Today is being celebrated not only in Dublin but across the world as Bloomsday (16 June 2023), a major cultural festival even by people who have never read Ulysses. Bloomsday recalls the day in 1904 when Leopold Bloom wandered the streets of Dublin as a modern-day Odysseus and, after many adventures in his mind and in the city, found his way home on Bloomsday.
I have written often in the past about Bloomsday and links with the Comerford family, including Leopold Bloom’s birthplace on Clanbrassil Street and the neighbouring homes of family members, Molly Bloom’s reference in her soliloquy to a Comerford family party, the portraits by John Comerford linked with James Joyce’s family.
But there is another possible, though remote, link between the Comerford family and Ulysses and Bloomsday that have been brought to my attention recently by the biographer and historian Bairbre O Hogain. Her biography of the poet, dramatist and novelist, WM Letts (1882-1972), Sing in the Quiet Places of my Heart, was published last October (2024) by South Dublin Libraries.
For many decades, my widowed grandmother Bridget (Lynders) Comerfords and her children lived at No 5 Ashdale Park, Terenure. No 6 next door, at the end of the terrace, was known as ‘Derrybeg’ and was the home of Sydney Augustine Verschoyle (1883-1974) and his family: his wife Julia née Branigan (1880-1967), and his daughter, Clare Verschoyle (1910-2004). Clare’s mother Rose (McGarry), who was Sydney’s first wife, had died a year after Clare was born, and Sydney Verschoyle and Julia Branigan were married in 1914.
Sydney Verschoyle was born in Clontarf and had worked as a telephone electrician. He died on 4 November 1974, Julia had died on 20 August 1967, Clare died on 23 September 2004 at the age of 93, and they are buried in Goldenbridge Cemetery.
The Verschoyle family was descended from Dutch Huguenot brothers who had moved to Dublin on 16th or 17th century. Family members included a large number of Church of Ireland clergy, including a Bishop of Killala and a Bishop of Kilmore.
Bishop Hamilton Verschoyle of Kilmore was the grandfather of the novelist and playwright Moira Verschoyle (1903-1985), from Castletroy, Limerick, and Brian Goold-Verschoyle (1912-1942), a member of the Communist Party of Ireland who fought in the Spanish Civil War and who was one of the three Irish people killed during the Great Purge ordered by Stalin.
The family was also related to Countess Markievicz of the Irish Citizen Army. Dermot Bolger has told the stories of Countess Markievicz and the Goold-Verschoyle family in his book The Family of Paradise Pier.
My grandmother’s neighbour, Sydney Verschoyle, is named as Sidney Verschoyle in Virginia Mason’s book on the Verschoyle families. James Joyce refers in Ulysses to ‘old Mr. Verschoyle with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs. Verschoyle with the turned-in eye’. Bairbre O Hogain suggests says that this ‘old Mr Verschoyle’ is Sydney’s brother Arthur, and that Arthur Verschoyle and his wife once lived near James Joyce.
The ‘Cyclops’ episode, which is known for its boisterous, patriotic, and often cynical tone. The narrator is mockingly listing different kinds of love, and the Verschoyles are among the examples. One is hard of hearing, the other is hard of sight, providing contrasting physical disabilities and emphasising the unusual pairing, with the overall effect of creating a sense of irony and humour. Joyce offers the Verschoyles as an example of how love can exist despite physical limitations and imperfections, and that it can be found even in the most unexpected places.
The passage highlights the pervasive theme of love in, even among seemingly unlikely or less-than-perfect couples. It is part of a larger passage about love and relationships, emphasising that ‘Love loves to love love’. This is what Joyce had to say about ‘old Mr Verschoyle’ in Ulysses:
Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14 A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty Mac Dowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M.B. loves a fair gentleman. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschoyle with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs Verschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody.
If Bairbre O Hogain and Virginia Mason are right in identifying ‘Old Mr Verschoyle with the ear trumpet’ with Arthur Verschoyle, then he may not have been all that old at the time of that first Bloomsday in 1904, and he was not yet married.
Arthur Verschoyle, the son of Charles and Sarah (White) Verschoyle, was born on 21 March 1881 at 88 Heytesbury Street, Dublin; Sydney Verschoyle was born Sidney Augustine Verschoyle, the son of Charles and Sarah (White) Verschoyle, on 6 August 1883 at Seaview Terrace, Clontarf. So Arthur was hardly ‘Old Mr Verschoyle’ at the age of 23 on that Bloomsday, Charles was only 21, and neither was married at the time of Leopold Bloom’s first odyssey.
On the other hand, Sydney and Arthur had their own insights into love and relationships. The brothers were married a day after each other in the same church: Arthur Verschoyle of Benburb Street married Mary Agnes Kelly of Aughrim Villas in Aughrim Street Church in Dublin on 29 April 1908; a day earlier, on 28 April 1908, Sydney Verschoyle and Rose McGarry married in Aughrim Street.
Perhaps ‘Old Mr Verschoyle with the ear trumpet’ was their father, Charles Verschoyle (1852-1827), who was originally from the South Circular Road area, near ‘Little Jerusalem’ with many residents who till come to life in Ulysses. Charles was a Sanitary Official with Dublin Corporation and the Superintendent of Dublin Corporation Artisans Dwelling, a large lodging house at 56 Benburb Street with over 100 male and female residents in one of the most deprived streets in Dublin.
They were certainly related to William Henry Foster Verschoyle (1860-1943), who was the father of two sons had were killed in World War I: Lieutenant Francis Stuart Verschoyle, was 19 when he was killed on 25 April 1915 in the Second Battles of Ypres, three days after the Germans launched the first ever poison gas attack; Captain (William) Arthur Verschoyle was 27 when he was killed in action at Arras in France on 11 April 1917 – his body was never recovered. They are named on the war memorials in Taney Church, Dundrum. Their mother is said to have died of a broken heart.
A third son, the Revd George John Foster Verschoyle (1889-1954), was the curate of Saint George’s, Dublin (1915-1925), a church that features prominently in Ulysses, and of Taney parish (1925-1930), and then Rector of Ardamine and Kiltennel, Co Wexford.
Their widowed father married the war poet, poet, dramatist, novelist and children’s writer, married the poet Winifred Letts (1882-1972) in Saint Stephen’s Church, Dublin, on 5 May 1926.
Meanwhile, my widowed grandmother, the next-door neighbour of Sydney Verschoyle and his family, continued to live at 5 Ashdale Park, Terenure, until she died there on 25 March 1948. She was buried with my grandfather, Stephen Edward Comerford, in Saint Catherine’s Churchyard, Portrane.
Her sons Robert and Patrick Comerford, her daughter Margaret and her step-daughter May continued to live at 5 Ashdale Park, which remained in the Comerford family until 1995.
I still need to do more research on Sydney Verschoyle of 6 Ashdale Park and the possible link between his bother Arthur and Ulysses.
I thought about these two sets of Verschoyle brothers and of Winfred Letts and her war poems on my two recent odysseys in Oxford, and her poem ‘The Spires of Oxford’:
The Spires of Oxford
I saw the spires of Oxford
As I was passing by,
The grey spires of Oxford
Against the pearl-grey sky.
My heart was with the Oxford men
Who went abroad to die.
The years go fast in Oxford,
The golden years and gay,
The hoary Colleges look down
On careless boys at play.
But when the bugles sounded war
They put their games away.
They left the peaceful river,
The cricket-field, the quad,
The shaven lawns of Oxford,
To seek a bloody sod—
They gave their merry youth away
For country and for God.
God rest you, happy gentlemen,
Who laid your good lives down,
Who took the khaki and the gun
Instead of cap and gown.
God bring you to a fairer place
Than even Oxford town.
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