‘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.
Gilbert Adair, 1944-2011
‘My ambition, as Author, my point, I would go so far as to say my fixation, my constant fixation, was primarily to concoct an artifact that would, or just possibly might, act as a stimulant on notions of construction, of narration, of plotting, of action, a stimulant, in a word, on fiction-writing today.’
- Georges Perec, A Void, trans. Gilbert Adair
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!’
Living in the centre of the city is both heaven and hell. Preferring the latter, I attempted to investigate the infernal underground workings of the area, drawn to the gloomy inky-dark streets of the south inner city. I lived just off a road called Blackpitts – its name a reference to the filthy puddles left by the River Poddle when its flow abated during the summer months. The street is built directly over the course of the river. I often wondered whether ‘Filthy Puddle’ wouldn’t be a better translation of Dubh Linn, one which would undoubtedly lend the city’s name a subversive undertow. Blackpitts is tucked to the west of Clanbrassil Street, down a short incline that hints at the presence of the river: the slopes on either side of Blackpitts are the valley, and the street itself is a substitute for the subterranean river that runs below.
Blackpitts is the gateway to a dense warren of streets packed with terraced houses and small factories, under all of which a complex network of man-made rivers runs. The houses date from different points over the last hundred or so years: the redbrick terraces grouped around Hammond and St John’s streets (this area was where I lived for a few years) are from the last years of the nineteenth century, and are the product of the Dublin Artisan Dwelling Company, who also built the terraces in Stoneybatter. Just behind the redbricks off Blackpitts is the area known as the Tenters, named after the ‘tents’ of flax fibres stretched out to dry on frames across the fields in the days when weavers were based in the locality. Houses were built here in the 1920s.
But it wasn’t just the history of the area around Blackpitts that interested me. Desirable as a place to live because of its proximity to the city centre, it was targeted in a serious way for redevelopment. It was an area that was far from settled: on a daily basis you could trace the changes as your footsteps drew you towards long-deserted warehouses, past fenced-off tracts of waste ground from which an old building had recently been cleared.
While the boom years made Dublin a site of constant flux in terms of property development, nowhere was the tension between construction and destruction more obvious to me than in the area where I lived. One day, as I walked down the street, a row of redbrick houses were being knocked down, brick-by-brick. I had previously thought the houses to be occupied – there were bicycles chained to the railings outside, and they otherwise showed no more signs of neglect than did my own residence. Half-knocked now, the lower floors of their front facade stood, sawn off just at the sill of the upstairs window, a spooky reminder of what was yet to be erased completely. The clinical precision with which the operation was being carried out made the top of the wall seem as sharp as a razor’s edge, when glimpsed in silhouette against the dull afternoon sky.
At the end of Blackpitts is Newmarket Square, an immense windswept plateau bordered by anonymous redbrick warehouses used by multinationals for document storage, and, at the western end, a cluttered and uncomfortable looking apartment development. A shuttered pub, Grey’s of Newmarket, stands at the north centre, on a corner where a road opens onto the new Cork Street extension. This pub was the scene of a gangland killing in 2004, and is one of a number of pubs that have been shut down in the Liberties area.
At number 48 Newmarket Square was a rooming house where Lily O’Neill, a young woman known as Honor Bright, lived; she was murdered in 1925, her body found on a quiet mountain road to the south of the city. Working as a prostitute, Lily made her way from her lodgings on the night of her murder along New Row, past St Patrick’s Cathedral towards Bishop Street, and onwards towards St Stephen’s Green. That walk was less than a mile, but it bridged two sharply contrasting worlds.
One of the streets she walked down, New Row, had also been built over the Poddle river – an early version of the streetname was New Row-on-Poddle. The point where the street meets the western end of the Coombe also marks the confluence of two different branches of the river, where the network of streams rejoins the Poddle proper. This is where George Sala, on an assignment in 1853 for Charles Dickens’s Household Words magazine, had found ‘semi-continental picturesqueness’ amongst the dirt and poverty of the Coombe’s inhabitants.
Tracking the different branches of the Poddle could occupy someone for weeks. For a while I became obsessed with tracking it, believing that an unlovely, unloved and largely hidden river was more valuable than those more celebrated watercourses: the Seine, the Thames, even the Liffey. I believed that its very insignificance held the key to its significance. That it was banished from sight as a result of its unholy stench made it even more intriguing. Yet it also emerged above ground briefly in the oddest places.
One day, I went a few steps from my house, and tried to find an exposed stretch of the river that appeared on maps of the area. In the grounds of Warrenmount Convent, I asked a groundskeeper about the river, and he brought me to the point where it had appeared on the map. A forbidding stone wall of at least ten feet in height, marking the extent of the convent’s grounds, stopped me in my tracks. There was no sign of the river within the boundary of the convent.
However, when I stopped and listened, I could hear the unmistakeable burbling of water, and I decided that it must be coming from the other side of the wall.
On the other side of the wall was a yard, used as a car-park by an Irish telephone company. As I walked onto the property, a guard emerged from his office, and told me I couldn’t continue my trespassing. I explained my reasons for being there, and eventually he relented, and pointed me towards the far corner of the car-park, where the gravel surface broke into scrubby waste-ground, and where there stood a couple of trees, which must have been 100 or so years old.
There, flowing freely along the other side of the convent wall, I found the Poddle – or, at least, one of its branches – and after a couple of minutes spent admiring it, I walked away satisfied, and the river disappeared from view once again.
Crowds at the Green Street Courthouse; the grey car to the right of the picture belongs to the accused. (Source: Irish Independent, 4/2/1926)
oOo
Lily O’Neill left home just after sunset on a warm summer evening in 1925. By the time the sun rose the next morning she lay dead, her corpse abandoned on a lonely mountain road, a bullet hole through her right breast.
Her body was found at around 7am the following day, Tuesday June 9th. The young woman was fully clothed, dressed in a grey dress and a black hat. There was an old scar on the left of her face; by her side, a partially smoked cigarette. Her left foot was bare, the shoe missing – it lay some distance from the body, as if it had been thrown.
The investigation into her death was followed closely by the newspapers of the time, who sought to communicate in sensational detail the excitement their readers craved. Eventually, when the case went to trial, the courts were filled by fascinated onlookers who had queued for hours, waiting for the doors to the courtroom to be opened.
A journalist covering the story described the scene of the crime, at the crossroads in Ticknock near Lamb Doyle’s pub: ‘the place […] is sparsely populated and in a lonely spot. Nearby is a disused quarry, and stretching towards the mountain is a large gorse-covered tract. Within a few yards is a thick fence of briars, towards which the feet pointed, the head resting on the grass-margined roadway.’
In addition, the same journalist noted that the bullet had made a hole ‘almost the size of an egg’ in the road surface ‘after ripping through the body.’
Over the next few days, details about the crime began to emerge, and interest grew in the chain of events that led to murder. From early on in the investigation, it became clear that O’Neill had worked as a prostitute, and that on the night she died, she had been seen on the north side of St Stephen’s Green, opposite the Shelbourne Hotel. And one other detail: she was known to all as ‘Honor Bright.’
Reports initially referred to the murdered girl as ‘Lil’, ‘Lilly’, or even ‘Lizzie’. Eventually most papers simply stuck with her pseudonym, which had the effect of making her seem fictional, of keeping the realities of the incident at arm’s length. People responded to the murder, and ensuing trial, as if she was a character in a novel who had met an unfortunate end. Plot and suspense were everything, and the Honor Bright murder trial delivered both unrelentingly.
Witness depositions made during an afternoon’s court session were swiftly written up for that evening’s newspapers.
On 4th July, two men were arrested, charged with Lily O’Neill’s murder: a medical doctor, Patrick Purcell, from Blessington, and Leopold J. Dillon, an ex-superintendent of the Civic Guards, from Dunlavin, Co. Wicklow. They had driven to Dublin in a grey two-seater car on the night of Monday 8 June, returning to Blessington in the early hours of the next morning. Both of the accused claimed innocence.
Lily lived in a tenement house at 48 Newmarket Square in the Liberties, and, on the night of her murder, had made her way from her home to Stephen’s Green, clearly used at the time by prostitutes as a ‘promenading ground’ where they could meet potential customers.
At around 2.30am, a cab driver had seen the girl he knew as Honor Bright called over by two men who fitted Purcell and Dillon’s description. Their grey car had pulled up between Kildare Street and the entrance to the Shelbourne.
Dr Purcell reportedly said to another cab driver, James McCabe, that money had been stolen from him by a girl earlier in the night, and that ‘only I had my £1 note in my pocket with my gun it would have been gone also.’
Purcell told McCabe that the girl responsible for the crime had bobbed hair and wore grey clothes. Then, Purcell was reported as saying that ‘if he got her he would put a gun through her mouth and bring her to the country, where no one would find her, and, if he did not get her, some other girl would fall a victim.’
Purcell had apparently also shown the gun to Madge Hopkins, a friend of the deceased who also lived in the Newmarket tenement. Later Dr Purcell would claim that the only thing in his pocket was the stethoscope that he always carried.
Lily O’Neill went from the Green in a cab, and was dropped by the driver at Leonard’s Corner – the junction of South Circular Road and Clanbrassil Street – less than five minutes walk from her home. As the cab driver headed back towards the Green, a grey car similar to Purcell and Dillon’s raced past him, towards where he had just left the girl.
The grey car was then spotted by a guard between 3am and 4am in Harold’s Cross. Two men and a woman, who had been talking at the side of the road, jumped into the car and sped off in the direction of Terenure. Soon after, Lily was dead.
When the case came to its final day of trial, on February 3rd 1926, interest was at fever pitch. Newspapers noted that ‘an unusual amount of public interest was centred in the proceedings.’
Crowds thronged outside the Green Street courthouse where the Central Criminal Court was sitting, seeking admission to hear the shocking evidence. Witnesses, and even some court officials, were delayed in getting past these crowds. The courtroom itself was full, and the attendance included ‘several well-dressed women’.
The counsel for the defence characterised the two men as having fallen victim ‘to the lure of wine and women’, but stressed that this did not make them ‘moral degenerates’ and asked that they should not be treated as ‘human vampires’.
Instead, he suggested that Lily ‘must have fallen into the hands of the police’, and that she was murdered ‘by some of those sinister societies that had arrogated to themselves the power of life and death’. This suggestion was subsequently rubbished by the prosecution.
Soon, though, the crowds outside got the sensation they had been seeking: just after 9pm, after it had deliberated for three minutes, the jury found the defendants not guilty. And with that, Purcell and Dillon walked free, Honor Bright passed into myth, and Lily O’Neill was forgotten.
I review Adam Braver’s novel about the day of JFK’s assassination, November 22, 1963, on 3:AM here.
My interview with legendary ex-NME writer Nick Kent is available in full from 3:AM Magazine here.
The last few days have been along these lines: drudge, drudge, drudge, sick, sick, doctor, hospital, doctor, hospital, drudge, drudge, positive meeting with my supervisor about recently submitted chapter. So it’s not all bad, then.
A while ago I wrote an article about a visit to the house the Marx Brothers grew up in, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Since then, some of the block the house stands on has been demolished with a view to building a seven storey apartment building, and a group has formed to campaign for the preservation of the house (they linked to my article, and that’s how I found out about the story). Woody Allen’s written a letter about the issue, calling for the preservation of the building
because the Marx Brothers are among the great comic artists in history, their accomplishments are revered internationally and in countries that place a high value on cultural contributions as opposed to simply bulldozing things in the name of progress, the Marx Brothers home would remain standing and affixed with a plaque.
Quite. There’s also a NY Times article about it here.