Allingham's History Lesson

 

 

WITH HORROR I SEE that the last time I posted an entry here was shortly after Christmas. The long silence was due partly to laziness, but I have an implausible string of other excuses too, of which I shall trouble you here with only one.

 

     Hector and I have been hard at work, preparing not one, but two further volumes of ‘Other Poetry’. They are to be called Dublin’s Other Poetry: Rhymes and Songs of the City and Ulster’s Other Poetry: Rhymes and Songs of the Province. The texts of both – along with hundreds of new drawings by Hector – are now complete, and according to Lilliput Press, things look set fair for simultaneous publication in the early autumn.

 

     As we did in Ireland’s Other Poetry: Anonymous to Zozimus, we have arranged the entries of both volumes alphabetically by author. So it happens that the Ulster one kicks off with an writer whose only generally known work is a mildly disturbing account of a group of foppish little men who used to terrorise children in out-of-the-way parts of rural Ireland. That is, of course, ‘The Fairies’, by William Allingham.

 

     The poem is not included in the book, however, and we are reproducing another far less familiar one, a sort of Irish history lesson which is not meant to be taken at all seriously.

 

As a preview of Ulster’s Other Poetry, the remainder of this webpage has been extracted from the manuscript of the book:

 

William Allingham            

 

     Though he is sometimes rather lazily called ‘The Bard Of Ballyshannon’, William Allingham (1824-1889) is hardly thought of as an Ulster poet at all. A native of Donegal, in early life he wrote ‘traditional’ ballads to airs by local musicians for sale as penny broadsheets. After many years as an Irish customs official, he left the airy mountains and rushy glens for England, where he edited magazines and gossiped with many of the great figures of Victorian literature. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, then Poet Laureate, became a good friend – despite his assertion that ‘Kelts are all mad furious fools!’

 

     In 1851 the final volume of John O’Donovan’s English translation of the Annals of the Four Masters appeared, and Allingham wrote this spirited précis of the book, no doubt confirming Tennyson’s opinion of the wild Irish. The lines were eventually published in By the Way (1912), a posthumous collection of the poet’s fragments and notes.  

IRISH ANNALS

 

MacMurlagh kill’d Flantagh, and Cormac killed Hugh,

Having else no particular business to do.

O’Toole killed O’Gorman, O’More killed O’Leary,

Muldearg, son of Phadrig, killed Con, son of Cleary.

Three show’rs in the reign of King Niall the Good

Rain’d silver and honey and smoking red blood.

Saint Colman converted a number of pagans,

And got for his friars some land of O’Hagan’s,

The King and his clansmen rejoiced at this teaching

And paused from their fighting to come to the preaching.

The Abbot of Gort, with good reason no doubt,

With the Abbot of Ballinamallard fell out,

Set fire to the abbey-roof over his head,

And kill’d a few score of his monks, the rest fled.

The Danes, furious pirates by water and dry-land,

Put boats on Lough Erne and took Devenish Island;

The Monks, being used to such things, in a trice

Snatching relics and psalters and vessels of price,

Got into the Round-Tower and pull’d up the ladder;

Their end, for the Danes lit a fire, was the sadder.

Young Donnell slew Rory, then Dermod slew Connell;

O’Lurcan of Cashel kill’d Phelim his cousin

On family matters. Some two or three dozen

Of this Tribe, in consequence, killed one another.

MacFogarty put out the eyes of his brother

James Longthair, lest James should be chosen for chief.

At Candlemas, fruit-trees this year were in leaf.

King Toole, an excitable man in his cups,

Falls out with King Rorke about two deerhound pups,

And scouring the North, without risking a battle

Burns down all the houses, drives off all the cattle;

King Rorke to invade the South country arouses,

Drives off all the cattle, burns down all the houses.

If you wish for more slaughters and crimes and disasters

See, passim, those annalists called ‘The Four Masters’.  

     Further juicy extracts from the forthcoming Dublin’s Other Poetry: Rhymes and Songs of the City and Ulster’s Other Poetry: Rhymes and Songs of the Province (Edited by John Wyse Jackson and Hector McDonnell, Lilliput Press, Autumn 2009) will follow in due course (I fondly hope).

James Joyce’s Christmas Cake

 

IN 1888, A CONCERT in aid of the local Boat Club was held at Breslin’s Hotel on the Esplanade in Bray, County Wicklow. Among the performers were the six-year-old Joyce James, resplendent in his new Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. As the Wicklow Newsletter reported a few days later, little James sang a popular comic Christmas ditty, ‘Houlihan’s Cake’. This is clearly a slightly garbled variant of what was once described as a ‘capital Irish convivial song’, ‘Miss Hoolihan’s Christmas Cake’, which could then be bought on the streets as a penny broadsheet.

 

     ‘Miss Hoolihan’s (or ‘Hooligan’s’) Christmas Cake’ was first popularized by one Harry Melville (‘The Irish Daisy’). The original version of the song seems to have been called ‘Miss Fogarty’s Christmas Cake’. It was published in the USA in 1883, when it was credited to Charles Frank Horn as composer of both tune and words. Horn, a prolific writer of popular songs, was born in Pennsylvania in 1853, and though I have found no evidence that he possessed Irish blood, his lyrics often poked fun at the Irish, displaying ‘Oirish’ spellings and sentiments. His other titles in this vein include the following: ‘Miss Mulligan’s Homemade Pie,’ ‘Grogan’s Grocery,’ ‘The Band on Murphy’s Block,’ ‘McCarthy’s Fancy Ball,’ ‘Duffy, the Rising Man,’ ‘Mr. Finnegan,’ ‘The McGettigans’ Social Soiree’ and ‘When McGinnes Drives Up to the Door.’

 

     As a seasonal treat, the words of 'Miss Hooligan's Christmas Cake' appear below. 

MISS HOOLIGAN'S CHRISTMAS CAKE

 

As I sat at my windy one evening,
The letter man brought unto me
A little gilt edged invitation,
Saying, Gilhooly, come over to tea.
Sure I knew that the Hooligans sent it,
So I went just for old friendship's sake,
And the first thing they gave me to tackle
Was a piece of Miss Hooligan's cake.  

     Chorus:

There was plums and prunes and cherries,
And citron and raisins and cinnamon too,
There was nutmeg, cloves, and berries,
And the crust it was nailed on with glue.
There was carraway seeds in abundance,
Sure 'twould build up a fine stomach ache,
'Twould kill a man twice after 'ating a slice
Of Miss Hooligan's Christmas cake. 

Miss Mulligan wanted to taste it,
But really there wasn't no use,
They worked at it over an hour,
And they couldn't get none of it loose.
Till Hooligan went for the hatchet,
And Killy came in with a saw,
That cake was enough, by the powers,
To paralyze any man's jaw.

 

Mrs Hooligan, proud as a peacock,
Kept smiling and blinking away,
Till she fell over Flanigan's brogans,
And spilled a whole brewing of tay.
’Oh, Gilhooly,’ she cried, ‘you're not 'ating,
Try a little bit more for my sake,’
’No, Mrs Hooligan,’ sez I,
’But I'd like the resate of that cake.’

 

Maloney was took with the colic,
M'Nulty complained of his head,
M'Fadden lay down on the sofa,
And swore that he wished he was dead.
Miss Daly fell down in hysterics,
And there she did wriggle and shake,
While every man swore he was poisoned,
Through 'ating Miss Hooligan's cake. 

     James Joyce did not forget his first public performance in later years. Though he is not known ever to have reprised the song during the rollicking musical evenings with which he enlivened his life as a famous literary man in Paris, he did allude to it in his last book, Finnegans Wake. On page 58, buried in a passage bulging with in musical quotations, you will find a sentence that takes as inspiration the first line of the song’s chorus: ‘Swiping rums and beaunes and sherries and ciders and negus and citronnades too.’ And if that wasn’t enough, another mangling of the same line appears on page 288, in one of the entirely unilluminating notes with which the author furnished that part of the book: ‘They were plumped and plumed and jerried and citizens and racers, and cinnamondhued.’

 

     As for the other end of the chorus, some years ago I received a kind titbit of information from the grandson of a lady who had actually attended that Bray Boat Club fundraiser all those years ago. Apparently, members of the audience were much amused that each time he came to the word ‘stomach’ in the third last line, the blushing young singer slurred over it, pronouncing it 'smmmmm': in Victorian Ireland the word was considered too anatomically explicit to utter in public, even for James Joyce.

Dublin: Poetry of Place (ii)

 

     For those of us who were young in Dublin in the 1970s, there was a distinct sense of being surrounded by eminent ghosts. You could meet talkative men in pubs who had drunk (or as someone more accurately put it, had been drunk) with Brendan Behan or Flann O’Brien. Even then we were aware that this sense of a looming past, full of extraordinary personalities, was nothing new. As the late John Ryan, a convivial literary Jack-of-all-Trades (he had once owned the Bailey Tavern in Duke Street) wrote:  

Dublin was a town of ‘characters’ then as now, and I suppose will ever be. A man I knew was taking a stroll down Grafton Street one day when he happened to overhear part of a discussion which three citizens were having outside Mitchell’s café. The gist of their dialogue was that they were deploring the absence from the Dublin scene of any real ‘characters’. They appeared to be genuinely aggrieved. They were, in fact, Myles na gCopaleen, Sean O’Sullivan and Brendan Behan.  

     – From his 1975 memoir, Remembering How We Stood, a book that may be highly recommended. It has just been reissued by Lilliput Press.

 

     So if in the 1970s people were affected by the literary legacy of the previous generation, those earlier writers too had problems wriggling out from under the burden that their own illustrious forebears had placed upon them. The poetry of WB Yeats hung over the work of poets like Austin Clarke and FR Higgins; and prose writers suffered too, particularly those who admired James Joyce and despaired of ever finding a voice of their own. By the 1970s, it seemed that matters were becoming even worse when everyone seemed to be celebrating Bloomsday, the day upon which Joyce had set Ulysses. Suddenly, every June the sixteenth, the novel surreally sprang to life in a parody of itself. Tourists flocked to Dublin to gape at multiple versions of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, each with his respective bowler hat or aesthete’s ashplant, as they sauntered around town, or along Sandymount Strand, generally in the company of bronzed ladies clad in the garb of Edwardian hoydens.

    

     The following verses were written in 1976 by one Seán Críonna Mac Seóinín. They seem to have been an attempt to illustrate the stultifying effect that literary ancestors had on some of those talkative men in Dublin pubs.  

BLOOMSDAY 1976

 

Today is Bloomsday! Drink, rejoice and sing,

For Dedalus never flew upon one wing.

 

Let’s go back, if we can, to Dublin past,

To Smyllie, Bang-bang, Myles and Gainor Crist,

And if we drink until the barrel’s empty

We could get back as far as 1920!

 

How nice it is to booze here till we’re beggared

And reminisce, remembering how we staggered

From Searson’s to McDaid’s with Paddy Kavanagh . . .

– But did he ever ask us, ‘Whatcha havin’?’

 

Ah, I resented that, but now I find

It isn’t Paddy’s poverty I mind

But all those College critics who presume

(They hated him alive) to say they knew him.

 

We’ll have another pint, and try to bring

Back nights when Brendan Behan used to sing

With me and you and Ryan and our cronies

In Davy Byrne’s and Neary’s and Moroney’s.

 

And were you there when Dublin’s greatest joke

Was Cecil Salkeld painted buff with puke?

What wit we had, what poetry! The shame is –

If we’d published any we’d be famous.

 

But then, the works of literature we offered

Were talked into the air, not sold for profit.

You never wrote too much yourself, did you?

And nor did I. One day I’m planning to.

 

Today is Bloomsday! Drink, rejoice and fall:

Dedalus never really flew at all. 

[Extracted from Dublin: Poetry of Place, edited by John Wyse Jackson, Eland Publishing, London 2008 (ISBN 978-190601123-9) Paperback: £6.99 in the UK.]

Dublin: Poetry of Place (i)

 

THIS MONTH, THE FIRM OF ELAND is bringing out three new titles in their ‘Poetry of Place’ series of pocket anthologies for travellers, Rome, edited by Glyn Pursglove, England, edited by AN Wilson and Dublin – edited by myself.

 

     Today, I beg your indulgence as I am simply reproducing below the first couple of entries from the Dublin one, along with the notes that accompany them. In the next webpage, there will be another small selection, though taken from the more modern end of the book.  

from A SATIRE ON THE PEOPLE OF DUBLIN

 

Hail to you, friars, with your cloaks of white!

You have a house at Drogheda, where ropes are made.

You are forever wandering around the place:

You pinch the holy sprinklers out of the churches.

     The one who wrote this piece of literature

     Was undoubtedly a real expert.

 

Hail to you, holy monks, with your jar

Full of ale and wine, morning, noon and night!

You can really knock back the drink – it’s all you care about.

You fall foul of the Benedictine rules, all too often.

     Pay attention to me, the lot of you!

     Obviously you can see that this is crafted with skill.

 

Hail to you, merchants, with your hefty packs

Of fabrics and other merchandise, and your sacks of wool –

Your gold, silver, jewels, rich marks and pounds as well!

You give very little of it to the poor and afflicted.

     The one who penned this shrewd advice

     Had talent – he was bursting with brains! 

 

Hail to you, tailors, with your sharp scissors!

Endlessly you cut your cloth for ill-made hoods.

Your needles are heated against the midwinter;

Your seams look fine, but they don’t last very long. 

     The writer who made up this verse

     Stayed wide awake: he got no sleep at all. 

 

Hail to you, skinners, with your steeping-tub!

Anyone who sniffs at it will live to regret it.

You must shite into it during thunderstorms.

You stink out the entire street – a curse on your modesty!

     The one who composed this excellent work

     Deserves to be made king.

 

Hail to you, bakers, with your little loaves

Of white bread and black bread, lots and lots of them!

You scrimp on the proper weight, against the law of God – 

You ought to watch out for the market pillory, I warn you.

     To be sure, no tongue could express

     How well this verse has been put together.

 

Hail to you, brewers, with your gallons,

Pottles and quarts all around each town!

You displace a lot of it with your thumbs, a sleazy dodge.

You should beware the cucking-stool: the lake is deep and disgusting.

     It was certainly some scholar

     Who produced this work with such expertise.

 

Hail to you, hawker women, down by the lake,

With your candles and casks and black cauldrons –

You and your tripes and calves’ feet and sheep’s heads!

Your inn is foul with your filthy trickery.

     Unhappy the life of the man

     Who is tied to a wife like that.

 

Perk up, my friends, you’ve been sitting there too long –

Now speak out for yourselves, have fun, and drink all you can!

You’ve heard how people spend their lives in this place:

You should drink deep and rejoice – you’ve got nothing else to do.

     Now I’ve come to the end of this song:

     May you be blessed, ever and always.

 

     The extracts above come from what may be the earliest surviving poem about Dublin. The verses (here put into modern English by the present editor) appear in an early fourteenth-century manuscript in the British Library. Nowhere in the work is a placename actually specified, but the Middle English original contains words that at that date were found only in Ireland, and the settlement described is clearly of some size and importance, so we may be reasonably confident that this is indeed a portrait of medieval Dublin.

 

Though the anonymous writer trumpets repeatedly about his great poetic skills, his estimation of the city’s clerics and tradespeople could scarcely be lower. During the centuries that followed his opinion would be shared by many of the poets who were to write about the citizens – and the fabric – of Dublin.  

DESCRIPTION OF DUBLIN

 

Mass-houses, churches, mixt together;

Streets unpleasant in all weather.

The church, the four courts, and hell contiguous;

Castle, College green, and custom-house gibbous.

 

Few things here are to tempt ye:

Tawdry outsides, pockets empty:

Five theatres, little trade, and jobbing arts,

Brandy, and snuff-shops, post-chaises, and carts.

 

Warrants, bailiffs, bills unpaid;

Masters of their servants afraid;

Rogues that daily rob and cut men;

Patriots, gamesters, and footmen.

 

Lawyers, Revenue-officers, priests, physicians;

Beggars of all ranks, age and conditions,

Worth scarce shews itself upon the ground;

Villainy both with applause and profit crown’d.

 

Women lazy, drunken, loose;

Men in labour slow, of wine profuse:

Many a scheme that the public must rue it:

This is Dublin, if you knew it.

 

     ‘In labour slow, of wine profuse’ indeed. This sour little portrait of the city in the first half of the eighteenth century is not the most original work to appear in these pages, since it was adapted by an unknown hand from the very similar ‘Description of London’ by John Bancks (1709-1751). But prose accounts of the time suggest that the verses were substantially accurate – and indeed, the moans about Dublin enumerated above are not so very different to complaints that were still being uttered two hundred years later. 

 

     By now, the old Anglo-Norman town had become a considerable city, with all that the term implies. As the century continued, Ireland’s reputation for wild and picturesque beauty spots began to spread far and wide. Travellers on the alternative Grand Tour might land at Ringsend on the southern bank of the River Liffey, but the moment they found themselves in the dirty streets of Dublin, they hurried out of the city as fast as they could, in search of the magnificent scenes and ‘romantick prospects’ that they had been told were waiting to be admired almost everywhere else on Erin’s green isle. Similarly, when poets noticed their fingers twitching for a quill, they generally avoided the subject of Dublin unless they were in a particularly angry or scornful state of mind.

 

[Extracted from Dublin: Poetry of Place, edited by John Wyse Jackson, Eland Publishing, London 2008 (ISBN 978-190601123-9) Paperback: £6.99 in the UK.]

Full of Sound and Furry

IN THE 13TH CENTURY, a Franciscan monk known as Bartholomew the Englishman produced an enormous encyclopedia, a sort of ‘How Things Work’, called De Proprietatibus Rerum. In the following entry, he explains how to recognize a Cat. It is, he says, 

... a beast of uncertain hair and color. For some cat is white, some red, and some black, some calico and speckled in the feet and in the ears. [He] hath a great mouth and saw teeth and sharp and long tongue and pliant, thin, and subtle. And lappeth therewith when he drinketh.

 

     Bartholomew observes that the Cat can be

 

… a cruel beast when he is wild and runneth in woods and hunteth the small wild beasts.

 

     As he warms to his subject, the monk waxes lyrical on the animal’s character and habits. He is, it seems, 

 

… full lecherous in youth, swift, pliant and merry, and leapeth and rusheth on everything that is before him and is led by a straw, and playeth therewith; and is a right heavy beast in age and full sleepy, and lieth slyly in wait for mice and is aware where they be more by smell than by sight, and hunteth and rusheth on them in privy places. And when he taketh a mouse, he playeth therewith, and eateth him after the play.

 

     Possibly even more disturbing to one who has taken a vow of celibacy are the courting rituals of the animal, who

 

… is as it were wild, and goeth about in time of generation. Among cats in time of love is hard fighting for wives, and one scratcheth and rendeth the other grieviously with biting and with claws. And he maketh a ruthful noise and ghastful, when one proffereth to fight with one another, and unneth [hardly] is hurt when he is thrown from a high place.

 

     Exasperated by the ruthfulness and ghastfulness of their caterwauling, the cleric has evidently taken to flinging rutting cats through the window of the monastery bell-tower. Since this doesn’t put them off the mating game, there are other measures that may be taken, as the entry ominously goes on to suggest:

 

… And when he hath a fair skin, he is as it were proud thereof, and goeth fast about. And when his skin is burnt, then he bideth at home. And is oft for his fair skin taken of the skinner, and slain and flayed.

 

     Whatever about English monks, Irish ones appear to have been more tolerant of the cat, if we can rely on the anonymous clerical scribe who wrote about Pangur Bán, the creature (or familiar?) with which he shared his cell. Written on Irish about twelve centuries ago on the back of a manuscript that surfaced in an Austrian monastery, the poem points out similarities between the vocations of the poet and his companion. The first verse might be translated:

  

We’re equally preoccupied, Pangur Bán and I,

In our own particular ways:

He’s obsessed with hunting;

I think only about my work.

 

     In Ireland’s Other Poetry, we may not represent the feline strand in Irish verse as comprehensively as the species deserves. A word-search of the text reveals several starring roles for both cattle and Catholics, but not many for cats. Passing mentions there are, of course: there’s a murderous moggie in ‘Fair Ladies’ by Patrick MacGill, another is found licking a spoon in a song called ‘The Buttermilk Lasses’, Arthur Griffith’s satire ‘Lucy Lanigan’ gives a walk-on part to ‘a doaty Manxland cat’, while in ‘The Galbally Farmer’ cats are used as a gauge to measure the toxicity of potatoes. (If you want further details of this last, buy the book!)

    

     Only one entry in the anthology is entirely about a cat. Consisting of only four lines, it begins:

 

De Valera had a cat …

 

     Recently I have learned that this text, which was found in Lady Glenavy's autobiography, Today We Will Only Gossip, is not the original one. It was not in fact Dev who owned the politically precocious puss in question, but his Ulster antagonist, Sir Edward Carson. My informant was Maurice James Craig, poet, social and architectural historian, and he should know: not only is he a native of Belfast, he is also Ireland’s most eminent anthologist of cats: his 2002 book, Cats and their Poets, is well worth seeking out and adding to your shelves.

 

     Now that I come to think of it, the Free State adaptation of the verse doesn’t make much sense. Accordingly, I reproduce below what we may call the definitive version of this masterwork: 

 

‘EDWARD CARSON HAD A CAT’

 

Edward Carson had a cat

Who sat upon the fender,

Every time she heard a shot

She shouted ‘No surrender.’

 

     All of the preceding wool-gathering is merely a preamble to today’s discovery, a ballad that I am told was written, or at least written down at some unknown date about a century ago by one Hughie Browne of Kingscourt, Co Cavan.

 

     The song comes with a salutory sting in its tail.

 

CONNOR’S CAT

 

Famed Bards have sang of this and that

Lords, Dukes and Knights of honour,

My theme shall be the great grey cat

Long kept by Brian O’Connor.

 

This beast of Prey from nose to tail

Did three feet seven measure

Bulldogs and Mastiffs he’d assail

And Weasels hunt for pleasure.

 

He’d gaze at Phoenix or the sun

While blazing like an Eagle,

Pick up his scent or trail the run

Like the Wolfhound or the Beagle.

 

Whole broods of Rats and Mice he slew

And thinned their hateful number;

Caught every sort of bird that flew

Surprising them in slumber.

 

Down many a chimney he did go

And gourmandize on Bacon,

Though often wounded by the foe

He is neither killed nor taken.

 

And when on rampage he would go

In search of prey to slaughter

He’s spilled as many tubs of cream

As Moll did – dirty water.

 

But now this cat is getting old,

He’s lazy, dull and stupid,

His rump is burnèd on the coal –He’s a worn down Quadrupid.