The Outstanding Champion of the City
By Dylan Tighe
To mark the anniversary of the writer’s death, let’s take a look at Brendan Behan’s life in Dublin 4.
In the words of the legendary Irish writer, “My one ambition is to live as long as I can”. It was an ambition thwarted by his premature death at the age of only 41 on 20th March 1964 – 61 years ago this year.
Behan’s funeral took place in the Church of the Sacred Heart, Donnybrook – the same church where he married Beatrice ffrench Salkeld, of Morehampton Road, in 1955. It stands within walking distance of the house in which Brendan and Beatrice lived on Anglesea Road, Ballsbridge, with its views of both the RDS and towards Herbert Park.
Shane Mac Thomáis, writing in Dead Interesting: Stories from the Graveyards of Dublin, describes how, “On a beautiful sunlit morning of 23rd March the coffin of Brendan Behan left Donnybrook church and made its way across to his spiritual home on the northside.”
(Photo: Ian Davis)
Ulick O’Connor, in his classic biography of Behan, notes that “[a]s the cortege reached the centre of the city, thousands of people lined the streets. One Irish paper described it as the biggest funeral since those of Michael Collins and Charles Stewart Parnell”.
Following his death, the great playwright Sean O’Casey remarked, “One thing Brendan Behan never did was to exploit his own talents…He died too quickly”. Behan, the self-confessed “drinker with a writing problem”, was an artist of exceptional promise, mercilessly curtailed.
Behan was born on 9th February 1923 and raised in Russell Street, close to Croke Park. The family were later moved to Crumlin, where he lived until his marriage to Beatrice in 1955.
Although from the north inner city, Behan’s later life is intimately linked to Dublin 4 and environs. It is here he first tasted artistic success and suffered the great private and public tragedy of his alcohol-induced decline.
Behan’s connection to the area predates his marriage to Beatrice. He was an enthusiastic participant in the bohemian ‘Baggotonia’ scene of the 50s and 60s, and one of a hardcore contingent who frequented the (literally) underground shebeen known as ‘The Catacombs’ on Fitzwilliam Place.
According to David O’Mahony, “ ‘Baggotonia’ was both an area and a cultural movement, populated by writers, artists, eccentrics, and other intellectuals living an anarchic life at odds with the conservative mores of the time”. Here, Behan became friends with, amongst others, the great painter Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund, who lodged for a time in Baggot Street.
In 1954, his play The Quare Fellow ran for six months at the experimental Pike Theatre on Herbert Lane. This local success led directly to productions in London and New York, and to national and international celebrity. In 1955 and 1956 he lived on Waterloo Road, where his intercontinental bestseller Borstal Boy was solidified. In 1957 and 1958 he lived on Herbert Street, before moving to Anglesea Road in 1959.
As to Behan’s movements in D4, Walter Hackett, writing in The Washington Post, describes how “he lived for a long span close to [Behan] in Ballsbridge” and used to meet him “in various places, such as Herbert’s news store, the dry-cleaning shop, and Ryan’s the butcher’s – and several times he came to my flat on Merrion Road.”
Lorna Hogg writes that “Behan…set his watch by the clock on Mespil Road. Along with Patrick Kavanagh, who lived at 62 Pembroke Rd, he drank at Mooneys’ pub, whilst Searsons and the Waterloo were also popular spots”.
In a letter sent from 18 Waterloo Road in 1955, Behan described himself as “a Dublin man of working-class Connolly and Larkin Socialistic origin”. His family home in Dublin 12 had been known as ‘the Crumlin Kremlin’, due to the Behans’ political proclivities.
Behan did not always feel at ease in the gentility of Dublin 4. In a letter from 1958, he described Anglesea Road as “rather a snob area”. As Ulick O’Connor writes, “[H]e was to rant about Beatrice’s middle-class background, that she wanted him to be out on Sandymount Strand every day with the dog, instead of living the life of an artist”.
But, he continues, “This accusation was unfair. What she wanted Brendan to do, above all, was to write and follow his profession”. Indeed, Beatrice, in their home on Anglesea Road, did everything possible to create stability around the increasing chaos of Behan’s life.
As Behan enjoyed pointing out, the streets of Dublin and the boulevards of Ballsbridge did not easily intersect. One of the occasions when they did, according to Behan, was the annual dog show in the RDS.
As Raymond na Hatta recounts in the Ulster Herald, one of the only places where a drink could be had in Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day, up until the 60s, was at the dog show.
“Behan”, he writes, “had many tales of Dublin jackeens hijacking dogs on the streets of Dublin and presenting themselves at the RDS grounds as exhibitors, with the streets on the southside of the city being taken over for weeks afterwards by hordes of lost dogs”.
One senses a thorough sending up of the fears of the bourgeoisie in Behan’s yarn.
A poignant collision of Behan’s past as an IRA radical with his Dublin 4 environs occurred on the day of his funeral. As Ulick O’Connor writes, “[A]fter the Mass, a Guard of Honour of eight I.R.A men escorted the coffin from the church past 5 Anglesea Road”, en route to Glasnevin cemetery.
In his lifetime, Behan moved between the socialist and the salubrious with great swagger. He resolutely refused to be restricted by Dublin’s endemic class divisions. Whether on the southside or the northside, he was, as Maurice Earls writes in the Dublin Review of Books, “…an outstanding champion of the city…”
While Behan’s soul was firmly in the north inner city, it could be said that his heart – “the biggest heart that has beaten in Ireland in forty years”, in the words of Flann O’Brien – was in Dublin 4.
E.H. Mikhail, writing in The Letters of Brendan Behan (the source of letters quoted above), notes that Behan wrote to Beatrice on only three occasions. One such postcard, postmarked 12th September 1955 while he was living on Waterloo Road, reads simply: “Enjoying myself at Balls Balls Ballsbridge”.
Flann O’Brien wrote movingly on the death of Behan that “…there are streets in Dublin which seem strangely silent tonight”. And yet, while there is a statue of Patrick Kavanagh on the bank of the Grand Canal near Baggot Street Bridge, and a statue of Behan on the Royal Canal in Drumcondra, it is surely long overdue that Brendan Behan be immortalised with a statue in Ballsbridge.
