Lower Sackville/O’Connell St, Dublin, after the 1916 Rising, with Nelson’s Pillar and (first on right) the shell of the Dublin Bread Company (DBC). As noted in Ulysses, nationalists met for chat and chess in the DBC tearooms, a haunt of Griffith (National Library of Ireland [KE116]).
Nights at The Bailey
Seán T. O’Kelly recalled that ‘Griffith, though never a heavy drinker, would take one or two bottles of stout during the course of the night’, while friends sat around and discussed literary and political topics.49 He liked to meet his acquaintances at an establishment just off Grafton Street that Parnell had also frequented, as one of them later wrote:
Griffith made The Bailey his own particular haunt, all the more so since his other rendezvous, Davin’s pub, The Ship, in Fleet St., had been destroyed in the Rising … He generally arrived some time after seven o’clock and made for the smoke room upstairs on the second floor. This was a small room, with two windows looking out on Duke St … Griffith had his own special seat … on the leather couch that ran along the inner wall that divided that room from the dining-room, between the fire-place and the window.
Should you enter the smoke room early in the evening, you would be sure to see ‘A.G.’, as he was always referred to, ensconced in his corner, a cigarette in his mouth, a silver tankard of stout on the table before him, going through a great pile of newspapers and journals. As he scrutinized the printed matter, he would now and again mark, with a blue or red pencil, passages that struck him for reference in his articles … When the last paper was duly scanned, A.G. would put them aside with a sigh of relief and join in the talk and discussions with his friends … And of friends he had many and diverse, attracting them from every class and level, high and low, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, atheists. Indeed, their social, religious and political variety was as astonishing as their personal and temperamental differences not to say clashes and contests.
However, having so written, the barrister and land commissioner Kevin O’Shiel noted that ‘Griffith’s part in those discussions was mainly that of a listener … speech he only resorted to when he felt he had something to say that was worth saying, and then he said it in the fewest possible words and with a most un-Irish lack of adjectives.’ O’Shiel added:
Griffith had two marked habits that one could not fail to notice. One was a habit of blinking his eyes. He was short sighted and always wore pince-nez; but I think the blinking was not due to his sight but to his innate shyness and sensitiveness. The other habit was that of every now and again pulling up his neck-tie. He could never make the usual tie knot, and so had to confine his tie through a gold ring which required constant adjusting.50
At closing time Griffith seldom walked alone to O’Connell Street. Usually one of his friends walked with him to Nelson’s Pillar where he boarded a tram.51 Some people who encountered him in public felt ignored. George Lyons wrote ‘he often confessed to me that he never knew who a person was until he heard their voice.’52 One evening, for example, Griffith was with a group when Eddie Lipman, a young doctor on leave from the war in Europe, joined them in uniform. Griffith did not give him a look of recognition. Lipman wanted to chat with Griffith but misunderstood Griffith’s demeanour as coolness towards the uniform and left. When Griffith heard of this a moment later he went to find Lipman, and stood talking with him in College Green.53 However, not everyone who hailed Griffith respected him. His solicitor and ‘close friend’ Michael Noyk told the Bureau of Military History of an occasion when Griffith was walking home with Seamus O’Sullivan from The Bailey and ‘an Irish-Party man, or maybe an A.O.H. man, made some nasty remark as Griffith was passing and pulled his hat. Griffith turned round and gave him a punch, knocking him down, even though Griffith had very bad sight and had to wear glasses.’54
James Moran remembered that one day, as he and his friends swam, ‘a very powerful shower of rain came down. We made for the dressing boxes for cover, but noticed that Griffith remained in the water, and was swimming in circles. Showing off was a thing he was never known to practise, so we shouted at him to come in.’ Immediately Griffith made for them, and they found him exhausted. They helped to dry and dress him before heading off for the nearest pub ‘where after a drop of good whiskey he was himself again’. Moran says Griffith explained ‘When the shower came down it splashed the water into his eyes, and his sight, always a little weak, became blurred. He couldn’t see what direction he was swimming in, but he gave no sign he was in distress. A most remarkable man!’55
5
Ballads, Songs and Snatches
Griffith had a musical ear, and it heard not only pleasant harmonies but also the voices of Irish people articulating in song their grief and scorn. He often crossed the Liffey to the Liberties, an old area of the city adjacent to Cook Street where his future wife lived until 1900. He met friends in the convivial surroundings of McCall’s ‘quaint old tavern’ at 25 Patrick Street. There, near St Patrick’s Cathedral, he would ‘listen to good talk about ballad poetry and old Dublin streets and people’. James Clarence Mangan had once frequented the pub, being a friend of an earlier McCall. At the time that Griffith used to go there ‘one could still be shown the actual place once favoured by Mangan, and even occupy his accustomed chair or bench’.1 Outside during the day, as an old photograph shows, a variety of street traders sold vegetables, shellfish and clothing among other items. Griffith also liked The Brazen Head pub nearby, with its table at which the patriot Robert Emmet was believed to have written. One of his earliest and strongest memories was said to have been of an ‘ancient’ female relative ‘who saw the dogs of Thomas St lap up a martyr’s blood [Emmet was executed there in 1803]’ singing defiantly ‘When Erin First Rose’.2
From an early age then Griffith was attuned to street ballads, which were a form of popular culture and a way to get a political message out. One of the first discussions of the Irish Transvaal Committee, when Griffith and Gonne decided to oppose Britain’s involvement in the Boer War, concerned ‘the practicability of utilising local ballad singers in singing appropriate songs against enlistment’.3 Griffith himself composed ballads for that purpose, with McCracken noting that, while ‘the Boer war did not throw up enduring works of literature, it did produce a rich literary legacy in the form of ephemeral doggerel. Much of this was written by Griffith’, some under his pen name Cuguan.4 He distinguished ballads from what he saw as the commercial vulgarity of music-hall singers with their English airs, complaining ‘They [our readers] have seen the old music forsaken for the jingles of Cockneydom, the songs that made men neglected for the things that reduce men to mere animals.’5
Patrick Street, Dublin, looking north, c.1895. McCall’s tavern is on the left (National Library of Ireland [L_ROY_05934]).
When he was fourteen, Griffith won copies of two books of Irish songs and ballads. They were awarded for his attendance and performance at Irish history classes of the Young Ireland Society, and were presented to him by the society’s president, veteran Fenian John O’Leary. According to a contemporary report, the books were Barry’s Songs of Ireland and a collection of ballads and poetry by ‘Duncathail’.6 On that day, O’Leary urged the rising generation to seek the ideal of Thomas Davis, whom Griffith was long to champion. It had been intended that Davis would, had he lived longer, edit the volume of ballads that Barry actually edited and that was first published in 1845. Barry, of whose collection Griffith now had a prize copy, informed readers that he ‘of course, rejected those songs which were un-Irish in their character or language, and those miserable slang productions, which, representing the Irishman only as a blunderer, a bully, a fortune-hunter, or a drunkard, have done more than anything else to degrade him in the eyes of others, and, far worse to debase him in his own’.7 Barry, like many other nationalists in the nineteenth century, contended
