BRIAN WENT TO UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN in 1929. Like most students, he took an interest in the Literary and Historical Society, the college’s debating society.
Meetings of the society were held at 86 St Stephen’s Green, a Georgian building with spacious rooms, high ceilings and wide staircases. There were few politicians, writers or lawyers of that time who did not address a meetings of the L&H or who were not members of the society. Pádraig Pearse, W.B. Yeats, Éamonn de Valera, Seán O’Leary, Tadhg Ó hÉalaithe, Jim Larkin, Isaac Butt and J.P Mahaffy were some of those who addressed meeting of the L&H. Members of the Society included Thomas MacDonagh, a signatory of the 1916 Proclamation, James Joyce, Art Ó Clérigh and Thomas Kettle.
The meetings were held upstairs in the old Physics Theatre on Saturday nights. It was a small enough room, lit by gas and in need of painting and decorating. On one side there were three or four rows of benches, stepped in tiers with the table for the Auditor and Officers of the Society facing them. The rest of the space was filled with chairs. The theatre accommodated about 200 people but often there would be twice that number present with more standing at the door or on the landing outside (Brian claims there used to be up to 600 standing but I think this figure too high). This group was an important part of the meetings, and it was not because there were no seats inside that they chose to stand at the door. They were there for their own fun and amusement and wanted to be free to leave if the ‘crack’ was not up to their standard. They made their own judgment on the debate: they would shout from the doorway but they had no proper spokesperson until Brian arrived on the scene.
He gave an account of the crowd at the door in an article published in Centenary History of the Literary and Historical Society, 1855–1955.
A seething mass gathered and swayed in a very large lobby outside the theatre, some sat on the stairs smoking, and groups adjourned to other apartments from time to time for a hand of cards. Many students participated in the Society’s transactions from the exterior of the lobby by choice, for once inside there was no getting out. A particular reason why many remained outside was the necessity to be free to make periodical trips to the Winter Palace at the corner of Harcourt Street, a pub where it was possible to drink three or four strong pints at seven pence each.
This most heterogeneous congregation, reeling about, shouting and singing in the Hogarthian pallor of a single gas-jet (when somebody had not thought fit to extinguish the same) came to be known as the mob, and I had the honour to be acknowledged its President.
Brian attained the title of ‘President’ with his voice during his first term at university. At that stage he had not put pen to paper. I was in the ‘mob’ the first night he began to introduce himself. He interrupted the speakers on their feet inside with a shouted addendum or an opportune reference or a play on words. The audience responded with a laugh every time. I myself tried to interrupt in a similar way but I failed to raise a laugh. The second Saturday he was back again. After a couple of weeks this voice from the mob became a necessary feature of the proceedings. Nobody knew him as yet, he was out of sight in the middle of the crowd, but by degrees the voice was identified with its owner. In the end, although this may not have happened during the first year, he went into the theatre and began to speak himself from the benches. I am not certain if the mob was too pleased with this move and I wondered about it myself. It seemed like a surrender to mediocrity and authority. On the other hand, many considered that the ‘mob’ had a ‘deputy’ inside the theatre who would speak on their behalf when there was a need to do so, and one who would not put up with any nonsense.
On the landing where the mob stood there was a ‘secret’ spiral stairway which twisted its way down to the basement and up to the top of the house, giving access to every floor. This stairway was very useful when a ‘reception’ was being planned for the chairman of the debate. The chairman was always a person of importance in the world outside. There were very few chairmen who knew anything about the L&H; who would not be expecting some carefully contrived ‘reception’.
I remember going up the spiral stairs one Saturday night to the big empty room directly above the L&H; room. A young man was there, on his knees in the twilight. He had taken up a couple of floorboards and was working by candlelight trying to make a hole that would let a shower of water cascade down on to the chairman’s head! There were many such pranks perpetrated on visiting chairmen and none of them took exception except for one man, a professor from the college, who got very red in the face with anger and walked out.
One night when the debate was in full swing and Brian interrupting as usual, there was a small group working hard at the door, which was folded back. Their objective was to take the door off its hinges. The door, which consisted of two hinged leaves, was very high and very heavy. They succeeded in taking off one leaf and this huge door was passed overhead from hand to hand as though it was proposed to let it fall into the theatre. Some sensible person, realizing that the weight could easily crush somebody if it were dropped in the middle of the crowd, persuaded them to lower the door and restore it to its hinges.
Brian progressed as a speaker in the society. I don’t remember being present when he was speaking formally but it appears that he was a comic speaker. P.J. Donovan had this to say in the Centenary History:
None of us will ever forget the debating genius of Brian O’Nolan who was the best impromptu speaker the Society knew in those days, because from the first all his speeches were impromptu and likely to contain a sharp barb even for an unwary chairman attempting to bring him to order.
A past Auditor of the Society, R.N. Coake, adds:
O’Nolan was undoubtedly the best humorous speaker of my time. I feel certain that he never prepared a speech or made the most exiguous note for a speech in his life, but I have seen him, I think in [Vivion] de Valera’s year, hold the house alternately convulsed with laughter and almost shamefaced with pathos for a full fifteen minutes. In an impromptu debate he was given the subject, after he had stood up to speak: ‘Sweet are the Uses of Advertisement’. He said nothing for half a minute while he felt in the outside pockets of his overcoat and then drew from the breast pocket a crumpled copy of the Evening Herald. Unrolling the paper slowly, he looked through it until he came to the advertisement for Lux soap flakes and read the headline aloud – ‘I wonder does he see that faded slip’. From then on he dealt with the ludicrous aspects of the advertisement with occasional references to the text while the house shook with laughter, but almost imperceptibly he changed the line and analysed the danger of such advertising with a thoughtful penetration [of which] few would have thought him capable.
Not surprisingly, Brian won the medal for impromptu debate for the year 1931–2. He was selected on the team of speakers who were sent to England to debate against some of the universities over there. In 1932–3 he contested the election for Auditor of the Society with Vivion de Valera, but failed to get sufficient support.
During our early years in college, a room was made available to the OTC – the Army Officers Training Corps of the National Army. This room was downstairs near the Main Hall. On the morning that the room was to be formally opened, Brian and I and a small group of students went down to see what was happening. It’s likely that some high-ranking army officers were present to make speeches. In the event, it was not they who made the speeches; before anyone had time to say anything, Frank Ryan arrived down the stairs accompanied by a couple of men. This was the Frank Ryan of the IRA who went to Spain to fight against Franco and died in Dresden in 1944. He was a graduate of the university and so had every right to be present that morning. He swept the enlistment and explanatory leaflets off the table with a stick and began to speak, condemning the foundation of the Corps. That was the first time Brian and I saw him, although we knew quite a lot about him. He was the editor of An Phoblacht at the time and it was a paper we read. Few issues of the paper appeared that didn’t give an account of Ryan being harassed by detectives from the Castle or of attempts to arrest him. A trick he used to resist arrest was to throw himself on the ground and refuse to get up. One had the impression that there were not many streets in Dublin where he had not prostrated himself at one time or another. With that sort of reputation one might expect to see an unkempt person, dirty from the mud of the streets, but far from it; Ryan wore a good grey suit. His face was full, he had the appearance of someone beginning to fall into flesh. Nevertheless, he was a handsome, well-built man and he spoke well. I do not remember what he said and I’m sure that neither Brian nor the other students paid much attention either. His protest failed to strike a chord of sympathy among the student body.
Poor Frank Ryan! I believe he was a good Gaeilgeoir, a rare thing in the IRA.
Brian and I often spoke with students and graduates who were members of the IRA. You would come across these people in the Main Hall. Mícheál Ó Ceallaigh was one of them – he was a big man who used to speak out of the corner of his mouth. He had a grouse that he was being refused leave to do his MA thesis on John Mitchel’s prose. I sympathized with him about his predicament but in my opinion whatever professor considered that John Mitchel’s prose was not good enough as a subject for a thesis was probably right. Anyway, if Ó Ceallaigh wanted to be so nationalistic, why not go a step further and do his thesis in Irish?
A group within the university opposed ‘Remembrance Day’, a memorial to those killed in the First World War. That memorial is practically discontinued now but at the time it was a big affair and West Britons used it to proclaim their anti-Irishness. Quite a few graduates and undergraduates used to come in on the 11th of November wearing poppies. While I objected to the practice, I was not prepared to snatch the poppies off their coats as some of the protesters did. However, my attitude must have been observed and my disposition noted, for one day after a lecture in one of the theatres upstairs I was approached by a tall man. He was a native Irish-speaker from Donegal whom I never suspected of having links with the IRA. ‘Did you ever think of enlisting in the IRA?’ he asked in a low tone. ‘I did NOT,’ I answered, with emphasis that left him in no doubt. He did not raise the matter again.
Whatever faults UCD had then, the students who had not much time to waste attending lectures – and there were many in this category – were not denied some recreation. A billiard room was available downstairs near the men’s cloakroom. The billiard room contained two full-size tables and two smaller ones. On entering it the newcomer would be confronted by an amazing sight – each of the players wearing a hard black hat well back on his head or pulled down over his eyes if he were stretching across the table, taking a shot. This extraordinary sight had a simple explanation. At the time it was customary for clerical students from Clonliffe to wear hats, indeed it was one of the sights of the city to see a group of them walking along in this get-up. Each had a wooden locker in the cloakroom near the billiard room where they kept their hats and other things under lock and key while attending lectures. An idle student decided one day to see what would happen if a firework called a ‘slap-bang’ were inserted into the key-hole of a locker and ignited. In the event, the lock broke and the door swung open, revealing the black hat sitting on a pile of books. The ‘safe-cracker’ took the hat and went off to play a game of snooker. Not surprisingly, his distinctive headwear made other players jealous. At the time a slap-bang cost only a few pence so within a short interval each of the players had procured his own hat. I do not think that the clerical students ever discovered what happened, as they did not frequent the billiard room.
For students who had no inclination to play snooker or no money to buy a few glasses of beer in Grogan’s pub on the corner, there was a spacious ‘reading room’ provided so that they were not reduced to attending lectures to pass the time. This reading room had plenty of tables and chairs. Morning papers and some other publications were supplied. This room was used principally for playing poker – schools of poker went on from morning to night. Students arriving in the morning made straight for this room and sat down at one of the tables. On one occasion, five aces were found in the pack that was in use in a school where bets were going very high. A terrific row ensued, the cards were thrown up in the air and that corner of the room set on fire!
We, too, enjoyed gambling, as most of our age-group did, but we avoided playing in College. The stakes were far too high and if you lost in the earlier hands, a thing that can happen to anyone, you had little or no chance of recovering your losses. In any event, card-playing was not a priority for us. Where to get sufficient tobacco for the day was a major preoccupation for young men with little money. I often lay in bed in the morning, facing a day without cigarettes and wondering if it was worth getting up at all. And indeed if I did not get up, would my mother be foolish enough to bring meals upstairs to a body that was fit and showed no signs of sickness?
Brian caused great jealousy by making an astute move during those penurious student years. Through knowing the right people he was appointed to be on the gate at the Phoenix Park Racecourse every Saturday night. The College students had some admission privilege and he was there to identify them from the general public. He received thirty shillings an hour for just standing there – money for nothing, or so we thought. That ‘income’ was a large sum in those days.