Poet, Madman, Scoundrel

by David Slattery

  Brendan and his crew experienced hunger, thirst and terrible hardships before they reached what is now Madeira. They sailed to the Azores and through the Sargasso Sea, where the boat nearly sank with the pull of the seaweed that grows there, before turning for Iceland where they saw volcanoes that they imagined were the gates of hell. From there, they sailed on to Newfoundland, where they became trapped by ice for the winter on a nearby island. They saw hideous monsters with cat-like heads, bronze eyes, fuzzy pelts, boar’s tusks and big bellies. This was Brendan’s description of a walrus. The terrified monks fled for their lives. After reaching the Bahamas, they finally landed in America at what is now Miami. The voyage had taken seven years, which probably felt like seventy. An old Irish monk, Festivus, who already had been there thirty years, greeted them when they came ashore in Florida.

  Florida was filled with exotic birds and plants. A particular bird informed Brendan that once upon a time he and the rest of the birds were all angels in heaven but when their boss, Lucifer, fell out of favour, they fell too, but only into that earthly paradise and not directly into hell. This bird was now serving the Lord in a tree with the other birds. Brendan also met an angel-like Indian who told him that, while it was the Irishman’s destiny to cross the mighty ocean and land in America, it was not his fate to go down in history as the person who “discovered” America. This was the price he must pay for his navigational success. Brendan sailed back home to Ireland and Christopher Columbus got the credit 1,000 years later.

  In 149241 Columbus sailed into Galway Bay seeking Irish help on his way to discover the western passage to Asia. Columbus had learned that Brendan visited lands in this direction. Columbus himself wrote an account of an Indian couple who had washed ashore in Galway tied to wreckage. Furthermore, hard driftwood regularly came ashore in Galway. All of these clues together reinforced Columbus’s hope of finding a western passage to Asia. Columbus sailed west from Galway with a local Irishman on board. This man was possibly the third European, after Festivus and Brendan, to set foot in the New World because he was the first off Columbus’s ship, the Santa Maria, when it landed.

  Limited Saintly Opportunities

  There are countless opportunities for sinning. It is understandable that so many chose the path of wickedness because, as mentioned, it has been practically impossible since the ninth century to become an official saint in the Irish tradition. Since then we’ve only had Cellach of Armagh (1080–1129) and Laurence O’Toole (1128–1180) in the twelfth century, and Oliver Plunkett (1629–1681) in the seventeenth. But even Plunkett found that the gate to sainthood had long been shut to the Irish, except for those willing to go to extraordinary lengths and emulate the saints of the older Italian tradition. Plunkett was hanged, drawn and quartered. However, even then he wasn’t beatified until 1920, and he wasn’t officially canonised until 1975 when a berth among the saints in heaven could be found for him.

  Perhaps we are just not as saintly as we used to be. Matt Talbot (1856–1925) is our only current hope. While he was alive, no one realised that Matt might be a saint. The undertaker discovered, after Matt dropped dead in a Dublin street, that he had been wearing ropes and chains wound tightly around his body. It was clear he had been wearing them for years because they were embedded in his flesh. This was a sign that Matt may become a saint.

  In his early life Matt was an alcoholic but he swore off drink and swore onto pain. He got his first chain from a “professor of philosophy”, Dr Hickey, who advised him to wear it as a penance. Doing bondage penance was fashionable at that time in Ireland. The chain started a series of self-punishments that included binding his limbs with ropes, sleeping on a plank with a wooden block for a pillow, eating little and giving generously to the poor. While not yet a recognised saint, Matt has achieved the status of “venerable”, which is an official step on the path to full sainthood.

  Sinners of the Irish Tradition

  Brendan established the tradition of the travelling Irish saint. But not all Irish saints had a stomach for ocean voyages. Many preferred to keep their feet on solid ground. Andrew was one such saint. He died on pilgrimage to Florence in the ninth century and was buried in an unmarked grave in the convent grounds. The location of his body was eventually forgotten over generations. However, when a beautiful young woman died a few hundred years later, Andrew became alarmed when the nuns unwittingly tried to bury her beside him. He had to rise from his grave to show them that his bones were buried in the place where they were proposing to bury the beautiful, if dead, young woman. The nuns resolved the necrophiliac temptation by digging up Andrew’s bones and placing them in an urn in their church. In gratitude for the scandal narrowly avoided, he performed miracles on demand. While alive, he was famous for his austerity, but obviously didn’t fully trust himself to resist temptation, so near at hand, after death. For most Irish saints, keeping away from women, dead or alive, was a constant obsession that continued into heaven. Unless, of course, you were one of those relatively rare saints, an Irish woman.

  Infamous Sinner-ettes

  Thankfully, not every woman recorded in Irish history was a saint. There were a few who dedicated themselves to sin. Mary Ann Duignan (1871–1929) was one such woman. She is arguably Ireland’s most successful prostitute, ever. However, how is such a proposition to be demonstrated? What is the approved measure of success: income or number of clients?

  In any case, Duignan wanted to be remembered in history as “the most dangerous woman in the world”. This was a significant ambition considering her relatively respectable beginnings in Co. Longford, where she was born into a family of small farmers. She endured the stifling restrictions of family life until she was eighteen, when she stole the family’s savings of £60 and ran away to America. By 1892, making up for lost opportunities for sinning in her childhood, she had quickly established herself as a prostitute and extortionist in Chicago, and earned herself the gangland name “Chicago May”. By 1894 she had moved her crime franchise to New York where she became a leading figure amongst the criminals of the Tenderloin District in Manhattan.

  She had three advantages in the pursuit of sin. First, she looked great. She was tall and gorgeous with glorious auburn hair and blue-grey eyes. Second, she was charming and witty, and she radiated a deceptive veneer of innocence. She had perfected a “butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth” attitude. Men could not resist her. Third, she had a genius for exploitation. On a typical evening, she drugged her clients before robbing them, throwing their clothes out of the window to a waiting accomplice and leaving them naked to make their embarrassed way home, if or when they regained consciousness. Sometimes she photographed them in compromising poses in which she’d artistically arranged them while they were out cold. Occasionally she got them to write her love letters that she could threaten to show to their wives. On other occasions, she invented an enraged husband of her own who she used to intimidate them. In other words, you could have a truly entertaining night at Chicago May’s place.

  She moved from city to city throughout North and South America, living an unsaintly life of jewelry, furs and first-class hotels. In 1897 she took a part as a chorus girl in the hit musical The Belle of New York as a front for her prostitution and extortion rackets. She claimed to have married a Wild West gunslinger before actually marrying James Sharpe in 1899. But she left him in 1900 and moved to London, which she made her European headquarters of sin.

  Being described in police files as “the worst woman in London” delighted her. She was on her way to notoriety. In London she extorted money from aristocrats, politicians and prominent businessmen. International jewel thief and all-round bad boy Eddie Guerin became her lover and extortion partner. In 1901 they burgled the American Express offices in Paris, netting $300,000.42 Guerin was arrested. Duignan was arrested soon after when she visited him in gaol. It must really have been love or maybe she wanted to know where he had stashed the cash. But she was back on the streets by 1
905, either by getting a presidential pardon or by seducing the prison doctor and then blackmailing him; we don’t know the exact escape plan that she used. That same year, Guerin escaped from the notorious Devil’s Island prison colony43 by bribing guards with funds that Duignan sent him.

  Duignan and Guerin were reunited in London but the romance quickly turned violent. Guerin beat Duignan and threatened to throw acid in her face. What’s a girl to do but shop him to the London police? But Guerin was free within a year, having beaten a French extradition warrant in court.

  Duignan and her new boyfriend, Charlie Smith, tried to gun Guerin down in a London street. Despite emptying a revolver at him, she managed to hit him only in the foot. Perhaps she still loved him, unconsciously.

  Following a sensational one-day trial at the Old Bailey, Duignan, flatteringly described as “the most notorious woman in Europe”, was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to fifteen years hard labour in Aylesbury Prison. There she met fellow Irish inmate and woman of historical note, Countess Constance Markievicz (1868–1927),44 who was an Irish revolutionary, suffragette and socialist.

  Duignan was released after ten years and deported to America, now having American citizenship through her marriage to James Sharpe. In any case, we Irish have always liked to send the troublemakers as far away as possible. She returned to prostitution. But her beauty and charm had diminished in gaol, so she found it much harder on the game.

  While in gaol in Detroit in 1926, she was persuaded by the celebrated criminologist August Vollmer to write her life story. In her successful illustrated autobiography she described herself as “the most dangerous woman in the world”, thereby achieving her life-long ambition. While engaged to marry her old flame and would-be fellow assassin and lousy shot Charlie Smith, whom she had just met again after a separation of twenty years, she tragically died following surgery in 1929. She had been operated on for a gynaecological complication.

  Ireland has produced its share of prostitutes whose lives were the stuff of literature. We were forced to read the life of the sourpuss and would-be saint from Dingle, Peig Sayers (1873–1958), in school when we could have been reading the autobiography of another Peig, Margaret Leeson (1727–1797), who was a high-class prostitute. Peig wrote her memoirs when she retired from the game. These memoirs made her a lot of money because many of her clients paid her not to be included.

  Her brothels were the go-to places for the who’s who of Dublin fashionable society. She was a noted wit. The Lord Lieutenant Charles Manners was one of her clients. One evening at the theatre, when she was asked who she had slept with last, she replied, “Manners, you blackguards.” She refused to take on Lord Westmorland as a client because she said that he had treated his first wife badly by flaunting an affair. Not surprisingly, she is regarded as one of Ireland’s original feminists.

  The Dreaded Anatomists

  Traditional Irish charm may be used to lure unsuspecting murder victims into your house. William Burke (1793–1829), born in Co. Tyrone, is one of our most accomplished murderers but is usually described as a “grave robber”. This is unfair because he never robbed a grave. He killed people and handed them to the anatomists before they were buried, thereby eliminating the inconvenience of having to dig bodies up. His niche market was the provision of still-warm fresh bodies in the most efficient way possible. In contemporary business parlance, he was in supply chain management.

  Burke didn’t come to his anatomical innovation easily. He tried several careers before settling on body procurement as his chosen vocation. He was a servant, baker, weaver and labourer. He played in the Donegal Militia Band, where he was regarded as an accomplished flautist. He married Margaret Coleman from Ballina in Co. Mayo. They had two children together. In 1818, following a row with his father-in-law over land, as often happened in Mayo at that time, he left his wife and children and went to Scotland to work on the building of the Union Canal. When the canal was completed, he started a career as a cobbler. Then he met his new girlfriend, Helen McDougal. When they both chanced upon Margaret Hare, who ran a boarding house, she suggested that they move in with herself and her husband, William, to run the boarding house together. Burke and McDougal agreed, and Burke embarked on his penultimate career, lodging-house manager.

  In 1827 an old lodger called Donald died in bed in the Hares’ lodging house. He owed the Hares £4 for rent. Hare had the brainwave of selling Donald to the local surgeon, Dr Robert Knox, for dissection because, at that time, the market for corpses was buoyant.45 Burke and Hare got £7 10s46 for Donald, no questions asked.

  Burke and Hare realised that running a lodging house in fact left them in a prime position for bumping people off. They decided to intervene in the natural order of things rather than await the serendipitous demise of more of the guests lodging in their house. To guarantee cashflow, they smothered eleven guests in total, who were attracted by the “no hidden catches” advertising campaign launched by the Burke and Hare syndicate. Burke had a natural advantage in the body-supply business because he was charming and mild-mannered. Those who met him and lived regarded him as friendly. He won the confidence of his potential bodies down in the pub before luring them back to the lodging house.

  Burke and Hare smothered five others off-site, including women and children. They smothered “Daft Jamie Wilson”, a mentally retarded nineteen-year-old, thereby demonstrating that, even in the nineteenth century, they were equal opportunity murderers.

  Smothering was a requirement for selling corpses into the anatomy business because it left no evidence of violence on the bodies: violence might have damaged the vital organs, thus interfering with the value of the dissections. Dr Knox’s school of anatomy paid between £8 and £14 a go, depending on the specimen and condition.

  Eventually, when Mary Docherty was smothered other lodgers became suspicious, or maybe even sober, on finding her body under a pile of straw. They called the police. As this was before phones, it necessitated the panicked lodgers running down the street together screaming, “Police! Police!” In return for not being prosecuted, Hare agreed to give evidence against Burke and his girlfriend, Helen McDougal. Burke was convicted while McDougal got off.

  Burke was hanged in Edinburgh in front of a crowd of 20,000 spectators. The crowd shouted “Burke him! Give him no rope!” referring to his suffocation technique. Thus, a new verb entered the English lexicon – “to burke”, meaning to suffocate. For example, you might say,“I am burking in this house. I’m off down the pub to see if I can meet some interesting people.”

  Alexander Munro, who was Dr Knox’s main competition in the anatomy game in Edinburgh, publicly dissected Burke’s body in front of a large excited crowd.47 The authorities felt that it wouldn’t be cricket to allow Knox to dissect his own main supply chain manager. Burke’s skeleton was put on display in the University of Edinburgh’s anatomical museum, where it can still be seen.

  The Highway

  However, the sin of killing people doesn’t mean that you cannot love as the Bible commands. William Crotty (1712–1742) and his wife Mary were the Bonny and Clyde of eighteenth-century Waterford. Theirs is the story of violence, betrayal, blazing blunderbusses and love.

  Crotty took up the career of highwayman when he was eighteen, after his father was evicted from their small farm. Sadly, “highwaymanry” is yet another obsolete profession. He hid out with Mary in the Comeragh Mountains in a small cave now known as “Crotty’s den”. He often strode around the streets of Tipperary, Kilkenny and Waterford armed to the teeth with a blunderbuss, a brace of loaded pistols and a dagger, defying any lawman to confront him. He was a dead shot with either hand. While he enjoyed a Robin Hood reputation amongst the locals, he was also capable of sudden and random outbursts of violence, usually involving his blunderbuss. He was a noted dancer and liked to show up unexpectedly at wakes and patterns48 to dance with the ladies, clinking his way around the dancefloor.

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nbsp; His lieutenant and number two gang member, David Norris, was arrested but released so quickly that Crotty’s gang suspected that he gained his freedom by agreeing to spy on Crotty for the local magistrate, Mr Hearn. For his own protection, Norris had himself put back in gaol. But Norris’s wife was upset by this, and, wanting her husband home as soon as possible, she betrayed the location of Crotty’s hideout to Hearn. The magistrate surprised Crotty when he was climbing out of the den, which was accessible only by rope, and shot him in the mouth. Following an amazing example of musket gunplay, Crotty escaped. He ran directly to Mrs Norris’s house for help. She welcomed him in. Having gotten him completely drunk with whiskey and disabling his many guns, she sent for Hearn, who quickly surrounded the house with a troop of soldiers. Despite being drunk and without his full complement of working firearms, a desperate gunfight ensued.

  Crotty was eventually taken prisoner and hauled away to Waterford where he was put on trial. Norris was the main witness for the prosecution. When he was found guilty, Crotty asked for a stay of execution until his child was born but this unreasonable request was refused. He was hanged in Waterford on 18 March 1742 and his head was put on a spike outside the gates of the gaol.

  Mary, his wife, was inconsolable, and may have drowned herself in grief or been transported to the Colonies. We don’t know exactly what happened to her. I like to think she turned up in the dead of night at the Norris’s with blunderbusses blazing.

  Gentleman Pickpocket

  Those who were too squeamish to smother or shoot people could pursue the sinful profession of gentleman pickpocket, like Dublin man George Barrington (1755–1804). His vocation began following a schoolyard fistfight. Sensibly, because he was badly losing, he resorted to stabbing his opponent. The headmaster was so upset that he flogged Barrington. Barrington retaliated by stealing ten guineas (£10 10s) from him and a watch from his own sister, before fleeing the school.