Preserving the memory of Arthur Griffith

The significance of the date, for those not perhaps as steeped in national lore as others, is that it marks the birth of Arthur Griffith in 1871. He died, as many more will remember, on August 12, 1922, of sudden heart failure; to be closely followed 10 days later by the death in action of Michael Collins. Their demise marked the climax of the Civil War.

Cut & Paste was the title of one of those fugitive little papers that Griffith edited in the years when the police continually harassed his activities, and is very suitably revived for the kind of collective journal that this is.

This is an assembly of nicely varied pieces about Griffith, but the most important item historically in these pages is a post-mortem drawing of Griffith on his deathbed in St Vincent’s Hospital.

Revolution

Having years ago surveyed the literature of the revolution, I thought then, and still think, that the most moving passage in all those many books and poems was surgeon Oliver St John Gogarty’s passage in his memoirs about what he witnessed when he arrived in the hospital to find Griffith’s dead body lying neglected on a passage floor. He was shocked. In a burst of anger he snapped at the staff, “Pick up that body.” But a moment later he cooled, and continued: “Pick up the President.”

Ireland’s first administrative head of state was carried into a bedroom and was laid on a bed for him to examine. There, a little later the President’s remains were drawn by Paul Henry, an artist indelibly connected with the very image of Ireland as kept in mind by other nations.

He drew two pictures, a large one of a simple head and shoulders, so much more expressive than a photograph, and another smaller sketch, more from the front. The making of these drawings, and their later suppression for political reasons, are explored in an article by Cormac O’Hanrahan.

It was widely published only once, in a memorial volume on Griffith and Collins issued that year by another fugitive publisher of the day named Martin Lester, with premises on the Quays. He is said to have been bankrupted by the project, as so few copies were disposed of; but surely, rather than taking only a few copies, the government must have bought up all of them to distribute at home and abroad. As collectors know the hardest item to find strangely enough is the bestseller, not the rarity.

(It would be good to know more about Lester, short lived though his firm was. I suspect that the general amateurism of so much Irish publishing was more to blame than anything the government did. One failure would not kill a firm, but several would. The few books of his I am aware of are very interesting, choice items, but not perhaps the stuff of best-sellerdom.)

Commemorative

There was a copy of this commemorative brochure, among the books in our old Dublin home, but I never discovered how exactly it came to be there; it was not I think in 1922, but sometime in the 1950s. It may have been picked up by one of my older brothers from one of those numerous book barrows and book dealers along the Quays.

I had not seen Cut & Paste before this; but I will look out for it again next year, as I imagine many others will. Certainly in writing about Griffith there is no shortage of topics; his time in South Africa – an Irish patriot in a colonial situation – cries out for exploration and deserves more attention.

That account of Gogarty ended with an allusion to a fragment of poetry on the death of another Arthur, King Arthur himself no less, at the battle of Camlann: “I perish by this people that I made”. But that line, which could have been said of Parnell as well, was not by an Irish poet, but ironically by Lord Tennyson. Did Gogarty feel that no Irish poet of the day was worthy to truly mourn such a noble figure as Griffith?