Come Here To Me!

Scanned from Lennox Robinson's 'Pictures In A Theatre'

The Abbey has a long and fascinating history. Some stories, like the riots which surrounded both The Playboy of the Western World and The Plough and the Stars have gone on to enter popular Dublin ‘lore and history. Yet there is a great hidden history to the Abbey, and below are five facts about the theatre that may surprise some of you.

1) Yeats could have made it a part-time cinema!

In his excellent history of the “theatre that refused to die”, Sean McCann wrote of the financial crisis that gripped the Abbey in the early 1920s. On the day Sean O’Casey’s classic ‘The Shadow Of A Gunman’ was first performed at the theatre in April of 1923, banks advised the directors of the Abbey that their cheques could no longer be cashed. As McCann notes in his history “by August of that year the letting of the theatre as a cinema was considered, with the warm approval of Yeats, and only the possibility of a Government subsidy gave any hope of keeping it alive.”

2) The Dublin Fire Brigade saved the pram from O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars.

L.Fallon collection. Posted previously to 'Come Here To Me'.

On July 18 1951 a fire ripped the home of the Abbey apart. Tom Geraghty and Trevor Whitehead noted in their history of the Dublin Fire Brigade that in was the busiest night of the year for the Brigade, with nine crews fighting the blaze.

What had been the former Mechanic’s Institute and City Morgue was just a gaunt dangerous skeleton festooned with The Plough and the Stars posters, and the ghost of Yeats was left to haunt an eerie smoke-filled chamber.

The incredible image above shows Fireman Frank Brennan salvaging the pram, which featured even in the excellent 2010 production. The frame is original, its casing isn’t.

3) It boasts a fine 1916 connection, though its monument has changed.

Historically, a plaque was located in one of the pillars outside The Abbey, listing seven names. These are individuals who participated in the Easter Rising, and who held a variety of roles at the theatre. The first casualty of the republican side in Easter Week of course was an Abbey actor by the name of Sean Connolly, but alongside him are six other names, all of whom survived the uprising. Máire Mic Shibhlaigh, Helena Molony, Ellen Bushell, Arthur Shields, Barney Murphy and Peadar Kearney were all listed on the plaque.

Today, their names are on the 1916 memorial inside of the theatre, rather than a plaque outside it:

In an excellent contribution to Dublin Historical Record, the publication of the Old Dublin Society, James Wren correctly noted that the theatres connections to the insurrection went much deeper.

Edward Keegan for instance was a 1916 volunteer who had a long history with the theatre, and his name is sadly omitted from the memorial. He had been a member of the National Players, and even appeared in the first productions of Yeats’ On Baille’s Strand and Lady Gregory’s Spreading The News.

Keegan worked with The Irish Times newspaper as a clerk, but found himself sacked following the rebellion for ‘disloyalty’!

4)It took a decade to pull it down after the inferno of 1951, but in the meantime it made a handy office for one infamous Dubliner.

Ernest Blythe recalled for me the first time he met Brendan Behan was when he went to one of the old rooms a long time after the fire and there he found a man installed. ‘It turned out he was using it for an office. He had all his papers spread out and he had made it his town office. Apparently, someone had told him where the key was kept and he had been using the place for months.

(Sean McCann: The Story of the Abbey Theatre (New English Library Limited, 1967) p.65)

5) Michael Scott, who designed the Abbey we all know today, once trod the boards of the old Abbey.

Michael Scott, the architect responsible for the Abbey which opened to the public in 1966, had a long personal history with the theatre. He joined the Abbey School of Acting under Sara Allgood, while also undertaking a architectural apprenticeship. He would recall in a recollection for The Irish Times that soon after going into private practice, he was given the call-up for a part in an Abbey play, on a London stage. He would also go on to appear at the theatre in Dublin..

Now in private practice in an office on the top floor of a building in O’Connell Street, and working on plans for the Gate Theatre in the Rotunda, and other projects, I was asked to go to London to play in Shaftesbury Avenue. The part offered was the Gossoon,in the Abbey Play The New Gossoon.

The Unlock NAMA occupation today has really grabbed peoples imagination, and I thought it was a great touch that alongside the information on NAMA and the properties under its ownership, the group behind the occupation included a history of the building to show what it was in past lives.

One picture stood out instantly, taken from here at Come Here To Me. 66-67 Great Strand Street were occupied today, but right next door at 64 occurred one of the most unusual events of the 1930s in Dublin, in the form of the storming of Connolly House following a rather heated mass at the Pro Cathedral.

Bob Doyle, who went on to fight fascism in Spain, was ironically enough among the crowd who stormed Great Strand Street. He wrote in his memoirs years later:

I had attended the evening mission on Monday 27 March 1933 at the Pro-Cathedral, during the period of Lent where the preacher was a Jesuit. The cathedral was full. He was standing in the pulpit talking about the state of the country, I remember him saying – which scared me – “Here in this holy Catholic city of Dublin, these voile creatures of Communism are within our midst.” Immediately after the sermon everybody then began leaving singing and gathered in a crowd outside, we must have been a thousand singing “To Jesus Heart All Burning” and “Faith of our Fathers, Holy Faith”. We marched down towards Great Strand Street, to the headquarters of the socialist and anti-Fascist groups in Connolly House. I was inspired, of you could use that expression, by the message of the Jesuit. There was no attempt by the police to stop us.

We’ve already looked at the event in some detail before, over here, but with the day that is in it I thought I’d repost the image as it appeared in the Unlock NAMA history today. Below is a rare image showing two police officers alongside the petrol cans used during the burning of Connolly House. It came into my possession as a gift, and I’m chuffed to share it.

DFallon’s great piece on Ettie Steinberg yesterday got me thinking about another unusual tale regarding the Irish and the Second World War. That is the story of John McGrath of Roscommon who became the only Irishman to be imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp.

If you stand in the Schubraum section of the Museum Building in Dachau, you will see a large map of Europe on the wall. Over each country is a number,  indicating how many of their citizens were imprisoned in the camp. The number ‘1’ is marked over Ireland.

John McGrath (c1893 – Nov 27 1946), was born in Elphin, Roscommon and educated at the Christian Brothers’ Schools in Carrick-On-Shannon. Joining the British Army, he saw action in France in World War One.

John McGrath. Sunday Independent, Apr 17, 1932.

Returning home safely he worked, as an administrative staff assistant, with the Gordon Hotel in London and then was involved with the organising of the Grand Prix Motor Race in the Phoenix Park and the Military Tattoo in Landsdowne Road in the late 1920s

He became the first House Manager of the new Savoy Cinema in Dublin in 1929, staying there for two years. When the Savoy Cinema in Cork was opened, he was sent down to manage it and worked there for a further two years. Returning to Dublin, in 1935, to manage the Theatre Royal on Hawkins Street, McGrath was recalled up to the British Army, as major, at the outbreak of war in 1939.

Theatre Royal, Hakins St. nd. (Picture credit -Damntheweather)

Landing with the Allies in Dunkirk in May 1940, McGrath was one of the ‘small Allied band’ who fought in France after the evacuation. He was wounded twice in battle near Rouen, Normandy before finally being captured by the Nazis. McGrath, now a Colonel, along with other captured POWs were then forced to march over four hundred miles to Germany. At least two hundred of the captured men died of exhaustion en route.

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Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. With that in mind, I dipped into an old Come Here To Me article which was the popular review we carried out of the Jewish Museum in Portobello.

A small, touching plaque features upstairs in the restored synagogue to Ettie Steinberg. Herself and her son were to become the only Irish citizens to perish in the Holocaust. Ettie was raised in Raymond Terrace. The horrific figure of six million can be difficult to comprehend, but when the story of one individual is brought to life, not least a Dubliner born only a short walk from the Museum, the horror of those years becomes clearer.

Ettie’s family were oiginally from Czechoslovakia, and had come to Ireland from London in 1926. She married a Belgian man in 1937, and moved to Belgium with him before going on to Paris two years later. In 1942, Ettie and her young son, born in Paris, were transported to Auschwitz by the Nazis. In his wonderful work Jews In Twentieth-Century Ireland , Dermot Keough wrote that:

By a strange irony, the Steinberg’s in Dublin had secured visas for Ettie and her family through the British Home Office in Belfast. The visas were sent immediately to Toulouse but they arrived too late. Ettie and her family had been rounded up the day before and sent to the camp at Drancy, outside Paris. They were transported to Auschwitz and to their immediate death.

The map below shows that area that once made up ‘Dublin’s Little Jerusalem’, and was first uploaded to Come Here To Me by jaycarax here, at the time of a fascinating documentary on the murders of two Jewish men in the area in the early 1920s.

Snap of Eoin O’Duffy’s Irish Brigade returning from Spain after a pretty disastrous and embarassing campaign which only lasted six months. Getting drunk regularly and, in their first action, coming under friendly fire from an allied Falangist unit from the Canary Islands, it is likely that Franco was glad to see the back of the Irish Brigade.

Brendan Behan famously quipped that “they certainly made history (as) they seemed to be the only army that went out to war, ever, and came back with more”. This is because a number of Irish men in the Spanish Legion(?) decided to get a lift home with O’Duffy and co. when they were leaving.

1937, Dublin, Ireland --- Irish Brigade Returns from Spain --- Image by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS