Cpt T. Mayne Reid - The County Down Cowboy Who Inspired Roosevelt & Nabokov

* This is it folks! My most obscure story yet, and that's saying something if you've read past blogs, covering everything from tractor development in Ulster & hamster hunting in the Yemen to the strange sport of Road Bowling.

But I do find this story intriguing. So I'm compelled to share. It's the true tale of the Ulster Presbyterian Cowboy who lit up the lives of schoolboys all over the world with his romantic tales of adventures in exotic lands from Tibet to Texas. It's the story of the now totally forgotten Captain Thomas Mayne Reid.

* He was, in terms of sales and reach, the most successful Irish author of the 19th Century. His breathless tales of adventure (and botany) amongst the plains Indians of North America or the Lamas of Kathmandu were translated into scores of languages and inspired everybody from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Vladimir Nabokov to Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz and US president Teddy Roosevelt.

In his time, he was considered a serious rival to Jules Verne. Edgar Allan Poe sang his praises. The two met in Philadelphia and became great drinking buddies.

Original Frontispiece For His Best Known Work

He fought, bravely, for the young US nation, built a Mexican hacienda in suburban London and married well, before dying of "severe melancholia", broke and forgotten. But his fame would live on for generations of schoolboys, including a young Vladimir Nabokov. who at 11 years of age, translated his best known novel "The Headless Horseman" from English prose into French alexandrines (a type of poetic metre favoured for romantic epics).

He was Captain Thomas Mayne Reid of Ballyroney, Co Down (and all parts North, South, East and West).

Born the son of a Presbyterian Minister in Ulster in 1818, he studied first for the church and then worked as a schoolteacher in his native land before becoming restless and heading for the United States in 1840.

He arrived in New Orleans and embarked on a colourful life as fur trapper, frontier school-master, and society writer for a Philadelphia newspaper (where he met with Poe and became a fast friend and drinking companion).

When war broke out with Mexico in 1846, he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the US Army, fought at Vera Cruz and was badly wounded while leading the charge at the battle of Chapultepec (where he would have witnessed the execution of scores of Catholic Irishmen, deserters from the US army who crossed the lines to fight with the Mexicans as the brave but doomed San Patricio Brigade - for their story, see here )

It was after the war, while recovering from his wounds, that he started to write seriously, while living in Ohio with an army buddy called Donn Piatt, who would go on to become famous in his own right as a Union General in the Civil War, wealthy publisher, patron of the arts and builder of gothic castles in the prairie lands of the West.

It was in London, in the early 1850's, that Reid began to find success with a line of adventure novels for boys, with titles like The Scalp Hunters, The Headless Horseman, White Squaw And Yellow Chief.

In total, he would write around 75 novels and many short stories and sketches - many were published in part-work in periodicals or sold as what would become to be known as dime-store novels.

These were florid, sentimental, wildly adventurous tales of cowboys and Indians, tales of the Prairie Lands and the West (only then being opened up), of Mexican banditos, brave cavalry officers, trappers, prospectors and explorers.

Caricature from Vanity Fair, 1873

One curious feature of the novels is his fascination with botany and natural history. Quite often, Mayne Reid would include the latin names of the plants or animals that featured in his stories, lines such as; "the cowboys heard a noise from just over the bluff, and began to crawl through the sage brush (Artemisia Tridenta).. far off in the distance, the sound of restless buffalo (Bison Bisonus)..".

One reviewer pointed out that the Irishman had missed his calling and should really be writing for a scientific journal.

His novels were hugely popular and found an audience around the world, especially in Poland and Russia where he was still a hero to schoolboys right up until the 1960s.

Reid became very famous and very rich. But he appears to have had a poor way with money and business. He sunk a large fortune into building an authentic Mexican Hacienda in North London (now, sadly gone) and found that as his style became very dated in the US and Europe, his money ran out quickly. He died in 1883 in London (at the age of 65 and is buried in Kensal Green Cemetary, his gravestone bearing a line from The Scalp Hunters; "This is 'weed prairie'; it is misnamed: It is the Garden of God."

He influenced a generation of schoolboys. President Teddy Roosevelt called him "one of the greatest inspirations of my life" and credited him with sparking a love of the outdoors and wild places which helped push the grown up Teddy into establishing the first National Parks.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - writer of the Sherlock mysteries - credited him as a major influence and inspiration.

Nabokov, in his autobiography Speak, Memory, name-checks all of the great writers who inspired him. But one gets more prominence than Blok, Pushkin, Flaubert, Kafka, Tolstoy etc. And that is the writer who "totally captivated me as a boy, a writer of Wild West Romances, Captain Thomas Mayne Reid".

Nabakov even admits to re-reading The Headless Horseman, his favourite, in adulthood and spends quite a while in his biography analysing the Mayne style and quoting his favourite lines (such as the description of a glass decanter glimpsed behind a Texan saloon-keeper; "an iris sparkling behind his shoulder".

He is almost totally forgotten now. But Thomas Mayne Reid inspired a generation of schoolboys to do everything from explore the world and run for president to put pen to paper.

**********

* This is from the Spectator Magazine of London, from the long obituary published shortly after the writer's death.

"The real cause of the popularity of Captain Mayne Reid's novels, which, as regards one or two of them, may last long, is that they gratify not the boyish, but the human love for pure romance, for stories in which there are practically fairies, though they are called Mexican ladies, and genii, though they are dressed as American filibusters, and devils, though they appear as Don Rafaels or Antonios ; and probabilities are set aside, and every- thing happens as it is convenient it should happen, and nobody cares a dump whether there are any laws, human or divine, or not. Adventures are adventured, and the adventurers fall into frightful dangers, and get out of them again by wonderful means; and laws, literary or other, are simply a burden. That is the secret of the "Arabian Nights," and it is that of Mayne Reid, as is also that of the indefinitely abler novels sold in such scores of thousands by Jules Verne"

ENDS 

Sam Beckett & The Tour de France

* Watching the Tour de France cycle race at the moment - and it got me thinking about Irish writer Samuel Beckett, his love of cycling and sport and the sporting connections of some other great Irish writers. So I decided to write this....

That's Young Sam Beckett - Second From Left

Sam Beckett was many things, great Irish writer, French Resistance Hero, personal school-run driver for the young André The Giant (a true story, as any Pub Bore like myself will tell you). 

After two years of chats with Beckett - Andre Got A Bike

Beckett was also a sports maniac - a first class cricketer for Trinity College, a fearsome amateur boxer, rugby-player, motorcyle racer and life-long Irish rugby supporter (it was said that publishers and others who dealt with him knew better than to bother Beckett when Ireland were playing). 

He loved bicycles, often mentioning them and using them as a motif in his works. And his best known play, Waiting For Godot, was apparently inspired (in part or name at least) by the Tour de France, and a hopeless old French pro-cyclist who was famous for always being last and always being late. 

The literary scholar Hugh Kenner, in his essay "The Cartesian Centaur" says that Beckett once, when asked about the inspiration for Godot, talked about "a veteran racing cyclist, bald, a 'stayer,' recurrent placeman in town-to-town and national championships, Christian name elusive, surname Godeau, pronounced, of course, no differently from Godot."

This Godeau was always the last to finish, sometimes trailing in hours behind the rest of the field, forcing frustrated race officials to miss their evening meals as the sun went down and they waited. And waited. And waited. 

Another story is that one day while walking through the streets of Paris Beckett stopped to ask members of a large crowd what they were doing. The weary spectators replied, "We are waiting for Godot," explaining that he was the oldest cyclist in the Tour de France, and had not yet passed by.

The Original Godot

That story may be a little too on-the-nose. But there really was a French pro-cyclist called Roger Godeau and (depending on who you believe) Beckett really did spend a pointless afternoon waiting for him once, while watching the famous Paris-Roubaix road race. 

The story gets even more sauce if you believe that - when Waiting For Godot had it's premier in Paris in 1953 - theatre goers who also knew their pro-cycling "got" the little joke about always waiting for this Godot character (and a few even laughed out loud - not a reaction normally associated with the famously downbeat masterpiece).

Godeau's nickname was "Popeye" (fans reckoned he looked a little like the cartoon sailor) and I often wonder if he was aware of the inspiration he provided to one of the greatest literary figures of the 20th Century?

And having done a little research into his record, it seems Roger did actually have some wins to his name and may not have been as hopeless as the Beckett story suggests. But why let that ruin a good tale?

"We've got a horse for ya!" - Bacon & Freud 

Another unique Irish artist of the 20th Century - the painter Francis Bacon - was a fiend for the horses - a hopeless gambler who knew the bookies of Soho very well and dropped many fortunes on beaten dockets. His appetite for roulette tables and race-horses was legendary - as was that of his best friend and fellow artist Lucian Freud.

Bacon's devotion to horse racing may be explained by his father's occupation - he was a noted race horse trainer on the famous Curragh in Kildare.

The two artists would bounce around the dives of Soho in the '50s and '60s, poring over a battered copy of the Racing Post and gambling away every penny they had. One bookie - a man called Alfie McLean - eventually agreed to take paintings from the two when they couldn't pay their debts. By the time Alfie died in 2006, he had 23 paintings by Freud (including many portraits of himself and his family) and around 8 Francis Bacon canvasses. Which were later auctioned off for just under £100m.

Brendan Behan loved the GAA and one of his most famous fashion accessories was a Rosette supporting the footballers of Co Down (for non GAA fans, the supporters of a team will often shout "Up Kerry!" or "Up Dublin!" depending on their county allegiance. Behan was a Dubliner who couldn't resist the surreal sentiments of a rosette that contradictorily proclaimed "Up Down!".)

Sometime soon - I'll explain how James Joyce's Ulysses is actually a searing indictment of anti-Semitism in the Gaelic Athletic Association.

But for now, we'll leave it there.

** Footnote - the reason why I know about Beckett & Godeau is because I was once sat next to a Beckett scholar at a dinner party. In the spirit of joining in,  I mentioned hearing this story and he basically looked at me (and my lack of a great college education) as some random idiot who was talking through his ass. And then voiced his opinion of me loudly.

So - instead of braining him with a wine-bottle - I went home and spent about two weeks researching the whole thing, so as to get my facts right for the next time I ran into Prof. J Smug-Condescending-Bastard.

I still haven't met the man again. But I come from a long line of patient, vengeful men.

And if you are reading this, Mr Professor, I'll be out there in the long grass. Waiting for you. You bastard.

**** hey! Thanks for reading!*******

A Little Bit Of Me On The Radio, Talking About Dining In Public Toilets

Hi,

Marian Finucane

I was on Irish radio recently - the Marian Finucane show on our national broadcaster, RTE.

I was talking about an amazing dining experience I had recently - we got the chance to have lunch in the Peer's Dining Room of the House of Lords, it's basically the most exclusive (and then some) dining room in London and normally host to the great and the good - including US presidents.

You can listen to the radio bit Here - there's a small preamble about the Irish Navy rescue missions in the Med - then me, talking about the House of Lords and then about the latest trend to hit London dining - restaurants and bars in former public toilets (seriously).

Peers Dining Room

The Peer's Dining Room in particular is an amazing experience and they are looking to open it again in September - if you are in London or can get there, I would recommend keeping an eye on the website - http://www.parliament.uk/ and regularly checking out the section on the Peer's Dining Room.



Joe

Summer In London? Try Something Different.

* Hi - regular readers might know that I am based in London at the moment - still doing/available for work in Ireland, but enjoying one of the great cities of the world, especially now that the summer has arrived. And London does summer very differently to Ireland - it's an actual season, with lots of sun and very little chance of having your kids battered senseless by hailstones while you cower in a park in Dublin or Galway.

ANYHOW! We have a lot of visitors who come to stay with us (popular, natch) and they always ask me about things they can do in London that are a little different from the usual touristy activities.

So here - in a bid to educate others but also have a handy one-stop guide for annoying visitors who "forgot" to get a six-pack of Tayto coming through duty-free - is my off-the-top-of-my-head guide to doing summertime in London differently....

"Sarf of the River at this time of night? You're 'aving a laff, aintcha!?"

LONDON! City of a thousand gourmet burger bars, botoxed Russian billionaires and prices so steep, you'll want to exit the Euro!

It's a fantastic city, and great in the summertime, if you can avoid the tourist hordes (don't go to Oxford Street and NEVER stand on the left on the Underground's escalators)

But what about the London that only smug blow-ins and locals (if you can find one, seriously, endangered species) know about?

I love exploring the city - and I love its more hidden spots, where you can see London from a different angle, get a real sense of a madly hectic, ever evolving city where people fondly remember the last wave of immigrants who used to live round 'ere before the current wave of immigrants. Seriously, just look at Brixton - posh-ish suburb in the '30s, Irish enclave in the fifties, Afro-Caribbean in the '70s and '80s and now full of South & Central Americans, hipsters and Africans (also a lot of Aussies, but that's more the Clapham end so don't go up there).

So in no particular order, and if you are gonna find yourself in London this summer I would recommend;

* Pop Brixton

Yes, yes, it's a "pop-up market" in a very hipsterish part of town - but don't let that put you off - this brand new addition to Brixton's thriving street-life is a collection of re-purposed shipping containers and cleverly designed walkways, outside seaingt areas and public spaces that is REALLY buzzing at the moment and offers lots of colour, good food, drink and great atmosphere - really worth putting at the top of your list if you are coming over the summer - more info Here


Also Brixton is also worth visiting for the great old reliable......

* The Brixton Market

Would seriously recommend this place if you are down in South London - just take the Victoria Line South to the very end, come out, turn left then left again down Electric Avenue (say hello to Eddy Grant) and you will find a series of huge, indoor arcades stuffed with weird shops and some of the best eating and drinking you will find in London. It's very trendy, but still very "local" and always surprises - take a few hours and wander around - great food, loads of outdoor seating and lots of colour.

Brixton's great for a wander - but being gentrified at an alarming rate - so get down there fast.

* Visit Eltham Palace

Bizarrely located in a pretty nondescript, dowdy part of Suburban East London, this Medieval royal palace, a childhood home to Henry VIII - has an amazing secret. The fabulously wealthy and glam society couple Stephen & Ginny Courtauld bought what was a derelict site in the 1930s and built a stunning art deco country house within the ancient moated grounds - grafting it onto the remains of the Medieval Great Hall.

Entrance Hall At Eltham Palace - Art Deco Glam 

It's a stunning example of British Art Deco that was only their home for a brief few years before and during WWII (when the couple and guests would sit on the lawn on a hill high over the city, looking at the Luftwaffe pounding away at London).

It's now run by English Heritage and may seem like a bit of a trip out of the city centre - but it is gorgeous (with great gardens) and can be done in a morning or afternoon.

More info Visit Eltham Palace 

* Franks Bar - Peckham

Frank's Some - View 

Hardly a secret to those in the know in London - but this bar and street food place on the top floor of a very dingy multi-story carpark in Peckham (another hipster hotspot) is well worth a visit for good food, drinks and vast panoramic views over London. Try and get there early-ish if it's a weekend and the sun is out because it gets RAMMED! Also - the toilets are a bit music-festival. So not for the squeamish. Their site is Here

* Have Lunch In A Toilet

Latest craze amongst novelty-obsessed diners in London? Having drinks, dinner etc in a former Victorian Public Convenience.

"Excuse me, where are the toilet...oh, right!" 

Seriously, there are now about 15 mostly high-end cocktail bars and cafes in porcelain palaces that once only had menu options Number 1 and Number 2.

The Attendant Cafe (geddit?) up on Foley Street in W1 offers high end coffee and sandwiches in a urinal based setting - really, you sit in former urinals.

These are all underground and all magnificent tributes to the love lavished on public toilets by the Victorians.

And "Story" down by Tower Bridge is a Michelin starred eatery in another disused Victorian WC.

See more about Attendant - on their website.


* The Grenadier Pub, Belgrave Sq

Down a mews-lined laneway in Belgrave, right in the heart of the embassy district, this is a small, lovely old London pub - a real star of the pub scene - if you find yourself in this neck of the woods and fancy a lovely pint of beer in a very unusual, quiet setting, check it out. Hard to find - would recommend you downlond the CityMapper app https://citymapper.com/ - a great, free way to navigate your way around the city.



* Gordon's Wine Bar - Villiers Street near Charing Cross

A real London Institution - a subterranean wine-bar open for 125 years - in the winter, a real cave, in the summer, a large, long outdoor seating area that's very popular with Londoners, post-work crowd etc - it's down near Charing Cross Stn, in a very busy part of London - and it can get VERY busy at the weekends, but definitely worth popping in for a glass of vino if you are in the area. And if it is too jammed - a tip, go to the nearby Sainsburys, get some drinks and go to the small park in front of
Gordon's just by the river - you can have a little alcoholic picnic in a lovely setting for little money (but just keep the bottles discreet, strictly speaking, you are not supposed to be drinking there - but everybody does).

* The Cutty Sark - Greenwich.

Greenwich is a bit hard to get to - and very packed with tourists - but go to the market for a bite to eat (great Lebanese falafel stall there) and then walk down the river path in front of the Royal Hospital to the Cutty Sark pub - pub itself is so-so - but the long row of tables right on the river bank give you a great view of the river and the city - the nearby Trafalgar Inn is also worth a visit.


* The Festival Hall On The SouthBank

Right - here's a good one - if you are down by the South Bank - the London Eye - in front of the Festival Hall main entrance there is LOADS of seating, right up over the river with views of the Houses of Parliament etc - and you can bring your own drink (or get drinks from the bar outside - or cheaper pints from the festival hall bar inside) - I LOVE this place on Fri afternoons - you see lots of colour and lots of people and can watch the boats going up and down the river and a Waterloo Sunset.

There is also an amazing terrace upstairs in the festival hall (see pic) which you can access for the price of a pint in the bar - gets busy at weekends - and they won't let you smoke up there - same goes for the nearby roof terrace (just look for the big yellow sign) so they can feck off.

* Brockwell Lido

Go for a swim in the city - this is near Brixton - a lovely, 50m outdoor pool that's very popular with Locals and visitors alike in the summer - again, tends to get jammed at sunny weekends so get there early - great food as well and a lovely cafe.

There are Lidos all over London - well worth checking out to see if there is one near where you are - the Serpentine Lake is one I plan to visit this summer.

* Hampstead

Yes, very posh and very expensive - but get the Tube up there and wander around - you can walk on the heath (good views over the city) visit the Lido or just hang in the cafes - very fashionable crowds and great place to have a goo at the quality.

* The French House, Soho

Soho is changing fast - and not for the better if you believe the anti-gentrification/keep Soho raw crowd. It's very busy but I would recommend the French House for drinks and the Bar Italia for coffee - to get a sense of the Old Soho that is very, very quickly disappearing.

* Artusi - Peckham

If you love your food - this relatively recent arrival on the scene is now reckoned to be one of the best in London - it's in a lovely part of Peckham (!) Bellenden Road, and there's a great pub called the Montpellier around the corner - book ahead though, it's jammers. Link - Artusi

If you can't get into Artusi - check out the Begging Bowl Thai resturant nearby - cheap-ish and reckoned to be one of the best in South London.

* AND FINALLY - THE WILTON MUSIC HALL - Tower Hamlets/East End

A rare survivor in a very unglam part of town - this is a mid-19th century music hall that - through a weird quirk of fate - survived being knocked down.

There are great music events on here all week and it's got fantastic history and surroundings - real, old London, down by the docks - see more Here




* I realise I am only scratching the surface here - but hopefully there are a few suggestions you'll think worth following up - thanks for reading!

The Ballerina, Her Mother And The Genteel Art of Forgery.

* This story is perhaps my most obscure yet. But the idea of  a genteel daughter of the Anglo-Irish peerage pulling off one of the most brazen art-frauds of the early 20th century appeals to me. Also, the fact that her daughter was the great, ferocious Doyenne of modern English ballet - Dame Ninette De Valois also adds a bit of colour. I really think Ealing Studios, or perhaps P.G. Woodehouse could have had a lot of fun with this one .........

* The gentlemen of Sotheby's Auction House on New Bond Street in London were in something of a pickle.

They had been consigned one of the greatest collections of antique Irish and British glass ever put together, the famous Harding Collection, for sale in their venerable auction rooms.

Ninette - 1925

But the collection of 17th and 18th century glass, previously estimated to be worth in the region of £16,000 (just over £1m in today's money) had failed to generate any excitement amongst the buyers. In fact, the Harding Collection was under something of a cloud. There had been whispers in the showrooms on New Bond street, dark mutterings about pedigree and provenance. Some had even gone so far as to utter the one word that could send a shiver of fear through the genteel staff of the world's greatest auction house, a business which had traded on its impeccable reputation since 1744.

That one word? "Fake!"

There was a huge sum of money on the line. The reputation of the great auction house, the ridicule facing a gullible, sadly departed philanthropist and millionaire. There was also the scandal that could wreck the career of the greatest ballerina and choreographer of the age, the fierce Irish dancer who had starred under Diaghilev at the Ballets Russes, worked with WB Yeats at the Abbey in Dublin and charmed the British Royals.

Dame Ninette de Valois was about to create one of the great dance dynasties, the company that would become The Royal Ballet. But in the early 1930s, one lady could still wreck all of that.

And that lady was her mother.

Elizabeth (Lilith) Graydon-Stannus, born into the Anglo-Irish aristocracy at a country house in Lacken, Co Wicklow in 1876 was an artist, entrepreneur and star of the British Art-Deco movement. She had become an expert in highly-collectible antique Irish glassware, established her own glass-works in amongst the post-war bohemians of Battersea in London and watched her daughter Ninette become one of the most celebrated prima-ballerinas and choreographers in the world. Ninette had changed her name from Edris Stannus to the more French sounding Ninette de Valois when she made her professional debut in London in 1911. Aged 13.

Ninette Aged 16 - Already a Seasoned Pro

 Ninette was a child prodigy. But also fiercely determined. She went from child dancer to prima-ballerina to Godmother of British dance through the 20th century. The Irish woman made a star of Fonteyn and sensationally brought Nureyev to London.

Her mother Lilith was, if one contemporary is to be believed; ""The greatest villain in the manipulation of the history of Irish Glass". 

Ms Graydon-Stannus might have begged to differ.

To her mind, she was not copying or faking rare and highly valuable antique glass - heaven forfend! She was merely "creating" and "improving".

Or as she once declared herself; "My endeavour is to create. Not to copy!"

And if the buyer, usually very rich but perhaps not expert collectors, were under the impression that they were actually paying for the real thing, well, these things happen, darling!

What Elizabeth Stannus did - as far as we can tell - was mix straight up forgery with very clever and sophisticated "reproduction" and "improving".

In some cases, she would take genuine old Irish glass pieces - decanters, goblets, etc - and "improve" them by getting her highly skilled workmen to do additional engraving and cutting, turning a commonplace, boring piece of glass worth £10 into a rare jewel worth £100.

Or, she would find old moulds, the ones used to produce the original pieces, and use them to churn out scores of new-old copies.

Elizabeth even went so far as to melt down old Irish glass to use its unique look and qualities to create highly convincing "reproductions" (even if that particular word was nowhere to be seen on the label).

It was clever, sophisticated and totally against the rules of the antiques business. It was fraud.

The real kicker is that Graydon-Stannus was something of a great artist herself - her highly colourful, beautifully designed Art-Deco pieces were very popular in their day and are hugely desirable to collectors today (look for the Gray-Stan mark in your local junk-shop).

She could produce modern classics - but she also had the skills and the, er, nerve to copy, fake and fool. And in her marvellously genteel way, charming the American visitors to London, hob-knobbing with the artistic elite of 1920s London, she set out to rake in the cash.

There has also been speculation that Lilith didn't stop at forging Irish antiques - she may have also tried her hand at famous contemporary names such as Lalique.

Strangely, it was the lady herself who gave the game away. In a speech to the Royal Society of Arts in 1926, she vehemently rejected growing claims that she was faking. But admitted that she owned old Irish moulds and had been working on reproducing the look and design of Old Irish Glass.

Lilith had literally written the book on Old Irish Glass - her handbook of that title had been considered at the time to be the bible on the subject, but today, the copy in the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford has a sticker on the front that says; "Use With Caution! Contains Many Factual Errors!"

The errors contained inside are mostly images and drawings of old Irish glass pieces, that had either been hacked-about or "created" by the lady herself.

Her reputation went into sharp decline. But it was too late for well-heeled buyers like Walter Harding, who visited her shop in Battersea in the 1920s and bought up almost her entire stock of "Old" Irish pieces.

When Harding - a millionaire philanthropist from Liverpool - died in the mid-1930s, his collection came up for sale in Sotheby's in London. Expected to fetch at least what he had paid for it, £16,000 (or almost £1m in today's money) - it sold for just £900 (£57k). Word about Elizabeth and her creative ways had obviously got around.

It should have been a huge scandal, perhaps resulting in legal action. Curiously, it was not. Some have speculated that her daughter Ninette - using her connections at the very top of British society - had the affair hushed up. There were rumours of some of the more irate customers being paid off, of favours being called in and mother being quietly packed off down the country.

The affair quickly died down. Sotheby's went on making money, Ninette went on building her Ballet empire and Lilith? Well, she is accused of many things, including creating such a mess of the history of Antique Irish Glass that many of her fakes may still be doing the rounds as the real thing.

But where's the harm? After all, new, old, fake or "improved", aren't they all simply lovely things?

Now, would you be interested in a lovely Jacobean wine goblet, at all? Fresh in from a gorgeous old Irish house..... so perfect! It looks as if it could have been made yesterday, darling!

**HEY! THANKS FOR READING!******* And by the way, if anybody is interesting in paying me to make a doc/write further about this, I will work for food. Also, antique glassware.

Easter 1916 - The Gorgeous Wrecks & The Cricket Bat That Died For Ireland.

* This is a piece I wrote for the Irish Independent newspaper - a personal take on the events of 1916 - the Easter Rising or Rebellion that hit loyal, peaceful Dublin like a thunderclap on a sunny Easter Weekend. I learnt about it in school - at the hands (and sometimes fists) of the Christian Brothers. But in recent years, I have tried to approach the events from a different angle.......

Captain Jack White - Free Lovin' Irish Revolutionary 

 * The Christian Brothers who taught me about Irish history presented Easter, 1916 as a heroic epic, the founding myth of our Republic.

They were muscular men, a generation or so on from the Rising, the War of Independence and our brutal Civil War, the latter being a subject that was still too raw to even mention in the classrooms of Cork in the 1980s.

They revered Pádraig Pearse, a teacher and strict disciplinarian after their own hearts, and believed in his doctrine of blood sacrifice, linking it to the men of 1798 and even further back to our original muscular Christian, brave, martyred Brian Boru.

Brian Boru - the High King of Ireland and scourge of the Vikings! - was presented in the same way we learnt about the early Christian martyrs, the Roman Legionnaires put to death for refusing to chuck their fellow Christians to the lions. 

In many ways, in their admiration for Pearse and mania for discipline, they were the paramilitary wing of the Catholic Church.

To my young, over-active imagination, Pearse was a cross between the hot-tempered Brother who tried to “bate” Irish into us and John Wayne at the Alamo, running his young volunteers through the tuiseal ginideach even as he fired his rifle from the burning wreck of the GPO.

In our homes, Michael Collins was revered, his portrait hanging alongside a picture of John F Kennedy and the Pope, Cork’s own Blessed Holy Trinity. DeValera was mentioned only in dark whispers, a bogey-man.

The events of 1916 didn’t seem real to us, even though they happened when our grandfathers were alive. And there was no connection made to the Troubles, to the nightly news reports about the Hunger Strikers, names such as Bobby Sands, heard as we sat around the table for our tea.

It is only in recent years, having gone back and looked at the events of 1916 for myself, that I have been able to find a way into the Easter Rising via some of the small, forgotten stories behind the Great Myth.

As a history nut, and having written a book about long forgotten Irish men who did everything from run the French slave trade to invading Imperial China, I see the small stories of individual men and women as a valuable way to approach Great Events from a different angle.

And 1916 has a wealth of small stories which can give us a sense of what it must have been like to live through those times, the sudden chaos, the trauma and the conflicting emotions and loyalties.

(The video below is only six minutes long and sets the scene well.)

One episode, a tragic side-show to the doomed struggle on O’Connell Street, gives us a striking picture of the confusion and tragedy of Dublin, Easter 1916.

It is the story of The Gorgeous Wrecks, how, on Easter Monday, April 24, a small party of volunteers occupying Clanwilliam House by Mount Street Bridge fired on a detachment of Home Defence Force volunteers.

The Home Defence men were a sort of Dad’s Army, mostly elderly Dubliners, loyalists, veterans of the British army and colonial wars. They wore armbands with the inscription “Georgious Rex” (King George) and their creaky, grey-haired ranks were known affectionately to Dubliners as “The Gorgeous Wrecks”.

The Wrecks had been out on an Easter Monday parade in full uniform and just stumbled into the volunteer strong-point. The 17 volunteers in Clanwilliam house opened fire, killing four of the Wrecks and wounding others before they realised, to what some later said was their horror, that these were not British Army regulars, but the Dad’s Army that Dubliners were accustomed to seeing parading on high-days and holidays. The jolly old Gorgeous Wrecks.

We could hardly find a better snapshot of a peaceful, loyal city of the Empire suddenly overwhelmed by sudden, shocking violence and confusion.

I am also drawn to the story of The Cricket Bat That Died For Ireland.

The Bullet Still In the Cricket Bat That Died For Ireland

This bat – now in the National History Museum – was in the shop window of Elvery's Sports in Sackville Street when it stopped a bullet from a British gun (the spent bullet still lodged in the bat is a .303). To me, this strange, very Anglo-Irish memento vividly represents the destruction and chaos of the Rising.

Contemporary accounts tell of street urchins looting bats, balls, lacrosse sticks and polo mallets from Elvery's and parading them like trophies around the edges of the fighting. One of the many surreal sights of a battle being fought in the heart of a busy, mercantile city.

Recently, I also came across the story of Captain Jack White, the son of an Ulster-born British Field Marshall and a decorated hero of the British Army himself.

Jack followed a strange path from Winchester Public School and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, fighting in the Boer War and then throwing in his commission to embrace radical socialism, free-love and the cause of Ireland.

It was White who brought his military experience to organising The Citizen’s Army. 

He did not fight in 1916 but when he heard his great friend James Connolly would be shot, he tried to organise the Miners of South Wales to come out on strike to put pressure on the British Government to commute the sentence.

White, who later went on to fight for the Republicans in Spain, battled sectarianism at home and tried to organise a socialist party in Ulster, was (in his own words) a miss-fit, one of the many men and women who saw the ideals of Connolly and brotherhood turn to dust in the years after 1916.

In the stories of Jack White, The Gorgeous Wrecks and the Elvery’s Cricket Bat, we can see past the epic myth, the cold revisionism and the strange, current need to treat 

Easter 1916 as some sort of profound, teachable lesson for modern Ireland.

Thanks to the internet and the great efforts of historians (academic and amateur) to put a wealth of history online, we can all now go back and look at the events of 1916, and look at the people and smaller events that never made the history books or the heroic myth.

These are the stories that I would tell about The Rising.

*** You can read more about the cricket bat Here - an excellent blog about its history and significance. 

**** HEY THANKS FOR READING**** 

The Pursuit of Happiness -The O'Shea Institute of Sociological Spoofery Comes Out On Gay Marriage.

* Everybody else has a Same Sex Marriage Referendum Blog. So Why Can't I?

"Is That A Girl or a Boy?" 

* Around the time I was leaving school and leaving home, two people that I knew took their own lives.

One was a middle-aged man, a friend of the family. The other was a young guy in my peer group, somebody I knew from around town, a quiet, friendly guy I would see at music gigs.

By the time it happened, I was already gone from my small city on the south coast. It was only years later that I really thought about what happened, and realised that both these men (well, one almost a boy) had almost certainly been gay. And they had looked at their lives in late 1980s Ireland and decided that they were not worth living.

But it was never talked about. Their deaths, the reasons behind them, the existence of gay people in our lives. I only really knew one Gay guy in our entire city. I hung out with him (shared an unhealthy obsession with The Smiths), but we never talked about why he, every weekend, he had to fight some twisted bastards who saw the blue streak in his hair, his clothes, his manner, and tried to pound him into the ground. I didn't really know how to talk about it and I think he didn't want to take the risk that I would stop being his friend. Around the time I left, he left too. Went to London to try and make a life.

It just wasn't talked about. It was never mentioned on the radio, on TV, in the newspapers. The first time I vaguely became aware of "otherness" was seeing Boy George And Culture Club on Top of the Pops and hearing my dad, like millions of other dads who witnessed the strangeness of that apparition, splutter; "Jesus Christ, is that Queerhawk a boy or a girl?".

It was only later that I found out that Boy George was working-class London-Irish. And as tough as that particular breed of people comes. Tough because he had to be.

My parents grew up in a cold, grey, utterly repressed and terrifying Ireland. I only found out recently that a Great Aunt, who helped to raise us, was forced to give up two children of her own because she was not married to the man she loved. They literally took the children from her in the hospital. Years later, she plucked up the courage to track down one of her daughters. When she went to her house, she had the door closed in her face. The shame was still there. On and on it went, down the generations. Those who could, left. Many who stayed endured misery and a kind of madness. Many - gay, straight, whatever, self-medicated via alcohol.

Ireland was a strange, cold place for so many. In 1990, in one of my first interviews as a student journalist, I talked to Richard Branson, who had shocked the country by offering condoms for sale over the counter at his Virgin Megastore in Dublin. Seriously, in the midst of the AIDS crisis, you basically couldn't buy condoms in Ireland unless you had a letter from your priest/doctor. Richard Branson is a polite, media-savvy man. But you could see he just wanted to shout; "What the F**K is WRONG with you people?"

For most of the '90s, I worked in a newspaper industry in Dublin that apparently employed no Gay men and women. Not one. LGBT people were invisible. Non-people.

David Norris. A Brave Human Being. And Great Craic. 

Homosexuality was still illegal in Ireland until 1993. It took the European Court of Rights and the fearless campaigning of a great Irishman called David Norris to force the Government to decriminalise it.

As recently as 2002, the newspaper I was working for had a front page "splash" - with Government Minister Brendan Howlin declaring; "I'm Not Gay!". There had been a whispering campaign against this popular politician, one which some say cost him the leadership of his party. So he felt he had to say it.

So on May 22nd, my country votes on Same Sex Marriage. The polls suggest the referendum should pass, though some are worried about the Irish habit of saying one thing to the pollsters and doing another in the voting booth. And there's Donegal, of course. Going on past form, Donegal may take the chance to bring back the death penalty or vote us into the Russian Federation.

Can't Argue With That 

But the vote is still very much in the balance.

There has been a loud, sometimes strange, often hysterical campaign against granting this basic civil right to Irish men and women. The veteran and respected journalist Bruce Arnold this week said we shouldn't vote Yes because we feel sorry for gay people.

Let that one sink in for a moment. "Banish your empathy, people of Ireland! It is merely a weakness of the flesh!"

The Catholic Church, once the power in the land, now grimly marching towards some dark, obscure place, says No.

The self-appointed experts say Say Same Sex Marriage will destroy the fabric of Irish society, lead to child abuse, compulsory gay adoption, cloning, cataclysmic genetic experiments in Leitrim, brother marrying sister and plumber marrying florist. Your basic frogs, blood and Elton John albums raining from the sky, scenario.

The arguments against Gay Marriage have mostly been high, wild and crazy. And have been shouted endlessly on the airwaves and in print by a class of people who up until very recently had total control of our society and yet now claim (in their newspaper columns and on endless TV and radio appearances) that they are a persecuted minority without a voice.

One leading politician and Noted Idiot said this weekend past that he was against Gay Marriage as he didn't want "any Elton John scenarios". We'll leave that one to future historians to work out.

What they are really saying - actually, screaming - is; "We are terrified. We once ruled this land. We imposed our morality on a cowed people. And now they are turning their backs on us, on Mother Church, on the old ways. We have lost our power."

Divorce didn't destroy the fabric of our society. Allowing gay men and women to live out in the open without fear of criminal prosecution didn't destroy our country. Giving them the same rights to marriage as enjoyed by the rest of the country won't either. You really would have to be in full flight from reality to think otherwise.

Rock On, Bishop Michael Burrows

Some people of faith have stood up for the Yes side. Church of Ireland Bishop Michael Burrows has said; " 'The rights of gay people have become, very properly, the great justice issue of our time just as the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women were in the past'.

Of course, being a Godless Protestant, he would say that. 

So I think back to those two human beings that took their own lives that year I left school. And the countless lives that were lived in misery, fear and waste because the Catholic Church and others has had such a bizarre obession/problem with human sexuality. With love, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Y'know, your basic Christian-values stuff.

I think Ireland has changed greatly. Since Gay people have been allowed to live openly amongst us, the famous, probably mythical block known as "Middle Ireland" has seen them for what they are. Brothers, sisters, friends, neighbours, sons, daughters, barmen, brickies, politicians and cab-drivers.

I think most people see same sex marriage for what it is. A basic civil rights issue. And more importantly, a Happiness Issue. We want our friends, neighbours and family to have that chance of being happy.

I think we will vote Yes with a significant majority on May 22nd because most Irish people will look at the real issues with clear eyes and decide it is the right thing to do. The human thing to do. And yes, the Christian thing to do.  

So hopefully, we will choose happiness. Knowing we were mired in misery for too bloody long. 

One final question - how could any country that loves the Eurovision soooo much (and guys, that's another thing we need to talk about), possibly vote against Same Sex Marriage? 

Think about it, people. And VOTE! 

***HEY, thanks for reading!***