Archiving a neighbourhood
How cancer sufferer unearthed so many positives from her Liberties grandad’s dusty old negatives
PHOTOGRAPHY enthusiast John Walsh was the John Hinde of the Liberties, capturing so many special moments from the characters of his Dublin inner city neighbourhood.
A documentary, set to air this evening, is a celebration of the Liberties and a tribute to the man who documented it with his trusty camera.
Francis Street in the 1940s and 1950s was hardly picturepostcard perfect, but John Walsh tirelessly chronicled the daily life of Dublin 8 through his lens, building up an archive of images that captured the social history of the area.
He snapped people going about their business, at local weddings and Communions, and took portraits of people in their crumbling tenement flats.
Following his death in 1999, he left behind a vault of work which was brought to his daughter Rita’s house in Kimmage.
The photographs remained untouched for 20 years before Rita’s daughter, Suzanne Behan, who was recovering from cancer, decided to pull her grandfather’s old negatives out of a storage room and go
‘It was a very strange time’
through them. What she found was ‘thousands and thousands’ of images going back through several decades – a veritable treasure trove chronicling life in and around Francis Street.
Suzanne jokes: ‘We laugh and say people get left things in their will and people get left money and I just got left a box of negatives – so yeah, it’s all grandad’s fault!’
She believes John gave her a ‘mission’ to uncover his life’s work and piece it together to take her mind off her cancer.
Following her treatment, she woke up in the same ward, same room and same bed that her grandfather passed away in, which she found a ‘weird’ coincidence. In another serendipitous turn of events, the second time she had surgery, her doctor’s name was John Walsh and last year, the hospital in Boston, where she travelled for treatment, was on a Francis Street.
Suzanne said: ‘I thought, “OK, we’re starting to get a pattern here”. If it was divine intervention on grandad’s behalf, then we’re happy to run with that.’
Discussing being diagnosed with sarcoma – a rare form of cancer which treatment is scarce for – she said: ‘It was a very strange time. While you may have felt well, you had doctors in the hospital telling you, “go home and sort your affairs, go home and get things ready”. And you just didn’t know what the situation was going to be.’
She says although she is grieving a life she had envisaged, it is easier to smile and tell people that she is fine – rather than tell them that she is thinking about her coffin or funeral music.
Suzanne credits the uncertainty of her future with leading her to uncover John’s lifetime collection of incredible moments frozen in time.
During t he programme, Suzanne visits many people who John photographed and their relatives.
In the process of reuniting some elderly residents with photos of themselves when they were young, she learned stories of their lives and how the photos came to be.
Little Flower Penny Dinners, which still exists today, was established on Meath Street to f eed f amilies in t he area ‘whether poor or well-off ’. The tradition was that local children were invited to break their fast there on their First Communion day – an event that John Walsh photographed many times.
Among those children was Pad, who recalled his upbringing in the tenements 50 years ago where he and his family slept under army overcoats as there were no sheets or blankets on the bed. Pad hung the photo of his family on his kitchen wall where he remembered his ‘hard life’. He said: ‘Everybody had a hard time to get by.’
Singer Eileen Reid was one of the most glamorous stars of the showband era and a proud Liberties girl. After seeing a photograph of her close-knit family, she emotionally recalled the earlier days of her career and the importance of family.
She wept: ‘When you see some of them are gone, I don’t know, there is something sort of spiritual about it. That’s the way family should be.’
Suzanne also discovered a mystery photograph roll in a box, which was labelled ‘Frank Eivers’.
She discovered that Mr Eivers was a member of An Garda Síochána but then joined the UN as a bodyguard for Dag Hammarskjold, the then secretary general of the United Nations.
They both died in a mysterious plane crash in 1961.
John realised that he had photographed Frank’s wedding a few weeks prior and decided to go to his funeral to document his passing also. Suzanne and Rita travelled to meet some of Frank’s sisters, Lizzie and Nellie, in Tubbercurry, Co. Tipperary, who are in their 80s now.
For Lizzie and Nellie, it is their first time seeing the images of their brother’s funeral. Nellie said it will ‘never’ be known why the plane crashed over Zambia, and his death will remain a mystery.
Frank was given a full State funeral and the Eivers family felt pushed to one side.
An emotional Lizzie said: ‘ We were there but we might as well have been 100 miles away’, as she tearfully thanked Suzanne for the photographs.
At 13 years old, John found work as a messenger boy for a photographer on Capel Street and went on to have many jobs such as barman, metal fabricator and shopkeeper but his skill and interest in photography became his livelihood.
He married a shopkeeper in the early 1940s and had four children.
Rita said: ‘We weren’t rich, and we weren’t poor, but we had more than what other children had.’
Suzanne also uncovered unseen photographs of her own family members. She is ‘fully convinced’ that her grandfather invented the selfie, as she showed a picture that John took as evidence.
Rita’s sisters Pauline and Patti recall being raised by widower John from the age of 12.
Pauline said: ‘I can remember as a teenager maybe leaving our house and we could be driving home at two in the morning and if we see a fire brigade, we take off after the fire brigade – we chased ambulances [to take photos].
‘And one time, we ended up at the English embassy which got burned down – fire bombs, petrol bombs, everything.’
Patti jokes: ‘People didn’t have television so that was life.’
One man said: ‘As long as there are photographs like this, those people will never be dead, they’ll never be dead.’
The Francis Street Photographer airs on RTÉ One at 6.30pm this evening.