On This Day -6.11.1929 The Gaelic League bans ‘foreign dances’ and the ‘Down with Jazz’ campaign begins

Posted on November 6, 2015 by Myles Dungan

We are a nation given to bans and boycotts. The latter expression, famously, has its origins in the Land War of the early 1880s. For many years the Gaelic Athletic Association maintained a ban on members playing soccer, rugby, hockey and cricket. During the so-called ‘Economic War’ of the 1930s we were encouraged to ‘burn everything English except their coal’ – a phrase that dates back to Jonathan Swift in the 1720s. But few campaigns can have been as bizarre as the hysterical antipathy towards jazz music in the 1920s and 30s.

The Great War, in which millions died, was, not unnaturally, followed by a period of anti-establishment moral and political lassitude. On the basis of what had gone on between 1914-18 many young European and American citizens chose to spend the next decade operating on the basis of the axiom ‘eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die’. The trenches and industrialised killing gave way to the Charleston, bobbed hair and shorter skirts. It was, to many older citizens who had spent the war in their clubs and drawing rooms, the collapse of civilization as they knew it. Critics of modern music and dance saw nothing particularly untoward in mass slaughter but were appalled at the excesses of the depraved Black Bottom and incendiary jazz music.

In Ireland post-war mass unemployment, abject poverty and wholesale emigration seemed to be of less significance to our legislators and the Roman Catholic hierarchy than stopping people listening and, far worse, dancing, to the devil’s music. The Cumann na nGaedhal government even set up a committee of investigation (the Carrigan Committee) which consulted expert witnesses on how the morality of Irish youth might be safeguarded against such corrupting foreign influences as Louis Armstrong and Glen Miller.

County Leitrim emerged as the last bastion of Gaelic civilisation when the parish priest of the village of Cloone, Father Peter Conferey lambasted jazz from the pulpit and urged people to sing Irish songs and wear home spun clothing only. A demonstration under the auspices of the Gaelic League was organized in Mohill. It was reported to have been attended by 3000 people, some of whom carried banners with slogans such as ‘Down with Jazz’ and ‘Out with paganism’. A supportive message was read at the meeting from the Catholic Primate of Ireland Cardinal McRory who described jazz dancing as ‘suggestive … demoralising [and] a fruitful source of scandal and of ruin.’ The Cardinal speculated that listening to such debauched music had been ‘the occasion of irreparable disgrace and life-long sorrow’ for many young Irish women. Given that jazz had been barely a decade in Ireland the ‘life long’ bit was probably something of a stretch

At the same meeting the Secretary of the Gaelic League, Sean Óg O’Ceallaigh, attacked no less a personage than the rather ascetic Fianna Fail Minister for Finance Sean McEntee. He was condemned for permitting Radio Eireann to play jazz music occasionally. O’Ceallaigh said, rather improbably, of the austere McEntee that ‘Our Minister for Finance has a soul buried in jazz and is selling the musical soul of the nation … He is jazzing every night of the week.’

In January 1934 the Leitrim Observer fulminated editorially against what it called ‘Saxon’ influences. ‘Let the pagan Saxon be told that we Irish Catholics do not want and will not have the dances and the music that he has borrowed from the savages of the islands of the Pacific.’ The racist theme was later taken up by Fr. Conefrey when he described jazz as being ‘borrowed from the language of the savages of Africa’ – so quite a geographical spread there. He then went on to attack the Gardai insisting that many members of the force were guilty of organizing depraved all night jazz dances. A far cry indeed from the Policeman’s Ball.

The campaign had the effect of forcing the introduction of the 1935 Dance Halls Act requiring all those who wished to organize such an event to apply for a licence. This, ironically, had the side-effect of making Irish traditional dances in rural homes illegal. Be careful what you wish for.

The Gaelic League decreed that anyone attending ‘foreign’ dances where jazz music was played, risked expulsion, 86 years ago, on this day

Below proof that some campaigns can, laced with irony, prove very useful

On This Day – Drivetime – 30.10.1751 – Birth of playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Posted on October 30, 2015 by Myles Dungan

He was one of the outstanding English playwrights and politicians of the 18^th century. Except like many other exceptional exponents of the benign art of theatre and the dark arts of politics he wasn’t English – he was Irish.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan was born in Dorset Street in Dublin in 1751. His surroundings were slightly more fashionable then than they are now. He was probably born to write for the theatre. His mother, Frances was a playwright and novelist, his father Thomas was, for a long time, an actor-manager.

His budding theatrical and political careers almost failed to get off the ground, however. Sheridan, to defend the honour of his future wife, Elizabeth Linley, was obliged to fight a duel against one Thomas Matthews, a rival for Elizabeth’s affections, who also happened to be married. Matthews had churlishly defamed her in a newspaper article when she rejected his advances.

The two men met twice in 1772. Swords were the weapons of choice on both occasions. At the first encounter, in London, Matthews posed few difficulties for the Irishman. He was quickly disarmed, begged for his life and was forced to retract the defamatory article. However, Matthews insisted on a rematch and Sheridan decided to oblige him. The second meeting, in Bath, was a much bloodier affair that Sheridan barely survived. According to contemporary accounts he was borne from the field with his opponents broken sword sticking from his ear and his whole body covered in wounds.

Sheridan survived and three years later produced his first play The Rivals a sparkling comedy that included the character of a hot-blooded and mean-spirited Irish duelist Sir Lucius O’Trigger. The comedy, coincidentally, is set in Bath. There is more than one way of gaining revenge on a loathsome adversary.

However, the most memorable character in the play was the sublime Mrs. Malaprop, a lady much given to hilarious verbal solecisms. Hence such infamous howlers as her reference to ‘an allegory on the banks of the Nile’ and ‘he can tell you the perpendiculars’. She also refers to another character as ‘the very pineapple of politeness.’

His greatest work, which appeared two years later, in 1777, was The School for Scandal – still performed today it matches and surpasses most of Oscar Wilde’s comedies of manners with it’s acid observations on contemporary social mores and the endless capacity for evil gossip in 18^th century London society.

In 1780 Sheridan essentially bribed his way into the House of Commons, as you often did in those days. The franchise in his constituency was fortunately small as each vote cost him a reported five guineas. In parliament he allied himself to the Whig faction led by Charles James Fox and sided with the American Colonials in their disputes with England. In one celebrated and highly theatrical aside in 1793 his fellow Irishman Edmund Burke was ranting about French revolutionary spies and saboteurs. After a rhetorical flourish to emphasise the dangers of allowing Johnny Foreigner access to England Burke threw a knife onto the floor of the Commons. This drew the retort from Sheridan ‘where’s the fork?’

Although he was an accomplished parliamentary orator and briefly held political office one of Sheridan’s reasons for retaining his seat in the Commons was probably to evade his creditors. When he lost his seat in 1812 they pounced. He died in poverty three years later but is buried in Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Sheridan is responsible for many memorable, pithy and witty phrases. He once said of a political opponent that ‘the right honourable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.’ In his 1779 play The Critic he has one of his characters make the very politically apposite observation that ‘the number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed.’

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, playwright, politician and sometime duelist, was born 264 years ago, on this day.

On This Day – 9 October 1913 – The Birth of golfer Harry Bradshaw

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Myles Dungan

He was the son of a professional golfer and three of his brothers followed the same calling. Harry Bradshaw was Ireland’s first golfing superstar, a proven winner with a jovial personality that endeared him to one and all and helped popularize the professional game in this country

Bradshaw played his golf out of the picturesque Delgany club in Co. Wicklow, where he was treated with respect and admiration. However, it was not always thus where professional golfers were concerned in those days. Even today golf would not be noted for its egalitarianism. In the 1940s and 1950s – when Bradshaw was in his pomp – it was a thoroughly elitist sport and many of those in its professional ranks were working-class men who often came to the game via the caddying route. They would serve their apprenticeships humping bags for well-heeled club members, sneak in as much practice as was tolerated, become assistant professional and fix the clubs and shoes of the same members. They would then, if they were fortunate, become fully-fledged professionals and play occasional tournaments for filthy lucre. This did not, of course, entitle them to admission to the clubhouse. They were, after all, mere employees. To enter the holy of holies they would usually have to be accompanied by a member. There is an enormous social, cultural and sporting gap between Harry Bradshaw and Rory McIlroy.

Bradshaw, dominated the Irish professional golfing scene from the time of his first Irish PGA championship victory in 1941. He went on to win it for the next three years, and took first prize ten times in all.

But it was on the international scene that he really made his mark. In the days prior to any notion of a PGA European Tour the Irish Open championship was a significant event. Brad first won it in 1947 and again two years later. He took the prestigious Dunlop Masters in 1953 and again in 1955. He played on three Ryder Cup teams during this period as well, taking on the Americans in 1953, 1955 and 1957 – the latter event, at Lindrick in England, giving Britain and Ireland its first win in the tournament since 1933.

In 1958, along with Christy O’Connor Sr. he shared in an Irish world championship victory when they combined to win the Canada Cup – now the World Cup – in Mexico. This despite the fact that Bradshaw suffered nosebleeds because of the altitude.

But his greatest achievement was also his greatest tragedy. In the 1949 Open Championship at the Royal St. George’s course in Sandwich in Kent he was inspired and took the great South African Bobby Locke to a play-off. It has always been argued that, but for a rush of blood to the head during the second round, Bradshaw would have won that tournament. He had driven off the 5^th tee and was walking down the fairway towards his ball when he realized that it had come to rest against a large piece of glass from a broken bottle. He could probably have dropped without penalty, he could well have waited for a ruling, but, somewhat rashly, though in the spirit of the game at the time, he opted to play the ball as it lay and duffed it. Had he been more patient he might well have won the tournament outright. Sadly, he lost the playoff to Locke who went on to win three more British Opens.

A few weeks later in the Irish Open Golf Championship at Belvoir Park in Belfast Locke was part of a distinguished field. This time, however, Bradshaw had the measure of the great South African and took the trophy. It was revenge of a sort but scant consolation for his failure to take the British Open. Bradshaw must rank alongside Christy O’Connor Senior as the greatest Irish golfer never to have won a Major. However, his heyday was at a time when the notion of ‘Majors’ was not as well developed as it is now and it was virtually impossible for Irish pros to play in the big money tournaments in the USA

Harry Bradshaw, the ebullient, trailblazing Irish professional golfer was born in Delgany, Co. Wicklow 102 years ago, on this day.

On This Day – 2 October 1852 – Journalist and politician William O’Brien is born in Mallow

Posted on October 5, 2015 by Myles Dungan

He was argumentative, controversial, committed, exasperating, vicious, divisive, loyal and lots of other adjectives besides, some positive, some pejorative.

William O’Brien was a poacher turned gamekeeper. For the early part of his life he was a muck-raking nationalist journalist, before devoting himself almost entirely to politics. Born into a Cork Fenian family – his brother was a member of the IRB and he may well have been sworn in himself – he was a campaigning newspaperman in his youth in the late 1870s writing for the stuffy Freeman’s Journal. Although his often explosive articles got his proprietor, the MP Edmund Dwyer Gray into plenty of trouble there was a huge mutual admiration between the Dublin grandee and the Cork firebrand.

In 1881, still in his twenties, he was asked by Charles Stewart Parnell to become the first editor of the new Land League newspaper United Ireland. He took on the task with gusto – so much so that he was arrested and jailed after barely a dozen issues. Totally undeterred O’Brien continued to edit the newspaper from Kilmainham jail, using the same underground communications system that allowed his leader to continue to conduct his passionate and adulterous relationship with Katharine O’Shea.

After the Land War United Ireland became the mouthpiece of Parnellism and an equal opportunities offender. O’Brien would, on a weekly basis, attack the Liberal and Tory parties in England, the Royal Irish Constabulary and Dublin Metropolitan Police, landlords, Unionists, Unionist journalists, nationalist journalists who weren’t nationalist enough, nationalist MPs who were equally unconvincing in their nationalism and anyone else who, in his eyes, was not stepping up to the mark. On finishing reading the very first issue of United Ireland in August 1881 the Chief Secretary for Ireland, William E. Forster was reported to have asked ‘Who is this new madman?’

He was a thorn in the side of the establishment, occasionally of his own party, and arguably he was even a thorn in his own side. He was utterly relentless and fearless in his journalism. That’s not to suggest that he was fair – he was anything but. However he was prepared to risk some stupendous libel suits in order to get his version of the truth out. It helped that for many years he wasn’t really worth suing, he had no personal resources, famously living out of two suitcases in the Imperial Hotel on Sackville Street – now Clery’s department store.

Although he could at times be a journalistic windbag he also had an eye for the pithy phrase or aphorism. When the Tory Prime Minister, Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury in 1887 appointed his own nephew Arthur Balfour as Irish Chief Secretary – in the process giving rise to the immortal phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’ -O’Brien noted the languid Tory’s predilection for playing golf and dubbed him ‘Mr.Arthur Golfour’ . Balfour, however, had the last laugh, throwing O’Brien in jail many times over the next four years.

While it broke his heart he opposed Parnell after the O’Shea divorce case but played little part in the vicious hounding of the former Irish party leader which only ended with his death in October 1891. Thereafter O’Brien temporarily disappeared from active politics. He re-emerged at the end of the decade to re-assert his dedication to agrarian politics by forming the United Irish League. It was under the auspices of this grass roots organisation that the Irish party split was healed. But O’Brien had a penchant for falling out with people and he soon moved on.

His latter years as a politician and journalist saw him at the helm of a Cork-based nationalist splinter group the All For Ireland League and editing the Cork Free Press.

By the time of the 1916 Rising, like many other nationalist politicians of his generation he’s had his day. Although highly respected by many of the more extreme Republicans who came to dominate Irish post-WW1 politics there was no place for him in the new dispensation and it was time to write a number of highly readable, entertaining and utterly unreliable memoirs. He died in 1928.

William O’Brien, Irish father of the so-called ‘New Journalism’ of the late 19^th century was born in Mallow, Co. Cork 163 years ago, on this day.

On This Day – Drivetime – 25 September 1880 The Murder of Lord Mountmorres

Posted on September 29, 2015 by Myles Dungan

It would probably be safe to say that for every week Ireland spent in the throes of rebellion in the course of our history we spent a year involved in serious and often violent land agitation.

The 1830s and 1880s in particular were times of agrarian uproar as the Tithe War, the Land War and the Plan of Campaign dominated the political and social agendas. From the Land War came the word and the practice of ‘boycotting’ – a peaceful but effective form of isolation of despised and uncooperative landlords. But sometimes the tactics employed on both sides were less than peaceful and distinctly unpalatable. The term ‘Ribbonism’ was used to describe the activities of the members of illegal secret societies who took direct action against those opposed to the interests of the tenants. The term Royal Irish Constabulary was used to describe the response of the authorities.

One of the myths of the periods of agrarian violence that frequently bedevilled rural Ireland was that members of Ribbon societies spent their evenings running around with blackened faces killing landlords. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not that many Ribbonmen would have objected to doing violence to their friendly neighbourhood aristocrats it was just that they rarely got close enough to take a pot shot at them. More at risk were the agents of the landlords, bailiffs who did their bidding, fellow tenants who did something inadvisable, like taking on land vacated by someone who had been evicted, aka ‘land grabbers’. or, more often than not, completely innocent livestock.

One significant exception, however, was an extremely modest landlord based in Clonbur in Co. Galway, Lord Mountmorres. He was ‘modest’ in the context of the size of his holdings. He was one of the smallest landlords in the country with only 11 tenants producing an annual income of around £300. The country’s bigger landlords – there were about 10,000 landed families altogether – would have boasted 20,000 or more acres and incomes of more than £10,000 a year. Unlike some of his peers Mountmorres was not known for evicting his tenants, led a relatively frugal lifestyle in the unpretentious Ebor House and was said to be quite popular in the part of Galway where he lived. So why was he shot dead a few miles from his home in September 1880 when another Galway landlord, the loathsome and avaricious Lord Clanricarde, notorious for evicting tenants, avoided a similar fate.

Two reasons come to mind. Firstly Clanricarde didn’t regularly take to the roads of Galway in a horse and trap – he spent his life in London and paid others to do his dirty work. Secondly, when you scratch the surface of the ‘benign landlord’ narrative that surrounds Mountmorres you find someone who was not nearly as popular as he was cracked up to be.

Mountmorres was shot at around 8.00 on the evening of 25 September driving alone between Clonbur and Ebor House. When his horse and carriage made it home without their driver the alarm was raised. His body was quickly found. He had been shot six times, some of the shots were at close range, and he had obviously died quickly at the scene. A local family, the Flanagan’s refused to allow the corpse to be taken into their house before it was finally removed, saying that ‘if they admitted it nothing belonging to [them] would be alive this day twelve months.’

Despite a £1000 reward being offered for information no one came forward. One of Mountmorres’s tenants, Patrick Sweeney, who had been served with an eviction notice, was suspected but no one was ever convicted, or even tried for the murder.

Later Michael Davitt would claim that Mountmorres had been killed because he ‘eked out his wretched income as a landlord by doing spy’s work for the Castle’. When Lady Mountmorres testified at a tribunal investigating agrarian crime in the late 1880s she claimed that the atmosphere changed in the locality after Sweeney was issued with his eviction order – ‘The men ceased to touch their hats, and they were disrespectful in their manner.’ – she later fainted under cross examination.

It emerged that Mountmorres had little time for the activities of the newly formed Land League, had sought police protection and demanded that the army be brought into the area to suppress the activities of the League. None of this was calculated to increase his popularity.

But, the truth is that we will never know who killed Viscount Mountmorres, and precisely why he was murdered 135 years ago, on this day.

Myles Dungan

Historian and broadcaster

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