Poet, Madman, Scoundrel

by David Slattery

  He was sued for divorce in 1880 and gaoled. A flop in London in 1881 necessitated his fleeing back to America. He entered a bigamous marriage in Australia, as you do in show business. The novelty of a bigamous couple filled theatres in New Zealand for a few months, where they were desperate for any form of distraction. When he died of heart failure he was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in New York City. Not surprisingly, he was then dug up and moved to Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York, where, surprisingly, he remains to this day. In all he wrote over 150 plays, and invented the matinee, the sensational scene and fireproof scenery. He was the first to pay attention to ensemble playing and the first engineer to be credited with anticipating the Russian theatre director Constantin Stanislavski because of his many modern directorial innovations and his professional approach to the theatre.

  The father of the Irish songwriter Percy French (1854–1920), under the common false impression held by many Irish parents that mathematics is their offspring’s leading talent, convinced Percy to enrol in a civil engineering course after he graduated with an arts degree from Trinners in 1876. While “studying” engineering he impressed his classmates with his virtuosity on the banjo, learned to play the piano and tennis, and organised concerts. He amazed his rapidly growing number of college friends with his comic song “Abdul Abulbul Amir”, which was a massive hit. He expanded his audience beyond the classroom to include audiences at cricket matches.

  He passed his final engineering examinations after just four years of musical distractions. He became an apprentice in the Midland Great Western Railway Company, after which he took a job with the Board of Works as an inspector of drains. He deserved that fate for passing his examinations. However, to mitigate this setback in his career, he used his office at the board to store banjos, paints, paintings and sports gear, and dressed outrageously on his drain inspections. He formed a music troupe called the Kinnypottle Komics and wrote his next smash hit, “Phil the Fluther’s Ball”. Predictably, the board did not renew his contract.

  Finally happily unemployed, French unsuccessfully edited a journal while writing his next hit, “Slattery’s Mounted Fut”, which was a song celebrating the ambiguous military achievements of some of my own forebears. He lacked ambition – a disposition often maligned in our contemporary world – especially engineering ambition.

  From the 1890s he began to drift into a hugely successful musical career in collaboration with the classical musician Houston Collisson. He cycled everywhere, and gave away his watercolour paintings to those who would actually take them. His famous song “The Mountains of Mourne” appeared in 1896. Drawing on his railway experience as an apprentice, he wrote “Are Ye Right There, Michael?” in 1902, which was a song about the punctuality of the West Clare Railway Company. He toured London, Canada and America. He frequented large London theatres in winter and Irish seaside resorts and small towns in summer. In 1915 he did eighty one-night concerts in Ireland alone. He sometimes toured with Collisson, or on his own when, I assume, Collisson couldn’t keep up. Between 1877 and 1915 he wrote about sixty-three songs and fifty-one poems, as well as parodies and plays. He performed in France for British troops during the First World War. However, he achieved little in engineering despite an unpromising start.

  If Trinners had built the atomic bomb it is probable that nothing would be different in our history because the engineers in the common rooms wouldn’t have known how to work the buttons, being too busy with their plays and musical instruments. Ironically, failed Irish engineers have made some of the most important contributions to the arts, which means that we either had the most inspired or the most misguided engineers in the world.

  Classical Applications of Engineering

  Perhaps the engineers may not have known what to do with a bomb, but the classicists might well have. In the eighteenth century, one of the most exciting innovations was in air travel. Richard Crosbie (1756?–1800?) was a balloonist. We don’t know when he died because he seems to have just drifted up, up and away in one of his balloons. We do know that, while he was a student at Trinners, his aptitude for mechanics came to the fore in his classics studies. He was noted for preparing reliable dueling pistols for his classmates. It seems he was practical precisely because he didn’t study engineering.

  Crosbie began experimenting with the new-fangled hot air and hydrogen balloons that were becoming the rage. Inspired by a short flight in Dublin in 1784, Crosbie planned to cross the Irish Sea by balloon. To raise money for this feat, he charged admission to his exhibition of balloons at Ranelagh in Dublin, where he released several into the sky, carrying animals. This resulted in Crosbie becoming embroiled in a lengthy public spat in the newspapers with his balloon rivals over the principles of large balloon design.

  On 19 January 1785, in front of 30,000 spectators at Ranelagh, Crosbie won the argument by ascending in an elaborate gondola or wicker basket. He eventually landed at Clontarf to a heroic reception. This was the first recorded balloon flight in Ireland.

  In May 1785 Crosbie, who was tall and heavy, was seriously worried about a public ascent in his balloon so he wisely asked a lighter Trinners undergraduate called Richard McGwire, who he seemed to have judged as hardly a significant loss to the scientific world, to go up in his place. But McGwire proved to be a more resourceful engineer than Crosbie imagined. While drifting into oblivion, he punctured the balloon to descend into the sea. Crosbie was furious when McGwire was knighted for his innovative efforts on behalf of Irish aviation.

  Following this drama, the Mayor of Dublin banned ballooning because the new mania was interfering with commerce with balloons crash-landing and burning all over the city. But Crosbie himself ascended from the lawn of the Duke of Leinster’s house in Dublin, now the home of the Irish Parliament (Dáil), on 19 July 1785. The balloon hit the Irish Sea about halfway to England. Crosbie was rescued by a specially commissioned barge but was not knighted. He made another flight from Limerick in April 1786 before eventually disappearing from history into thinning air.

  There is evidence from the history of computing in Ireland that those who didn’t study engineering made the most progress. Percy Ludgate (1883–1922), from West Cork, was Ireland’s first computer nerd, even before we had information technology. As a suitable preparation for nerdiness, he studied accountancy, becoming an auditor with Kevans & Son in Dublin. During the First World War he was on a committee formed by his company to control the production and sale of oats for cavalry horses. Ludgate shone at the complicated organisation involved in this.

  He is the earliest successor to Charles Babbage, who in 1834 invented the fundamental concepts of what would become the digital computer of the twentieth century. Ludgate’s work is known from just one surviving paper that he published in 1909. This paper describes his plans for a machine that incorporated fully automated mechanisms for storing and accessing nearly 200 28-decimal numbers, and executing a sequence of arithmetic operations on these numbers under the control of instructions entered on a punched paper tape. His machine was different from Babbage’s. He indicated a sliding rod to represent a decimal digit instead of Babbage’s rotating gear wheel. Ludgate claimed that he learned of Babbage’s designs only during the final stages of his own plans. His techniques in what have become known as programme control and storage addressing were more advanced than those of Babbage.

  Ludgate never built his machine, nor did anyone else. If you have a few million hours on your hands it would make an interesting hobby. However, he did point the way for all future computer geeks and nerds who would follow. He lived at home with his mother, spending all his free time in his bedroom, where he died in 1922. Sadly, none of his papers or drawings survived. It seems that after his death his mother did a thorough spring clean.

  Is There a Real Doctor in the House?

  Between 1772 and 1782 Patrick Joyce from Kilkenny was known as Achmet Boroumborad. He is described for posterity as a professional quac
k and fraud. He was what we would now call an entrepreneur.

  Being a swindler was a common career in eighteenth-century Ireland, so he had to do something more noteworthy to stand out from the crowd of imposters. He dressed in what passed at that time in Dublin as being a Turk on the run from Istanbul. This went down exceedingly well with the local gentry. In 1769, centuries ahead of his time, he was promoting the benefits of steam baths in Finglas, in Dublin. Sometime during his Turkish career, when he dressed as a Turk and recommended Turkish baths, he assembled a group of politicians and local gentry to demonstrate the benefits of his hot and cold baths with the hope of attracting funding for expanding his enterprise. Unfortunately, the assembled local dignitaries fell en masse into one of the baths.

  However, the character of the eighteenth-century fraudster is necessarily robust. Joyce quickly bounced back from that setback by throwing off his Turkish robes and marrying the sister of a “surgeon”. At that time the difference between a quack and a “surgeon” was well understood: a “surgeon” would have trained in the most efficacious methods by which to kill their patients, while a quack would have killed theirs by improvisation. Joyce later became an heir to the estate of William Gregg, who we can be confident expired with convenient speed after this. He even gets a mention in James Joyce’s (1882–1941)146 Finnegan’s Wake as “an Indian sahib and aural surgeon”.

  You didn’t have to be a “surgeon” or “doctor” in the past. You could have been an actual doctor. For example, the famous conjurer Doctor Lynn was hugely popular with his audiences. It seems a doctor’s popularity was directly proportional to his willingness to perform illusions. He toured Dublin every year at the end of the nineteenth century, and every year his audience looked forward to being bewildered and delighted by him. He specialised in pulling bowls of fish from the air. Demonstrating another improbable skill, he would ask a member of his audience to select any pear from a bowl of pears that he would present to them with a flourish. Once selected, the audience member would be invited to take a slice from the pear with a knife, presented for that purpose, and to eat the slice before handing the partly consumed pear back to the amazing Doctor Lynn. He would take the pear, throw it in the air and when he caught it as it fell he would hand it back to the audience member whole and sound. Fantastic.

  The Father of Turpentine

  Ah, the past! Then, if you didn’t have any medical qualifications you could simply claim to have them – and if you were caught you could defend yourself by claiming to be an eccentric. Sadly our modern laws ignore eccentricity as a medical exoneration. There were definite circumstances in the past when you might have wanted to become an eccentric. These included being illegitimate, too cerebral, too rich or not having enough to occupy your time. The latter was a typical historical manifestation of being too rich.

  John Brenan (1768–1830) was a satirist, accomplished classicist, “physician” and proficient eccentric. He began his career writing verse for Dublin magazines before coming up with the not-entirely-original idea of claiming to have medical qualifications from Glasgow University. Having thus qualified himself, he started practising medicine at the turn of the nineteenth century, and quickly cornered the market in turpentine cures.

  Brenan claimed to be the first to use turpentine as a treatment for puerperal fever,147 having seen it used on a horse to treat colic. In an unexpected development for medical standards of the time, he was fired from the Rotunda Maternity Hospital for dosing everyone with turpentine during an epidemic. He then did the appropriate thing. He wrote a few pamphlets, Thoughts on Puerperal Fever and its Cure by Spirits of Turpentine (1814) and Reflections upon Oil of Turpentine, and upon the Present Condition of the Medical Profession in Ireland (1817). These were essentially ravings against the establishment in which he compared his own genius to that of Jenner, Harvey and Galileo. As Edward Jenner discovered the smallpox vaccine, he can be regarded as the “father of immunology”. William Harvey discovered the circulation of blood and may be looked upon as the “father of anatomy”. Galileo Galilei discovered the orbit of the Earth around the sun and consequently enjoys the title the “father of modern science”. Perhaps Brenan can lay claim to being the “father of turpentine”.

  After falling out with his magazine editors, Brenan started his own, the Irish Monthly Gleaner. Being an eccentric, naturally he didn’t publish this monthly every month. This magazine was dedicated to establishing the benefits of turpentine.

  But turpentine wasn’t his only obsession. He was also a fanatical wrestler and organiser of wrestling bouts. He regularly broke the shins of his wrestling opponents, and then offered to fix them using his medical skills. Obviously, this involved rubbing them with turpentine.

  When his father died, Brenan sued his mother for his father’s land, and the matter was dragged through the courts with the opposing attorneys getting all the money in the estate. Not surprisingly, Brenan’s mother died penniless in the poor house, which was one condition that defied his turpentine treatments.

  The “Science” of Healing

  Valentine Greatrakes (1628–1683), from Affane, Co. Waterford, began to feel, as you do, that he might have the power to cure people of scrofula,148 also known as the king’s evil. On one occasion, Greatrakes met King Charles II of England who didn’t like him because he, the king, couldn’t cure the king’s evil, while Greatrakes, not the king, could.

  Greatrakes’s first patient was a boy from Lismore, Co. Waterford who had disease around his eyes, face and throat. People started to flock to Greatrakes’s house for cures when the boy improved. He was called “the stroaker” because he healed by rubbing his spittle onto the affected area.

  Apart from curing people, he was a busy man. He was a farmer and one-time justice of the peace so he was only able to set aside three days a week for curing. The Dean of Lismore wanted him to stop healing because it was against the teachings of the Church to help people without a licence.

  Greatrakes got himself into a pamphlet war with his many critics. His defence included testimonials from fifty-three people whom he had cured. He eventually became disillusioned with the public’s lukewarm response to his healing, and retired to his farm.

  Greatrakes visited Florence Newton (d.1661?) in Youghal, Co. Cork when she was in gaol on charges of witchcraft. She had been accused of bewitching Mary Langdon, who was a servant. Langdon claimed that she had been bewitched shortly after refusing to give Newton some of her employer’s beef at Christmas. She fell victim to fits and trances so violent that four men were needed to hold her down. She vomited needles, straw and pins. Stones also rained down on her that instantly disappeared. The fits stopped as soon as Newton was safely chained in prison.

  Greatrakes undertook a variety of well-established tests to decide if Newton was actually a witch, including, I assume, determining if she had a cat. But she didn’t; she was a dog person. Newton confirmed that she had a familiar in the form of a greyhound, and that she had “overlooked”, or put a spell on, Langdon.

  Local busybody David Jones tried to teach her the Lord’s Prayer while she was in gaol because it was a fact that witches couldn’t recite the Lord’s Prayer in gaol, or anywhere else. She kissed his hand in gratitude and, sure enough, he was dead within a fortnight.

  We don’t know what happened to her or how Greatrakes’s evidence affected her case. Maybe she just vanished or turned into a greyhound.

  If There Is No Cat Is It Really Magic?

  Biddy Early (c.1798–1874) was a clairvoyant from Co. Clare who had a genius for healing. She established her occult reputation when she was a teenager by predicting the murder of her employer. With her employer dead as foretold and her reputation established, she settled in Kilbarron, Co. Clare, where she opened her clairvoyant and healing business. She treated thousands of people for various illnesses, disabilities and possession by fairies, which, though a common ailment at that time, has since been completely eradi
cated as a medical condition, just like smallpox.

  Fairies are the spirits who remained neutral during the conflict between God and Lucifer. In other words, they couldn’t decide whether they were unambiguously on the side of good or evil. When God won that fight, they were punished for their ambivalence by being sent to live under fairy mounds, deserted castles and graveyards, ruined churches, glens, lakes and caves all over Ireland. They usually congregated in large societies. Fairies could change shape and make themselves so ugly that you would faint if you saw one. It is not known for certain if they had wings but their apparel was agreed upon. Lady fairies wore pure white robes with long hair flowing untied over their shoulders. Married female fairies wore their hair tied up in a bun, signifying their marital status. Male fairies donned green jackets with white breeches and stockings.

  In fairness, fairies were in Ireland before Irish people so we respected their prior claim on the country. It seems they engaged in savage fairy wars, and may have wiped themselves out. But in the absence of their written records, we will never know. Whatever happened, we definitely didn’t do it. We can take credit for the dodo, the woolly mammoth and our cousins the Neanderthals, but not fairies. We were too terrified to go near them.

  Fairies specialised in stealing beautiful peasant babies and replacing them with young, ugly, red-faced leprechauns who would bawl non-stop. Interestingly, no one has ugly babies these days. This pulchritudinous improvement in our infant stock seems proof that fairies are no longer operating in Ireland.