Poet, Madman, Scoundrel: 189 Unusual Irish Lives

205 Pages·2012·1.33 MB·English

by  Slattery David

Poet, Madman, Scoundrel
189 Unusual Irish Lives
David Slattery
Orpen Press Lonsdale House Avoca Ave
Blackrock
Co. Dublin Ireland
e-mail:
Acknowledgements
Our libraries remain a constant valuable national resource while everything else
changes around them. I want to thank the several fabulous libraries that gave me
essential help with the research for this book. Thanks to Dr Jason McElligott,
keeper of Archbishop Marsh’s Library, which, along with being a source of
historic treasure, was founded in 1701 and is itself an historical institution. Some
of the books still bear bullet holes from the Easter Rising of 1916. Jason was a
great help in pointing me towards interesting Cromwellians, rebels and
scandalous law cases.
Thanks are also due to the helpful staff at the Royal Irish Academy who gave
me access to their vast collection, including the definitive guide to who currently
counts in Irish history – The Dictionary of Irish Biography from the Earliest
Times to the Year 2002. This vast tome is edited by James McGuire and James
Quinn, and is published by the Royal Irish Academy and Cambridge University
Press. It is the principal source for the lives I have included in this book. My
thanks to those hundreds of expert contributors to the dictionary who provided
the biographical details for the thousands of historical figures. The Royal Irish
Academy has also the best reading and writing space in Ireland. I also thank the
National Library, which continues to provide the entire population with a
fabulous free historical resource and a glorious reading room.
Thanks also to Piotr Sadowski for his suggestions and to Tomás Clancy for
sharing with me both his legal erudition and extraordinary grasp of the history of
Irish law.
Special thanks to my editor Elizabeth Brennan for the original ideas,
predictably good advice and constant support.
Contents
Preface
1. The Rebellious Irish: It’ll Be All Right on the Night
2. Saints and Sinners of the Irish Tradition
3. Glorious Irish Men and Women of the Battlefield: When It’s Not Good to
Talk
4. The Sporting Irish: From Wrestling to Chess
5. The Unsinkable Irish: Explorers and Mariners on the Green Oceans
6. Irish Writers: The Chicken-Leg Effect and Other Forms of Inspiration
7. Irish Science and Thought: Life In (and Out of) the Laboratory
Postscript: Giants of Irish History
Notes
Bibliography
About the Book
Preface
When I told friends that I was writing an Irish history, most of them shuddered
with the memories of school history that had emerged from the murky depths of
their unconscious. I persisted by explaining that, in order to write a fun history of
Irish people, I had decided to forget, or repress, what I learned in school, and
that my Irish history wasn’t intended to be traumatising. In fact, it was actually
intended to be enjoyable because it would be a history of unusual Irish people, as
opposed to the usual suspects who populate Irish school history.
So be reassured that this book is about only interesting Irish people. If you’ve
never read any Irish history, I assure you that we are all interesting.
Poet, Madman, Scoundrel is a chronicle of how 189 unusual Irish individuals
chose to live – the professions they followed, their interests and passions, and
the risks they took for their ambitions. I haven’t embellished the documented
details of their lives in any way. I have merely interpreted that information,
which anyone writing history should try to do, and I’ve tried to present it in an
entertaining way. While it was often tempting to change the ending of many
lives to make them happier, nastier, more miserable or even more successful, I
have stuck rigidly to the facts. I say this because I am sure that, like me, you will
ask yourself, “Is this really true?” at certain points in the stories. Suffice to say at
this point that, yes, it is all true.
Have I covered exactly 189 lives in this book? Have I counted them
accurately? The answer is not simple – it depends on the way you count. If you
are a mathematical genius like some of those in Chapter 7, you will know – even
if I don’t – what is meant by 189 being a complex number, part real and part
imaginary, because who decides what counts as one life anyway? I can also
imagine you asking, “Why 189?” The answer would be easy if there were only
189 unusual people in the whole of Irish history, but that is definitely not the
case. My 189 are just the tip of a human iceberg. To help you count them I have
included birth and death dates only for the Irish lives portrayed in this book. I
don’t intend for those people omitted from the book to be viewed as dull. I chose
the most interesting histories that caught my attention in our national archives
during one particular period of research. I recommend searching out others for
yourself.
Irish history is like a well-trodden path through an overgrown wood with who
knows what scary monsters hiding in the gloom. Where the path is worn, it’s
very worn. Just off the path the darkness increases quickly. I have chosen to
explore the less travelled areas of this vast forest of Irish lives. Some of those I
include in this book lie partially on the well-worn path so that their names will
be familiar to many of us. Others lived far from the limelight and some, while
famous or notorious in their own time, have since fallen out of focus.
I have concentrated on those who might have been interesting or even
dangerous to know, especially if they were experimenting with the law,
chemicals, bombs or quack cures. I have chosen to include the following: a
selection of our less successful rebels because we have so many; some saints
because we are famous for them, but I have also included sinners for moral
balance; soldiers of both sexes because, while the Irish started very few wars in
history, once a good conflict was under way, anywhere involving anyone, we
were happy to join in and take our chances; a variety of sporting heroes of a
range of shapes and sizes because so many of us enjoy watching and playing
sport; sailors and explorers because we live on an island and love the sea; and
writers and their inspirations because we write almost as much as we talk. I
finish with our scientists and thinkers of varying degrees of rigour. Though we
do not have an international reputation for our scientific achievements, we have
had interesting experimenters and several people who were good at sums.
*
My interest in former times is anthropological rather than historical in the
traditional sense. I am interested in our social history, much of it involving
individual tragedies and triumphs, rather than the history of our well-established
national heroes who, when they do feature in this book, tend to be spear carriers
in someone else’s play. L.P. Hartley famously tells us in the opening line of his
novel, The Go-Between, that, “The past is a foreign country: they do things
differently there.” Who am I to judge these foreigners from our past? Where we
have presidents, they had kings. Where we have the internet, they had
pamphleteers. Where we have hygiene, they had prayers. Where we have
television they had – actually – nothing. But we do have much in common with
these foreigners. Like us, people in the past hoped for the best. They had
ambitions for themselves and their families. They lay awake at night worrying,
probably about fleas.
If people from 200 or 300 years ago could travel forward in time they would
be astonished to see us driving around in our horseless carriages while
apparently talking to our own hands (on our mobile phones). But it is just as
amazing and challenging for us to imagine what life was like in the past because
so much changes over time. There are fashions in cars, horseless or otherwise,
clothes, diseases and careers. For example, the Black Death, gangrene, leprosy,
tuberculosis, smallpox, melancholia and syncope were once highly fashionable
diseases. Syncope is itself an historical term for fainting, which ladies used to do
frequently in the past, especially when there were wealthy gentlemen on hand to
catch them.
Similarly, in the area of careers, the professions of saint, quack, eccentric,
physiognomist and pamphleteer are now out of vogue. Unfortunately, nowadays,
fancy professions such as highwayman or pirate, or being the proprietor of a
laboratory in a castle basement (where you dissected the brains of just-dead
criminals) are obsolete.
Many forms of entertainment have also declined in popularity from earlier
times, such as fantastic free public entertainments like hangings, beheadings and
dissections. Before cinema ruined it, the travelling Waxwork Show was popular
in Ireland. With a simple change of clothes, hair added or taken away, or a nose
lengthened or squashed, the museum proprietor could keep up with
contemporary celebrities without fuss or expense. A wax figure that started out
as Napoleon could become Robert Emmet with a simple change of uniform, or
Enrico Caruso with the addition of hair. If a blaze melted your exhibits they
could simply become other celebrities. This once happened in Skibbereen, Co.
Cork, where a melted Mayor of Cork became a circus clown. Technology has
killed this form of entertainment. But such constant change makes all travel
through time exciting.
People tell me that I am living in the past. That is not true. I would like to live
in the past, which is a completely different matter. Oh, for a time machine! I am
currently building one in my garden shed. But until I have perfected my
technology, I have history.