The lure of the Limerick … lines on the corner of Limerick’s White House (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)
Patrick Comerford
On a street corner in Limerick, an inscribed stone juts out from O’Connell Street into Glentworth Street, with the words:
The Limerick is furtive and mean;
you must keep her in close quarantine,
or she sneaks up to the slums
and promptly becomes
disorderly, drunk, and obscene.
For many Limerick, Limericks and poetry are difficult to separate. For some, the Limerick may have been their introduction to poetry, for others they never moved beyond the fun of the Limerick to enjoy the breadth of opportunity offered by poetry.
It is widely thought that Edward Lear invented the Limerick, although this is probably incorrect.
The Limerick as a form was popularised by Edward Lear in his first Book of Nonsense (1846) and a later work, More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, Botany, etc. (1872). Lear wrote 212 Limericks, mostly considered nonsense literature. The humour is not in the punch line ending but rather in the tension between meaning and the lack of meaning.
In one of his typical Limericks, Lear wrote:
There was a Young Person of Smyrna
Whose grandmother threatened to burn her.
But she seized on the cat,
and said ‘Granny, burn that!
You incongruous old woman of Smyrna!’
Whether he invented it or not, Lear certainly made the Limerick popular. The Oxford English Dictionary first defined the word Limerick in 1892, four years after Lear’s death. But as OE Parrott makes clear in the opening pages of The Penguin Book of Limericks:
The Limerick’s birth is unclear:
Its genesis owed much to Lear.
It started as clean,
But soon went obscene.
And this split haunts its later career.
But in Limerick, it is said the five-line verse probably originated from the Limerick-makers of Croom, known as the Maigue poets, who worked in the 18th century. They were school-teachers, priests and self-styled persons of letters, living within 30 km of Croom. Their gatherings and revels in pubs and inns were said to resemble the ancient Irish bardic schools, conducted in Greek, Latin and Irish.
One of the Maigue’s first-known Limerick-writers was a publican, John O’Toumy, who was born near Croom in 1706. Of his own business practices, he bemoaned:
I sell the best brandy and sherry,
To make my good customers merry.
But at times their finances
Run short as it chances,
And then I feel very sad, very.
To this another Maigue poet, Andrew McCrath, quickly retorted:
O’Toumy! You boast yourself handy
At selling good ale and fine brandy,
But the fact is your liquor
Makes everyone sicker,
I tell you that, I, your friend, Andy.
Ronald Knox caricatured the philosophy and theology of the I8th century Irish bishop George Berkeley in a pair of Limericks:
There was a young man who said, ‘God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there’s no-one about in the Quad.’
And the reply, according to Knox was:
Dear Sir:
Your astonishment’s odd:
I am always about in the Quad.
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be,
Sincerely observed by, Yours faithfully, GOD.
The poet WH Auden, whose literary corpus is marked by thoughtfulness and solemnity, seemed to find release in the humour of the Limerick:
T.S. Eliot is quite at a loss
When clubwomen bustle across
At literary teas,
Crying: ‘What, if you please,
Did you mean by The Mill on the Floss?’
The plaque celebrating the fun of the Limerick is on a corner of Limerick’s White House pub, which dates back to 1812. One previous manager attributed the pub’s enduring success over the past 200 years to the fact that it is ‘simple in its design, everything works. It has basically been untouched since it first opened.’
This has been a favourite haunt of bankers, lawyers, artists and musicians. Jack Charlton, Jim Kemmy, Frank McCourt and Richard Harris are all said to have had a pint here.
The pub earned its name not because of its colour but because the company that first opened the White House was WH White & Co. It was bought by Eamonn Gleeson and his family in the 1920s. Eamon Gleeson, whose picture hangs proudly in the bar, was noted as ‘an eccentric, who used to wire all the bar stools together so they couldn’t be moved.’
For a long time the bar and its management prided themselves on the fact that this was one of the few pubs in Limerick not to have a TV, focusing instead on poetry and acoustic music nights, promoting local writers and singers.
The pub is known for its artistic and cultural heritage. The White House poetry nights have featured poets from all over the world, and the pub has always been supportive of actors, writers and musicians. The pub was bought in 1999 for the equivalent of €1 million. But the poetry nights continued, and in 2015 the White House celebrated a cultural milestone in marking 600 consecutive poetry nights.
When the White House was bought last year by the former Munster and Ireland rugby player Damien Varley, reportedly for €650,000, a Facebook page was set up to save the pub from being turned into a sports bar.
The White House has a late 19th century shopfront and a Victorian pub interior (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)
The White House is a prominent building at the corner of O’Connell Street and Glentworth Street. It was designed to address both streetscapes in a formal architectural manner. The late 19th century shopfront and the Victorian pub interior make this building one of architectural importance.
This end-of-terrace, two-bay, four-storey building over a concealed basement has a three-bay, four-storey over basement south-facing side elevation. It was first built as a red-brick townhouse about 1810, but the shopfront dates from the late 19th century, with Doric pilasters on both elevations rising from ‘crazy’ tiled stall-riser plinths flanking both door openings and display windows, and supporting a timber framed fascia board with incised lettering behind glass panes that reads: ‘James Gleeson.’
The roof is concealed behind a parapet wall. Red brick walls laid in Flemish bond with cement repointing. A gantry crane on the side elevation may be original and was probably used to hoist goods to and from the basement level.
A plaque erected by Limerick Civic Trust on the left-hand side of the O’Connell Street façade was unveiled by President Michael D Higgins on 24 February 2015 as a tribute to the Limerick-born poet Desmond O’Grady (1935-2014), who began reading his poetry at the White House Bar in 1954 as part of the Poetry Circle.
When Desmond O’Grady died at the age of 78 in 2014, President Michael D Higgins led the tributes, describing him as one of Ireland’s best-known poets, who was deeply committed to his work.
With the exception of Yeats, he was arguably the most international of 20th century Irish poets.
His first book, Chords and Orchestrations, was published in 1956. He was the author of almost 20 books of poetry, including My Alexandria (2006), On My Way (2006), The Road Taken: Poems 1956-1996 and The Wandering Celt (2001).
He also published over a dozen collections of translated poetry, among them Trawling Tradition 1954-1994, Selected Poems of CP Cavafy, The Song of Songs, Ten Modern Arab Poets, and Kurdish Poems of Love and Liberty. His other works include prose memoirs of his literary acquaintances and friends.
A plaque on the façade of the White House celebrated the Limerick-born poet Desmond O’Grady (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)
Desmond O’Grady was born in Limerick in August 1935, and spent much of his childhood in West Clare and the Irish-speaking districts of Co Kerry. After boarding school in Roscrea, Co Tipperary, he moved to Paris in the 1950s and worked in the Shakespeare and Company bookshop, so closely associated with James Joyce and the publication of Ulysses.
He went on to teach in Paris, and there he became friends with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Pablo Picasso, and Samuel Beckett, who had recently published Waiting for Godot.
When he married an exiled Iraqi Catholic, they moved to Rome, where O’Grady taught English and was the English-language voice of Pope Pius XII on Vatican Radio. In Rome, he also met Federico Fellini and played the role of an Irish poet in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. For some years, he was secretary to the American poet Ezra Pound in his exile in Italy.
When he and his wife separated, he went to teach at Harvard, where he also completed his MA and PhD in Celtic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Studies. At Harvard, he became friends with Robert Lowell, and continued the links he had forged in Europe with the Beat writers Kerouac and Ginsberg. O’Grady also worked as the European editor of The Transatlantic Review.
He returned to his spiritual home on mainland Europe, and from Europe, he went to Egypt. While was absorbing, distilling, and writing, he was teaching at the American University in Cairo, where he was Poet in Residence, and at the University of Alexandria.
When he returned to live in Ireland, he settled in Kinsale, Co Cork, where he lived for the last 20 years of his life.
We met soon after his return to Ireland, and had a lengthy discussion about the Greek poet CP Cavafy, who was born in Alexandria. Over 20 years ago, in ‘An Irishman’s Diary’ in The Irish Times in 1996, I wondered why little attention had been given to his translation of 33 of Cavafy’s poems. This version of 33 Cavafy poems, Alternative Manners, was published in 1993 by the Hellenic Society (Athens and Alexandria). Unfortunately, much to his regret, the proofs were never properly corrected, and so the book was never put on the market commercially and has never been reviewed in newspapers.
He felt Alternative Manners ‘reads like Greek ruins’ and asked later readers to ‘please forgive, and overlook, and correct.’ But, he conceded modestly, the collection had its admirers. ‘Greek people who know their Cavafy and who have read it found my Hiberno English very suited to Cavafy’s Alexandrian Greek, and closer to the text of Cavafy’s language than standard British and American translations.’
A reading of two of Cavafy's best-known poems illustrates the particular insights and turn of phrase which an Irish translator brought to his work. His translation of Ithaka loses the references by Kimon Friar and Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard to Laistrygonians and Cyclops; instead, they become ‘cannibal bogeymen met in half light’ and ‘those with one eye, open for their main chance.’ The ‘Phoenician trading stations’ or ‘market places’ of the other translators become ‘ports you’ve not dreamed of’ and ‘every city.’
In Waiting for the Barbarians, Sherrard and Keeley have the city fathers ‘assembled in the forum’ and Friar has them mustered in the forum, but O’Grady, who renames the poem Expecting the Barbarians, has them ‘waiting, here in the square.’ Instead of the barbarians being dazzled, they are not impressed by ‘bamboozle.’ And, instead of rhetoric and public speaking or ‘eloquence and public speeches,’ O’Grady speaks of ‘boring baloney.’
At the time, I noted how O’Grady had come to regard Greece as his second home. I suggested his earlier frustration with the Greek printer’s handling of Alternative Manners ‘could be rectified if an Irish publisher found an interest in the book.’
That hope was realised in 1998, when the Dedalus Press in Dublin published Selected Poems of CP Cavafy, a volume that was reissued in 2012, two years before he died.
Desmond O’Grady was unusual among Irish poets of his generation for both his interest in modernist experimentation and his immersion in the poetry of other cultures. He was, in the true sense, a citizen of world poetry.
He died in 2014, on the eve of his 79th birthday. In his later years he took comfort in the theme in Cavafy’s Ithaka – it is the journey, not the destination, is what constitutes our true reward:
Keep Ithaka marked on your mind’s map,
always. Arrival there is your final goal.
Don’t hurry your journey in any way. Better
to last it for decades. As you age, anchor
at small islands with the wealth you’ve acquired
voyaging. Never expect Ithaka to give you anything.
Ithaka gave you the journey.
CP Cavafy ... a portrait by David Hockney
15 June 2017
The missing heir from
Limerick who inspired
Rudyard Kipling’s story
The 1916 memorial on Sarsfield Bridge stands on the site of a statue to Viscount Fitzgibbon and the dead of the Crimean War (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)
Patrick Comerford
Earlier this morning, I was describing the elegant Arts and Crafts clubhouse at Shannon Rowing Club, designed by the Edwardian architect William Clifford Smith. There are two rowing clubhouses on Shannon Island at either side of the bridge: the Shannon Rowing Club on the north side was founded by Sir Peter Tait in 1868; Limerick Rowing Club on the south side was founded in 1870 and has a simpler structure.
Both clubs add to the interesting stories of Sarsfield Bridge, whose name recalls Patrick Sarsfield, the Earl of Lucan, who played a commanding role at the Siege of Limerick in 1691.
But the bridge was known originally as Wellesley Bridge, in honour of the Duke of Wellington. The Limerick Bridge Commissioners were incorporated in 1823 to build the bridge and a floating dock ‘to accommodate sharp vessels frequenting the port of Limerick.’ The Act was introduced into Parliament by the Thomas Spring Rice (1790-1866) of Mount Trenchard, then MP for the City of Limerick and later MP for Cambridge, Chancellor of the Exchequer and 1st Lord Monteagle.
The foundation stone was laid in 24 October 1824 by John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare. The design of the bridge was based on the Pont de Neuilly in Paris. The bridge was designed by the Scottish architect and engineer Alexander Nimmo (1783-1832), and it took 11 years to build. Nimmo’s other projects included designing the village of Knightstown on Valentia Island, Co Kerry, the road from Galway to Clifden and the harbour of Roundstone in Connemara.
When Nimmo died in 1832, the bridge was completed by John Grantham in 1835 at a total cost of £89,601, 50 per cent more than the original estimate. The contractor was Clements and Son. When the bridge finally opened on 5 August 1835 it was a particularly important development for Limerick, allowing the city to expand on the northern shore of the River Shannon.
The design of Sarsfield Bridge drew inspiration from the Pont de Neuilly in Paris (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)
The bridge has five large and elegant elliptical arches with an open balustrade, running from an artificial island, originally called Wellesley Pier and now known as Shannon Island, to the north shore, and a simple flat, swivel deck with iron lattice railings crossing a canal and road from the island to what was known as Brunswick Street and is now Sarsfield Street.
Each span of the bridge reaches 70 ft, with each arch rising to a height of 8 ft 6 in. The existing metal swivel bridge, made in Darlington, replaces an earlier 19th century twin-leafed swivel bridge made in Liverpool and connects the island to the shore.
The swivel end of the bridge is no longer functional, although some of its heavy machinery is still intact underneath the roadway. A lock system has replaced the swivel section to allow for the passage of smaller boats. But, apart from this, the bridge has remained largely unchanged since it opened and still has its original lamp standards.
The monument on the bridge commemorates the 1916 Rising. But an earlier monument was erected on this site in 1857, commemorating John Charles Henry Fitzgibbon (1829-1854), Viscount Fitzgibbon of Mountshannon House in Castleconnell, Co Limerick.
John Charles Henry FitzGibbon was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, Oxford, and became a lieutenant in the 8th (King’s Royal Irish) Hussars. He was killed in the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854.
Fitzgibbon’s statue, cast by the sculptor Patrick MacDowell (1799-1870), showed him standing in his uniform on a stone plinth decorated with the names of those from Limerick who were killed in the Crimean War. The statue was flanked by two Russian cannons captured in the Crimean War.
The plaque on the bridge read:
To commemorate the bravery of
Viscount Fitzgibbon
8th Royal Irish Hussars
& of his gallant companions in arms
natives of the County & City of Limerick
who glouriously fell in the Crimean War.
Fitzgibbon was reported ‘missing presumed dead’ during the Charge of the Light Brigade. There is a story that he married Frances Murphy in 1854 in a clandestine marriage, and that he had a posthumous son, William John Gerald FitzGibbon, who was born in 1855.
Fitzgibbon’s statue was originally intended for the Crescent in Limerick. But political and religious sentiments were running high, the site at the Crescent was used instead for a monument for Daniel O’Connell erected in 1857, and Fitzgibbon’s statue was erected on Wellesley Bridge.
Fitzgibbon’s body was never found and inevitably there were stories that he had not been killed at Balaclava. One story claimed in 1877 that he had been taken prisoner, and that later, for an assault on a Russian officer, he had been sent to Siberia. The stories claimed he later returned to England, and visited the Hounslow Barracks, where the 8th Hussars were stationed, and that there he was identified by Colonel Mussenden and Quartermaster-Sergeant-Major Hefferon, who had been Fitzgibbon’s servant.
Mussenden and Hefferon later denied the reports. Despite appeals in newspapers, no-one came forward to claim the title of Earl of Clare which had died with his father over a decade earlier in 1864.
A similar story gained currency 25 years after the Charge of the Light Brigade. During the second Afghan War (1878-1880), Fitzgibbon’s regiment, the 8th Hussars, were stationed near the North-West frontier.
One night a dishevelled looking man who spoke English, but seemed unaccustomed to doing so, was brought into the officers’ mess. He was invited to stay for dinner, where he surprised all by having an uncannily good knowledge of the regimental customs, indicating he was an ex-officer of the regiment. He was not asked to identify himself, but on examining the regimental records it was discovered that the only ex-officer whose whereabouts had not been positively accounted for was Viscount Fitzgibbon.
Rudyard Kipling was intrigued by the story and it provided the basis for his short story The Man Who Was, in which a man arrested for gun-stealing and believed to be an Afghan turns out to be an ex-officer who has been a Russian prisoner for many years before escaping and finding his way back to his regiment.
Meanwhile, Wellesley Bridge continued as a toll bridge, and tolls continued to be collected until 1883. The name of the bridge was changed to Sarsfield Bridge that year, but Fitzgibbon’s statue continued to stand on the bridge until it was blown-up by the IRA on 9 June 1930, leaving only the podium intact. The cannons survived and are still apparently outside the Harbour Master’s office.
The plinth was unused for many years until the erection of the present memorial, which is the work of the sculptor Albert Power, in 1954. One of the original stone plaques from the Crimean Memorial was overlain by a bronze plaque that records in Irish the names and events of the 1916 Rising. Another plaque reads: ‘This memorial was erected by means of voluntary public subscriptions in memory of the Limerick men and their comrades who died ... during the Easter Rising of 1916.’
The memorial has bronze statues depicting the Fenian Tom Clarke, a signatory of the 1916 Proclamation, pointing to the proclamation. At the top is Clarke’s brother-in-law, Commandant Edward Daly, Con Colbert from Athea, Co Limerick, who is seen crouching, and a chained allegorical figure representing Mother Ireland. The Mother Ireland figure is said to be based on Tom Clarke’s wife, Kathleen Daly, a Limerick woman.
Patrick Comerford
Earlier this morning, I was describing the elegant Arts and Crafts clubhouse at Shannon Rowing Club, designed by the Edwardian architect William Clifford Smith. There are two rowing clubhouses on Shannon Island at either side of the bridge: the Shannon Rowing Club on the north side was founded by Sir Peter Tait in 1868; Limerick Rowing Club on the south side was founded in 1870 and has a simpler structure.
Both clubs add to the interesting stories of Sarsfield Bridge, whose name recalls Patrick Sarsfield, the Earl of Lucan, who played a commanding role at the Siege of Limerick in 1691.
But the bridge was known originally as Wellesley Bridge, in honour of the Duke of Wellington. The Limerick Bridge Commissioners were incorporated in 1823 to build the bridge and a floating dock ‘to accommodate sharp vessels frequenting the port of Limerick.’ The Act was introduced into Parliament by the Thomas Spring Rice (1790-1866) of Mount Trenchard, then MP for the City of Limerick and later MP for Cambridge, Chancellor of the Exchequer and 1st Lord Monteagle.
The foundation stone was laid in 24 October 1824 by John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare. The design of the bridge was based on the Pont de Neuilly in Paris. The bridge was designed by the Scottish architect and engineer Alexander Nimmo (1783-1832), and it took 11 years to build. Nimmo’s other projects included designing the village of Knightstown on Valentia Island, Co Kerry, the road from Galway to Clifden and the harbour of Roundstone in Connemara.
When Nimmo died in 1832, the bridge was completed by John Grantham in 1835 at a total cost of £89,601, 50 per cent more than the original estimate. The contractor was Clements and Son. When the bridge finally opened on 5 August 1835 it was a particularly important development for Limerick, allowing the city to expand on the northern shore of the River Shannon.
The design of Sarsfield Bridge drew inspiration from the Pont de Neuilly in Paris (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)
The bridge has five large and elegant elliptical arches with an open balustrade, running from an artificial island, originally called Wellesley Pier and now known as Shannon Island, to the north shore, and a simple flat, swivel deck with iron lattice railings crossing a canal and road from the island to what was known as Brunswick Street and is now Sarsfield Street.
Each span of the bridge reaches 70 ft, with each arch rising to a height of 8 ft 6 in. The existing metal swivel bridge, made in Darlington, replaces an earlier 19th century twin-leafed swivel bridge made in Liverpool and connects the island to the shore.
The swivel end of the bridge is no longer functional, although some of its heavy machinery is still intact underneath the roadway. A lock system has replaced the swivel section to allow for the passage of smaller boats. But, apart from this, the bridge has remained largely unchanged since it opened and still has its original lamp standards.
The monument on the bridge commemorates the 1916 Rising. But an earlier monument was erected on this site in 1857, commemorating John Charles Henry Fitzgibbon (1829-1854), Viscount Fitzgibbon of Mountshannon House in Castleconnell, Co Limerick.
John Charles Henry FitzGibbon was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, Oxford, and became a lieutenant in the 8th (King’s Royal Irish) Hussars. He was killed in the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854.
Fitzgibbon’s statue, cast by the sculptor Patrick MacDowell (1799-1870), showed him standing in his uniform on a stone plinth decorated with the names of those from Limerick who were killed in the Crimean War. The statue was flanked by two Russian cannons captured in the Crimean War.
The plaque on the bridge read:
To commemorate the bravery of
Viscount Fitzgibbon
8th Royal Irish Hussars
& of his gallant companions in arms
natives of the County & City of Limerick
who glouriously fell in the Crimean War.
Fitzgibbon was reported ‘missing presumed dead’ during the Charge of the Light Brigade. There is a story that he married Frances Murphy in 1854 in a clandestine marriage, and that he had a posthumous son, William John Gerald FitzGibbon, who was born in 1855.
Fitzgibbon’s statue was originally intended for the Crescent in Limerick. But political and religious sentiments were running high, the site at the Crescent was used instead for a monument for Daniel O’Connell erected in 1857, and Fitzgibbon’s statue was erected on Wellesley Bridge.
Fitzgibbon’s body was never found and inevitably there were stories that he had not been killed at Balaclava. One story claimed in 1877 that he had been taken prisoner, and that later, for an assault on a Russian officer, he had been sent to Siberia. The stories claimed he later returned to England, and visited the Hounslow Barracks, where the 8th Hussars were stationed, and that there he was identified by Colonel Mussenden and Quartermaster-Sergeant-Major Hefferon, who had been Fitzgibbon’s servant.
Mussenden and Hefferon later denied the reports. Despite appeals in newspapers, no-one came forward to claim the title of Earl of Clare which had died with his father over a decade earlier in 1864.
A similar story gained currency 25 years after the Charge of the Light Brigade. During the second Afghan War (1878-1880), Fitzgibbon’s regiment, the 8th Hussars, were stationed near the North-West frontier.
One night a dishevelled looking man who spoke English, but seemed unaccustomed to doing so, was brought into the officers’ mess. He was invited to stay for dinner, where he surprised all by having an uncannily good knowledge of the regimental customs, indicating he was an ex-officer of the regiment. He was not asked to identify himself, but on examining the regimental records it was discovered that the only ex-officer whose whereabouts had not been positively accounted for was Viscount Fitzgibbon.
Rudyard Kipling was intrigued by the story and it provided the basis for his short story The Man Who Was, in which a man arrested for gun-stealing and believed to be an Afghan turns out to be an ex-officer who has been a Russian prisoner for many years before escaping and finding his way back to his regiment.
Meanwhile, Wellesley Bridge continued as a toll bridge, and tolls continued to be collected until 1883. The name of the bridge was changed to Sarsfield Bridge that year, but Fitzgibbon’s statue continued to stand on the bridge until it was blown-up by the IRA on 9 June 1930, leaving only the podium intact. The cannons survived and are still apparently outside the Harbour Master’s office.
The plinth was unused for many years until the erection of the present memorial, which is the work of the sculptor Albert Power, in 1954. One of the original stone plaques from the Crimean Memorial was overlain by a bronze plaque that records in Irish the names and events of the 1916 Rising. Another plaque reads: ‘This memorial was erected by means of voluntary public subscriptions in memory of the Limerick men and their comrades who died ... during the Easter Rising of 1916.’
The memorial has bronze statues depicting the Fenian Tom Clarke, a signatory of the 1916 Proclamation, pointing to the proclamation. At the top is Clarke’s brother-in-law, Commandant Edward Daly, Con Colbert from Athea, Co Limerick, who is seen crouching, and a chained allegorical figure representing Mother Ireland. The Mother Ireland figure is said to be based on Tom Clarke’s wife, Kathleen Daly, a Limerick woman.
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