Patrick Comerford
Tuesday next marks the fourth anniversary of the Russia’s launch of a large-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, expanding its war against Ukraine and creating Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II.
Of course, the Russia-Ukraine War began eight years earlier, in February 2014, with Russia’s covert invasion and annexation of Crimea. The conflict escalated significantly with Russia’s full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022, which expanded the existing conflict in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
The life story of the photographer Arthur Fields (1901-1994), known affectionately to generations of Dubliners as the ‘Man on the Bridge’, provides a link between Ireland and Ukraine, a link between Dublin and Kyiv, and is a reminder of the sufferings of Jewish refugees who fled pogroms, antisemitism and oppression in the Russian Empire and of the positive contributions refugee families to countries that receive and welcome them.
Arthur Fields was born Abraham Feldman on 27 October 1901 in Dublin to Ukrainian Jewish parents Malka, also known as Molly or Mary (Sweed) and Simon Feldman, a draper, of 6 Raymond Street off the South Circular Road. He had four brothers: Oran, Jacob, David and Moses, and a sister who died in infancy.
Simon Feldman was originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, where his father had been a prosperous rabbi. Simon Feldman fled Ukraine with his wife and their two eldest sons, in 1891 or 1885, escaping the pogroms that spread across the Tsarist empire following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia. About two million Jews fled the Russian empire between 1881 and 1914, with around 3,500 arriving in Ireland, the majority settling in Dublin.
Feldman is family name found in a number of Jewish refugees who fled Ukraine at the time, and a number of Feldman families were living in Dublin by the end of the 19th and the early 20th century; the comedian Marty Feldman (1934-1982) was a son of Myer Feldman, an East End gown manufacturer who was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant from Kyiv.
Simon Feldman left Kyiv in the middle of the night with his family in a horse-drawn carriage, taking whatever valuables they could manage. Like many of the new ‘foreign Jews’ who arrived in Dublin, they settled around the South Circular Road and Portobello area of Dublin, and lived at a number of addresses in the ‘Little Jerusalem’ area, including 20 Windsor Terrace (1897), 24 Saint Kevin’s Road (1899) and 6 Raymond Street (1901), when Arthur was born as Abraham Feldman on 27 October 1901.
The Feldman family later changed their name to Fields and the children took on English-sounding versions of their Hebrew-sounding names: Oran became Harry, Jacob became Jack, Moses became Morris, David remained David, and Abraham became Arthur, although continued to be known to his family as Abby.
Arthur Fields went to Saint Catherine’s School, Donore Avenue, and then to Wesley College on Saint Stephen’s Green, before going into the tailoring trade. As a young man, he visited his elder brother Jack who had a successful real estate business in the US and his brothers Harry, Morris and David in England.
For a time, he lived in Chalkwell in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, where he and his brother David Fields (1897-1956) bought a house. He met his wife-to-be, Doreen Cracknell (1917-1990) from the East End in London, at a dance in Southend in 1934. Doreen was 17 and Arthur was 33 when they married and moved to Dublin. They first lived Sandymount, but then lived for the rest of their married life at 602 Howth Road, Raheny. They were the parents of one daughter, Norma, and three sons, Bernard, Philip and David.
Doreen was an Anglican, and Arthur was largely non-observant as a Jew, but he retained a strong personal religious commitment and attended Adelaide Road Synagogue on high days and holy days.
Arhur Fields left the tailoring business and moved into street photography in the 1930s. Alongside other street photographers jostling for customers, Arthur established his patch on O’Connell Bridge, but also worked on O’Connell Street, particularly at night to photograph young people visiting the street’s cafés, ballrooms and cinemas, at a time when the street was at the heart of bustling night life in Dublin
He would approach potential customers, take their photograph, ask whether they would like the picture, give them a ticket for a local studio, where they could pay for the photograph have it posted out to them. His wife Doreen developed the photographs – first in premises on Pearse Street, then in a darkroom at home – and posted the prints out to customers.
Arthur was a sturdy and committed man, and would walk from Raheny to the bridge each day and back home again, a 10-mile round trip. He was cautioned for peddling or selling with a licence on several occasions in the early days. But he persevered and was eventually tolerated by the gardai. He began using a Polaroid camera in the 1960s so he could give customers their photographs on the spot.
For almost half of his 50-year career on the bridge, Fields worked one side while his older brother David worked the other. The brothers shared a close bond, David lived with Arthur and his family in Raheny, and the two spoke Yiddish to each other at home. Their mother Molly died at Kilworth Road, Drimnagh, in 1940.
David died on 13 June 1956, leaving his younger brother bereft: Arthur had a breakdown and was given a course of electric shock treatment, before returning to work on the bridge. He travelled further afield at times, taking photographs in resorts like Bray, Co Wicklow, and Bundoran, Co Donegal, or at the Spring Show at the RDS, Ballsbridge, or at the Ploughing Championships.
Privately, Fields did not have good social skills, nor did he have close bonds with many other people outside his family circle, nor did he take part in family occasions or attend any of the weddings of his four children, choosing to work instead.
But, while Arthur Fields may have been just one among the many street photographers in Dublin in his day, he was the most prominent and had the lengthiest career. He finally left his pitch on O’Connell Bridge in 1988 at the age of 87. Doreen died two years later on 2 April 1990. He continued to live alone at home in Raheny with the help of his neighbours and family. He died of heart failure in Beaumont Hospital on 11 April 1994 at the age of 92. At his funeral and cremation in Glasnevin Cemetery, many people brought photographs he had taken to share with his family.
The Irish Times described him as ‘one of Dublin’s best known characters’, while the Evening Herald called him a ‘Dublin institution for thousands of people visiting the city’. Declan Kiberd wrote in the Irish Press: ‘Those who mourned the Man on the Bridge … may have been lamenting not just their lost youth, but the lost innocence of an era which Arthur Fields in a way symbolised.’
The legacy of Arthur Fields is his archive of city life in Dublin. During his 50-year career from the 1930s to the 1980s, it is estimated, he took at least 182,500 photographs. These photographs chart the many changes in the city, from fashions in clothing and changes in hairstyles to the disappearance of Nelson’s Pillar. The many celebrities he photographed on O’Connell Bridge or on O’Connell Street include Noel Purcell, Gene Tierney, Bing Crosby, Margaret Rutherford, Brendan Behan, Jack Doyle and George Harrison.
Fields never kept any negatives or copies of his images. His archives survive primarily in homes across Ireland. To bring some of these images together, the ‘Man on Bridge’ multimedia project was launched on the Late Late Show on RTÉ in 2014, asking people to submit their photographs. This resulted in a book of 250 images and an exhibition of 3,400 photographs at the Gallery of Photography in Dublin later that year.
RTÉ broadcast a documentary, Man on Bridge on 28 December 2014. A further book, Man on the Bridge: more photos by Arthur Fields, was published in 2017, when the archive had reached 6,000 photographs.
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
