Singing the Rally Anthem—‘Molly Malone’ on the steps of the Mansion House

Photographs: Andy Murray & Paul Oatway

BICYCLES, BLOOD, BLOOM AND BURGUNDY

In 1893 in picturesque College Park, in Dublin’s Trinity College, Charles Findlater won the one-mile bicycle novices’ race and received a magnificent portico clock which one hundred years on sits proudly on my mantelpiece.^* Some prize for a novices’ race, it weighs all of three pounds! He also won a number of long distance races with the Irish Road Club. In 1899, again in College Park, surgeon, writer and wit, Oliver St John Gogarty, the basis for the character Buck Mulligan in Ulysses, won virtually all the cycling events in the College races; he was first in the mile, the mile handicap, and the three-mile and would have won the five-mile had his tyre not burst at the beginning of the race. He competed with the Dublin University Cycling Club and was the last of the great Trinity cyclists. Alas he never won an Irish title.⁹ Those were the days when sport paved the way to student fame in Trinity. The College Races were the most important outdoor social event of the year in Dublin. The Viceroy and his court attended, while it was the occasion of the first showing of summer fashions. Thousands of people attended for the two days and the gathering was enlivened by bookies shouting odds from the back of the crowds. Here is how one spectator described the College Races as early as 1850: ‘Taking my position on an elevation near the Park wall, the coup d’oeil was truly magnificent. Twenty thousand spectators, three-fourths of them the gentler sex, were circled round the scene of operations, and certainly the galaxy of beauties, adorned with all the grace of fashion suited for so brilliant a day, shed a lustre which must have astonished and delighted Phoebus, as it did the writer and all who witnessed it.’¹⁰

Bicycles were the trendy purchase of the day, and it is no surprise to find that the Findlaters were in the business, with Martin and Findlaters’ bicycle shop at the lower end of Dawson Street where Waterstones now stands. The wife of Charles’s partner Martin was a twin sister of Alfie Byrne’s mother. Alfie served his apprenticeship in the bicycle shop and was a lifelong friend of the Findlater organisation. ‘Alfie Byrne, the Perennial Lord Mayor of Dublin (ten times), with his neatly waxed moustache, his chain of office, his hand ever outstretched to shake and be shaken, and his wallet always at the service of the destitute. Elected simply on the strength of his personal popularity.’¹¹

It was inconceivable that Joyce would overlook Alfie and so we find him in Joyce’s fairy tale, The Cat and the Devil, published in 1936, where a Monsieur Alfred Byrne was Lord Mayor of Beaugency.

In 1897 while all this was going on in Dublin, two Irishmen, already mentioned in this book, had a most unusual encounter in Edgeware, then a village on the outskirts of London as George Bernard Shaw, a cousin on the Wheeler side of our family, describes in his account ‘On Pleasure Bent’:

It occurred to me that if I went into the country, selected a dangerous hill and rode down it on a bicycle at full speed in the darkest part of the night, some novel and convincing piece of realism might result . . . [and it did]. Probably no man has ever mis-

^* Charles, an engineering graduate of Trinity, survived Gallipoli but died on the Somme, aged forty-six.

FINDLATERS

Interior of Martin and Findlater’s bicycle shop in Dawson Street

understood another so completely as the doctor misunderstood me when he apologised for the sensation produced by the point of his needle as he corrected the excessive openness of my countenance after the adventure. To him who has endured points made by actors for nearly three years, the point of a surgeon’s darning needle comes as a delicious relief. I did not like to ask him to put in a few more stitches merely to amuse me, as I had already, through pure self-indulgence, cut into his Sunday rest to an extent of which his kindness made me ashamed; but I doubt if I shall ever see a play again without longing for the comparative luxury of that quiet country surgery, with the stillness without broken only by the distant song and throbbing drum-beat of some remote Salvation Army corps, and the needle, with its delicate realism, touching my sensibilities, stitch, stitch, stitch, with absolute sincerity in the hands of an artist who had actually learned his business and knew how to do it.

It so happened that my voice, which is an Irish voice, won for me the sympathy of the doctor. This circumstance must appear amazing almost beyond credibility in the light of the fact that he was himself an Irishman; but so it was. He rightly felt that sympathy is beyond price, and declined to make it the subject of a commercial transaction. Thereby he made it impossible for me to mention his name without black ingratitude; for I know no more effectual way of ruining a man in this country than by making public the smallest propensity on his part to adopt a benevolent attitude towards necessitous strangers. I was no more to him than an untimely stranger with an unheard-of black eye, for this doctor actually did not know who I was.

With a cynicism for which his charity afterwards made me blush, I sought to reassure him as to the pecuniary competence of his muddy, torn, ensanguined and facially spoiled visitor by saying ‘My name is G.B.S.’, as who should say ‘My name is Cecil Rhodes, or Henry Irving, or William of Germany.’ Without turning a hair, he sweetly humoured my egotistic garrulity by replying, in perfect lightness of heart, ‘Mine’s F.; what are you?’ Breathing at last an atmosphere in which it mattered so little who and

BICYCLES, BLOOD, BLOOM AND BURGUNDY

The still unopened Volnay bottle as advertised in The Irish Times on 16 June 1904 and another advertisement for the same wine.

what G.B.S. was, that nobody knew either one or the other, I almost sobbed with relief whilst he threaded his needle with a nice white horsehair, tactfully pretending to listen to my evasive murmur that I was a ‘sort of writer’, an explanation meant to convey to him that I earned a blameless living by inscribing names in letters of gold over shop windows and on perforated wire blinds. To have brought the taint of my factitious little vogue into the unperverted consciousness of his benevolent and sensible life would have been the act of a serpent.¹²

The ‘F’ in this account was of course Dublin-born and Trinity-educated Dr Alex F., brother of Adam and Charles.

Joyce is well known to have used the Dublin street directory and papers of the day when writing his masterpiece, so it is no surprise to find that on the original 16 June 1904 Findlaters were advertising Burgundy in The Irish Times and that Burgundy finds its way into the text as Bloom lunches in Davy Byrnes ‘Tiptop . . . Let me see. I’ll take a glass of burgundy and . . . let me see’, and ‘Good glass of burgundy, take away that. Lubricate.’¹³ and ‘Sips of his wine soothed his palate. Not logwood that. Tastes fuller this weather with the chill off.’¹⁴ Extraordinarily one unopened bottle of the wine that we advertised on that day has survived to this very day.

FINDLATERS

Most characters, merchants and traders of the day find their way into Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and Adam Findlater Jnr (Chapter 6) is no exception:

Where do they get the money? Coming up redheaded curates from the county Leitrim, rinsing empties and old man in the cellar. Then, lo and behold, they blossom out as Adam Findlaters or Dan Tallons.^* Then think of the competition. General thirst. Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub. Save it they can’t. Off the drunks perhaps. Put down three and carry five. What is that? A bob here and there, dribs and drabs. On the wholesale orders perhaps. Doing a double shuffle with the town travellers. Square it with the boss and we’ll split the job, see’ .¹⁵

As well as in Ulysses, Adam also appears a few times in Finnegans Wake. Without a knowledge of our history the reader would be hard pressed to interpret: ‘While for whoever likes that urogynal pan of cakes one apiece it is thanks, beloved, to Adam, our former first Finnlatter and our grocerest churcher, as per Grippiths’ varuations,^† for his beautiful crossmess parzel.’¹⁶ Or a further play on the church: ‘The Reverest Adam Foundlitter.’^‡ Or yet another ‘By whom as my Kerk Findlater’s, ye little chuch rond ye corner’.¹⁷ Or ‘Findlater and Gladstone’s, Corner House, Englend’.^§ Or ‘Is that the great Finnleader himself in his joakimono on his statue riding the high horse there forehengist?¹⁸

And again, more obscurely,

Yes, we’ve conned thon print in its gloss so gay how it came from Finndlader’s Yule to the day and it’s Hey Tallaght Hoe on the king’s highway with his hounds on the home at a turning’^¶

Which however works better when read to the rhythm of:

Do ye ken John Peel with his coat so grey,

Do ye ken John Peel at the break of day,

Do ye ken John Peel when he’s far far away,

With his hounds & his horn in the morning.

^* Dan Tallon was a significant publican who became Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1899 and 1900; Adam was also a substantial licence-holder.

^† Adam campaigned against a higher rateable valuation on licensed premises and succeeded. Urogynal = original; crossmess = Christmas; former: Adam died in 1911, 28 years before Finnegans Wake was published. Griffith’s Valuation was published in the 1850s.

^‡ Finnegans Wake p 420. The Abbey Presbyterian Church in Parnell Square, known as Findlater’s Church, was paid for by Adam’s great-uncle Alexander in 1864.

^§ Finnegans Wake p 170. In the 19th century Alexander Findlater of Dublin and Thomas and Robert Gladstone of Liverpool were partners in various wine firms in England. The one Joyce refers to is probably that at Findlater’s Corner under London Bridge. Thomas was related to the prime minister.

^¶Finnegans Wake p 334. I learnt that Adam hunted with the Ward Union from a letter written by his brother Dr Alex from ‘a dug-out, a hole in the ground on the side of a hill’ while engaged in the Gallipoli campaign in 1915: ‘Felt a bit jumpy before the flag fell [fighting started], but now feel as if I am in the middle of a good hunting run as I used to enjoy when having a hunt with poor Adam with the Ward Hounds.’