley Jr. (known as Barry) and Gerard (known as Gerry) – had been working in the pub for sometime and took it over then. They built up a reputation for stocking exotic drinks from all over the world. Barry later recalled to The Irish Times (07 Sep 1985) that “there was a time when, if a customer wanted a particular drink and we didn’t have it in stock, he got something else for free”. We take it for the granted the range of drinks available in Dublin bars today but Bartley Dunne’s was really a trailblazer. It offered saki, tequila and ouzo before any other place in the city. Mary Frances Kennedy writing in The Irish Times (15 July 1960) was amazed at the range of wines available including Bull’s Blood of Eger (11s 6d a bottle); Balatoni Reisling (10s a bottle); Tokak Aszu (19s 6d a bottle) and Samos Muscatel (11 6d a bottle).

It would seem that Bartley Dunne’s (known to many as BD’s), which had already been attracting Dublin’s avant garde and theatre crowd, started to become gay-friendly by the late 1950s.

David Norris visited the pub as a schoolboy in his late teens circa 1961/62. In his 2012 autobiography ‘A Kick Against The Pricks’, he wrote:

Towards the end of my schooldays I started to explore a little. I had a kindred spirit in school and we occasionally visited a city centre bar called Bartley Dunne’s which was a notorious haunt of the homosexual demi-monde. It was an Aladdin’s cave to me, its wicker-clad Chianti bottles stiff with dribbled candlewax, tea chests covered in red and white chequered cloths, heavy scarlet velvet drapes and an immense collection of multi-coloured liqueurs glinting away in their bottles.

The place was (full) of theatrical old queens, with the barmen clad in bum-freezer uniforms. While not being gay themselves, as far as I know, the Dunne brothers were quite theatrical in their own way. Barry would hand out little cards, bearing the legend ‘Bartley Dunne’s, reminiscent of a left bank bistro, haunt of aristocrats, poets and artists’. Whatever about that, Saturday night certainly resembled an amateur opera in full swing. There only ever seemed to be two records played over the sound system: ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’ by Edith Piaf, and Ray Charles’ ‘Take These Chains From My Heart’.

Brian Lacey in his excellent book Terrible Queer Creatures: A History of Homosexuality in Ireland (2008) noted that among the many characters that frequented the bar was the then virtually unknown Norman Scott, whose 1960s affair with Jeremy Thorpe (later to become leader of the British Liberal Party) forced him to resign from the party in 1976. Scott lived in a flat near Leinster Road while in Dublin. Ulick O’Connor mentioned in his diaries that Scott also had a long relationship with an unidentified person prominent in an Irish political party.

It was noted in The Irish Times (22 March 1967) that Moscow journalist Lev Sedin, who has visited Dublin a number of times, had recently published a book on Ireland that dealt with politics and economics as well as more “frivolous subjects”. One of these was a lyrical poem about Bartley Dunne’s and his experience there of being consulted on the correct pronunciation of the Russian wines in stock. Sedin recommended the pub to anyone in Europe “who wished to imbibe true culture”.

A writer going by ‘Endymion’ in a 1968 Dublin guide book described Bartley Dunne’s as the city’s “most unusual pub'” Its clientele was an “an odd mixture of bohemians and down-to-earth Dubliners [that] creates an atmosphere which would have interested James Joyce.”

The pub was described by Roy Bulson in ‘Irish Pubs Of Character’ (1969) as:

one of Dublin’s most unusual pubs with its Continental atmosphere. Well worth a visit to mix with a variety of characters. Ask for the wine list which is one of the most reasonably priced and extensive in Dublin.

Bartley Dunne’s had a “French bistro ambience” with prints on the walls by Cezanne, Monet, and Picasso as well as Parisian theatre posters and photographs of film stars. It was also famous for its dimly lit nooks and crannies. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton drank there regularly in 1965 during the filming of ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ as did actors Kim Novak and Laurence Harvery when they took time off from filming Of Human Bondage at Ardmore Studios. Noël Coward was another visitor.

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‘Crime in the City: Crime & History’ is a series of upcoming talks being organised in the Central Library, inside of the Ilac Centre.

All of the talks are free to attend and I’m actually giving one myself, which will focus on the ‘Animal Gang’, anti-communism and gang violence in 1930s Dublin. Also speaking are some of my favourite authors and bloggers, including Finbar from the Irish History Podcast on the subject of crime in medieval Dublin, and Joe Joyce, author of a brilliant biography of the Guinness family and a regular contributor to The Irish Times.

All talks take place on Thursday’s, and kick off at 1pm. My talk is designed to tie-in with the recent release of Locked Out: A Century of Irish Working-Class Life, which includes a chapter from me on the ‘Animal Gang’. Feel free to attend, but also please inform others who you think may be interested.

Joe Joyce: 3rd October
Joe is author of ‘The Boss’, ‘The Trigger Man’, ‘The Guinnesses: the untold story of Ireland’s most successful family’ and ‘The Tower’. His most recent book ‘Echoland’ is set in a divided Dublin in June 1940.

Donal Fallon: 10th October
Donal is co-author of ‘Come Here To Me: Dublin’s Other History’ and a regular contributor to the ‘Come here to Me’ blog. He will speak on ‘The Animal Gangs’ and gang violence in 1930’s Dublin.

Michael Russell: 17th October
Michael is author of ‘City of Shadows’ and the sequel ‘City of Strangers’. Both books are set in 1930’s Dublin. ‘City of Strangers’ will be published in November 2013. ‘City of Shadows’ was longlisted for a (Crime Writers Association) John Creasey Award in the UK this year.

Finbar Dwyer: 24th October
Finbar is an historian and founder of http://www.irishhistorypodcast.ie. His forthcoming book is called ‘Witches, Heretics and Stockholm Syndrome: Stories from Medieval Ireland’.

Kevin McCarthy: 31st October
Kevin is the author of the historical crime novels ‘Peeler’ and ‘Irregulars’. ‘Irregulars’ was released in May and is a detective story centred in the Monto and set during the civil war in 1922.

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Here is a very interesting account from the summer of 1982 of fifteen men and women from the gay community who visited a total of eight pubs in Dublin city centre and recorded their experiences.

I found it on the excellent Irish Queer Archive facebook page.

The eight pubs visited were The Viking, The Oak Tree, The Grannery (sic), The Clarence Hotel,  The Lord Edward, The Castle Inn, Rices and Fives.

I thought it would be interesting to collate the experiences  of the group in each pub and find out whether that particular establishment is still open 31 years later.

1. The Viking, 75 Dame Street.

Some of the group were allowed in, others were not. This did not seem to have been directly to with sexual orientation but apparently due to the fact that three of the women had gotten into an argument with the barman the previous evening. We have previously about how written how The Viking has been described as the first bar in the city to be owned by a gay proprietor and to be opened specifically as a gay bar.

Today it is known as Brogans.

2. The Oak Tree, 81 Dame Street

The group were served here without any issues but left after a few drinks as it was too noisy. A couple of older gay men have mentioned online (see here and here) that this bar was gay-friendly in the 1980s.

Today it is known simply as The Oak

3. The Granary, 35-37 East Essex Street

Though quickly becoming “the largest and most conspicuous” group and “loudly discuss(ing) gay politics”, the service was “friendly and efficient”.

Today it is known as Bad Bob’s, before that it was called The Purty Kitchen.

4. The Clarence Hotel, 6-8 Wellington Quay (with an entrance on East Essex Street)

The group was refused service here being told by a bouncer that “this is not your kind of place”.

Today is still The Clarence. It was taken over by Bono, the Edge and Harry Crosby in 1992.

5. The Lord Edward, 23 Christchurch Place

Ushered upstairs where “there would be no room”, the group (who were wearing Pink Triangle badges) were then threatened that the police would be called. Presumably if they didn’t leave.

Today it is still known as The Lord Edward.

6. The Castle Inn, 5-7 Lord Edward Street

Fairly empty on arrival, the group were all served here though “not without a little resentment”. Three women left the pub when the gay group sat down in a table beside them.

Today it is known as The Bull & Castle.

7. Rice’s, 141 Stephens Green/1 South King Street

It was mentioned in the piece that a smaller group had tried to have a drink in Rices but were refused.

This is quite interesting as Rice’s has been widely described as being gay-friendly from as early as the 1960s to mid 1980s when it was demolished to make way for the Stephens Green Shopping Centre.

8. Fives, 55 Dame Street

A smaller number of the group were also refused here earlier in the evening.

After much searching, I cannot find anymore information about a pub in Dublin in the early 1980s called ‘Fives’.

(Edit: Facebook commenters Tommy Doran and Vince Donnelly have helped solve the mystery. Fives was the name of a indie club on Dame Street. It later became The Underground. It is now Club Lapello, “Dublin’s longest established Lapdancing club”)

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