B Griffin

All colours of the rainbow, including black and gold: making and selling bicycles in Ireland in the 1880s and 1890s

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, cycling in Ireland progressed from being a relatively exclusive pursuit, confined mainly to young, middleclass men, to a popular sport and pastime which appealed alike to young, middleaged and elderly members of the middle class, including large numbers of women. At the beginning of the 1880s, most Irish cyclists were young men who rode the high-wheeled ‘Ordinary’ or ‘Penny-farthing’ machine. The introduction of the more cumbersome, but easily mountable, tricycle meant that in the early to mid-1880s cycling became accessible to older or more timid men than those who braved the Ordinary machine, and many women also took to the roads on the tricycle. The pastime also received a boost later in the decade, with the invention of the chain-driven ‘safety’ bicycle in the mid-1880s. The safety bicycle did not render the Ordinary obsolete until after the development of the pneumatic tyre, by John Boyd Dunlop, in 1888. Once it became apparent in a number of cycling races in Ireland and England in 1889 and 1890 that the chain-driven and pneumatic-tyred safety bicycle was both quicker and easier to ride than the Ordinary bicycle, the latters days were numbered. From 1890 onwards, bicycle dealers in both countries were inundated with requests for pneumatic-tyred safety bicycles, and in the course of the 1890s cycling was transformed into a popular, albeit still mainly middle-class activity, that appealed to both sexes.

The Romance of the Wheel: Cycling, Fiction and Late Nineteenth-century Ireland

The subject of the Irish sporting press in the nineteenth century is one of the many under-researched subjects in the field of Irish sports history. This paper offers an examination of a distinctive strand in the output of Irelands leading Victorian cycling newspaper, that of fictional short stories and sketches. An exploration of the Irish Cyclists use of such material demonstrates how these writings were used by the editor, Richard James Mecredy, to give the weekly journal a tone that would appeal more to a potential unionist readership than a nationalist one. This ran counter to the supposedly non-political and non-sectarian ethos of the nineteenth-century Irish cycling world. A close examination of many of the fictional short stories and sketches which are set in the Irish countryside reveals the authors’, and presumably the readers’, fear of the Catholic peasant or nationalist ‘other’.

The more sport the merrier, say we: sport in Ireland during the Great Famine

Scholars have made considerable progress in recent years in researching the history of sport in Ireland, yet there are still important areas that have not received scholarly attention. One of these is the topic of sport during the Great Famine. A close perusal of contemporary newspapers reveals that large numbers of Irish people, from all social groups, continued to enjoy sports, either as participants or as spectators, during the Famine years. Horse races, especially steeplechases, were universally popular, with many meets attracting attendances that numbered in the thousands. Other popular sports included fox hunting, stag hunting, greyhound coursing, sailing, cricket and cockfighting. This article illustrates the widespread popularity of sport in Ireland in this period, based mainly on a reading of newspaper accounts, and discusses why the subject of sport does not feature in folk or popular memory of the Famine.

The tourist gaze: cycling tourists’ impressions of Victorian and Edwardian Ireland

Abstract Cyclists’ written records of their Irish tours in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been overlooked by those scholars who have studied travellers’ impressions of Ireland in this period. The tricycle and the bicycle opened Ireland to a new form of tourism in the form of cycling tourism, and many of these holidaymakers, both Irish and foreign, were keen to record their experiences and impressions awheel, either in the cycling press or in other publications. This article is the first sustained effort to present a scholarly analysis of this material. It shows that the cycling tourists’ writings, as is the case with other travel writings, reveal more about the authors’ prejudices and their preconceived ideas about the places that they would visit and the people that they would encounter than they necessarily do about the realities of Irish life.

Anti-Catholicism in Bath from 1820 to 1870

This paper challenges the idea that harmonious relations prevailed amongst Baths various religious denominations during the ‘Age of Reform’, from the 1820s to the 1860s. It reveals instead that the public expression of anti-Catholic opinion was a regular feature of the citys political scene in this period. An anti-Catholic ‘crusade’, directed against such local targets as Prior Park and Downside colleges, and ‘Popery’ in general, was sustained by a variety of local organizations and national organizations that had branches in Bath, as well as prominent Tory activists resident in the city. Many Irish-born evangelical clergymen played a prominent role in this crusade. It is not surprising, given the prominence of Irish clergymen in Baths anti-Catholic movement, that protests against the state endowment of Maynooth College were popular with the citys anti-Popery activists; furthermore, several proselytizing organizations whose principal aim was the conversion of Irelands Catholics to the Protestant faith had a permanent base in Bath. The perceived iniquitous effects of ‘Popery’ in Ireland formed part of the anti-Catholic crusades propaganda message. While the anti-Popery cause appealed particularly to the citys Church of England community, with many of its clergymen and prominent lay Anglicans to the fore of the anti-Catholic agitation, it attracted support from all sections of Protestant society.

Sporting Policemen: Sports and the Police in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland

Historians of an garda sochna have stressed the importance that the leaders of that force placed on having their men engage in sports during the formative years of the Irish Free State, not merely as a means of maintaining physical fitness among the gardaí but also as a means whereby their men could “play their way into the hearts of the people.” The promotion of sports in An Garda Síochána was a deliberate policy, an allegedly novel approach that was designed to avoid the supposed mistakes of the Garda’s main predecessor, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), which was often portrayed by the new state’s founders as an alien and unpopular force, one that had been isolated in its barracks from the population it policed. Recent work has called into question the perception of the RIC as a force that was isolated from the Irish public. What is largely missing from this revisionist work is a close examination of the extent to which the RIC and its sister force, the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP),

History, Politics And Art

From being a relatively under-researched area before the late 1980s, the subject of the police forces of nineteenth-century Ireland is now quite a crowded field, with important contributions in the last two decades from such scholars as Stanley Palmer, John Brewer, Ian Bridgeman, W.J. Lowe, Richard Hawkins, Jim Herlihy, Stephen Ball, Mark Radford and Donal O’Sullivan, amongst others. Given the fact that the ‘Peelers’ in Ireland have attracted the attention of numerous researchers in this period, it is probably inevitable that much of Elizabeth Malcolm’s new book, The Irish Policeman 1822–1922: A Life, has a familiar ring to it, at least to experts in the field. The bulk of Malcolm’s discussion aims at putting a human face to the mass of officers and men – at least 86,000 of them – who served in the ranks of the constabulary in its various manifestations as the County Constabulary from 1822 to 1836, Irish Constabulary from 1836 to 1867 and Royal Irish Constabulary from 1867 to 1922. In order to do this she explores crucial aspects of the constabulary’s social history, with special attention being given to such important topics as the social profile of police recruits (their age, religion, occupation and geographical origins), their motivation for joining the police, as well as their experiences once they had become policemen. The military-style training of the men and officers, as well as the wide range of duties they routinely performed after they left the Dublin training depot, are explored in detail, as are the various financial rewards which accrued to policemen during and after their service, particularly their pay, promotion and pensions. While policemen’s pay was often generous when compared to the wages available to the rural workforce (the main source of police recruits), and pensions were another attractive feature of policemen’s rewards,Malcolm also makes it clear that the policeman’s lot was not always a rosy one, even before the crisis which overwhelmed the force from 1919 to 1922. Although such open discontent as the Limerick ‘mutiny’ of 1882 and the Belfast police ‘strike’ of 1907 was rare, dissatisfaction with perceived poor conditions often simmered below the surface and manifested itself in high rates of resignation at particular periods, with manymen opting for emigration, often to serve in colonial police forces. Discontent was not confined to members of the constabulary, however; as Malcolm shows, policemen’s wives also found that their domestic life was adversely affected by constabulary regulations. Perhaps the main problem with Malcolm’s book is that it offers little that is not already known about most of the topics delineated above. A considerable proportion of Malcolm’s key arguments and general findings about the constabulary from the 1830s to 1914 agrees broadly with what I have written in my doctoral dissertation on the social history of the nineteenthand early twentieth-century Irish police, for instance, although a non-specialist reading her book would mostly be unaware of this. Even several of her more interesting anecdotes and quotations from primary sources also feature first in my dissertation, but, again, it is disappointing that this fact is not always alluded to in her text or references. More comprehensive references to previous scholarship on the constabulary would have served the general reader better, I feel.