Cockles, mussels and a pint of plain in Dublin’s literary haunts
Veteran writer Tom McCaughren takes a nostalgic trip down the streets of Dublin and raises a glass to a host of notable writers, artists and genial pub landlords
AS I watch tourists posing for photographs at the statue of Molly Malone her popularity never ceases to amaze me. Whether the fishmonger who cried “cockles and mussels, alive, alive O” actually existed is a matter of conjecture. If she did, there are those who denigrate her by suggesting she sold cockles and mussels by day and something else by night.
Whatever the truth of the matter, the famous ballad is still sung with great gusto by Dubliners and visitors alike. As far as the visitors to Dublin are concerned she is what the ballad says she is and what her statue in Suffolk Street shows her to be. Every day they pose beside her and her wheelbarrow with its baskets of cockles and mussels, singing as they do “alive, alive O”. Whatever about other famous features of the city, it’s the snapshot of them and the iconic Molly Malone that they want to take back home.
Believe it or not, the tradition of selling shellfish on the streets and in some pubs was still alive and well when, as a young reporter, I came to work in Dublin in the late 1950s.
In those days pubs didn’t sell food. Hence the opportunity for a later day ‘Molly Malone’. The fishmonger who carried on the tradition was, in fact, a man. But it wasn’t on every bar that he placed his basket of shellfish, as some young friends and I discovered when we tried to track him down.
At that time some now-famous writers were trying to shake off the shadow of James Joyce and his masterpiece,
Ulysses — writers like Brian O’Nolan, later to become better known as Flann O’Brien for his book At Swim-Two-Birds and as Mylesnag Copaleen for his swingeing column ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ in the Irish Times.
I met him once when I was on night duty. About three in the morning he came in but not to deliver his column. Instead, he sat down at one of the desks and endeavoured to make a phone call. He wore a long coat and a wide-brimmed soft hat and from his general demeanour it was obvious he was, as they say, ‘well on’. How he managed to make his phone call I don’t know for he seemed barely able to speak and never said a word to me.
It wasn’t until after his death that I discovered the meaning of Cruiskeen Lawn.
In Toner’s pub in Lower Baggot Street is a large mirror advertising Mitchell’s Cruiskeen Lawn Irish whisky. The Belfast distillery, I might add, spelled whisky without the e that nowadays denotes Irish as distinct from Scotch. When I asked a member of staff what Cruiskeen Lawn meant, I was told, “a small jug full”. Anthony Cronin, in his book No
Laughing Matter, translates it as “little brimming jug”. In any event, it meant a jug of whiskey.
What the columnist meant by his pseudonym ‘Myles na gCopaleen’ is another matter. Cronin translates it as ‘Myles of the little horses’. But sometimes I wonder if it was a double meaning as he wrote that one of his characters was “fortified with a pony of porter”.
The word porter is said to have come from beer that was produced in London in the 18th century that was much favoured by porters who carried luggage through the streets of the city. Guinness produced porter or single stout, known as plain, and a double or extra. Hence, in At Swim-Two-Birds, the famous poem called The Workman’s Friend declares that: “A pint of plain is your only man.”
It wasn’t the ghost of Molly Malone but the pint of ‘plain’, that attracted us to the Palace Bar near the corner of Fleet Street and Westmoreland Street. That and the ghosts of the literati who used to meet there. The editor of the Times, RM Smyllie, we were told, would hold court in the back lounge with people like O’Nolan, the poet Patrick Kavanagh and the painter Harry Kernoff. And as we discussed their work, the genial proprietor Bill Aherne would serve us with a great pint, one I might say that was anything but plain. Bill Aherne’s son Liam, or his son Willie, will identify some of these famous people in photographs on the wall of the lounge if you ask them.
I don’t know if Molly Malone sold cockles and mussels in Grafton Street, not far from where her statue is, but nowadays there is always a good choice of seafood on the menu in Davy Byrnes once frequented by O’Nolan, Kavanagh, Brendan Behan and others. It was for a strong German beer, Statenbrau I think, that we went to Davy Byrnes, but it wasn’t until many years later that we learned of the Behan connection to the murals that adorn the walls.
These are the work of an eccentric painter called Cecil Ffrench-Salkeld, father of Brendan’s wife Beatrice. According to Anthony Cronin, one of the characters in At Swim-Two-Birds was modelled on Salkeld, “who spent a deal of time in his bed, where he drank a lot of whiskey, in later life retiring to it almost altogether and arising only on very special occasions such as the day appointed for the annual cleaning of his murals in Davy Byrnes”.
I came across Brendan Behan once in Fleet Street. He was wearing an ill-fitting tweed jacket and was jangling a handful of change deep in his left pocket. When he succumbed to drink or diabetes, his friend Cathal Og O’Shannon, who was also a newspaper reporter, would get a call and rush off to rescue him. After the Abbey Theatre was burned down, I remember going to the Queen’s Theatre in Pearse Street with my good friend and colleague Paddy Nolan to see Behan’s play, The Quare Fellow — who was played by Harry Brogan.
Cathal’s father, also Cathal, was a regular customer in the Pearl Bar in Fleet Street. A long-time member of the Labour Court, he was a small, stooped figure in a wide-brimmed black hat. He always drank with Lord Killanin, president of the Olympic Council of Ireland, later president of the International Olympic Committee.
Some of our bosses also drank there, and at some stage we, the younger members of staff, decided to switch our custom to Bowe’s pub farther along the street. And it was there that we got our cockles and mussels, or should I say, oysters and prawns.
In our youthful exuberance we ate little and consumed more pints than were good for us, and when the familiar figure of the fishmonger came in and placed his wicker basket of shellfish on the bar we knew we were in for a treat.
His name was Hughie Hanlon, and — I am open to correction on this — I had the impression he may have come from the Ravensdale area of Co Louth. If so, I imagine he may have got his supplies of shellfish in Carlingford. Our understanding was that he kept them in the North Star Hotel opposite Amiens Street Station, now Connolly, returning to the hotel to get more when he needed them.
The older and more discerning customers at the bar in Bowe’s might have chosen oysters, which Hughie would deftly open with his little knife. We hadn’t reached the stage where we would have appreciated oysters, but we always enjoyed his prawns, which he sold in paper bags about the size of a bag of sweets. The prawns were greatly appreciated, although not the next morning if we awoke in our digs to find that there was still a bag of them in our overcoat pocket!
Nevertheless, it was Hughie Hanlon’s visit to Bowe’s that was the crowning moment of the night.
And when, today, I hear someone singing “alive alive, O” I don’t think of the ghost of Molly Malone, but of the man in the long white apron who suddenly appeared in Bowe’s and placed his basket of shellfish on the bar.
‘He spent a deal of time in bed, drinking a lot of whiskey, and arising only on special occasions’