Bethel Solomons, the prominent Jewish doctor who won ten caps in international rugby for Ireland

A portrait of Dr Bethel Solomons by his sister Estella Solomons (Irish Jewish Museum, ©The Trustees of the Estate of Estella Solomons)

Patrick Comerford

This is another weekend of wall-to-wall, back-to-back rugby in the Six Nations Championship, with Ireland playing Italy tomorrow (2:10 pm) and England playing Scotland (4:40 pm), and then Wales and France on Sunday afternoon (15:10).

Despite a disappointing 36-14 defeat by France in the Stade de France last week, my fervour for Irish rugby is undimmed, and my hopes, however unfounded, remain high this weekend.

Few Jewish players have played at the highest levels in Irish rugby history. Bethel Solomons (1885-1965) is the most prominent Jewish Irish rugby international, capped as a forward for Ireland in the early 20th century, and also a noted doctor. Later, another former Irish rugby international, Tony Ward, discovered his Jewish heritage with dramatic revelations in recent years.

Dr Bethel Solons was the Master of the Rotunda Hospital, an actor at the Abbey Theatre and President of the Dublin Jewish Progressive Congregation. In addition, he was an international rugby player.

Bethel Albert Herbert Solomons was born on 27 February 1885 into a prominent Jewish family who are one of the oldest continuous Jewish families in Ireland. The Solomons family came to Ireland from England in 1824, when Elias Solomons opened his optician’s shop in Nassau Street, close to Trinity College Dublin. His son, Maurice Solomons (1832-1922), continued the optician’s practice at 19 Nassau Street, on the corner with South Frederick Street. He is mentioned by James Joyce in Ulysses, and was also a JP and the honorary consul in Ireland of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

James Joyce in street art in Nassau Street … Maurice Solomons (is mentioned by James Joyce in ‘Ulysses’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Bethel’s elder brother Edwin Solomons (1879-1964) was a stockbroker and prominent member of the Dublin Jewish community. Their sister Estella Solomons (1882-1968) was a leading artist; she married the poet and publisher James Sullivan Starkey (1879-1958), a Methodist, who wrote under the penname Seumas O’Sullivan. Their younger sister Sophie trained as an opera singer.

Bethel Solomons went to Saint Andrew’s School, Dublin, and studied medicine in Trinity College Dublin, where he enjoyed the social life, theatre and rugby. He captained Trinity to the Leinster Senior Cup (1908), also played for Wanderers, and played on the Hospitals’ Cup winning team in the 1903-1904 and 1904-1905 seasons. He became the first Jew to play Test rugby when, on 8 February 1908, he lined up as Ireland’s number 8 in a 13-3 defeat by England at the Richmond Athletic Ground. In all, he won ten caps for Ireland (1908-1910).

In The Oval World: A Global History of Rugby' by Tony Collins, an account is given of Solomons taking a taxi to ensure he would be in time to run on to the pitch for a rugby international: ‘Fearing he would be late for Ireland’s 1909 home match against England, he hailed a cab in the centre of Dublin. He told the cabbie he wanted to go to Lansdowne Road. “It’s for the Ireland rugby international” explained Solomons. “Ireland?” snorted the driver dismissively “it’s nothing but fourteen Prods and a Jew”.’

Ireland were defeated 11-5 by England that day, 13 February 1909.

The stadium at Lansdowne Road, the home ground of Ireland and of Wanderers … Bethel Solomons was capped ten times for Ireland (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

He acted at the Abbey Theatre, under the stage name Thomas Thornhill, in 1913 in August Strindberg’s There are Crimes and Crimes, and James Stephens dedicated The Charwoman’s Daughter to him.

Although his rugby and theatrical ambitions were limited by the demands and successful medical career, he went on to become a selector for the Irish team and was vice-president of the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) in later years.

After his experience as an extern maternity assistant at the Rotunda Hospital, attending home births in the Dublin slums, he became devoted to obstetrics and gynaecology, also studied in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden and Munich, and started to teach medical students.

Bethel Solomons was a supporter of the suffrage movement and an advocate of women’s equality. He opened the Jewish Medical Dispensary in Stamer Street in Dublin’s ‘Little Jerusalem’ in 1913 and ran it with Ada Shillman, a midwife who attended most of the Jewish women in Dublin during her career.

He married Gertrude Levy in 1916 at the Liberal Synagogue in London in a wedding conducted by Claude Montefiore. Gertrude was a friend of his sister Sophie since they were students at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Gertrude and Bethel lived in 42 Fitzwilliam Square, where he ran a successful practice (1916-1926). His patients included George Yeats and Iseult Gonne, and they later rented the upstairs of 42 Fitzwilliam Square to WB Yeats and his wife George. He later practiced from 30 Lower Baggot Street.

Bethel Solomons was the Master of the Rotunda Hospital from 1926 to 1933, and as Master he is mentioned by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake: ‘in my bethel of Solyman’s I accouched my rotundaties.’

He inherited considerable financial challenges at a hospital that needed to modernise and to maintain its reputation as one of the world’s leading maternity hospitals. His improvements included a new nurses’ home, new out-patient department, theatre block and sick babies ward, the introduction of X-ray facilities and incubators and a revival of the pathology laboratory.

As World War II approached, Solomons took an increased role in Jewish affairs. He wrote to the British Medical Journal in 1937 warning against the choice of Berlin as the location for an international medical academy of postgraduate work and research to ‘further international fellowship and friendship’.

The Dublin Jewish Progressive Congregation on Leicester Avenue, Rathgar (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

From 1939, he worked to raise funds for the Jewish Refugee Aid Committee, which was chaired by Leonard Abrahamson and had among its vice-chairs, his brother Edwin, who was the President of the Dublin Hebrew Congregation at Adelaide Road Synagogue. At the end of the war, he became chair of the Jewish Children’s Refugee fund, raising funds to bring refugee children to Clonyn Castle, Co Westmeath or to Millisle Farm in Northern Ireland.

Solomons chaired a meeting in the Mansion House in Dublin in 1946 addressed by Rabbi Israel Mattuck of the Liberal Synagogue in London. The meeting led to the formation of the Dublin Jewish Progressive Congregation (DJPC), with Bethel Solomons as president from 1946 to 1965. The former Chief Rabbi of Ireland, Yitzhak Herzog (1888-1959), by then the Chief Rabbi of the Holy Land, denounced the new synagogue as an ‘open, active, organised rebellion against the Torah’, but Bethel Solomons refuted this in the Jewish Chronicle in 1946.

Solomons received many international honours and was President of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland in 1946-1949. He died on 11 September 1965 at his home, Laughton Beg, Rochestown Avenue, Dún Laoghaire. Bethel and Gertrude Solomons were the parents of three children. Their second son, Dr Michael Solomons (1919-2007) was a distinguished gynaecologist, a pioneer of family planning in Ireland, and a veteran of the bitter and divisive 1983 constitutional amendment referendum campaign.

Another Irish rugby international, Tony Ward, found out late in life that his father, Danny Ward, was from a Jewish family that fled Poland to escape Nazi persecution. In a peculiar accident or coincidence in history, his paternal ancestors too had Solomons as their original family name.

Tony Ward was only five years old when his father died, leaving him with ‘precious few early memories of him’ so that he ‘knew very little about him or his family.’ It was only in later life he discovered his father’s story as a Jewish refugee from Poland later, partly through research initiated by his daughters, Nikki and Lynn, as a Christmas present. Through a professional genealogical agency, Ancestry Made Easy, they came across findings he had never known for the best part of six decades.

His father, known as Danny Ward, was born Saul Solomons on 16 August 1909. The Solomons family were victims of their time, and following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, they fled the persecution of Jews in Russia, Poland and Finland.

Harris Solomons and Jane Cohen were the parents of Saul (Danny). Harris was a tailor and he and Jane lived at Great Garden Street, Whitechapel, in the East End of London. Saul Solomons, or Danny Ward, had three siblings: Sadie, Sydney and another sister, Sarah, who died soon after birth. The three surviving children were all born in London, but the census return listed them as Russians.

Saul Solomons and Lily Gross were married in Philpot Street Synagogue in the East End in 1934. They both worked in London as hairdressers and their son Derek, who was born in 1935, is Tony Ward’s half-brother.

That first marriage was later dissolved, and Saul Solomons then moved to Ireland and settled in Dublin in the late 1940s. He met June Connolly, a Catholic, around 1952 and there was an 18-year age gap between them. Gor them to marry, he reportedly had to give up his Jewish religion. By late November 1953, he had changed his name from Saul Solomons to Daniel Ward, had become a Catholic, and they married in Cardiff Registry Office.

The couple lived for a time in Leeds, where Tony Ward was born. Danny Ward had a heart attack and died in Leeds General Infirmary on Saint Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1960. Tony was only five, and June returned to Dublin almost immediately. Yet, having spent part of his childhood in Leeds, Tony Ward is still a committed Leeds United supporter.

There are other Jewish sports figures who have played cricket and football for Ireland, including Louis ‘Abraham’ Bookman and Finn Isaac Azaz. But more about them, perhaps, on another and appropriate Friday evening.

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום‎

Dr Bethel Solons was the Master of the Rotunda Hospital, an actor at the Abbey Theatre, President of the Dublin Jewish Progressive Congregation, and was capped then times for Ireland in international rugby

A Bloomsday conundrum: did my grandmother live next door to a brother of ‘old Mr Verschoyle’?

No 5 Ashdale Park, Terenure … the Comerford family were neighbours of the Verschoyle family for over 60 years (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

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.

The Bloomsday Festival on 11-16 June 2025 celebrates 121 years of Bloomsday

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.

Christ Church Meadows in Oxford … ‘The Spires of Oxford’ is one of the war poem by Winifred Letts (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

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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i>‘God bring you to a fairer place / Than even Oxford town’ (WH Letts) … the Bridge of Sighs and the Bodleian Library in Oxford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The Museum of Literature Ireland and Dublin’s tributes to James Joyce and so many other writers

The Museum of Literature Ireland is housed in Newman House on Saint Stephen’s Green, Dublin, and backs onto the Iveagh Gardens (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Patrick Comerford

As Charlotte and I were strolling through the Iveagh Gardens in Dublin last weekend, we were surprised to find the gate leading into the gardens of MoLI – the Museum of Literature Ireland.

The gardens are at the back of the Museum, which is housed at 86 Saint Stephen’s Green – this was Newman House, once a part of University College Dublin. The place still boasts that this is where James Joyce was a student, and the acronym MoLI was chosen as a wordplay on the name of Molly Bloom.

The museum is a digital, interactive celebration of Ireland’s literary legacy and of Irish poets, playwrights and novelists. It features immersive multimedia exhibitions and literary artefacts, including Joyce’s Ulysses notebooks and ‘Copy No 1’ of Ulysses, inscribed by Joyce for his patron Harriet Weaver, who donated it to the National Library of Ireland in 1952.

MoLI also hosts events and performances, creative workshops and education programmes. The changing exhibitions include one that features an in-depth look at one author at a time, while another looks at the connections between Irish literature and international cities.

Maeve Binchy’s words at the gate from the Iveagh Gardens leading into the Readers’ Garden behind the Museum of Literature Ireland (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The earliest piece in the museum collection is by a female author dating from ca 900 CE. Other work on display includes Joyce manuscript pages, some annotated, a letter from Joyce to William Butler Yeats and samples of Joyce’s notebooks.

The first of MoLI’s revolving exhibitions, in place for the opening, was on Kate O’Brien, and was followed by another on Nuala O’Faolain. Last year, MoLi marked the 100th anniversary of Brendan Behan’s birth, with ‘The Holy Hour’, an audiovisual installation reframing Behan’s life and work.

The museum is in two Georgian townhouses collectively known as Newman House, where the Catholic University of Ireland was founded in 1865, and also incorporates the original university Aula Maxima or Great Hall of UCD. Newman House remains part of UCD, although the university is now located in Belfield.

Newman House is not one but two restored townhouses. No 85, the granite-faced original house, was designed by Richard Cassels in 1738 for Hugh Montgomery MP, who sold it to Richard Chapel Whaley MP in 1765. But he wanted a grander home, and commissioned another house next door at No 86.

When Whaley lived there, the house developed some notoriety because of the lifestyle and reputation of his son, Buck Whaley, a notorious gambler and hellraiser.

The house is admired for Cassels’s architectural work, but its plasterwork is also known as the finest in Dublin. The artists at No 85 were the Italian stuccodores Paolo and Filippo Lafranchini, whose work includes the detailed Apollo Room on the ground floor. The plasterwork in No 86 is by the Irish stuccodore Robert West. When the Catholic University of Ireland took possession of the house in 1865, the alterations to some of the plasterwork included covering the nude figures with ‘modesty vests’.

A sculpture of a reading Jesuit in the Readers’ Garden behind the Museum … inspired by Gerard Manley Hopkins? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

While Newman House was part of the university, the residents included the Jesuit priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins who was Professor of Classics, from 1884 until he died. The students there included James Joyce from 1899 to 1902.

The museum is a partnership between the National Library of Ireland and UCD. Its origins are in a conversation at Bewley’s Café between Eamonn Ceannt, Bursar and Vice-President of UCD, and a representative of the National Library of Ireland, when they talked about a literary centre at Newman House began with a discussion.

The new museum was originally planned as an exposition of the work of James Joyce, to be known as the Ulysses Centre. But, after discussions with Failte Ireland, the concept was expanded to include Irish literature in general.

The Killarney Strawberry tree in the Readers’ Garden at the Museum (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The original plan was to open in the spring 2019, but because of the Covid-19 pandemic the launch was delayed and MoLI was finally launched on Culture Night, 20 September 2019. Meanwhile, the Dublin Writers Museum on Parnell Square had closed during the Covid-19 pandemic, and finally shut down in 2022 without ever reopening. Since then, many of its collections have been transferred to MoLI.

The Readers’ Garden, which we accessed from the Iveagh Gardens on Saturday morning, includes the café courtyard, secluded places to read, a sculpture of a reading Jesuit – inspired, perhaps, by Gerard Manley Hopkins – and two protected trees: the ash tree where James Joyce had his graduation photograph taken and a Killarney Strawberry tree.

The museum café, the Commons, opens onto the Readers’ Garden, and is run by Peaches and Domini Kemp. Beside it is the museum shop.

Marjorie Fitzgibbon’s 1982 bronze bust of James Joyce in Saint Stephen’s Green faces Newman House and MoLI (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Across from Newman House, on the south side of Saint Stephen’s Green, Marjorie Fitzgibbon’s 1982 bronze bust of James Joyce faces his alma mater. It is mounted on a tall square-plan limestone plinth inscribed with carved painted lettering: ‘James Joyce 1882-1941 Crossing Stephen’s, that is, my green …’ Joyce’s bust is part of a significant group within the Green, including Constance Markievicz, Arthur Guinness, Theobald Wolfe Tone and Rabindranath Tagore.

Earlier that morning, I had come across a more recent image of James Joyce nearby, side-by-side with Nora Barnacle in street art near the end of Dawson Street and close to the Nassau Street gate of Trinity College Dublin. ‘Love loves to love love’ was painted last year (2023) by the artist Andrew McCarthy, who was also the head designer of the new National Transport Livery for TFI.

James Joyce met Nora Barnacle from Galway for the first time on 10 June 1904 while walking down Nassau Street. They had their first date on 16 June 1904, now celebrated as Bloomsday, and she would become his wife and muse and the inspiration for the character of Molly Bloom in Ulysses.

Dublin can never get enough of James Joyce.

‘Love loves to love love’ … James Joyce and Nora Barnacle by Andrew McCarthy near the Nassau Street gate of Trinity College Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Daily prayer in Ordinary Time 2024: 38, 16 June 2024, Trinity III

The altar and the holy gifts seen through the central doors of the iconostasis in Stony Stratford, open during the Divine Liturgy (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Patrick Comerford

This is the Third Sunday after Trinity (Trinity III, 16 June 2024) and Father’s Day – and in Dublin today is also being celebrated as Bloomsday, one of the great literary festivals in the English-speaking world. Later this morning I hope to sing with the choir at the Parish Eucharist in Saint Mary and Saint Giles Church in Stony Stratford.

Before today begins, I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, for reflection, prayer and reading in these ways:

1, today’s Gospel reading;

2, a reflection on the icons in the new iconostasis or icon stand in the Greek Orthodox Church in Stony Stratford.

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;

4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.

The lower, first tier of the iconostasis in Stony Stratford, with the central doors open during the Divine Liturgy (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Mark 4: 24-37 (NRSVUE):

26 He [Jesus] also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground 27 and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. 28 The earth produces of itself first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. 29 But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle because the harvest has come.”

30 He also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? 31 It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, 32 yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

33 With many such parables he spoke the word to them as they were able to hear it; 34 he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.

A circular icon of the Archangel Gabriel in the central doors of the iconostasis in Stony Stratford, one of two icons depicting the Annunciation (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The Stony Stratford iconostasis 1: The Doors

At the Divine Liturgy in the Orthodox Church, the Symbol of Faith or the Creed is traditionally introduced with the exclamation: ‘The Doors! The Doors! In wisdom, let us attend!’

However, the doors referred to here are the doors of the church building, and not the doors of the iconostasis as many think. This is a call to ensure that all catechumens and non-communicants have left, and that no-one enters or leave the liturgical assembly. The historical liturgical expectation was that the Creed would be said only by those who had already officially pronounced it at baptism, and continued to confess it within the life of the Church.

Of course, visitors are now allowed to remain in the church and, because the bread and wine of the liturgy have been brought though the doors of the iconostasis, many people now believe that these are the doors referred to in the call: ‘The Doors! The Doors! In wisdom, let us attend!’

Over the last few weeks, I have been watching the building and installation of the new iconostasis or icon screen in the Greek Orthodox Church in Stony Stratford. In my prayer diary this morning and over the next few weeks, I am reflecting on this new iconostasis, and the theological meaning and liturgical significance of its icons and decorations.

The lower, first tier of a traditional iconostasis is sometimes called Sovereign. On the right side of the Beautiful Gates facing forward is an icon of Christ, often as the Pantokrator, representing his second coming, and on the left is an icon of the Theotokos (the Virgin Mary), symbolising the incarnation. It is another way of saying all things take place between Christ’s first coming and his second coming.

Other icons on this tier usually include depictions of the patron saint or feast day of the church, Saint John the Baptist, one or more of the Four Evangelists, and so on.

The central doors of the iconostasis in Stony Stratford have two round or circular icons, one of the Archangel Gabriel and the other of the Virgin Mary.

When the doors are open during the liturgy, all can seen the altar and above it an iconic representation of the Crucifixion, with images on each side of it of the Virgin Mary and Saint John the Theologian or Saint John the Evangelist.

I am thinking this morning of how many people find the doors of the church are closed to them, and how often we fail to bring Christ out of the church and into the world. Bishop Rosemarie Mallett, in her reflections for the USPG Prayer Diary this morning, also discusses how many in the Windrush generation looked for welcome and hospitality from their Christian brothers and sisters but were turned away from church doors. Who else finds the doors of the church are closed to them?

A circular icon of the Virgin Mary in the central doors of the iconostasis in Stony Stratford, one of two icons depicting the Annunciation (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Today’s Prayers (Sunday 16 June 2024, Trinity III):

The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church,’ the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘Windrush Day.’ This theme is introduced today with reflections by the Right Revd Dr Rosemarie Mallett, Bishop of Croydon:

‘On Windrush Day, we remember the Caribbean migrants who, in the same year that Windrush Day was inaugurated (2018), faced deportation. Despite arriving in the UK with British passports and living here for decades, they were told they did not belong and had no right to be in the country.

‘That sense of ‘unbelonging’ and the hostile environment of racism and rejection are felt by many of the original generation and their descendants. There can be no Caribbean-diaspora person who has not personally faced or known someone who has faced overt racism, unconscious bias, and racialised arrogance due to skin colour and cultural differences from white UK society. This was no different for those who looked for welcome and hospitality from Christian brothers and sisters and were turned away from church doors. Thankfully, this did not stop that generation of migrants from envisioning a place for themselves in whatever aspect of society they wished to succeed in.

‘On this and every Windrush Day, we give thanks to those early pioneers, celebrating the successes of those individuals who believed in their talent and skills, and most often, their God. Who often worked hard to overcome prejudice and advance themselves, their families, and their community. Today, we can see the flourishing of leadership and representation of people of colour and those of Caribbean heritage and descent in all aspects of life in this country. However, though much has changed, there is still a way to go before people can truly feel welcome and accepted and that they fully belong.’

The USPG Prayer Diary today (16 June 2024, Trinity III) invites us to reflect on these words:

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands (Revelation 7: 9).

The Collect:

Almighty God,
you have broken the tyranny of sin
and have sent the Spirit of your Son into our hearts
whereby we call you Father:
give us grace to dedicate our freedom to your service,
that we and all creation may be brought
to the glorious liberty of the children of God;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Post Communion Prayer:

O God, whose beauty is beyond our imagining
and whose power we cannot comprehend:
show us your glory as far as we can grasp it,
and shield us from knowing more than we can bear
until we may look upon you without fear;
through Jesus Christ our Saviour.

Additional Collect:

God our saviour,
look on this wounded world
in pity and in power;
hold us fast to your promises of peace
won for us by your Son,
our Saviour Jesus Christ.

Yesterday’s introduction to the Stony Stratford iconostasis

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

I have watched the iconostasis being built and put in place in Stony Stratford in recent weeks (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition copyright © 2021, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

A short visit to Dublin and Bray brings back good memories from 40 and 50 years ago

Time moves on at McCloskey’s in Donnybrook … memories of poetry readings, drama groups and rugby matches (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Patrick Comerford

I was back in Dublin at the end of last week for a very short family visit, and we stayed for two nights in Bray, Co Wicklow, in the Martello Hotel on the Promenade, facing out onto the sea front.

Seeing the Bray People on a news stand in a nearby supermarket on Friday evening was a reminder that this was one of the titles in the Wexford People Group of Newspapers, where I had worked 50 years ago.

Until I left the Wexford People for The Irish Times in late 1974, one of my pleasant assignments each week was the design and layout of the front page of the Bray People.

Evening lights in Bray and a table at Butler and Barry (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Bray has many family links and memories. Until, perhaps, the 1960s, an aunt had lived only three days away from the Martello, at Seanchara House, once known as Tullira, in Wavecrest Terrace on Strand Road. My parents first lived on Putland Road in Bray after they were married almost 80 years ago, at end of World War II in 1945.

I also remember many childhood trips to Bray, when I was able to sneak away and enjoy the thrills of the ‘Bumpers’ and the Ghost Trains or – when some of us were more adventurous – climbing Bray Head and pretending we could see across to the coast of Wales on the other side of the Irish Sea.

In more recent decades, I often enjoyed walks along the seafront in Bray or around the harbour, followed by coffee or lunch in cafés such as Carpe Diem.

Living near Milton Keynes for the last two or three years, it is difficult (though not impossible) to find the same opportunities for a walk on any beach. So, as we had dinner in Butler and Barry on one of those evenings, it was good to share the joys of looking out onto the sea below and beyond.

Friday was a packed day, with family visits in Rathmines and Knocklyon, and the Dart connections between Bray and Lansdowne Road were ideal for setting out on a walk through some of south Dublin suburbs that retain many sweet memories for me, and that allowed me to recall some key anniversaries that take place this year.

The former Bea House on Pembroke Park … memories of student days at the Irish School of Ecumenics 40 years ago (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

A short walk from the Lansdowne Road stop on the Dart line in from Bray brought me to Pembroke Park, off Herbert Park, and the house that was once known as Bea House when it was the administrative centre of the Irish School of Ecumenics.

I was burning the candle at both ends 40 years ago, when I studied post-graduate theology there in the 1980s while working at The Irish Times spending a lot of time campaigning with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

There were happy memories of Robin Boyd, who had been the director of ISE, Alan Falconer, who was my tutor and, at the time, also a neighbour, and Bill McSweeney, who supervised my dissertation, leading to my graduation through ISE from Trinity College Dublin in 1984.

Other part-time lecturers 40 years ago included Des Dinan, who was then working on his PhD and who is now a professor at Georg Mason University, while the visiting lecturers included Jürgen Moltmann, who died last week, and Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware), who died two years ago.

There were happy memories too of many walks with other students from Pembroke Park through Donnybrook and along Marlborough Road to Ranelagh and lectures in Milltown Park.

I had to stop too to see McCloskey’s pub in Donnybrook, although it is now closed and has been sold. This had been a favourite ‘haunt’ in the early 1970s, when I was involved in poetry groups and poetry groups based around the corner in Muckross Park on Marlborough Road. And there was the house at 52 Marlborough Road, where I stayed those weekends I travelled up to Dublin from Wexford until 50 years ago, when I left Wexford and the Wexford People and joined The Irish Times at the end of 1974.

Street art in Rathmines last week (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

I walked on through Ranelagh, once again sought out the house in Old Mountpleasant where my grandfather had once lived, and then found myself on Belgrave Road, where I worked 20 years ago, from 2002 until 2006, when I joined the Church of Ireland Theological College, later the Church of Ireland Theological Institute.

I stopped for lunch in Rathmines, visited my brother in Rathmines and once again visited the house in Rathmines where my father was born in 1918, and the house in Terenure where he spent his childhood.

By late afternoon, I was at the house where I lived in Knocklyon from 1996 until 2017, when I moved to the Rectory in Askeaton, Co Limerick. At the polling booth in Firhouse, I bumped into an old friend and neighbour, Dr Vincent Kenny. We caught up on many shared memories in Delaney’s, also known as the Knocklyon, before I caught a bus to Blackrock Station, and the Dart to Bray.

Evening lights at Blackrock Station last week waiting for the Dart to Bray (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024; click on image for full-screen view)

I am working on a paper for Salvador Ryan’s next collection, looking at ‘Childhood and the Irish.’ Throughout the day, I found myself thinking of the various places James Joyce had lived as a child, including Brighton Square, Rathgar, and the house where he was bor, Saint Joseph’s Church in Terenure where he was baptised, the houses in Castlewood Avenue, Rathmines, and back at Martello Terrace, Bray, where he had spent parts of his childhood years, and the place in Terenure where his mother was born.

But next Sunday is Bloomsday (16 June 2024), and perhaps I should tell some of those stories then and more of them in that planned book that Salvador Ryan is commissioning and editing.

Meanwhile, as I was on my own Bloom-like odyssey around Dublin 4 and Dublin 6, Charlotte was back in Bray, and decided to climb Bray Head. Sorry to say, she did not catch a glimpse of the coast of Wales either.

We had dinner in the Martello on Friday evening, and caught the plane back from Dublin to Birmingham yesterday (Saturday) afternoon, and were back in Stony Stratford by early evening.

The ‘Bray People’ … still going 50 years after I left in 1974 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Molly Bloom’s Christmas Card: where Joycean fiction meets a real-life family

No 52 Upper Clanbrassil Street, Dublin. Was this the birthplace of Leopold Bloom? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

The centenary of the publication of Ulysses in 1922 was celebrated in Dublin with a style and gusto in 2022 that James Joyce undoubtedly would have found endearing and entertaining. One of the many places that attracted attention is 52 Upper Clanbrassil Street, where a plaque claims that it house is the birthplace of Leopold Bloom.

In Episode 17 (‘Ithaca’) of Ulysses, Molly Bloom is searching through the contents of Leopold’s locked drawers when she finds the document that places the Bloom family at 52 Clanbrassil Street at the time of her husband’s birth. She also finds ‘a Yuletide card, bearing on it a pictorial representation of a parasitic plant, the legend Mizpah, the date Xmas 1892, the name of the senders: from Mr + Mrs M. Comerford, the versicle: May this Yuletide bring to thee, Joy and peace and welcome glee.’

But who were the Comerfords who sent a Christmas card to Molly Bloom? With a hint of self-interest, I have wondered why Joyce chose a couple named Comerford to send that card in 1892.

The card shows a recognition by the Comerfords of Bloom’s Jewish background, though by 1892 he had been baptised on three occasions. Christmas is abbreviated to ‘Xmas’, and the name of the season is not spelt out. There is a reference to ‘Yuletide,’ instead of a nativity scene there is a depiction of mistletoe, and the word Mizpah was a common alternative greeting for Jews sending cards in the late Victorian period.

In her soliloquy, Molly Bloom has good reason to remember Christmas 1892-3: it was a harsh winter, and the Grand Canal, separating Clanbrassil Street from Harold’s Cross, had frozen over in February 1893. Molly and Leopold were invited to a party at the Comerfords that winter, and she recalls how she had too many oranges and too much orange and lemonade at a party in the Comerford home in Clanbrassil Street. She was caught short on the way home that night, and, as she recalls, had to use the men’s toilets in a pub, with great personal discomfort.

Any pub between Upper Clanbrassil Street and Lombard Street, where the Blooms then lived, would have been at Leonard’s Corner, the junction of Clanbrassil Street and the South Circular Road, the main crossroads in the area that became known as ‘Little Jerusalem.’ She recalls: ‘O and the stink of those rotten places the night coming home with Poldy after the Comerfords party oranges and lemonade to make you feel nice and watery I went into 1 of them it was so biting cold I couldnt keep it when was that 93 the canal was frozen’ (Penelope).

Why did James Joyce chose the name Comerford for the Blooms’ friends in Ulysses? Apart from coming across my grandfather’s brother, James Comerford, at 62 Lower Clanbrassil Street in Thom’s Directory, was there another reason the family name caught his imagination?

John Henry Raleigh suggests in The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom: Ulysses as Narrative that ‘This Anglo, somewhat toffish name, is meant to suggest, I believe, that the Blooms had some friends rather higher on the social scale than previous or subsequent to their Lombard Street West days.’ The Comerford name may also have attracted Joyce’s attention because he claimed some family portraits had been painted by the Kilkenny-born miniaturist, John Comerford (1771-1832).

What had the Comerfords of Clanbrassil Street to celebrate in early 1893, just after Christmas? In 1893 my great-grandfather James Comerford (1817-1902), a stucco plasterer, his sons, James (1853-1915), Stephen Edward (1867-1921) and Robert (1868-1902), and his nephews, James Comerford (1839-1903) and Robert Comerford (1855-1925), were founding members of the Regular Stucco Plasterers’ Trade Union of the City of Dublin. His nephew James Comerford later lived at 50 Upper Clanbrassil Street, and he and his wife had much to celebrate in 1893 with the birth of their youngest child, Robert Thomas Comerford (1893-1958), at 62 Lower Clanbrassil Street. Perhaps, hoever, this was a little too late for Molly’s post-Christmas party, as Bob was born on 27 April 1893.

Joyce’s choice of 52 Clanbrassil Street as the birthplace of Leopold Bloom has led to the presumption that he was referring to Upper Clanbrassil Street, and not to Lower Clanbrassil Street, which is actually at the heart of Little Jerusalem. Two doors away from No. 52 Upper Clanbrassil Street, a Comerford family was living at No. 50 in 1904, the year in which Joyce sets Bloomsday. My grandfather’s cousin, James Comerford, lived at this No. 52, and this may have prompted placing the plaque at No. 52, claiming this was Bloom’s birthplace.

Although members of the Comerford family were living at No. 50 Upper Clanbrassil Street on the first Bloomsday on Thursday 16 June 1904, my grandfather’s cousin, James Comerford, had died the previous year, 1903, and his widow Ellen was living in the house in 1904.

But what if Rudolph Bloom was born not at No. 52 Upper Clanbrassil Street but at No. 52 Lower Clanbrassil Street, and the plaque was erected on the wrong house? It is more credible to suggest that in Christmas 1892 Joyce is asking us to imagine the Comerford and Bloom families were actually living in Lower Clanbrassil Street, which was then at the heart of the Jewish community in Dublin.

If Joyce actually intended to place Leopold Bloom’s birth at No. 52 Lower Clanbrassil Street, then who are the Comerfords referred to in Ulysses? In the short space of a half century or so, immediate members of this one branch of the Comerford family had addresses in at least 15 houses in Lower and Upper Clanbrassil Street, and many more lived in the warren of streets off Clanbrassil Street, in Little Jerusalem, in Portobello and around Charlemont Street.

If I add their in-laws, their cousins and their nieces and nephews, it must have been impossible then to walk along Clanbrassil Street without meeting and greeting a member of the Comerford family. Family lore recalls it seemed every second person on Lower Clanbrassil Street then was either a Jew or a Comerford.

Joyce used the 1904 edition of Thom’s Directory to locate key Dublin characters and figures in Ulysses. In the 1901 census, N.o 62 Lower Clanbrassil Street was shared by three families: my grandfather’s eldest brother, James Comerford, his wife Lena, and their five children; their cousin, James Comerford, his wife Ellen; and the Keegan family.

Previously, this house had been the home of my grandfather’s cousin, Thomas Comerford, a plasterer, and his wife Mary Anne (Ludlow), who lived there in 1862-72, along with his sister Elizabeth and her husband Denis Cuddy. In 1874 it was the home of another family member, Thomas Comerford and his wife Mary Jane (Cusack). However, by the time of the 1904 edition of Thom’s Directory, 62 Lower Clanbrassil Street was no longer divided into flats. Instead, the house stands out from all the tenements on the street as being occupied by only one family, the home of my grandfather’s brother James Comerford and his family.

By 1911 this James Comerford and his family were sharing 82 Lower Clanbrassil Street with his sister and brother-in-law, Mary and Francis Coleman, and their family, and with Isaac Joffe, a 58-year-old Jewish shopkeeper from Russia and his Russian-born Jewish wife, Hannah.

So, if the Blooms got a Christmas card from the Comerfords in 1892, and Molly was at a party with the Comerford family two months later, it must have been Joyce’s intention to refer to the Comerfords at No. 62 Lower Clanbrassil Street, and not at No. 50 Upper Clanbrassil Street. Today, the site of 62 Lower Clanbrassil Street is the premises of Capital Glass.

As for Leopold Bloom’s birthplace, it was more convenient to erect that plaque in Upper Clanbrassil Street because No. 52 Lower Clanbrassil Street no longer exists: it has long been demolished in road-widening schemes.

Sources and Further reading:

James Joyce, Ulysses (various editions).
John Henry Raleigh, The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom: Ulysses as Narrative (Berkeley: University California Press, 1977)

‘TMolly Bloom’s Christmas Card: where Joycean fiction meets a real-life family’ is published in Christmas and the Irish: a miscellany, ed Salvador Ryan (Dublin: Wordwell Books, 2023, 403 pp, €25, ISBN: 978-1-913934-93-4), pp 151-155, with the photograph of 50 Upper Clanbrassil Street on p 155.

The list of contributors includes this note on p 400:

Patrick Comerford is an Anlican priest living in retirement near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. He is a former adjunct assistant professor in Trinity College Dublin

‘Christmas and the Irish: a miscellany’ was launched in the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, on 30 November 2023

‘O commemorate me with no hero-courageous Tomb – just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by’

Patrick Kavanagh’s bench by John Coll at Wilton Terrace on the Grand Canal, between Baggot Street Bridge and Leeson Street Bridge, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Patrick Comerford

O commemorate me where there is water,
Canal water, preferably, so stilly
Greeny at the heart of summer. Brother
Commemorate me thus beautifully
Where by a lock niagarously roars
The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence
Of mid-July. No one will speak in prose
Who finds his way to these Parnassian islands.
A swan goes by head low with many apologies,
Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges –
And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy
And other far-flung towns mythologies.
O commemorate me with no hero-courageous
Tomb – just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.

While I was being interviewed in Dublin last week by Montenegrin television, Charlotte and I were staying in the Clayton Burlington Hotel on Leeson Street, close to Leeson Street, Raglan Road, Pembroke Road, Baggot Street and the Grand Canal, and all their memories of and associations with the poet Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967).

It was Bloomsday, and after coffee in the Canal Bank Café on the corner of Leeson Street and Suffolk, we went on our own Dublin perambulation of the area that Patrick Kavanagh made his own corner of Dublin after moving to the city from Co Monaghan in 1939.

He wrote 70 years ago in 1953:

If ever you go to Dublin town
In a hundred years or so
Inquire for me in Baggot Street
And what I was like to know.

Patrick Kavanagh’s love of the area is feted in his ballad, ‘On Raglan Road’, and these streets became his ‘enchanted way’, the quiet streets where old ghosts meet.

There are plaques to him on the houses he lived in – one of them is now the Mexican Embassy on Raglan Road – and he pops up constantly in the street art around the area along with other writers, including Samuel Becket and Brian O’Nolan or Flann O’Brien or Myles na Gopaleen.

Parson’s Bookshop was beloved by many writers in Dublin, particularly Brendan Behan, Benedict Kiely, Mervyn Wall and Mary Lavin, but none more so than Patrick Kavanagh. It used to be the Bridge House, on Baggot Street Bridge, but has long since closed.

‘And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy / And other far-flung towns mythologies’ … barges on the Grand Canal between Baggot Street Bridge and Leeson Street Bridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Patrick Kavanagh’s lasting memorial along these ‘enchanted ways’ is his bench close to Baggot Street Bridge on Wilton Terrace and Wilton Park, on the north bank of the Grand Canal.

Sitting on a bench erected to the memory of ‘Mrs Dermot O’Brien’, Kavanagh wrote a sonnet requesting the same for himself. That bench inspired his sonnet, ‘Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin.’ That particular seat was on the Mespil Road or south side of the Canal, and was dedicated to ‘Mrs Dermot O’Brien.’ She was Mabel Emmeline Smyly, the wife of Dermod William O’Brien (1865-1945) from Mount Trenchard, near Foynes, Co Limerick, a landscape and portrait painter who won an Olympic medal in the painting competition at the 1928 Olympic Games.

Shortly after Kavanagh died in 1967, his friends John Ryan and Denis Dwyer formed a committee to raise money to buy the materials and pay for the labour for another, less-well-known seat. That statue, unveiled a few months after his death, is a simple wood and granite seat designed by the artist Michael Farrell (1940-2000).

But the sculpture that is best-known as a commemoration of Patrick Kavanagh is on Wilton Terrace. This is a more recent sculpture, with a much-photographed life-size bronze figure by John Coll. It was commissioned as part of the Dublin 1991 European City of Culture celebrations and was unveiled 32 years ago on 11 June 1991 by President Mary Robinson.

John Coll is originally from Taylor’s Hill Galway and now living in Dublin. After an initial career as a marine biologist, he became a figurative sculptor with many public works to his name, including the monument to Patrick Kavanagh on the Grand Canal and his celebration in bronze of Brendan Behan on the Royal Canal in Drumcondra.

John Coll’s sculpture on Wilton Terrace, between Baggot Street Bridge and Leeson Street Bridge, shows a reflective Patrick Kavanagh sitting thoughtfully, his hat beside him on the bench. He seems to offer a sympathetic, non-judgmental ear to passers-by, inviting them to sit down and have a chat.

Coll imagines the poet Kavanagh composing not ‘Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin’ but another sonnet, ‘Canal Bank Walk,’ for a plaque beside the sculpture bears the quotation:

Leafy with love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me
Patrick Kavanagh 1904 to 1967
Sculptor John Coll.

The poem ‘Canal Bank Walk’ was also inspired by the Grand Canal, but was written in 1958 after the poet’s recovery from lung cancer and from legal difficulties:

Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.

The house where Patrick Kavanagh once lived on Raglan Road is now the Mexican Embassy in Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Did Joyce confuse Athos and Argos when naming the dog in ‘Ulysses’?

Docheiariou Monastery on Mount Athos … but why is Bloom’s dog named Athos? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Over the past few days in Dublin I have been musing about the churches named by James Joyce in Ulysses and wondering which synagogue in Dublin, if any, Leopold Bloom’s father Rudolf Bloom might have felt welcome in wither before he converted to Christianity or in his last days as he thought about returning to the Judaism of his birth.

In Ulysses, Joyce constantly draws comparisons between Jewish and Greek history, language and culture with Irish experiences. It is impossible to read Ulysses without an understanding of both Jewish life and practice and Homer’s Odyssey.

But in these past few days, I have also been wondering why on earth Rudolf Bloom called his dog Athos and not Argos.

It is difficult to imagine that Joyce did not know Mount Argus, the Passionist monastery in Harold’s Cross a ten-minute walk from Brighton Square where he was born and a church where his mother had once sung in the choir – with a Miss Bloom. There is a passing reference in Ulysses to Father Charles of Mount Argus (1821-1893), a Dutch-born Passionist monk with a reputation for healing miracles.

In Greek mythology, Argus or Argos (Ἄργος) is the name of characters, including Argus, King of Argos and son of Zeus and Niobe; Argos, son of Arestor, builder of the ship Argo in the story of the Argonauts; Argos, son of Jason and Medea; Argos Panoptes (Argus ‘All-Eyes), a giant with 100 eyes; and, most relative to my musings this week, Argos, the faithful dog of Odysseus.

In Book 17 of the Odyssey, Odysseus arrives home on Ithaka finally, after 10 years of fighting in Troy, followed by 10 more years struggling to get home to his island. In his absence, reckless suitors have taken over his house in hopes of marrying his wife Penelope.

In order to secretly re-enter his house to spring a surprise attack on the suitors, Odysseus disguises himself as a beggar, and only his son Telemachus is told of his true identity. As Odysseus approaches his home, he finds his dog Argos lying neglected on a pile of cow dung, infested with fleas, old and very tired.

This is a sharp contrast to the dog Odysseus left behind. Argos used to be known for his speed and strength and his superior tracking skills.

Unlike everyone else, including Eumaios, a lifelong friend, Argos recognises Odysseus at once and he has just enough strength to raise his head, prick up his ears and wag his tail. But the dog then loses the strength to hold his ears up, much less to greet his old master. The disguised Odysseus wipes away a tear and asks Eumaeus about the handsome animal. But he is unable to greet his faithful dog for fear that this would betray who he really is.

After telling the beggar about the dog’s glory days, the noble man who raised him from a puppy, and the duties that are forgotten when a lord goes away, Eumaeus goes into the palace to tend to the needs of the insolent suitors. Having finally seen the man he longed for, Argos dies. This is a substantial event in marking the return of Odysseus.

‘Be kind to Athos, Leopold …’ an old man and an old dog in Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

There is an echo of the story of Odysseus and his dog Argos in Ulysses, but Leopold Bloom’s father Rudolf Bloom named his dog Athos and not Argos.

In his suicide note, Rudolf Bloom asks Leopold Bloom to care for the animal. Throughout Ulysses, Bloom is kind to stray dogs. In the episode Circe, he gives one dog the meat he has bought, and in Eumaeus he remembers Molly’s vexation when he tried to bring home a stray dog.

Athos corresponds to Odysseus’s Argos, the faithful dog who waits for his master’s return. Bloom remembers his father’s instructions in his suicide note: ‘Be good to Athos, Leopold, is my last wish.’ He recalls the note again in Ithaca: ‘be kind to Athos, Leopold…,’ remembering Athos as ‘an infirm dog.’ Bloom thinks in Hades that Athos too ‘took it to heart, pined away’ when his master died.

There are suggestions that Rudolph Bloom named his dog Athos after Athos, Count de la Fère, a character in the novels The Three Musketeers (1844), Twenty Years After (1845) and The Vicomte de Bragelonne (1847-1850) by Alexandre Dumas. The other two musketeers, Porthos and Aramis, are friends of the novel’s protagonist, d'Artagnan.

Despite Joyce’s deep love of Greek and classical literature there are no suggestions that Leopold or Rudolf Bloom ever knew of Mount Athos, let alone visited it, and Joyce himself never visited the holy mountain.

Perhaps we just have some simply play on words here by Joyce, conflating the names of two holy mountains with monasteries, both known as all-male bastions and with different levels of formidable severity when it comes to the exclusion of women.

Mount Argos Monastery in Dublin … not to be confused with the monasteries of Mount Athos in Greece (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

A Bloomsday odyssey in Dublin in search of a synagogue for the Bloom family

The Adelaide Road Synagogue of the Dublin Hebrew Congregation opened in 1892 and closed in 1999 … one of two Dublin synagogues named by James Joyce in ‘Ulysses’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Patrick Comerford

It has been a pleasure to be back in Dublin today (16 June 2023), which is Bloomsday, celebrated throughout Dublin as a major cultural festival, even by people who have never read Ulysses.

Although I have been working most of the day on an historical documentary with a television production company from Montenegro, I could not help revelling in the coincidence that I am back here on Bloomsday.

Leopold Bloom is the most celebrated fictional person in modern Irish literature. Despite many of the claims that he is the most prominent Jewish figure in Irish literature, every critic known that Leopold Bloom is not actually a Jew. Although James Joyce makes Leopold Bloom’s father, Rudolf Bloom, a Hungarian who was born a Jew, the former Rudolf Virah converted to Christianity before he married.

Leopold Bloom’s mother was not Jewish, he was never circumcised not did he ever have a bar mitzvah, he was baptised in the Church of Ireland and was later baptised again and married in the Roman Catholic Church, and his diet is anything but kosher. By any shared standards in Judaism, Leopold Bloom is not Jewish.

On this blog yesterday, I was looking at some of the churches James Joyce refers to in Ulysses. But, on this Friday evening, as this is Bloomsday, I am allowed to amuse myself in wondering this: had Leopold Bloom been brought up a Jew, which would have been his family synagogue?

Joyce refers to at least two synagogues in Ulysses, Mary’s Abbey Synagogue and Adelaide Road Synagogue.

In Episode 10, ‘Wandering Rocks,’ Ned Lambert says heartily: ‘We are standing in the historic council chamber of saint Mary's abbey where silken Thomas proclaimed himself a rebel in 1534. This is the most historic spot in all Dublin. O’Madden Burke is going to write something about it one of these days. The old bank of Ireland was over the way till the time of the union and the original jews’ temple was here too before they built their synagogue over in Adelaide road. You were never here before, Jack, were you?’

Later, in Episode 17, ‘Ithaca,’ during a discussion that involves comparisons of Hebrew and the Irish language and a comparison of the sufferings of Jews and the impact of the Penal Laws on Irish Catholics, we are told: ‘their dispersal, persecution, survival and revival: the isolation of their synagogical and ecclesiastical rites in ghetto (S. Mary’s Abbey) and masshouse (Adam and Eve’s tavern): the proscription of their national costumes in penal laws and Jewish dress acts: the restoration in Chanan David of Zion and the possibility of Irish political autonomy or devolution.’

Despite his conversion and name change, the widowed Rudolf Bloom returned to some of his Jewish practices before his suicide, including celebrating the seder meal at Pesach. However, had Rudolf Bloom remained a Jew, and had his son Leopold been brought up a Jew, it is unlikely that either father or son would found a home in either of the synagogues named in Ulysses.

The synagogue at Mary’s Abbey survived from 1836 until 1892 … one of two Dublin synagogues named by James Joyce in ‘Ulysses’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

When the Stafford Street Synagogue in Dublin was forced to close in 1836, Dublin’s Jewish congregation moved to 12 Mary’s Abbey, off Capel Street, and remained there for almost two generations until 1892.

The new synagogue was Dublin’s fourth, following short-lived synagogues at Crane Lane, off Dame Street; Marlborough Green, off Marlborough Street; and the converted rooms on an upper floor of a private house at 40 Stafford Street, now Wolfe Tone Street.

Like its predecessors, this was not a purpose-built synagogue, but the former chapel of a small Presbyterian group known as the Non-Burghers or Seceders, who later joined similar groups in forming the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.

Saint Mary’s Abbey, which gives its name to nearby Abbey Street, was founded by the French Cistercians in 1147 on the site of an older Benedictine foundation. The chapter house was used as the meeting place for the king’s council, and it was there ‘Silken’ Thomas Fitzgerald renounced his allegiance to Henry VIII and started his ill-fated rebellion. The abbey was dissolved at the Reformation in 1539 and its lands were divided.

The former Presbyterian chapel at Mary’s Abbey, which gives its name to Meeting House Lane, was bought on 15 January 1836 to provide a permanent synagogue for Dublin’s Jews, who then numbered about 300 people. A further £500 was spent on providing the new synagogue with a new Aron haKodesh or ark for the Torah Scrolls, a bimah or reading desk seating and flooring.

The Revd Isaac Davidson, who had been the minister in the Stafford Street synagogue, moved with the congregation to Mary’s Abbey. One of the first trustees, Alexander Lazarus Benmohel (1788-1839), travelled to London to ask the elders of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue or Bevis Marks to become trustees for the property, and some time later the congregation asked to be considered a branch of Bevis Marks.

The capacity of the synagogue is disputed by historians. Louis Hyman, in The Jews of Ireland (1972) says at first the synagogue had a seating capacity of about 90 and that the numbers were never greater than 350 at its peak. However, others say even these modest figures may be overstated.

The attendance and membership were drawn mainly from the Anglo-Jewish middle classes in Dublin, and its strict Victorian standards of decorum fostered a formal and stuffy atmosphere that later earned it the nickname of the Englishe shul (‘English synagogue’) among a newer immigrant community.

The congregation was seen as a prosperous community in its early years, and by 1854 it agreed to ‘conform to the form and service of the Great Synagogue, Duke’s Place, London,’ for centuries, the main Ashkenazi synagogue and centre of Ashkenazi life in London.

The congregation began to call itself the Dublin Hebrew Congregation from around 1859. It aligned itself with the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Anyone married to a non-Jew was not allowed to engage a seat or to receive any form of honour. The synagogue committee decided whether Jews who had intermarried or who did not openly profess the religion as a Jew would be allowed a Jewish burial.

By the mid-1870s, the Jewish Chronicle reported that the congregation was ‘respectable but unfortunately dwindling.’ The last Sabbath service was conducted at Mary’s Abbey on 5 December 1892. On the following Saturday, Jews and Christians attended the dedication of an ornate purpose-built synagogue at Adelaide Road, that remained open until 1999.

The site of the former synagogue at Mary’s Abbey in Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The synagogue at Adelaide Road, which is also named in Ulysses, was the first purpose-built synagogue in Ireland. It was designed in a vaguely Byzantine style, with seating for a congregation of 300 in the main body, and for another 150 in the galleries, by the Dublin-based architect John Joseph O’Callaghan (1838-1905).

The synagogue on Adelaide Road opened on 4 December 1892, when the Chief Rabbi, Dr Hermann Adler, said in his sermon: ‘Ireland is the only country in the world which cannot be charged with persecuting the Jews.’

The new synagogue was soon dubbed ‘the English shul’ by the Eastern European Jewish families in ‘Little Jerusalem’ because of its tendency to follow the style and custom of synagogues in Britain.

But Adelaide Road synagogue opened six years after Rudolf Bloom died by suicide in 1886 in the Queen’s Hotel in Ennis, Co Clare. So the Bloom family would never have known the inside of this synagogue.

The synagogue celebrated its centenary in 1992, but by the 1990s, the numbers attending on a Saturday morning usually stood at 40 to 50. The Dublin Hebrew Congregation voted to close the synagogue on Adelaide Road and amalgamate with the synagogue on Rathfarnham Road, Terenure. The building was sold, most of it was demolished, apart from the façade, and the site was redeveloped as offices. The Dublin Hebrew Congregation formally merged with the Terenure Hebrew Congregation in 2004.

The synagogue at 7 Oakfield Place, off Clanbrassil Street, was founded in 1885, a year before Rudolf Bloom died (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

In the 1880s and 1890s, a number of smaller synagogues opened in the area between the South Circular Road and Portobello that became known as ‘Little Jerusalem,’ and by 1890 communal relations were strained in Dublin.

Peter L Fishback on his website ‘Major Tweedy’s Neighborhood’ suggests that one of these small synagogues, the Hebroth at Oakfield Place, is ‘likely the synagogue Leopold Bloom’s father attended when as a widower, he returned to his old faith.’

The new Jewish immigrants fleeing Poland, Russia and the Baltics in the face of rising persecution in the Tsarist empire, found the congregation at Saint Mary’s Abbey too formal, stern, assimilated, middle class and unwelcoming. But these new small synagogues were also established out of necessity: the more orthodox new arrivals needed to be able to walk to their synagogue on Friday nights and Saturday mornings without breaching any of the limitations on distances during the sabbath.

According to Louis Hyman in The Jews of Ireland, the shul founded in Oakfield Place in 1885 was one these many hebroth established in this area by the recent immigrants from Lithuania and Poland.

The Oakfield Place synagogue had 45 seat-holders or subscribing members in 1885, according to the Jewish Year Book, although this number had fallen to 35 by 1897.

Although many of these small synagogues survived after the opening of the new synagogue at Adelaide Road in 1892, some of them survived for only a few short years, and others closed within a few decades.

When the United Hebrew Congregation was proposed in 1909, it had the support of many of these smaller hebroth. A synagogue opened at Greenville Hall on the South Circular Road in 1916, it attracted the members of many of these small synagogues, and a new synagogue built on the site of Greenville Hall opened in 1925. The hebra at Oakfield Place finally closed in the 1930s.

The synagogue at 11 Lombard Street West in the Portobello area of Dublin was founded in 1890 or 1893 and continued until the 1960s (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Peter L Fishback points out that Rudolph Bloom would have been out of place in Mary’s Abbey Synagogue as the congregation consisted of fairly prosperous, native-born Dubliners with ancestors from England and Germany. But, as a Hungarian Jew might he not have also felt out of place among the recent immigrants from Lithuania and Poland?

Rudolf Bloom died on 27 June 1886, which means he could never have known the Chevrah Tehillim Synagogue at 46 Lombard Street West. Louis Hyman says this small shul was founded in 1893, although the Jewish Year Books say it dates from 1890.

Joyce in Ulysses has Leopold and Molly Bloom living nearby at 38 Lombard Street West in 1893. In her soliloquy, Molly recalls 1893, the year ‘the canal was frozen’ and how she had too many oranges and too much lemonade at a party in the Comerfords’ home in Clanbrassil Street. She was caught short on the way home to Lombard Street that night, and recalls how she had to use the men’s toilets in a pub, with great personal discomfort.

The small synagogue at 46 Lombard Street West closed in the early 1960s, due to the decline in the Jewish population in the area.

So, while the Blooms lived for a time on Lombard Street West, the widowed Rudolf Bloom could never have known this synagogue as he considered returning to the Judaism of his childhood before he died.

Shabbat Shalom

Adelaide Road Synagogue … one of two Dublin synagogues named in ‘Ulysses’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)