Myles Away From Dublin (14 page)

Call it delusion, hallucination, folly or just plain original sin, it is something the Irish are very prone to, though it is known all over the world: I mean this custom on the part of people who know nothing whatsoever about horse racing and who have no interest in it whereby they have a bet on a horse provided only the race is big, that is what we more knowledgeable characters call a classic.

Humdrum races at such places as Newbury,
Doncaster
, Mullingar or Newmarket do not count. But if the race be the Grand National or the Derby, then Mr Innocent dives into the pocket wherein he keeps the fivers. His betting, usually on a substantial scale, distorts the market and tends to annoy the regulars. And they become quite infuriated when Mr Innocent wins, as he frequently does.

Occasionally he tamely accepts a ‘certainty’ but
generally
he has his own mysterious methods of finding the winner – methods which are occult, arcane, or based on formulae more in keeping with the practices of the witch-doctor.

Take that affair at the Curragh. The main event was the Sweep Derby. The innocents in their regiments came forward to find the winner of this uniquely rewarding (to the horse owners) event. On the face of it, the thing was obvious.

The term Sweep Derby contains 10 letters: therefore the winner must be a horse whose name is spelt in 10 letters. This line of reasoning cuts out aberrations and distractions such as breeding, racing form, previous
racing record, the ‘going’ and so on. It seems a godsend, an inspired short-cut; never mind if it has an odd cabalistic quality.

Only two horses in the race had names amounting to 10 letters. One was Saint Denys, ridden by the well-known P. Canty, heavily tipped in the papers and fairly heavily backed. The starting price was 100/7. Alas, it was not placed.

Perhaps, however, it was outside the rules by reason of having a name of two words. The other genuine
10-letter
horse was Tambourine. Tambourine won, of course, at 10/1. The favourite Larkspur (a meagre thing of only eight letters) was 9/4, so that Tambourine’s price was generous and well worthwhile.

The race was run on a Saturday, which is an
eight-letter
word. That gives the racecourse mystic an embarrassingly wide choice as between Larkspur, Gail Star, Borghese, Our Guile, Solpetre and Trimatic. I imagine that, finding the portents so multi-faced, he would discard all of those horses and try for another formula.

Sometimes some of the innocents back a horse because, utterly irrespective of his record or the odds, they like his name. Who would begrudge the innocents the few quid they made when Tipperary Tim won the Grand National as a total outsider at 100/1? Not I, for my father backed him and later made me a present of a toy machine-gun. I don’t think there was any
symbolism
involved there.

Another method I have heard of is to find out on what saint’s feastday the big race is to be run and then to find the horse who seems related in some way to the saint. I can’t say whether such prognostication is religious, superstitious or sacrilegious; I should merely state that it is unreliable.

Now and again Mr Innocent and Mr Well-tried can become interchangeable, and I feel bold enough to sympathise with a great many Carlow people for all the money they lost last Saturday on London Gazette. This animal was bought cheaply to be set up as the object of a raffle in aid of Carlow Golf Club, whose club-house had been burnt to the ground.

The lady who won him put him up for auction and under his new owners and trained by Tom Jones, did really well in England. For the Sweep Derby, his jockey was confident enough to say, ‘This fellow will win.’ Any decent Carlowman would feel it treasonable to back any other horse, and for a local golfer it would be plain heresy. Well, starting at 33/1, he was not napped at all.

I’m afraid there is no useful conclusion to this soliloquy of mine, if it not be that most reverend old adage – ‘betting on horses is worse than drink.’

The Irish people have a number of failings. So, of course, have other peoples, but it might be worthwhile glancing at those of the Irish if only to acquit them of many failings attributed to them by others which they haven’t got at all.

The people who suffer most from delusions about the Irish are the British (or perhaps it would be fairer to say the English). The Englishman’s attitude, I should add, however mistaken, is not hostile; in fact it is usually indulgent.

Perhaps the primary delusion of the Englishman is that the Irish spend most of their time fighting each other. Whether the fighting is done with fists or shillelaghs is not material, as no real damage is ever done.

There is no motive for these fights, no issue, nothing at stake, no
casus
belli
– not even jealousy over a pretty colleen.

It was just fighting for the love of it. I believe ‘trailing his coat’ was a phrase originally invented in relation to the Irishman.

I note, incidentally, from many American
publications
that the word donnybrook (thus with a small ‘d’) is used in the sense of a violent row. I once lived in Donnybrook and can certify that it is a most peaceable and God-fearing district. The ‘donny-’ part of the word is the Gaelic
domhnach
,
or church.

The Englishman’s second important belief about the Irishman is that he is always drunk. There is a shred of logic in this belief if one accepts the preceding
proposition that Irishmen are also always fighting, for too much liquor can lead to blows. But there is not much sign of logic in the subordinate beliefs. Ireland is in fact a cattle-raising country and, disreputable as it may sound in theory, we have to import annually a considerable amount of wheat wherewith to make bread.

But the Englishman never sees Paddy driving, selling or owning a cow. The one animal he loves and cherishes is the pig. Not infrequently the pig lives in the house with him, rather as the Englishman himself allows his dog to dwell with him. Already the Irishman is an unusual character – drunk, fighting and having a pig in the kitchen.

How does he (and the pig, for that matter) sustain life? Both subsist on one foodstuff only – spuds. The failure of the potato crop caused the great Famine of 1845–7.

In bygone years he used to drink (in addition to potheen and lethal home-made whiskey) buttermilk but the expansion of the creamery industry and the decline of home churning – an exhausting activity carried out not by the Irishman but by his wife – has made buttermilk a rarity and the poor man deprived of it is often forced to the humiliation of having to drink pints of stout.

Aside from natural shortcomings (drunkenness,
fighting
) he has a multiplicity of subordinate failures. He is inordinately fond of gambling and will not hesitate to put his week’s wages on a horse or even on the toss of a coin.

The fact that no money remains to buy food for his wife and family if the gamble does not come off is an afterthought and not very important.

After all, what is the relieving officer for? Or those stately palaces, the County Homes?

Well, what else is there about the Englishman’s Irishman? He is dishonest. Employ him behind the counter in your public house and he will be meticulous
in putting all cash into the cash register but he will quietly drink four glasses of malt every day.

If you are in business as a grocer, he will take home everything needed in the way of eatables in his own house and not a word about it. If you decide it is time for a show-down, he will listen with poorly disguised impatience to your charges and denunciation and then gently tell you he is engaged to your daughter.

All the time, no matter what he is up to, the Irishman is guilty of an abiding and usually very noticeable delinquency: he never washes himself.

He is superstitious.

He paralyses industry in Great Britain with strike after strike.

He’s a Communist under the skin.

He thinks he owns and runs the United States.

All those charges, however groundless, seem to add up to one thing: the Irishman is important.

It is a biggish question, I admit. Anticipating the reader, I have just reached for the dictionary and find the answer given there surprising yet oddly in pattern with what I have to say later.

Here is what the book says:

A wry smile may be evoked by this disclosure that a Celt is to be found in ancient barrows, as if this was the only way to get him home on Saturday nights.

It is the practice to speak of the rather short and dark-complexioned Celtic-speaking people of France, Great Britain and Ireland as Celts, although the ancient writers seem to have applied the term ‘Celt’ chiefly to folk of great stature, with fair hair and blue or grey eyes.

See where that leaves us? We are sort of international tramps, and we’re not sure who we are.

If someone were to say, possibly by way of sneer, that one of my forebears was Brian Boru, I wouldn’t be in a position to challenge the assertion.

I would probably mutter something like, ‘Aw well, he fought the Danes, which is more than the Milk Marketing Board is doing today’ and then shamble out, pretending I had to catch a bus. There is a lot to be said for keeping history in the schoolroom.

But recently I came across by accident a piece of literature which to some extent enlightened me, not to say shocked me.

It is a paper read before the Royal Irish Academy on 26th January last by Professor J. J. Tierney, who occupies the chair of Greek in UCD, entitled ‘The
Celtic Ethnography of Posidonius’ (now available in print, Hodges, Figgis & Co., Dublin, 9/–).

It would be impossible and, anyhow, unfair, to try to convey here what Professor Tierney adduces as the testimony of the ancient Posidonius. Not only does the Professor give chapter and verse but also the texts relied on.

I stumbled through page after page of Greek and then tangled with the Latin recitals (Greek is much easier to read than Latin) – only to discover, at the heel of the hunt, that English translations had been thoughtfully provided at the end.

The next section of this discourse is entirely quotation from that, and here is what Posidonius has to say about us:

Well, I went along to the final on Sunday, the 22nd, of the Hospitals’ Sweeps golf tournament at Woodbrook, near Bray, so narrowly won by Christy O’Connor. How sound are your nerves? How would you like £1,000 to hang on the attempt at one final putt on the last green?

I am personally no stranger to golf. Some years ago I was induced to take up the game on the course of Delgany, near Greystones, in Wicklow. On completion of 18 holes, I found myself puffed out and exhausted.

I soon gave the game up for a variety of reasons, not the least of them being the undeniable fact that all golf clubs have an enormous number of holes.

My Woodbrook visit prompted me to go to reference books to find out the real facts about golf, and they turned out to be, like the Delgany course, mountainous. Many courses there are in Britain but in the United States in 1930 there were 5,691, in property value worth $830,000,000 with 2,225,000 persons playing. Today in all Ireland there are 225 courses, and a curiosity is that the Six County group does not seem to be very fond of golf.

But let’s go back. The word ‘golf’ (in ancient times variously called goff, gouff and gowff) is said to come from the Dutch word for a club – kolf. There is a belief that the Dutch played a game not unlike golf except that they did it on ice, and that the Scots copied the idea. The widely-held notion that modern golf originated in Scotland may yet be the answer to your blazing Irish hothead who roars about golf being a ‘foreign game’. Everybody knows that Ireland invented Scotland and
gave her her original language.

The first Scotch reference to the game is in a decree of parliament dated 1457 which ordains, as to Sunday, that ‘the futeball and golf be utterly cryit down, and nocht usit.’ The original concern about the cult of golf was that it led to neglect of the important science of archery.

In 1491 an angry decree read: ‘Futeball and Golfe forbidden – item, it is statut and ordainit that in na place of the realme there be usit futeball, golfe or uther sik unprofitabill sportis.’ But royal taste changed.

In 1603 James VI (later James I of England) appointed one William Mayme to ‘during all the dayes of his lyif-tyme, club-maker to his Hienes.’ It was those and similar utterances that caused golf to be known as the ‘royal and ancient’ game, and the foundation at St Andrews of the club with that name which has become the governing body of golf in this
hemisphere.

It would be tedious to trace progress from primitive to modern golf. Even the golfball has its private history. Up to 1848 the ball was of leather, stuffed with ‘as many feathers as a hat will hold’. They were easily battered out of shape and were of no use in wet weather.

There was great welcome for the ‘guttie’ ball which followed, made from solid gutta-percha, but this was liable to break up into tiny pieces. The modern
rubber-cored
ball was invented by an American in 1898. The official US ball is larger than that of Europe.

Players? There have been many famous ones, and still remembered (and still alive at a pleasant age of 60) is Bobbie Jones, an amateur who had his first sensational win in 1916 and who in 1930 made a clean sweep of the world’s most difficult targets – the British Amateur and Open and the US Amateur and Open.

How his skill would compare with today’s magicians’ is another question. The top professional in the US in 1921 was Walter Hagen. In the two following years he was succeeded by Gene Sarazen but Hagen was again
top in the four years 1924–7.

I noticed that the US took the Great War so seriously that there was no competition in 1917–18.

But here is the ultimate statistic that will make many golfers angrily shout ‘Liar!’ The diameter of the hole on the green is FOUR AND A HALF INCHES.