that were hard to identify because of the widespread use of pen names then. Mangan greatly appealed to Griffith, as he did to James Joyce who spoke publicly about him in 1902.42 Mangan’s classic poem ‘Kathleen-Ni-Houlahan’ was a source of inspiration for Yeats’ play about that particular personification of Ireland, a play with which (as will be seen) Griffith said he helped Yeats. On Saturday afternoons Griffith also visited booksellers on the quays, and bought many ‘twopenny or threepenny bargains’: ‘In his humble home’, wrote one friend, ‘he was the despair of his mother – books for breakfast, books for dinner, and books by the light of a halfpenny candle after the rest had gone to bed’.43 Another friend, James Starkey (the writer ‘Seumus O’Sullivan’), visited him when he lived in Summerhill: ‘Sometimes I would accompany him to that old house, a strange house with a low wall in front of it, and talk far into the night amidst the chaos of books with which his room was heaped. For he was an omnivorous reader.’44 Patrick Carey, Griffith’s fellow tenant in Summerhill, described him as ‘very quiet and hard-working’. He added that Griffith ‘used to work till all hours of the night … in a little front parlour room, facing Buckingham Street. He called it his “den”. He had a table and chair in it and did all his research and writing there. He would be up till two and three o’clock in the morning.’45 But Griffith liked fresh air too. He was a keen swimmer all his life, bathing regularly at Clontarf or the Bull Wall or further afield in Sandycove:
Although he worked in his office like an insect, although he would round off his day by going into the National Library and reading until ten o’clock, Arthur Griffith was very much an open-air man. Every day, when the water was not absolutely chilling, he swam in the sea; the vigorous constitution that he had and his persistent exercise kept him in good condition: often, however, he showed weariness and strain.46
He had ‘amazingly strong muscular arms’, declared Robert Brennan ‘which he attributed to his early gymnastic training and his regular daily swim’. He also had something of a reputation as a boxer, and he surprised Brennan and other fellow inmates interned in England by the ease with which he scaled a ten-foot wall, on which there was apparently no foothold, in order to retrieve a handball.47
He enjoyed playing chess, a pastime that suited his reserved demeanour and his reputation for calm, strategic thinking. He wrote to thank friends who, for his thirty-eighth birthday, gave him a ‘beautiful chess board and chessmen’. True to type, he feared that it might distract him from his work. He sometimes played with friends in a popular café on O’Connell Street – the ‘DBC’, later destroyed during the 1916 Rising. One friend with whom he is said to have ‘often’ played chess was Abraham Briscoe, father of Dublin’s first Jewish lord mayor, Robert. Griffith, when interned, also passed time playing or teaching chess. On the train from Holyhead to London with the treaty team in 1921, he produced a portable set and played chess with Desmond FitzGerald.48
Lower Sackville/O’Connell St, Dublin, after the 1916 Rising, with Nelson’s Pillar and (first on right) the shell of the Dublin Bread Company (DBC). As noted in Ulysses, nationalists met for chat and chess in the DBC tearooms, a haunt of Griffith (National Library of Ireland [KE116]).
Nights at The Bailey
Seán T. O’Kelly recalled that ‘Griffith, though never a heavy drinker, would take one or two bottles of stout during the course of the night’, while friends sat around and discussed literary and political topics.49 He liked to meet his acquaintances at an establishment just off Grafton Street that Parnell had also frequented, as one of them later wrote:
Griffith made The Bailey his own particular haunt, all the more so since his other rendezvous, Davin’s pub, The Ship, in Fleet St., had been destroyed in the Rising … He generally arrived some time after seven o’clock and made for the smoke room upstairs on the second floor. This was a small room, with two windows looking out on Duke St … Griffith had his own special seat … on the leather couch that ran along the inner wall that divided that room from the dining-room, between the fire-place and the window.
Should you enter the smoke room early in the evening, you would be sure to see ‘A.G.’, as he was always referred to, ensconced in his corner, a cigarette in his mouth, a silver tankard of stout on the table before him, going through a great pile of newspapers and journals. As he scrutinized the printed matter, he would now and again mark, with a blue or red pencil, passages that struck him for reference in his articles … When the last paper was duly scanned, A.G. would put them aside with a sigh of relief and join in the talk and discussions with his friends … And of friends he had many and diverse, attracting them from every class and level, high and low, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, atheists. Indeed, their social, religious and political variety was as astonishing as their personal and temperamental differences not to say clashes and contests.
However, having so written, the barrister and land commissioner Kevin O’Shiel noted that ‘Griffith’s part in those discussions was mainly that of a listener … speech he only resorted to when he felt he had something to say that was worth saying, and then he said it in the fewest possible words and with a most un-Irish lack of adjectives.’ O’Shiel added:
Griffith had two marked habits that one could not fail to notice. One was a habit of blinking his eyes. He was short sighted and always wore pince-nez; but I think the blinking was not due to his sight but to his innate shyness and sensitiveness. The other habit was that of every now and again pulling up his neck-tie. He could never make the usual tie knot, and so had to confine his tie through a gold ring which required constant adjusting.50
At closing time Griffith seldom walked alone to O’Connell Street. Usually one of his friends walked with him to Nelson’s Pillar where he boarded a tram.51 Some people who encountered him in public felt ignored. George Lyons wrote ‘he often confessed to me that he never knew who a person was until he heard their voice.’52 One evening, for example, Griffith was with a group when Eddie Lipman, a young doctor on leave from the war in Europe, joined them in uniform. Griffith did not give him a look of recognition. Lipman wanted to chat with Griffith but misunderstood Griffith’s demeanour as coolness towards the uniform and left. When Griffith heard of this a moment later he went to find Lipman, and stood talking with him in College Green.53 However, not everyone who hailed Griffith respected him. His solicitor and ‘close friend’ Michael Noyk told the Bureau of Military History of an occasion when Griffith was walking home with Seamus O’Sullivan from The Bailey and ‘an Irish-Party man, or maybe an A.O.H. man, made some nasty remark as Griffith was passing and pulled his hat. Griffith turned round and gave him a punch, knocking him down, even though Griffith had very bad sight and had to wear glasses.’54
James Moran remembered that one day, as he and his friends swam, ‘a very powerful shower of rain came down. We made for the dressing boxes for cover, but noticed that Griffith remained in the water, and was swimming in circles. Showing off was a thing he was never known to practise, so we shouted at him to come in.’ Immediately Griffith made for them, and they found him exhausted. They helped to dry and dress him before heading off for the nearest pub ‘where after a drop of good whiskey he was himself again’. Moran says Griffith explained ‘When the shower came down it splashed the water into his eyes, and his sight, always a little weak, became blurred. He couldn’t see what direction he was swimming in, but he gave no sign he was in distress. A most remarkable man!’55
5
Ballads, Songs and Snatches
Griffith had a musical ear, and it heard not only pleasant harmonies but also the voices of Irish people articulating in song their grief and scorn. He often crossed the Liffey to the Liberties, an old area of the city adjacent to Cook Street where his future wife lived until 1900. He met friends in the convivial surroundings of McCall’s ‘quaint old tavern’ at 25 Patrick Street. There, near St Patrick’s Cathedral, he would ‘listen to good talk about ballad poetry and old Dublin streets and people’. James Clarence Mangan had once frequented the pub, being a friend of an earlier McCall. At the time that Griffith used to go there ‘one could still be shown the actual place once favoured by Mangan, and even occupy his accustomed chair or bench’.1 Outside during the day, as an old photograph