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 – editedby 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.

Invincible Verses

It is a commonplace to say that the world, as well as warming up, is shrinking. We are told that we live in a global village, and it seems to be true. The internet’s squinting windows are now monitoring the entire valley, and anonymous curtain-twitchers behind a million screens will pass on everything they see to anyone who is interested. You may try to hide in a Cambodian jungle by transferring all the hair on your head to the end of your chin, but if you have ever been a member of the glitterati it’s likely that somebody will track you down in the end.

     As recently as thirty years ago, things were quite different. Assuming that Lord Lucan, for example, wasn’t eaten by one of John Aspinall’s tigers, he was very successful at concealing himself. If he had tried it today, the uxoricidal gambler would probably have been found, since all the rumoured sightings in Uruguay or Chad or Rockall would have been solidly backed up with photographic evidence taken by mobile phone.

     (Suddenly I remember an something that happened in the late 1970s when I was waiting at a bus-stop in West Dublin. I was accosted by a very odd-looking woman with a headscarf, a hairy upper lip and a Chelsea accent, who challenged me to bet her a quid that the bus wouldn’t come within the next five minutes. I didn’t have that sort of money on me in those days, and soon was glad that I didn’t, for a moment later the 25A appeared round the corner, and she would have won. It is only now that the true significance of the incident has occurred to me – the bus was bound for Lucan! Obvious in retrospect, of course. Nobody would ever think of looking for his Lordship there, would they?)

     Today’s verses are about James Carey, one in Ireland’s long line of supergrasses. He was once leader of the Invincibles, the spinoff group of the Irish Republican Brotherhood which in 1882 assassinated Permanent Under Secretary Thomas Burke and Lord Frederick Cavendish in the Phoenix Park. Carey’s testimony sent four of his former colleagues to the gallows.

     Nowadays, the forces of justice would probably have given Carey a new identity and police protection in reward for turning King’s Evidence, but then his only hope was to flee the country. But the case was so well-known, and his treachery so heinous, that even without mobile phones or the internet he was easily tracked down on a ship close to Cape Town, and was bloodily done to death.

     Several more of the Invincibles went to prison, including James FitzHarris, the assassins’ getaway jarvey, who was sent abroad to serve his sentence. Fitzharris was said to be almost comically ugly, and looked, one chronicler remarked, as if he had long ago been ‘badly battered by a traction engine.’ Allegedly, his ferocious thirst once induced him to sell the skin of the beloved family goat to buy a few pints – hence the nickname. The gloriously venomous song below (which owes a lot to Patrick O’Kelly’s ‘The Curse of Doneraile’) appeared for sale on the streets of Dublin a year after the murders; I suppose it’s possible that Skin-the-Goat actually wrote it, but I doubt it. 

     The text here, apart from a few small changes, is taken from an enjoyable book put together by Fintan Vallely, called Sing Up!: Irish Comic Songs and Satires for Every Occasion, a fine new showcase of one strand of the tapestry that is ‘Ireland’s Other Poetry’.

SKIN THE GOAT’S CURSE ON CAREY

Before I set sail I will not fail

To give that lad my blessing,

And if I had him here, there’s not much fear

But he’d get a good top dressing;

By the hat on my head but he’d lie on his bed

Till the end of next September,

I’d give him good cause to rub his jaws

And Skin the Goat remember.

But as I won’t get the chance to make Carey dance,

I’ll give him my benedictions,

So from my heart’s core may he evermore

Know nothing but afflictions.

May every buck flea from here to Bray

Jump through the bed that he lies on,

And by some mistake may he shortly take

A flowing pint of poison.

May his toes fill with corns like a puckawn’s horns

Till he can neither wear slipper nor shoe,

With a horrid toothache may he roar like a drake

And jump like a mad kangaroo.

May a horrid big rat make a hole in his hat

And chew all the hair off his head,

May the skin of a pig be made into a wig

And stuck on him when he is dead.

May the devil appear and fill him with fear,

And give him a kick of his club,

May hard paving stones and old horse’s bones

Be all he can get for his grub.

May the sun never shine, nor the weather be fine

Whenever he walks abroad,

Till the day of his death may he have a bad breath

That will stink like a rotten old cod.

May his old wife be jealous and pitch up the bellows

Till the flames roar up over the head,

May he get such a fright he’ll be turned left and right

Every night till it knocks him stone dead.

May a horrid baboon jump out of the moon

And tear his old carcase asunder,

And the day he’ll set sail, may frost, snow and hail

Accompany rain and thunder

That the world may know that Ireland’s foe

Has left the shamrock shore,

And gone to stay at Hudson’s Bay,

Or else in Baltimore.

When the equator is crossed, may the rudder be lost

And his vessel be wafted ashore,

To some cannibal isle near the banks of the Nile

Where savages jump and roar.

With a big sharp knife may they take his life

While his vessel is still afloat,

And pick his bones as clean as stones,

Is the prayer of poor Skin the Goat.

And if I die may my ghost sit on his bed-post

All the night till the morning-cock crow,

And you may surely swear, while I am there,
I’ll squeeze him before I go.

The Irishman’s Tale

 

     Morgan Dockrell is that rare bird, a poet who doesn’t care what the critics think of his poems. He has never attempted to bring out a book of his work, and took some persuasion before he would allow us to publish three of them in Ireland’s Other Poetry: Anonymous to Zozimus. When I assured him that very few people would be likely to see them here, he has agreed to let me reproduce a few more.

    

     He was born in 1939 into the well-known Dublin family of merchants and public servants, who sent him to school at St Columba’s College, in the foothills of the Dublin mountains. He remembers the art teacher there, Oisín Kelly, remarking, ‘You Anglo-Irish Protestants are disliked by everybody! The Southern Irish dislike you because you are Protestants, the Northern Irish because you are Southerners and the English because you are Irish.’

    

     The first of his poems below, written in 2002 in an attempt to disentangle the conundrum, beats the boundaries of Dockrell’s Irishness. It is symptomatic that he finally defines it in terms of a sport which is itself equivocal in its national status – and which he dislikes so much that he can only consider attending a game if primed with sufficient quantities of (German) alcohol.

 

     In a note to the verses, Dockrell remarks that if the worst came to the worst and he found himself at an international rugby match after all, he ‘would of course cheer for Ireland and NOT for England’. He goes on to say that he believes ‘that to be “a good Irishman” is to keep out of trouble with the police and to pay one’s taxes’. And there can be no argument with that, can there?

 

 

IDENTITY …

TIED IN NOTS …

 

Defining ‘ME’ … I’m in a spot,

Or, if you would prefer, a jam,

Since I’m defined by what I’m NOT

Rather than what in fact I am.

 

In Faith I’m NOT a Romanist,

In Tribal terms I’m NOT a Gael,

In outlook NOT a Nationalist,

At whose excessive zeal I rail.

 

And so my ‘ME’ is in a mess.

It could be said my Being lives

Through layers of contrariness,

Exclusive set of Negatives.

 

Come on! Dig deep! Some line creative

To show I’m NOT a Foreign Entity.

I have it! I would go quite native

And with the masses share identity,

Could I be bribed with Hock (a load!)

To watch a match at Lansdowne Road.

 

     Morgan Dockrell is never happier than when he is attacking hypocrisy. The Johnsonian verse below was written in 1960.  

 

PORTRAIT OF A POLITICIAN

 

High on his hollow Pedestal he stood,

He whom the people thought sincere and good.

In honeyed tones he verbally caressed them,

While they were proud that such a man addressed them.

Benevolent, suave, scorning to harangue,

His agile tongue concealed an adder’s fang.

He promised: and their hopes began to float.

He smiled: and every gesture gained a vote.

Without ideals which he could call his own,

He shrewdly followed what the wind had blown.

But when opinion changed renounced with haste

What he had seemingly of late embraced.

Genuine only in his love of fraud,

He spurned the weak and dearly loved a Lord.

A friend to all except a friend in need,

He perjured daily and betrayed his Creed,

While smoothly, through ingratiating tongue,

Climbing Preferment’s Ladder rung by rung.

Straining to rise but terrified to sink,

He leaned thus far – then wavered on the brink.

Had they but gently pushed that narrow ledge

Whereby he balanced on the razor’s edge,

Then would his Fall have cleansed the clouded air,

But no-one pushed, for all were unaware.

He lifts a hand: duped thousands rush to serve him.

Long may he live! Such people  well deserve him!

 

     In the national dogdays of 1974, RTE held a Hymn for Ireland competition. This was the entry by Morgan Dockrell, which for some reason did not find favour with the judges! It should be played to Haydn’s melody of ‘Austria’, as in Deutschland über Alles.

 

HYMN FOR IRELAND

 

Lord, the Land of Saints and Scholars

Craves three boons (at least) from Thee:-

Grant we run not short of dollars,

But enjoy Prosperity.

Grant we get the land we covet,

Our so longed-for Counties Six.

Lord, so mightily we love it

That it plagues our politics.

 

Grant still further, we beseech Thee,

Gift of Pentecostal Tongue,

That our prayers may daily reach Thee,

Fervent from each Gaelic lung.

Pious though we are, we’re idle,

Work involves such sweat and fuss.

Erse-ified the other side’ll

Find us quite miraculous.

 

Fill our land with milk and honey;

But we’ll further Thee exalt,

If, ensuring we have money,

Thou providest us with Malt.

Thus to end: Thy Chosen People

Will continue Thee to bless

IF Thou helpst us in Life’s Steeple-

Chase to win in Idleness.

 

 Floreat Morgan Dockrell!

Billions of Blue Blistering Epispastics

THANKS TO THE GOOD OFFICES of my kind friend John in the Bretherton Library in the University of Leeds, today I can bring you that elusive mid-nineteenth-century song about Bishop M‘Cue (or McCue, or even Mc’Cue) and his blister. I was alerted to its existence by a mention in ‘Stony Pocket’s Auction’ – to be found on my last webpage. There, ‘Bishop M’Cue’s fine blister’ is among the articles for sale, with a suggestion that the purchaser might find it useful ‘to stop the mouth of a scolding wife’

         Exactly what this particular blister was I did not know. Since then I have consulted the OED which gives, as the third meaning of the word: ‘Anything applied to raise a blister; a vesicatory.’ Of course I had to look ‘vesicatory’ up as well, and found that it was ‘A sharp irritating ointment, plaster or other application for causing the formation of a blister or blisters on the skin.’

     The dictionary went so far as to quote one Whytt, a philologist or philisopher, who in 1758 wrote the sentence (in Phil. Trans. L. 570, in case you were wondering): ‘I advised a blister to be applied.’ Horatio C Wood put it even more clearly in the 1879 edition of his invaluable A Treatise on Theraputics:  ‘Epispastics, vesicatories, or, more colloquially, blisters.’

     You may look up ‘epispastics’ yourself – do you expect me to do all the work around here?

     As you will see when you read the song, this particular blister becomes a sort of intimate booby-trap. It is set by Corney Regan, a tenant with a grievance against his rackrenting episcopal landlord.

     Peter, one of my more botanically-minded brothers, tells me that the meadow buttercup (Ranunculus acris) was often placed on the skin to raise a blister and draw out disease, while Ranunculus flammula, the Lesser Spearwort, was used in the same way in a (presumably hopeless) attempt to cure bubonic plague. The effects of either of these would have been extremely uncomfortable for his Lordship. However, the contents of Corney’s booby-trap are anyone’s guess – he might well have used something far worse, like caustic soda.

     I had asked my helpful librarian friend John, if he succeeded in finding ‘Bishop M‘Cue’, to tell me whether he thought it was any good. He responded succinctly: ‘In a word, no.’ He is certainly correct if we are judging the song as literature, but I would submit that as a social document it is interesting. I might even go on to suggest that, although the words are not exactly very funny now, it is at least worth looking at as an example of what some people obviously thought was funny then.

     As John informed me, the verses appear on at least two surviving ballad broadsheets, one from Birmingham and one from Preston. Both date to within a few years of 1850. There may have been others – given the setting, the original version was probably from Ireland.  

     Here it is, then. Now you can recite it to your family, or if you are able, sing it to them. Its tune is ‘Derry Down’.

BISHOP M‘CUE

Or, The Charity Sermon

 

Be still where you are for a minute or two,

And I’ll tell you what happen’d ould Bishop M‘Cue,

He gathered his rents in the town of Dundalk

Sure for preaching he beat ould Nick by a chalk.

                                             Filliloo, oh! Hubbabubboo.

 

Amongst all his tenants he’d one merry blade,

Corney Regan by name, and a tailor by trade,

Now Corney’d a pig the Bishop wish’d him to sell,

For which he would pay bold Corney right well.

 

The very next time that the quarter was due,

Corney’d no blunt for ould Bishop M‘Cue,                    (cash)

He seized on the pig, ’twas a darling excuse,

But Corney swore vengeance, ’ere the pig he could lose.

 

Now the Bishop gave out that he was wholly detarmin’d

Next Sunday to preach them a charity sarmind,

His toggery not being in a wearable state,

For his best Sunday breeches was ript in the sate.       (seat)

 

Now the Bishop he got in a bit of a stew,

Being Saturday night, and what could he do?

Being no tailor but Corney, for many miles round,

So for want of his breeches brought the pig out of pound.

 

The pig sent to Corney – the breeches being done –

The parson at church, and the sermon begun.

The patience of Job was the text that he took,

But he had to keep scratching in spite of his book.

 

The Bishop he thought he was really bewitched,

For Corney a big blister in the sate he had stitched,

He danced and he capered when the plaster got warm,

Sure he thought little devils was there in a swarm.

 

The Bishop grew frantic, and tore off his robe,

The clerk bid him remember the patience of Job –

Botheration, says he, when he broke the clerks phiz,     (face)

Beelzebub’s in my breeches – he wasn’t in his.

 

The congregation laughed till they fell into fits,

To see him tearing his white surplice to bits,

They thought that he was a fool for a play,

’Till he tore the whole sate of his breeches away:

 

Nine steps from the pulpit he cleared in one jump,

And down on the alter came head and heels plump.

With prayer-books they peltered him out of the pew,

From that day to this he’s called Pelter’d M‘Cue.

 

*           *          *

I HAVE JUST HEARD THE NEWS that Ronnie Drew is no more, and it makes me sad. With his group, The Dubliners, he did a great deal to revive interest in the sort of ‘Other Poetry’ that we have been exploring here, at a time when few people believed it was worth bothering with. No other singer will ever bring what he brought to songs like ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin.’ I wonder what he might have made of ‘Bishop M’Cue’. Still, it is certain that, thanks to his many recordings, we will all be hearing and enjoying that unmistakable voice for ever.   

Stoney Pocket’s Auction

 

Every so often one of Dublin’s salerooms announces a sale of ‘Literary and Historical Artefacts.’ The song I am disinterring for your delight this week (or rather this fortnight – for that is roughly how often I seem to be adding to this webpage) does just that, offering a cornucopia of curiosities from the early nineteenth-century and before. It is taken from a cheap volume called The Dublin Comic Songster: A Selection of the Most Fashionable Comic Songs, which was published in Dublin by James Duffy and Co., some time in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

 

     Some of the lots on sale in Stony Pocket’s ‘Auction’ come from real life. These include the actor Edmund Kean’s famous stage cloak, Paganini’s long musical nose, and the noisy wooden leg of the First Marquess of Anglesey. This was the world’s first articulated one, and was sometimes called the Clapping Leg, from the sound it made when his lordship stretched it out straight.  (The one it replaced had naturally been buried with full military honours near the battlefield at Waterloo.)

 

     Also up for bids is a portion of ‘moving bog’, a natural phenomenon that caught the Victorian imagination internationally. In 1821 there was a spectacular example in County Offaly (or as it was then, King’s County). On 19 June the Kilmaleady Bog, all 590 acres of it, it seems, began to ‘move with astonishing velocity along the valley to the southward, forcing before it not only the clumps of turf on the edge of the bog, but even patches of the moory meadows, to the depth of several feet, the grassy surface of which heaved and turned over almost like the waves of the ocean …’ Ever alert to the power of such occurrences Bram Stoker (who was interested anyway in the geological sciences) put an excellent moving bog into his 1890 novel, The Snake’s Pass, where he calls it a ‘carpet of death.

 

     Other things for sale at Stony Pocket’s Auction are taken from songs – for instance, the button from Paddy Hagerty’s breeches and King O’Toole’s gander, both of which can be found in Ireland’s Other Poetry: Anonymous to Zozimus. The Dublin traitor and government sanctioned torturer and murderer Jemmy O’Brien, whose lips, gruesomely, are here, is hanged in ‘The Kilmainham Minuet’, a song full of late eighteenth-century lowlife Dublin slang that is a fellow to ‘The Night that Larry was Stretched’. As for the episcopal blister in the final verse, it comes, I believe, from a Cork ballad called ‘Bishop M‘Cue or, the Charity Sermon’. (I hope to lay my hands on this before long, and will no doubt pass it on to you here if it proves to be at all interesting.)

 

     Mysteries remain, of course – just what was it that happened so unpleasantly to Darby Kenny? Why are the boys of Wicklow likely to be interested in a kippeen (a little stick)? Could it perhaps be the first shillelagh, from Shillelagh village in that county? When was Tommy Galvin a hangman, and was the man with the plaid cloak possibly the despised Major Sirr of Dublin – whose own collection of curios was purchased by the Royal Irish Academy after his death?

 

     But the most puzzling question of all is – who was Stoney Pocket himself?

 

     Suggestions are welcome!

 STONEY POCKET’S AUCTION

 

Air: ‘Umbrella Courtship.’

 

Gentlemen, we’ll soon begin,

     There are seats for those that walk in,

And goods well worth your notice here,

     At Stoney Pocket’s auction:

If you have an antiquarian taste,

     You’ll just step in and see ’em –

Don’t miss this opportunity

     Of filling your museum.

 

But if I cannot coax,

     I’ll call the catalogue, sirs,

The article marked No. 1,

     Is piece of the moving bog, sirs;

No. 2, is in the hall,

     Nailed up in one of the niches,

It’s the flap and ivory button

     Of Paddy Hagerty’s breeches.

 

No. 3, is a telescope,

     Blind Homer bought to gaze with,

No. 4, is the piece of chalk,

     That Shakspere wrote his plays with.

No. 5, is the gander’s neck,

     Belonging to King O’Toole, sirs,

And we’ve the rotten crock that smothered

     Darby Kenny with the goold, sirs.

 

We have lots of books that printed was

     Before the world began, sirs,

And written in a language

     That was never spoke by man, sirs.

In the glass-case, No. 9,

     Is two small things stitched together.

Those are the lips of Jemmy O’Brien,

     That’s worn with smacking leather.

 

We have Lord Anglesey’s old wooden leg,

     He hopped from Waterloo on,

It’s made of piece of an apple-tree,

     That oysters often grew on;

You will also see a splendid cloak,

     Was worn by Kean, the stager,

And the plaid one hanging next to that,

     Was worn by the Major.

 

If there’s any boys from Wicklow here,

     The time they’ll surely nick, sirs,

As the Auctioneer is knocking down,

     The kippeen of a stick, sirs;

Musicians too may have a treat,

     If they wish to sport a guinea.

They can buy the string, the bow and bridge,

     Of the nose of Paganini.

 

To stop the mouth of a scolding wife,

     Buy Bishop M‘Cue’s fine blister,

And to hang her we have a good ropes-end,

     Tommy Galvin’s wizen twister!

There are other goods whose names are far

     Too numerous to be told, sirs,

But to-morrow night I’ll call them out,     

If they’re not already sold, sirs.