Come Here To Me!

George Desmond Hodnett (Image Credit)

Next Sunday marks the centenary of the birth of George Desmond Hodnett, a man who lived a colourful life on several fronts. A guest on the first ever edition of The Late Late Show, he was part of the Bohemian set of 1950s Dublin, primarily known as a pianist and composer at the popular Pike Theatre.  He was also a distinguished music critic with The Irish Times, with an unrivaled knowledge of jazz music. Known to many as Hoddy, a review of his appearance on The Late Late Show noted:

Hoddy brought to the show a splendid touch of almost baroque eccentricity. Now  living in London, he was snaffled for the Late Late Show at a few hours notice. He entertained both studio audience and the viewer at home with a delightful line of talk about everything from the proceeding vulgarisation of O’Connell Street  to his own view on copy-writing, a job he is currently doing in London.

A Dubliner by birth, he enjoyed a decidedly middle class youth, educated at the private Catholic University School on Leeson Street and Trinity College Dublin. He never finished his studies at Trinity, instead falling into the Dublin set of the day, frequently to be found in McDaid’s or the so-called Catacombs where drinking could continue into all hours.

Irish Times journalist Deaglan De Breadun remembered of him:

A talented composer and musician, he played jazz piano, trumpet and, of all things, zither. Perhaps he learnt to play it from his Swiss-born mother, Lauré. The instrument became briefly fashionable thanks to the Orson Welles movie, The Third Man and, at the time, George was probably the only zither-player in the country.

He cut a most unusual shape, and Frank Kilfeather recalled that “from his dress, to his conversation, to his peculiar habits, Hoddy was a character. If he hadn’t existed, the most brilliant fiction writer couldn’t invent him. He always wore two overcoats and two jumpers, even in the middle of summer.”

In the 1950s, Hoddy was a loved part of the repertoire of the Pike Theatre, penning and performing satirical tunes for revues at the venue, where he worked as resident pianist. I won’t say much about the Pike Theatre, because it will be returned to again on the blog, but it was a necessary institution in the Ireland of its day that pushed boundaries and offered a platform to sometimes sidelined voices. In the words of Brian Fallon, writing about the 1950s (a decade that is  often wrongly considered a grey one in Irish culture), “most of the laurels for the decade belong to the gallant little Pike: for its staging of Behan’s masterpiece, for mounting Beckett’s Waiting for Godot the following year and for its 1957 performance of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo which led to its actors appearing in court under a police prosecution for indecency.” Located in Herbert Lane, the theatre was the great vision of Alan Simpson and Carolyn Swift. It was making an impact at a time when the mainstream theatre world was offering little. In Spiked: Church-State Intrigue and The Rose Tattoo, it’s noted wryly that “when the Abbey burned down in 1951, it was popularly joked that the fire was the first flame of any kind to light the place up for many years.”

One great Hoddy original was Monto, popularly known now as ‘Take Her Up To Monto’. In his own words, it was a satire of many folk songs of its day, though he noted in one interview that its popularity reached a point “when it has become the folk song it originally aimed at satirising.”

If you somehow haven’t heard it here it is in all of its glory:

Popularised by The Dubliners, the song takes it title from Montgomery Street, located in the heart of what was Dublin’s thriving red light district of the Victorian age.  Immortalised as ‘Nighttown’ in Ulysses, the district became notorious enough to warrant a mention in the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1903:

Dublin furnishes an exception to the usual practice in the UK. In that city the police permit ‘open houses’ confined to one street; but carried on more publicly than even in the south of Europe or in Algeria.

By the time Hoddy penned Monto, the district was no more, relegated to folk memory thanks to a high profile Garda raid in 1925 and the efforts of the Legion of Mary. In Monto, Hoddy managed to squeeze in not only Monto itself but plenty of stories from the Victorian age, including the distant war in South Africa and the Phoenix Park murders. It is the Second Boer War in particular that leaps out from the song, with Victoria’s visit to Ireland during the conflict mentioned, along with the rather unfortunate Royal Dublin Fusiliers, who had a horrid time in South Africa, as Fusiliers’ Arch recalls. 

In an entertaining (they always are) Irishman’s Diary on the song, Frank McNally quoted Hoddy himself explaining that:

The verses were constructed to include the pre-possessions that would appeal to the Dublin proletarian taste….Hence the ingredients of hurler-on-the-fence; support for persons regarded as patriots (Invincibles verse); anti-police attitudes (‘the buggers in the depot’); anti-‘toff’ attitudes (Buckshot Forster); anti-Englishness (same); local allusions; and, of course, smut. This construction probably accounts for the song’s success, if that is the word.

Well, if you’ve got a wing-o,
Take her up to Ring-o
Where the waxies sing-o all the day;
If you’ve had your fill of porter, And you can’t go any further
Give your man the order: “Back to the Quay!”
And take her up to Monto, Monto, Monto
Take her up to Monto, lan-ge-roo,
To you!

Have you heard of Buckshot Forster,
The dirty old impostor
Took a mot and lost her, up the Furry Glen.
He first put on his bowler
And buttoned up his trousers,
Then whistled for a growler and he said, “My man!”
Take me up to Monto, Monto, Monto
Take me up to Monto, lan-ge-roo,
To you!

You’ve seen the Dublin Fusiliers,
The dirty old bamboozeleers,
De Wet’ll kill them chiselers, one, two, three.
Marching from the Linen Hall
There’s one for every cannonball,
And Vicky’s going to send them all, o’er the sea.
But first go up to Monto, Monto, Monto
March them up to Monto, lan-ge-roo,
To you!

When Carey told on Skin-the-goat,
O’Donnell caught him on the boat
He wished he’d never been afloat, the dirty skite.
It wasn’t very sensible
To tell on the Invincibles
They stand up for their principles, day and night.
And you’ll find them all in Monto, Monto, Monto
Standing up in Monto, lan-ge-roo,
To you!

Now when the Tsar of Russia
And the King of Prussia
Landed in the Phoenix in a big balloon,
They asked the police band
To play “The Wearin’ of the Green”
But the buggers from the depot didn’t know the tune.
So they both went up to Monto, Monto, Monto
Scarpered up to Monto, lan-ge-roo,
To you!

The Queen she came to call on us,
She wanted to see all of us
I’m glad she didn’t fall on us, she’s eighteen stone.
“Mister Me Lord Mayor,” says she,
“Is this all you’ve got to show me?”
“Why, no ma’am there’s some more to see, Póg mo thóin! (Kiss my arse)”
And he took her up Monto, Monto, Monto
He set her up in Monto, lan-ge-roo,
For you!

The inclusion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers may have been a nod towards Oliver St. John Gogarty, who rather cleverly suggested that Monto was where soldiers returning from the Boer War would be heading upon arrival back in Dublin. A poem entitled The Irish Yeoman’s Return, or Love is Lord of All appeared in the pages of the rather conservative Irish Society newspaper in 1901. On first glance, it was patriotic stuff:

The Gallant Irish yeoman
Home from the war has come
Each victory gained o’er foeman
Why should our bards be dumb.

How shall we sing their praises
Our glory in their deeds
Renowned their worth amazes
Empire their prowess needs.

So to Old Ireland’s hearts and homes
We welcome now our own brave boys
In cot and Hall; neath lordly domes
Love’s heroes share once more our joys.

Love is the Lord of all just now
Be he the husband, lover, son,
Each dauntless soul recalls the vow
By which not fame, but love was won.

United now in fond embrace
Salute with joy each well-loved face
Yeoman: in women’s hearts you hold the place.

Reading the first letter of each line downwards, it read: The Whores Will Be Busy. Though sent anonymously, it was the work of Oliver St. John Gogarty, then a young medical student in Trinity College Dublin. Not unlike James Joyce, he had a familiarity with the Monto himself.

Hoddy’s song referenced both heroes and villains in an Irish context. Take the mentioned de Wet for example. The famed Boer general Christiaan de Wet achieved something of a legendary status among Irish nationalists in the early twentieth century. In his Bureau of Military History Witness Statement, Irish Volunteer Patrick O’Reilly recounted:

I was five years of age in 1900, when the Boer War was raging. My recollections of the period are very vivid. The neighbours around who gathered at our house in the evenings discussed with vigour the pros and cons of the war, All were in favour of the Boers and had the greatest contempt for the British. The weekly papers, giving details of the fighting, would be read and re-read several times. In all these discussions, we youngsters became familiar with such tiaras as Kruger, De Wet, Cronge. Horses and dogs were named after those heroes.

The song caught the attention of Luke Kelly, finding its way onto the Dubliners Finnegan Wakes LP, released in 1966. Featuring what many regard as the iconic Dubliners line-up (Ronnie Drew, Barney McKenna, John Sheehan, Ciarán Bourke and Luke Kelly), it was a live recording from Dublin’s Gate Theatre in April of that year. It was an immediate crowd pleaser, destined to remain in The Dubliners set-list for decades to come.

Finnegan Wakes (ItsTheDubliners)

Hoddy died in September 1990, leaving behind a fine collection of reviews and writings in The Irish Times. More than anything however, ‘Monto’ remains. In 2016, singer Róisín Murphy christened her album Take Her Up To Monto, remembering that her uncle was a photographer with The Irish Times who knew Hoddy personally. To her:

Take Her Up to Monto is a very satirical song. I don’t really like people calling it a folk song because it kind of isn’t. It’s a bit cheeky calling it Take Her Up to Monto, but the whole idea was to be very irreverent. My da used to sing Take Her Up to Monto to me when we were walking down the street – he still does actually – because it’s got a walking tempo, and I still sing it to myself when I’m walking along. So it’s a little postmodern fragment, a bit of history.