LOVE, AND FITZWILLIAM SQUARE

All photographs tell a story, but what happens to them as years go by, that tells another. When I collected photos (given all that up now!) I constantly asked myself, how, and what and when and why? How on earth did a particular photo end up in a particular junk shop? What sort of family would throw their grandparents’ memories out in a skip? When precisely does a photograph cease to have any meaning? What is the tipping point? How many generations must pass before it can safely be disposed of?

Questions without answers, and a few more to come. But first, the story.

Long years ago I found these snapshots in a Dublin office. An empty office in a Georgian building in Fitzwilliam Square. The concern that had carried on its business there had been long established, and the people who carried on the business of the concern had been equally old. Their activities were appropriate to a gaslit Dublin, long gone. But, although a venerable concern, their activities were still relevant to the modern age. That’s how they survived.

How these snapshots survived is another matter entirely.

The employees were long dead when I found the photos. The organisation itself had merged, with a younger body. The old desks and furniture and bits and pieces were left behind. The building was awaiting refurbishment, the contents awaiting a skip.

I was an architect then. I mooched about. I found the photos. That’s how they survived.

They date from the 1910’s.

They show a young man and a girl on an outing.

They’re in DúnLaoghaire. I know that, not from the photos, but because I grew up in DúnLaoghaire. I can feel that place, even in black and white.

Yes, definitely DúnLaoghaire. Or, rather, Kingstown as it was, in those days.

So, why, why sixty years later would I find these photos in a Dublin office building?

Simple. Because the man who had been in charge of the office had them there. And who was he? I didn’t know, for years. But last year the Dublin 1911 Census came on line, and I tracked him down on that. I don’t think his name is particularly relevant here, except to someone whom it might upset, so we’ll leave that be. Enough to say that in 1911 he was pushing forty, living in Sandycove with his parents.

Why? Why was he not married? He’d certainly a good enough job to afford it. Maybe he was homosexual. Maybe he just never found the right woman. Maybe he had found the right woman, and it hadn’t worked out.

Whatever about those questions and their answers, why didn’t he just keep the photographs at home?

Did he eventually marry someone else, and maybe it wouldn’t have been politic to have photos of himself and another girl around the place?

Perhaps, perhaps.

He worked a lifetime in Fitzwilliam Square. How often did he look at these photos, through the decades of years?

They stayed in his office, through the twenties, the thirties, the forties. Ireland and the world changed, and the photos stayed the same. He looks happier than her. Is there a clue there, in her solemnity?

Did he look for that clue throughout his years?

Did he glance at the photos, after a thoughtful lunchtime stroll?

How often did he think of her, as he went home on the tram?

How many questions am I going to ask?

No more, no need.

I suppose we all know our own answers.

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New postings will be made here from time to time, hopefully every few weeks. 

If you'd like an alert
Contact conan.kennedy@gmail.com or @conankwrites

Many earlier articles in the Connections series can be viewed 

by going to this link ,and still more are held 

on The Irish Times archive.

Other photographs from the Conan Kennedy Collection are to be seen on the discontinued blog http://cksoldphotos.blogspot.ie/

The National Library of Ireland hold a large selection of  the Conan Kennedy Collection, 

this link here will tell you all about it.

CHAPELIZOD, THE TITANIC, MORGAN THE PIRATE, DOWNTON ABBEY,ETC.(AND WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS)

Certain folks in the media recently seem to have been getting excited by the fact that the elegant English Duchess of Cambridge is related to the small Irish singer Chris of Burgh. But sure that’s nothing in this genealogical game, I can top it easily.

This young woman here (go away, I saw her first) is related to someone buried in Chapelizod (CofI) graveyard, to a once famous Irish barrister and, well, to me. She has connections to the Titanic and…not only that, she was one of the world’s first ‘mannequins’ or fashion models, was central to the work of Lady Duff Cooper and (thus) to the fashion house Lucile which…wait for it…was mentioned in the storyline of TV’s Downton Abbey as being the fashion house for late Edwardian women to acquire their “trousseau lingerie’. (I suppose we can see why from the picture.) The fashion house Lucile is still going and, it is reported, following the Downton Abbey plug, sales rose by some fifty percent.

The original founder of Lucile was that Lady Duff Cooper, a coutourier with salons in London, Paris and New York. It was she who invented the “cat walk”.  The Duff Coopers were on the Titanic when it sank and were later vilified because they escaped on a half empty lifeboat. They were travelling (mysteriously) under the name “Mr and Mrs Morgan”.

Yes, there are many murky elements jostling with family skeletons in all this.

But, joining up the ( less murky) dots.

            The strangely lovely woman here is Edith Morgan, known as ‘Corisande’. The photo dates from 1911. She had two children by a soldier in the 1^st WW, then three more by a Harold Morgan Chandler. This Harold Morgan was son of Edith Marion Morgan Byrne, who was a daughter of James Peter Byrne, a Dublin solicitor who lived in the Chapelizod house and estate which has now been developed as King’s Hospital School. James Peter’s wife was Monimia Morgan, who was a kinswoman of Henry Morgan the Welsh pirate. (This couldn’t get any better.) A son of James Peter and Monimia was Henry Morgan Byrne, a ‘colourful’ Law Library character in the 1930’s. And this is where William Butler Yeats comes in. He, WBY, had a first love by the name of Edith Laura Armstrong. However, she spurned him and married the above Henry Morgan Byrne instead. Not that that went well really, Henry divorcing Edith Laura a while later on the grounds of her adultery. WBY never got over this and it is said that Edith Laura rather than Maud Gonne was his true inspration. Whatever. My connections? Henry Morgan Byrness sister, Monimia Ellen Morgan Kennedy, known as Nina, was one of the wives of my grandfather, and she is buried in Chapelizod. Two or three years back I wrote a newspaper article about that Nina and recently a googling family researcher, of whom I’d never heard, got in touch with me and told me all about this matter, and particularly Corisande, his mother. He is Leonard Chandler, an elderly retired British Royal Navy man.

And so they go on, connections.

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New postings will be made here from time to time, hopefully every few weeks. 

Contact morriganbooks@gmail.com if you'd like an email alert.

Many earlier articles in the Connections series can be viewed 

by going to this link ,and still more are held 

on The Irish Times archive.

Other photographs from the Conan Kennedy Collection are to be seen on the discontinued blog http://cksoldphotos.blogspot.ie/

The National Library of Ireland hold a large selection of  the Conan Kennedy Collection, 
this link here will tell you all about it.

THE NAKED, AND THE DEAD

Looking carefully, to the right of this picture, we will see a small boy holding a flag. He stands disturbingly close to the penis of that buck naked man. Who that man be, no idea. But that boy is my half uncle Frank Conan. He became a soldier and won a medal in the 1^st ww. He died, once again a soldier, in the 2^nd ww. He was a tough enough nut. I suppose a childhood spent in the proximity of naked men in the Vico Men’s Bathing Place sends a chap one way or t’other.

Yes, this is the Vico Men’s Bathing Place in Dalkey in around 1904. It was founded by my mother’s family who lived nearby. One of that family was Walter, who ran a company called DeSelby Quarries. An inventor, he was interested in underwater explosives, and tested out his depth charge fuses at this very spot. He was in fact the inventor of the 1^st ww depth charge used by the British against the Germans. He was also the inspiration for DeSelby, Flann O’Brien’s eccentric Dalkey Archive inventor. But I’ve written of all that before and no-one much noticed so (dear readers) I see little point in giving people another chance to ignore such interesting information.

Moving right along...

My son, who is in mid twenties, a graduate of UCD, a poet and an intellectual and (being a graduate of UCD) a tourist guide in Rome, he tells me he finds this photo strange, in that it depicts naked men who are dead. And I suppose it is, and I wonder why. It’s not as if images of nakedness are not all around, though of course the majority of such tend to be of women. And yes of course in art, which includes photography, we do see many images of naked women who are dead. In fact much of classical art is based on images of naked women…who are dead. Not so, so much, with men. Yes the classical sculptors did portray the male form in an elegant and gracious and attractive manner, as have done such modern artists as Hockney. The more disturbed variety of modern artists, Bacon and Freud come to mind, they have chosen to portray naked men as grotesque. Bacon particularly, but then he was pretty grotesque himself.  Be all that as it may, what no-one seems to have done is portray naked men in ordinary day to day situations. They are either idealised, as in gay pornographic culture, or rendered grotesque, as mentioned above.

So that solves that, that’s the strangeness of this photograph!

So, as they say in the Roman tourism business, Grazi, Dad.

            This following bit comes with an asterisk, because it’s an addendum.

(An addendum, to those of us in the writing business, is something we can’t quite work out where to fit in).

*The Naked and The Dead was and still is a blood and guts war novel by Norman Mailer...many critics said it was a fugging good book and Gore Vidal said it was rubbish. But Gore Vidal is precious and bitchy and obviously belongs in Aosdana…which gives us three good reasons to ignore him. More interesting is that many people complained because the original publishers of the book used the spelling fugging for the more correct version of the expletive. Oh well, that was the nineteen fifties for you.

__________________________________________________

New postings will be made here from time to time, hopefully every few weeks. 

Contact morriganbooks@gmail.com if you'd like an email alert.

Many earlier articles in the Connections series can be viewed 

by going to this link ,and still more are held 

on The Irish Times archive.

Other photographs from the Conan Kennedy Collection are to be seen on the discontinued blog http://cksoldphotos.blogspot.ie/

The National Library of Ireland hold a large selection of  the Conan Kennedy Collection, 
this link here will tell you all about it.

PRESIDENTS

I was a smallish boy when my father took me to a rugby match and pointed out a smallish man in a largish top hat. It was President Sean T. O’Kelly.  Somewhat later a tallish man loomed loftily over my teens, DeValera, a living repository of our turbulent history, a quiet ascetic man, but somewhat sinister. The years moved on. The first president I actually shook hands with was Mary Robinson. She said ‘how nice to see you again’. I had never met her before in my life. The next time I shook her hand I was greeted with ‘how nice to meet you’, she somehow forgetting that we had been old mates on the previous occasion. I suppose that sort of thing happens to presidents. Particularly when dealing with us bearded blokes who are of a type, interchangeable. The next president to shake my well-shook hand was Mary McAleese. She giggled girlishly and said something in Belfasto-English which I didn’t quite catch. But I was smitten anyway.

Long before life in a business where one tends to meet presidents and their ilk, this present writer was in the architectural profession. Perhaps not another Gandon, nor a Cassels or even a Sam Stephenson, I nonetheless did make a mark on my native city. That long brick wall that runs up Appian Way beside Fitzwilliam Tennis Club? I designed it.  And I also designed the (right hand side of) curtain wall to the now former EBS head office in Westmoreland Street. That’s the wall of the old Paradiso Cafe in the middle.

Apparantly I was the man for walls.

Then, for reasons obscure, I was plucked from all this by my boss the above mentioned Sam S, and assigned to look after his ‘special clients’. Yes of course he was a rogue and the practice was profoundly corrupt but those were the days! The ‘special clients’ ranged from the mistresses of property speculators to dodgy financiers, developers and auctioneers. While the mistresses wanted the normal things that mistresses require, (mostly nice kitchens), the speculators and financiers and dodgy bankers and builders and auctioneers all seemed to want classical things. Porticoes in the ionic order. And very very vulgar bathrooms. What this writer does not know about corruption in the building industry, nice kitchens, porticoes in the ionic order and vulgar bathrooms is not worth knowing.

How and ever, in amongst the movers and shakers and shysters of the special clients’ list there were some normal upright citizens. Not many, just some. Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh was one of these. Not remotely interested in ionic porticoes or vulgar bathrooms, he was merely trying to do up his house in Wicklow. Recently appointed Chief Justice, the State was making the house more secure and in the process bits and pieces of renovations and extensions were being done.

The point man for the State, I spent an afternoon a week for many weeks down there. The house was in what is known as The Russian Village, in Wicklow’s Kilquade, a strange little enclave vaguely reminiscent of the set for the film The Fiddler on The Roof. Though without the marauding Cossacks and singing Jews and chirping chickens. My afternoons there were spent taking tea and discussing the topics of the day with the Chief Justice’s wife, Mrs O’D. Sometimes the topic of architecture arose, but rarely. Instead we wandered widely on life’s rich tapestry.

An older woman to my youth, I liked her lots.

For some reason the State had decided to replace the house’s original leaded pane windows with clear sheets of glass. Whether this from sheer bloody ignorance or as some plan to give the Special Branch a clear field of fire at assassains I do not know. In any event, the elegant old windows went, and came to me via the good offices of Mrs O’D, who knew I was building my own house in Mayo at the time.

And that, was that.

The Ó Dálaighs moved on, to Áras an Uachtarain. I did not see them again. Then not so long ago I found a magazine, or an old school year book rather, stuck in a bundle of old magazines that I came across in a shop.  I noted this photo, and bought the bundle, and snipped the photo out.

No, it is not the President’s wife, nor the wife of the Chief Justice. Nor is it the older woman who gave me tea so many times, and listened to my young man’s waffle, amused and wise. It’s all of them, and lots of other people too.

“Mairín Ní Dhiarmada, of Dartmouth Square, Dublin”, the caption tells me, “on the 16^th May 1934 she married Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh.”

Right now I look through her leaded glass windows and see…connections.

______________________________________________________

New postings will be made here from time to time, hopefully every few weeks. 

Contact morriganbooks@gmail.com if you'd like an email alert.

Many earlier articles in the Connections series can be viewed 

by going to this link ,and still more are held 

on The Irish Times archive.

Other photographs from the Conan Kennedy Collection are to be seen on the discontinued blog http://cksoldphotos.blogspot.ie/

The National Library of Ireland hold a large selection of  the Conan Kennedy Collection, 
this link here will tell you all about it.