Very soon, all going well, fingers crossed, le cúnamh Dé, and Inshallah, I expect to be back in my native Dublin again, after a long exile caused by the wretched virus. So, doubly vaccinated, distance-abiding and in the open air, I should be free to stroll by the banks of the Dodder river and its environs, watching the waters run over the little brooks and weirs, and the willows bend their graceful boughs.
ut it’s more the people, rather than the engaging aspects of nature, that make this part of Dublin so distinctive. Between the Donnybrook Dodder and the Grand Canal at Baggot Street lived a roll call of fascinating characters, from the Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton (35 Marlborough Road) to The O’Rahilly (40 Herbert Park, alas demolished last September); from Lady Mary Heath, the pioneering Limerick aviatrix (Pembroke Road, number unknown) to the great Monaghan poet Patrick Kavanagh, who gave the name “Baggotonia” to his then-bohemian surroundings at 62 Pembroke Road. The artist Jack Yeats lived at 61 Marlborough Road, while his brother W.B. was at 5 Sandymount Avenue, a little further away.
Éamon and Sinéad de Valera were also denizens, at 33 Morehampton Terrace, as was our most devout Taoiseach John Aloysius Costello, who, at 20 Herbert Park, had a private chapel in his home. Garret FitzGerald was also a Dodderside dweller, at 75 Eglinton Road — he once waded into the Dodder in his wellies, helping to do an environmental clean-up. Maud Gonne MacBride might have been his near neighbour, at Floraville in Eglinton Road, before she died in 1953.
I always knew the Dodder-Grand Canal area of Dublin was a neighbourhood full of stories, and Beatrice M. Doran’s excellent history and guide, From the Grand Canal to the Dodder, published during the pandemic, really fills in the details, with addresses where so many of these local personalities lived. We have the renowned painters Estella Solomons and Seumas O’Sullivan, who dwelt at 2 Morehampton Road. They eventually married but, being of different religions — she Jewish, he Methodist — their families disapproved and so they had to keep it discreet for some years. But they had a wonderful literary salon which “everyone” in Dublin attended. Estella’s father and brother were also distinguished obstetrician/gynaecologists who did much to improve maternity care.
Baggotonia was well known to us: its heart was Parsons Bookshop at Baggot Street Bridge, run by May O’Flaherty and Mary King, two ladies who sustained Dublin’s artistic bohemia from 1949 to 1989 (Brendan Lynch’s charming Parsons Bookshop tells that story). Brendan Behan, rebel and playwright, was also a resident of our bailiwick at 5 Anglesea Road, with his clever wife, Beatrice, daughter of the painter Cecil Ffrench Salkeld. They were married at Donnybrook’s Sacred Heart Church and she enabled him to write, though the drink was always a competitor. After his death, Beatrice lived with Cathal Goulding, of the Marx-ish Official Sinn Féin/IRA.
Other neighbourhood writers included the wonderful Mary Lavin — she had a mews house in Lad Lane — as well as Maura Laverty, at 25 Pembroke Road, whose Never No More and No More Than Human are such terrific autobiographical novels. The great Ben Kiely was at 119 Morehampton Road and Padraic Colum was at 2 Belmont Avenue, Donnybrook, with his wife, Mary, who did so much to try to help Lucia Joyce, James and Nora’s daughter, who had severe schizophrenia.
A most surprising resident was the author P.L. Travers, who gave us Mary Poppins and all its sequels, movies and biopics. She was a protégée of the poet and patriot AE and lived at 69 Upper Leeson Street, just a stone’s throw from the Canal. Pamela Travers (born Helen Lyndon Goff, in Australia) chose to adopt an Irish boy called Camillus, Dr Doran writes, and bring him up as her own. He had a twin, Anthony, whom Miss Travers rejected, and whom Camillus only learned about when he was 17. Both boys were grandchildren of Joseph Hone, Yeats’s biographer. I’m not sure if any modern Mary Poppins would think that separating twins in this way was recommended child-rearing.
Frankie Byrne, who pioneered an “agony aunt” broadcast on RTÉ radio, dealing with relationship problems, was also a Donnybrook resident, at Dunbur, Brookvale Road. Kevin Myers, in his immensely readable Burning Heresies, gives Frankie a hard time for staying too conservatively within the moral guidelines of Catholic Ireland, though she explained that she had to conform to the values of the day. Actually, by the 1980s, Frankie was “discussing adultery, non-marital cohabitation and contraception”. She had had a child out of wedlock herself, whom she placed for adoption — and later they were reunited.
And there are many more fascinating historic characters within the borders of the Dodder and the Canal. Although the roll call includes strong Republicans and adamant socialists, as far as I know there has never been a campaign to alter those old, very British, road names: Wellington, Waterloo, Marlborough, Pembroke, Morehampton, Eglinton. Funny, that!
