anyone wanted a nod from him; he really believed himself to be an unknown and an unnoticed man and he was entirely oblivious of the fact when he walked through a crowd that anyone paid the slightest importance [sic] to his actions.33
Seán T. O’Kelly, later president of Ireland, was an assistant in the National Library when he first encountered Griffith – whom he said made ‘constant’ visits and spent many hours researching there in the 1890s. They subsequently worked together in Sinn Féin, and O’Kelly wrote ‘He was a very difficult man to know. He was always very reserved. His friends were few – that is, those he took into his intimate confidence. It was some years before I could say I had won his confidence.’34
Lyons thought ‘In organisation affairs he oft-times failed to check an abuse through his inability to realise that he held any sort of authority, and in no possible circumstances could he ever be conceived in the position of ordering people about their duties.’35 Griffith wrote in the United Irishman of 24 June 1899: ‘We have at all times opened our columns to our critics. The want of a free, tolerant, and intelligent public opinion in Ireland is directly traceable to the Irish politicians and their press.’ This willingness to permit a range of views to be expressed in his papers, however admirable, allowed people such as F.H. O’Donnell and Oliver Gogarty to indulge their prejudices in a manner that continues to dog Griffith’s reputation. Maume believes that ‘Like many professional unmaskers, Griffith’s scepticism shaded into paranoia, and he was susceptible to demented cranks.’36
However, Griffith was also at times stubborn in his interpretation of a question, and this offended some nationalists who failed to change his mind. Tongue-in-cheek, his friend Padraic Colum later wrote:
People in Dublin said he was intolerant of ideas, and that he preferred to have with him second-rate men who accepted the whole of his doctrine rather than first-rate men who differed from him on a point. I must say that I never knew any of the first-rate men who differed from him on a point offering their services to him.37
Colum may have had in mind persons such as Patrick Pearse. Pearse, like de Valera, did not join Sinn Féin before 1916. Indeed, in an open letter that he published as editor of An Barr Buadh on 18 May 1912, Pearse admitted ‘I have never loved the same child [Sinn Féin].’ But this did not deter him from urging Griffith to change before it was too late. As Sinn Féin weakened, Pearse wrote he was ‘sorry to see its father being killed.’ While he described Griffith as narrow-minded, distrustful and overbearing, he confessed that the latter was also best placed in Ireland to lead the movement, and thought it a great pity that Griffith might fail because nobody else could work under his leadership.
If some found Griffith difficult, others were more sanguine. In 1917 the socialist Cathal O’Shannon told the Irish Labour Party leader Tom Johnson,
Arthur Griffith of course is narrow and stubborn – always was and I suppose always will be. I, however, have found that I can always get along with him even when we differ. Most of our people on both sides have a way of saying things that might be more effectively said in another way – there is a great deal in the way a thing is said.38
Notably, even a number of those who supported the opposing side during the civil war, such as Seán T. O’Kelly and Maud Gonne, later wrote kindly of Griffith.
One of those who disliked Griffith was the writer Sean O’Casey, who opposed the treaty. He mocked Griffith’s championing of Thomas Davis, the hero of Young Ireland, and even sneered at Griffith’s gait:
Right enough, there was Up Griffith Up Thomas a Davis, hunched close inside his thick dark Irish coat, a dark-green velour hat on his head, a thick slice of leather nailed to his heels to lift him a little nearer the stars, for he was somewhat sensitive about the lowness of his stature. His great protruding jaws were thrust forward like a bull’s stretched-out muzzle; jaws that all his admirers spoke of, or wrote about, laying it down as an obvious law that in those magnificent jaws sat the God-given sign of a great man … As plain as a shut mouth could say, he said he was Erin’s strong, silent man. What was he thinking of as he stood there, grim and scornful?39
Dan McCarthy, who worked with Griffith, also thought that he put a cork wedge in his boots to make himself higher. Griffith did walk unusually, in footwear made for him by Barry’s of Capel Street, perhaps because of a minor disability. In South Africa from 1897 to 1898 he was nicknamed ‘Cuguan’, an approximation of the sound made by doves and attributed alternatively to his gentleness with black employees who were accustomed to brutality and whippings or to the manner of his walking.40 He often used ‘Cuguan’ as one of the pseudonyms on his articles.
James Moran, an early acquaintance of Griffith, described him as ‘One of the finest men it was ever my good fortune to meet; modest, sensitive, courageous, clean-minded, with a keen sense of humour, he was utterly selfless, a friend in need, and a boon companion, who could discuss almost any subject without obtruding himself.’41
Reading, Swimming and Chess
Throughout his life Griffith treasured time with books. At the National Library, for example, he and a friend spent many nights searching in old papers for poems by James Clarence Mangan that were hard to identify because of the widespread use of pen names then. Mangan greatly appealed to Griffith, as he did to James Joyce who spoke publicly about him in 1902.42 Mangan’s classic poem ‘Kathleen-Ni-Houlahan’ was a source of inspiration for Yeats’ play about that particular personification of Ireland, a play with which (as will be seen) Griffith said he helped Yeats. On Saturday afternoons Griffith also visited booksellers on the quays, and bought many ‘twopenny or threepenny bargains’: ‘In his humble home’, wrote one friend, ‘he was the despair of his mother – books for breakfast, books for dinner, and books by the light of a halfpenny candle after the rest had gone to bed’.43 Another friend, James Starkey (the writer ‘Seumus O’Sullivan’), visited him when he lived in Summerhill: ‘Sometimes I would accompany him to that old house, a strange house with a low wall in front of it, and talk far into the night amidst the chaos of books with which his room was heaped. For he was an omnivorous reader.’44 Patrick Carey, Griffith’s fellow tenant in Summerhill, described him as ‘very quiet and hard-working’. He added that Griffith ‘used to work till all hours of the night … in a little front parlour room, facing Buckingham Street. He called it his “den”. He had a table and chair in it and did all his research and writing there. He would be up till two and three o’clock in the morning.’45 But Griffith liked fresh air too. He was a keen swimmer all his life, bathing regularly at Clontarf or the Bull Wall or further afield in Sandycove:
Although he worked in his office like an insect, although he would round off his day by going into the National Library and reading until ten o’clock, Arthur Griffith was very much an open-air man. Every day, when the water was not absolutely chilling, he swam in the sea; the vigorous constitution that he had and his persistent exercise kept him in good condition: often, however, he showed weariness and strain.46
He had ‘amazingly strong muscular arms’, declared Robert Brennan ‘which he attributed to his early gymnastic training and his regular daily swim’. He also had something of a reputation as a boxer, and he surprised Brennan and other fellow inmates interned in England by the ease with which he scaled a ten-foot wall, on which there was apparently no foothold, in order to retrieve a handball.47
He enjoyed playing chess, a pastime that suited his reserved demeanour and his reputation for calm, strategic thinking. He wrote to thank friends who, for his thirty-eighth birthday, gave him a ‘beautiful chess board and chessmen’. True to type, he feared that it might distract him from his work. He sometimes played with friends in a popular café on O’Connell Street – the ‘DBC’, later destroyed during the 1916 Rising. One friend with whom he is said to have ‘often’ played chess was Abraham Briscoe, father of Dublin’s first Jewish lord mayor, Robert. Griffith, when interned, also passed time playing or teaching chess. On
