‘Sometime on the 14th or 15th of January, the plaque rose from the dead.’
Read my story about the return of the Bram Stoker commemorative plaque in today’s Irish Times here. (Scroll beyond Tony Clayton-Lee’s article.)
Find out more about the plaque’s disappearance: my Guardian article from 2010 here and previous blogposts here and here.
Stoker plaque at 30 Kildare Street. Photo by Warren Whitney.
The Bram Stoker plaque, which had been missing from the facade of 30 Kildare Street, Dublin, mysteriously reappeared over the weekend. It had been absent for three, possibly four, years. I’ve previously written about the plaque for the Guardian here, and on the blog here.
Dr Albert Power, of the Bram Stoker Society writes:
‘On Tuesday 17th I drove specially into the city to check for myself, and – yes, there it was! [...] There’s no doubt that it’s the original plaque and not a replacement. The most recent photograph of it I had seen was John Moore’s from May 2008, when it had been coloured brown: it was blue back in 1983. Furthermore, upon close examination there looks like to be a faint shading or patina along its inner rim, which would suggest storage in a damp place or having been secreted under something which had left an impression. It also looked to me that it was hung ever so slightly askew. [...] It’s quite a while, to the best of my knowledge, since any of us did anything about this, and I for one had regarded the battle (with much sadness) as lost. Maybe the cumulative effect of all these efforts took its intended toll.
30 Kildare Street before the reinstatement of the plaque
By Karl Whitney.
I scrabbled about blindly in the undergrowth in the park in south Dublin. The fact was: Dave Allen’s house just wasn’t to be found. The old building where the comedian grew up had once stood on a site close to the swathes of knotted, twisted foliage I was currently fighting off – but the house had been knocked down in 1986. The morning was cool and bright, yet it felt like darkest night due to the canopy of vegetation hanging above me. Having the vaguest sense of being followed, and feeling slightly spooked, I ducked through an old stone doorway. It led into yet more jungle, so I struck instead towards the football pitches that adjoin the Firhouse Road, and into the light of day.
Dave Allen had been born David Tynan O’Mahony on 6 July 1936. He had lived near where I was standing, in Cherryfield House, on the stretch of land that’s now a public park running along the river Dodder. This had been where, on cold winter nights, the comedian’s father assembled his family to tell them stories of the macabre and the supernatural. Later, during his television programmes, Allen would insist that the studio lights be lowered as he told a ghostly tale; these moments recalled the sense of anticipation and fear experienced when his father began to tell stories by the fireside.
Cherryfield House (from South Dublin Libraries collection)
Allen once wrote that his father had ‘a natural flair for the narrative. Sometimes in the evenings he gathered my brothers and me around the hearth to tell us a story before we went to bed. They were frequently true, and often associated with Irish history, but there was always a special air of apprehension and excitement when he related one of his suspense stories, of which he had an endless collection.’
His father, Gerard John Cullen Tynan O’Mahony – known more simply as ‘Cullie’ – was the general manager of the Irish Times. Brian O’Nolan, Austin Clarke – who lived a little further down the Dodder, at Templeogue – and many other literary figures numbered amongst the guests at Cherryfield, not least when Cullie celebrated his birthday each New Year. ‘My father was born on New Year’s Day in 1900,’ Dave Allen explained. ‘He was the first baby born in Ireland in the new century. And, consequently, there was a fairly good shindig every New Year’s Eve.’
In 1974, Allen collected a series of ghost stories by authors such as Bram Stoker and M.R. James under the title A Little Night Reading. In the introduction, he credited another storytelling influence, ‘an old man with white hair and a flowing beard, who lived in the village and whom I believed to be a hundred years old.’ He calls this man ‘Old Malachi Horn’ – although his name is more usually rendered as Malachi Horan. In his account, Allen says that, as a child, he spent days listening to Horan’s storytelling: ‘I used to play truant from school just to go for a ride in his pony and trap, and listen to legends of wild banshees and headless coachmen.’
Allen’s estimate of Horan’s age is surprisingly accurate: the storyteller died in 1946, aged 98. Rather than living in a village, however, Horan lived in a thatched cottage at the top of Killinarden Hill near Tallaght, which is where Dr George A. Little found him in the early 1940s: sitting at the fireside telling grisly tales of botched hangings, violent local rivalries, and ghostly occurrences in the hills. Dr Little sketched Horan for the reader: ‘A square face of great power, eyes grey-green beneath a penthouse of bushy white brows; lips so firm set as to be almost immobile […] woolly-white hair and side-whiskers – a face set to the world, or to a purpose’.
In one of many chilling tales recorded by Dr Little in his book Malachi Horan Remembers, the storyteller recalls ‘the most fearsome thing’ he had ever met. The way Horan told it, he had been walking home, having successfully sold a young horse for a good price in Naas. After stopping for a few celebratory drinks, he continued down the Saggart Road in the direction of his house. As he walked, the wind howled and the moon became obscured by cloud, leaving him in darkness. Suddenly, he was struck – by a man’s shoulder, he thought. Having cheerily wished the other man a good night, the collision happened again, and continued to recur. He broke out in a cold sweat, for he now knew ‘it was no living man’.
Unnerved, and stemming his rising panic, Horan decided not to head for home, making his way instead in the direction of a friend’s house. As his friend let him through the door, Horan turned to see that ‘a fully dressed man stood behind me, but – he had no head; just a raw stump of a neck!’ Scared stiff, they agreed that ‘what was outside was the man killed by the steam-tram’, and said a prayer for his soul. (The Dublin and Blessington Steam Tramway ran along a nearby road, and it fatally felled so many casualties that its route was often referred to as ‘the longest graveyard in Ireland’.)
Although in later life Dave Allen confessed that he had never had an unearthly experience, a fascination with the grisly and the ghostly persisted in his comedy. Graves and graveyards were frequently exploited for comic purposes, such as in the sketch where two funeral cortèges race to be first into a graveyard, or the story he tells of a night spent in the house of a gravedigger – who had died of fright – during which the comedian felt a cold, heavy presence (it was his own hand, and, at least in this telling, his shocked reaction accounted for his missing left index finger – he bit it).
Allen also wrote that ‘as a young teenager walking home in the twilight through the local graveyard, I became conscious of a noise that continually followed just behind me, which only stopped when I turned round to see what it might be. ‘The hackles rose on my neck, and I was in a cold sweat. My fear only receded when I reached the comparative light of the local village to discover a twig attached to my trouser leg!’
On Thursday night from 7pm I’ll be in conversation with John Holten about his debut novel, The Readymades. The event takes place at the Pygmalion bar on South William Street, Dublin.
From The Readymades’ Facebook page:
‘Holten has expanded the scope of the contemporary novel’
— Brian Dillon
To mark the first Irish presentation of John Holten’s novel The Readymades Broken Dimanche Press are pleased to announce an evening discussion between Holten and writer and journalist Karl Whitney.
Holten has created a unique fiction that uses a variety of forms, genres and found texts to tell the story of Đorđe Bojić and the LGB art group. In collaboration with the Serbian artist and filmmaker Darko Dragicević, they have resurrected contemporaneously a catalogue of LGB artworks from 1995-2007 that accompany the story of The Readymades.
BDP, together with our new partners at Galerie Gojković, will be presenting this work through exhibitions that will mark the launch of the book across Europe this autumn. We’ve already started in Oslo at Gallery 1857 in August, and this discussion will lay the ground for a further Dublin intervention in the coming weeks.
This fiction is on-going; the novel is dead, long live the novel! Time for a fight
‘One should always have something sensational to read in the train’
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Me with the 'Soccer in Tallaght' Luas Citywest poster; photo: Eamonn Hoban-Shelley
A few months ago I approached the Railway Procurement Agency (RPA) to see if they’d be interested in putting posters up at their stops along the new Luas tram line to Saggart, known as ‘Luas Citywest’. The line wasn’t yet open, but I knew that it was due to begin operations in June or July. I had started work as a local history researcher in South Dublin Libraries, and much of my research up until that point had been into the Saggart area. I saw an opportunity to put some of this research, and the visual content we have in our digital archive, out there, so it could be seen by passengers during the couple of minutes they wait for the next tram. I also thought it would be something fun to do. Ultimately, I wanted to put something at each station that I – and, hopefully, other people – would be interested in reading.
Aviation poster on a shelter at Belgard Luas station
In searching for precedents for this sort of thing, I looked towards France. I really admire the history posters on the Paris Métro, and a few months ago Laura and I stopped at the Hôtel de Ville Métro station in order to see the array of posters on display there, and to take some photos.
Raymond Queneau poster at Hotel de Ville Metro station, Paris
The aims of the Parisian project were, in the words of the RATP website:
‘[to make] the general public aware of the historical and cultural value of unknown or little-known aspects of the transportation network and its surroundings […] The information boards provide a link between the overarching historical picture and the personal stories, as well as between the transport facility and the surrounding urban area, enriching passengers’ travel experience.’
I kept these aspirations in mind when sketching out my own proposal. In this, I had the help and support of Maria Fitzgerald and Freya Smith – the project archaeologists from the RPA who both managed the poster project and were heavily involved in the creative process, including the research and writing of two of the six posters, at Fettercairn and Saggart. My boss at South Dublin Libraries, Síle Coleman, was extremely active in the sourcing of specific heritage material to illustrate the posters to a strict deadline (of which more later).
Luas poster: 'Aviation in Belgard and Baldonnel'
I had earmarked six stops for the heritage poster treatment: Belgard, Fettercairn, Cheeverstown, Citywest, Fortunestown and Saggart. I knew I wanted each poster to address a specific theme, and in the end we settled on: Aviation, Tower Houses and Dublin’s Frontiers, Soccer, Industry, the Dublin and Blessington Steam Tramway, and the archaeology of Saggart.
We already had extensive holdings for some of these topics: we had visual material about the airstrip at Belgard, the Library has published books about the tramway and the Urney factory on Belgard Road, and the RPA has published a pamphlet (PDF) on the archaeology along the Citywest line. (I’ve also written about the tramway for the Irish Times here.)
'Soccer in Tallaght' poster
What we didn’t have was much on soccer in Tallaght, but this was soon remedied by a quick with material gathered from Richard, a Shamrock Rovers fan who works in the library, and from the collection of photos held by Tallaght Stadium. For the Aviation poster, we had hoped to get clearance from the New York Post for the famous ‘backwards’ headline related to Douglas ‘Wrong Way’ Corrigan’s solo flight across the Atlantic to Baldonnel, but we were sadly unable to achieve this before deadline. So here it is:
New York Post; source: Wikipedia
In the end, having spent a few months thinking about the posters, they were written and produced to deadline in just over a week: between the 19th and the 28th of July. And now, a couple of weeks after that, they’ve gone up at the stops. Get along to see them, if you can: they’re up for the month of August only!
See all the posters at the South Dublin Libraries site or the Luas site.
We’re organising a free guided heritage walk of Saggart at 2pm on Saturday 20th August. Find out more here.
My essay about a walk I undertook around Tallaght last November is online at Some Blind Alleys.
This is how it begins:
‘On a frosty morning at the end of last November, I set out from my parents’ house to walk around the edges of Tallaght: it was the day the government was due to announce cuts ahead of yet another emergency budget, but I wasn’t much in the mood to pay attention to the news. The idea was to try to stitch together my memories of the places I knew with less familiar areas. I also wanted to see if this far-flung zone was still traversable by foot – seeing it by car would not suffice, and anyway I can’t drive.’
Continue Reading here.
Went along to see Joanna Newsom (above, being attacked by a wolf) in Dublin’s Daniel Libeskind-designed Grand Canal Theatre last night. Good gig and everything, but while I was there something occurred to me: where did all these hipsters come from? Thousands of them streamed through the doors of the theatre, indifferent to their surroundings and eager to bed in for a night’s largely-silent devotion to la Newsom. Was it simply the proximity of Googletown (strip of land between Ranelagh and the Liffey that’s home to many expensive apartment developments, a number of half-completed gentrification projects, and the offices of said search engine)? Or is there something else going on that I’m missing? Enlighten me, please.
Myles na gCopaleen on his friend Remington, a man whose bones were replaced with typewriter parts:
“Remington I knew well. He had the whole of his insides taken out of him, bones and all, when he was a lad – he was suffering from diffused chrythromelalgia – and had new bones made for him out of old typewriters. [...]“
More here.
The other week, on a bright, slightly chilly autumn afternoon, I cycled down to the Pigeon House to take a look around this strange outgrowth of land that’s located right in the geographical centre of Dublin. The chimneys of its now defunct electricity generating station are visible from almost everywhere in Dublin, yet I know very little about the area, and I don’t think I’ve ever travelled the full length of the peninsula, which continues past the generating station, reaching a granite sea wall that leads all the way out to the Poolbeg lighthouse.
When you get to the Pigeon House Road, a road that seems to lead nowhere, you see a bank of containers in a commercial shipping yard to your left, and a tall barrier shielding the site to your right. Behind this barrier is the bulldozed site of the Irish Glass Bottle Factory, one of the most controversial property purchases made during Ireland’s boom. Intended as a mixed-use, high-rise mini Manhattan, it’s now little more than a muddy field churned up by heavy machinery.
I went straight ahead at the end of the road, which I learned is not the way to go: it leads to a dead end, where railings and gates block your path towards the grassy wastelands that border the south side of the peninsula.
I returned the way I had come, then turned right, past the entrance to the container yard, where juggernauts were queuing up to deposit their loads. Cycling along this road, you’re immediately assailed by the smell of sewage, which has been processed and expelled on this site for about a century. As you can imagine, the stench is pretty disgusting. Nevertheless, I stopped to take a photo of the canal of effluent that emerges from under the road, then runs parallel to it before joining the Liffey just before it reaches the generating station. Opposite me at this point was the site of the Poolbeg waste incinerator, another oddly-located site of controversy on this peculiar outcrop.
Canal of stench
Poolbeg incinerator site
Straight ahead, the looming towers of the Pigeon House, and in front of them a large redbrick building dating from 1902: the first electricity generating station in Dublin. James Joyce mentions it in Ulysses (set in 1904):
‘the flags of the Ballast office and Custom House were dipped in salute as were also those of the electrical power station at the Pigeonhouse, and the Poolbeg light.’
Generating station (1902 station in foreground)
A large granite building next to the generating station was built as a hotel in the late 18th century, then converted into barracks soon after the 1798 rebellion, when British troops were stationed there. Essentially this tip of the peninsula remained military property for around a hundred years, after which it was sold to the corporation and used for electricity generation, feeding the substation in Fleet Street in central Dublin.
Cycling past the gates to the Pigeon House, you come across an incongruous line of cannon, which obviously reference the site’s military history. Taking a sharp right turn down a narrow roadway, you emerge at a wide stretch of sand dune, providing a view of the south county and the Dublin mountains.
Continuing on along the road, you pass the generating station, then reach the sea wall, a mile-long construction that was built in the eighteenth century as a means of clearing the mouth of the Liffey of the sand and silt that had made it such a danger to shipping. At the end of the wall, the Poolbeg lighthouse was built (it became operational in 1767).
As I walked along the rough granite of the sea wall, I watched the activity in the surprisingly busy shipping lane, as passenger ferries and container traffic came and went. I thought of how, when in the centre of the city, you never thought about Dublin as a port – you carried on oblivious to the continual traffic just a couple of miles down the river.
The Pigeon House area is an intriguing place, full of surprises and traces of Dublin’s industrial and civic past. It also smells, really badly.
When I think of the markets in Dublin, I think of overcast Saturday afternoons spent circling the deserted streets around the market buildings, camera in hand, recording the intricate stonework decorating the corners of the sheds. On walks such as this, I’d have made my way from Dawson Street, around the area surrounding St Patrick’s Cathedral, up Francis Street in the Liberties, down the hill from St Audeon’s Church, onto Church Street on the Northside, near the Four Courts. The streets at the back of the Four Courts, where the Luas runs along, have their own particular ambience: the terraced houses that adjoin Church Street provide a dense, atmospheric, network similar to the houses around Blackpitts on the South of the city.
Often, when walking near the markets buildings, I would stop and think about what they were like in their heyday, when surely they were busier than they are now: were the narrow corridors between fruit and vegetable stands constantly thronged by customers coming and going? Were the streets outside full to bursting with carts and carriages?
A lot of nineteeth century architecture in the central city forces me to think this way: what was it like back when it really mattered? Of course, this might just be a nostalgic projection provided by my own wishing that Dublin must have been relevant at some point in the past. The former Irish Parliament building on College Green, now the Bank of Ireland, was an illusory centre of Irish political life in the nineteenth century – the real power being vested in the Westminster parliament in London. It was an empty centre: Ireland was then a peripheral part of the British Empire, and now stands on the edge of Europe, both geographically and in terms of its political relevance to the wider European Union.
But what can you make of the psychological effect of this emptiness at the core, instituted perhaps by the shadow-puppetry of colonial assuagement, but nonetheless preserved meticulously, unthinkingly, right up to the present day? One aspect: an enduring scepticism about the real worth of institutions combined with a compulsive habit of tipping one’s hat to power, in the absence of anything else to do with one’s hat. Governmental, media [insert the name of the state broadcaster and major national newspaper you are currently thinking of here]: any institution gets it in the neck verbally, but no one knows what to do in order to occasion any tangible change. The net result: no change of any substance. This is the kind of impotence that makes Dublin, and Ireland in general, a circle of hell for anyone inclined to interrogate it in this way. Better to keep your head in the sand. Better, indeed, to get on with the business of living: commute expensively, accumulate, keep your taxes low and your house prices high; pave; re-tile; repeat ad nauseam.