Timing is the secret of an actor’s success. Harris got the timing badly wrong – though he can hardly be blamed! The Wall Street Crash had occurred less than a year before his birth, plunging America into a deep economic depression. That quickly became global. Between 1929 and 1932 the devastation hit Europe, driving inflation through the roof and plunging the continent into the chaos that would eventually lead to the Second World War.
By 1930 Ireland was feeling the pinch. The country was helped by the fact that it was relatively undeveloped and largely self-sufficient. But Ireland’s largest trading partner was the United Kingdom, and it was suffering badly. Between 1929 and 1932 industrial production dropped by nearly one-quarter, and wholesale prices by one-third. Foreign trade halved and unemployment more than doubled.
At the time there was huge emigration from Ireland, mainly to the UK and America. But both countries were struggling, and emigrants were not able to send the money home that they traditionally did. As wholesale prices plummeted in the UK, they did the same in Ireland. Suddenly the secure base of the Harris fortune looked less secure.
None of that affected the toddler Richard, known to all his friends and family as Dickie. He had a big house with extensive gardens to play in. There were servants to pick him up when he fell, at least in the early days, and his mother was always there, her beautiful smile a beacon of security in his world. It would be a number of years before the economic crash seeped through the walls of Overdale. His childhood was punctuated by three more confinements, and three new siblings. It was a noisy house, full of laughter and joy.
Irish children are traditionally sent to school at the age of 4. Richard was packed off to St Philomena’s Junior School. It was on the other side of the city from his home. Overdale was on Ennis Road, the main road north of the city towards Ennis and Galway; his school was on the South Circular Road. It would have been a 2-mile walk to the school, but young Dickie didn’t need to walk. His family were one of the few in the city to have their own car, which brought him to the school, safe from the inclement weather.
There were schools much closer to his home – schools where the local children went. But St Philomena’s was a private school, the only private primary school in the entire mid-west region. Established in 1863, it provided small classes and highly qualified teachers for the elite of the city. It was a co-educational school, with boys and girls sitting side by side in the little classrooms. This alone would have made it unusual. Traditionally – aside from tiny rural schools – Irish schools have been segregated. The sexes didn’t get to mingle until they reached university. Dickie Harris was exposed to a different ethos. From an early age, girls were not mysterious exotic creatures who played behind convent walls; they were his friends and companions. This probably instilled in him a confidence lacking in many Irish men of his generation. He was never at a loss for words when it came to the opposite sex.
School was a harsh place in the 1930s, with corporal punishment and beatings the norm. But Dickie was a tough nut, and he was rarely put out by the harsh regime of the nuns. He was never overly academic, but he kept up with his studies easily. He also enjoyed the rough-and-tumble in the school yard. Occasionally he got into trouble. Once a nun struck him with a ruler, and he wrestled the wooden implement from her, striking her in return. For that display of free spirit he was suspended.
But those early days were mostly happy ones. At home he never lacked for friends – there were seven brothers and sisters milling around, with plenty of space to lose themselves in. The garden was extensive, with plum and pear trees, gooseberry bushes and lawns to run in. A laneway ran behind, where the children also played. Dickie gathered the wild fruits when they were in season, and climbed the trees when they were not. The family had two garages – one for the car and one for garden equipment and junk. This was in sharp contrast to the rest of Limerick. Most families did not have a car to worry about, and for many households the only outbuilding was an outside lavatory, as indoor plumbing was a long way short of universal in the 1930s. The Harris family did have an outside loo – but they used the inside one.
They also had a dog called Reggie, which officially belonged to Dickie’s sister. He wrote about it in a poem when he was 9, when the creative streak was just beginning to break out in him. The poem is simple, humorous, but heartfelt:
My sister had a dog
Named Reggie
She loved Reggie
She said she loved me too
She kissed and patted Reggie
She never kissed and patted me.
In the summer the family were wealthy enough to decamp to the seaside for three months. Their holiday destination never varied; they always went to Kilkee. It was as traditional and immutable as the shamrock on St Patrick’s Day. To his dying day, Richard Harris maintained that Kilkee was his favourite spot on earth.
The three most popular costal resorts within easy reach of Limerick are Lahinch and Kilkee in County Clare (north of the city), and Ballybunion in County Kerry (south of the city). Lahinch has never been popular with Limerick people – it was a golf town, with a wide sweeping beach that has now become a Mecca for surfers – but it was always the retreat of Dubliners. Ballybunion was as popular as Kilkee, but a bit more downmarket. Everyone went to Kilkee. Whether you were rich or poor, whether you were spending the day or the month, there was only one place to be during the summer.
The town, to this day, is invaded during July and August, when Limerick people outnumber the locals. The population can swell by 5,000 in the summer. Originally a small fishing village, Kilkee nestles in a horseshoe bay with one of the safest beaches in Ireland. The beach is protected from the Atlantic by a reef, and sheltered from the wind by cliffs. The water is often more like a lake than the sea.
In the early nineteenth century a paddle-steamer service was established from Limerick to Kilrush, a port on the Shannon estuary a few miles from Kilkee. After this the resort began to thrive, being ranked as one of the finest bathing spots in the UK by the Illustrated London News. As the town was more accessible to people from Limerick rather than Clare, holidaying in Kilkee became more of a Limerick custom. Gradually the town grew, as wealthy merchants from Limerick wanted holiday homes by the sea, resulting in a building boom in the 1830s. The West End became the place to have a home. The houses were in tall, elegant terraces, with big bay windows facing the sea. It was one of those West End houses that the Harris family rented every summer. But they didn’t just rent the house; they rented the owner. Back in the 1930s and ’40s renting a house for the summer did not work as it does today. The owner of the house would remain there for the summer. Every morning Milly Harris would have to go out and buy the groceries, and then the landlady would use those groceries to cook for the family. Self-catering was decades away. To the Harris family, who were used to servants, this was how holidays should be lived.
The normal way to get to Kilkee was to take the train to Ennis, then board the West Clare railway service. This was the most famous – and the longest still-surviving – narrow gauge railway line in the country. A steam engine towed the carriages in a meandering loop around the south of the county. Timekeeping could be erratic, but when you are off on your holidays a few hours’ delay is part of the adventure. The service was immortalised in a song by Percy French, ‘Are You Right There, Michael, Are You Right?’
Kevin O’Connor is a journalist from Limerick who was a few years younger than Dickie Harris but knew him and his family well. He went to the same school and played rugby in the same clubs. His father had a bakery and did business with the Harris family. He recalled those annual excursions to the seaside, so much a part of the Limerick upbringing: ‘We used to use the West Clare railway, and sometimes we used to also go by boat from Limerick to Kilrush, then get a taxi or something to Kilkee. Dickie’s favourite spot was Kilkee.’
Noel Harris still remembers the excitement of holiday time:
Every summer we went up there. In the beginning we used to go for three months, June, July and August. Eventually, as we got older, it was just July. But it was a large chunk of our childhood. That was where the love came from. We all acquired a love of Kilkee. I still have it. I absolutely adore the bloody place. It’s a fantastic place. Beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous. You couldn’t go wrong with Kilkee. It was as safe as houses for young children. Great swimming facilities. Nobody ever locked their front doors. There were never any rows, or stealing. It was fantastic.
We’d stay in different places every year. But we always stayed at the West End.
To this day, the West End of Kilkee is full of imposing Victorian terraces and big houses. It was always the moneyed side of the village, while the East End, with smaller houses, was where everyone else stayed.
‘We’d stay in many different houses – whatever was available,’ said Noel:
We always stayed in a house that was pretty large, because we had a large family. My father brought us down first of all, those of us who could squeeze into the car. The rest of us would go down by the West Clare, or the bus. There was a bus every day to Kilkee. And families were very united in those days. If there was a spare seat in a car going down they would offer you a seat to Kilkee. This was when we were very young.
One can only imagine the excitement that the young Dickie Harris felt as he boarded the carriage in Ennis, with the Slieve Callen - the engine - at the front, belching steam, the smell of the coal and turf permeating the entire train. As they pulled out into the countryside he could have been trundling across the vast prairies. He could look out at the herds of cattle and imagine them as buffalo. The trees and gently rolling hills could have concealed whole tribes of Indians.
The train chugged towards Corofin, then through to Ennistymon, Lahinch and Miltown Malbay before reaching the tiny platform at Moyasta. There was no village here, just the small station. The family would have had to transfer to a branch line that took them the final few miles to Kilkee.
The resort was a paradise for a young boy with plenty of energy to burn. Dickie loved to swim, and he was spoilt for choice. There was the beach, but closer to the grand houses of the West End were the famous Pollock Holes, three natural rock pools a few metres deep and several metres long, which are like tidal swimming pools. The closest to the shore was officially the ladies only pool. In practice, however, everyone used the near hole, and this was where Dickie learnt to swim as a young boy.
The second hole was for men and women, but the third hole, furthest out on the reef, was for men only – and this was strictly observed. Men sunbathed in the nip and swam au naturel. In a conservative country such as Ireland, this was enough to keep the ladies away.
The best time to swim in the Pollock Holes is when the tide is out. When the tide is in, the best swimming place is Byrne’s Cove, on the east side of the beach. This is a rocky outcrop near the golf course, about half a mile from the edge of the town. Again, it was men only, and was enforced by the nude bathing. From Byrne’s Cove it is almost a mile across the bay to the third popular bathing spot, New Found Out. This is on the West End, between the beach and the reef, and consists of a high wall, whitewashed, with diving boards. The highest board is 13m above the surface of the water. Traditionally this was a proving ground for young men. Only the bravest would take the plunge from the high board. Dickie loved posing at New Found Out, and as he got older he was one of the daredevils who caught the girls’ eyes with spectacular leaps.
As he became a stronger swimmer, he began to swim across the bay from Byrne’s Cove to New Found Out. This is a daunting swim across open water, with a depth of over 60ft for much of the way. The only company was the occasional jellyfish, and the odd curious porpoise or dolphin.
‘You’d see them all out at the Pollock Holes. They were all very strong swimmers,’ remembers Kevin O’Connor.
Dickie was a strong swimmer rather than a good swimmer; he could stray out into deep water and bring himself home safely, but his stroke lacked finesse and he wasn’t fast. ‘We all swam in Kilkee,’ said Noel Harris. ‘He was never a great swimmer. He was a reasonable swimmer, but he never swam seriously.’
Manuel Di Lucia, the son of Italian emigrants, was born and raised in Kilkee. He was ten years younger than Dickie, but remembers him clearly. They ended up lifelong friends. ‘He introduced me to swimming the big bay at an early age. He took me across the big bay as a young boy,’ said Di Lucia. ‘He did it on his own many times. It is one nautical mile exactly, at high tide. And that is the only time to do it.’
Di Lucia took to the swimming with enthusiasm, eventually becoming a diver and a qualified diving coach, as well as setting up a Marine Search & Rescue unit at the resort. He was responsible for turning Kilkee into one of Europe’s major and busiest diving centres. He never forgot the role Harris played in that, and in 1970 he started an annual swim race across the bay. The cup for the winner is the Richard Harris Cup, and the actor paid for it.
‘His sons were here this year [2012], and some of his grandchildren were here to present the trophy. One of them said they might try it next year. I don’t know whether they will or not,’ laughed Di Lucia.
Swimming wasn’t the only sport on the beach. A version of racquetball, called racquets, was played against the wall of New Found Out every summer when the tide was out. Dickie excelled at this sport, winning the annual tournament on a number of occasions. His brothers were almost equally skilled, and there was always friendly rivalry within the family. The tournament was something Harris continued well into later life, making the semi-final at age 40.
Life in Kilkee was full of fun, and Dickie was at the centre of every bit of trouble, every scrap of action. Di Lucia recalled those carefree years: ‘He used to come to Kilkee all the time with his family. All his brothers - they used to all come to Kilkee. They were all interested in beach sports and water sports. And he was a great swimmer. He was a brilliant racquetball player.’
But it wasn’t just the sporting prowess that made Dickie stand out. He was a one-man Irish Jackass.
‘There were several kinds of stunts he got up to,’ said Di Lucia. ‘One stunt he was supposed to have done, but I didn’t see him do it, was to cycle along the top of the strand-line wall, over where the alleys are. That’s about 40ft high. He is supposed to have cycled along that.’
The wall Harris was cycling along was less than 1ft wide. On one side he could have fallen onto the road, but on the other side he would have plunged to the rocks below, and would have been lucky to escape with broken bones. It was a sheer drop of more than 40ft, and was the wall against which the annual racquets tournament was played. Cycling there was a crazy thing to have done. But it was not unusual for him. Others remember even wilder stunts.
Kevin Dineen was a baker from Limerick, who holidayed in Kilkee. He was two decades older than Harris, but knew the family well as he was in the same trade. He remembered seeing a bizarre sight one afternoon. He was on the beach, looking up at the top of the wall, towering the height of a three-storey building above him. Many daredevils walked along the wall as a challenge. There was a big crowd watching in awestruck wonder as a boy of about 12 was doing just that. But what had them all amazed was that the boy was doing the walk on his hands. That was typical Harris.
‘Another stunt which I did see him do was this,’ said Di Lucia:
He cycled up a plank, up over a wall, back where the Diamond Rocks holiday homes are built. All that was there was bare grass and mounds of earth. There was a natural pathway down by the side of it, and he put a plank up against the wall and it was done as a dare.
He got up on this old bicycle, cycled along the pathway, up the plank, and off and into the sea on the other side. Mad. The bicycle would follow him, but someone got the bright idea that they would tie a bit of rope around the bike, so that when he went off, the bike wouldn’t go after him. It would just go down and pull back so that he wouldn’t get hurt with the bike landing on top of him.
That is what he did. That was in his teens. Probably one of the last seasons he would have been here. He was around 17 at the time. There was this adventurous, crazy streak in him.
One of the highlights of the summer was the horse races, contested every year on the strand. The races were held over two days in September, the last hurrah of the summer, before Dickie had to board the train for the journey back to Limerick.
When he was 12, Dickie wrote a poem about his childhood. Published in his poetry volume I, In the Membership of my Days (Random House, 1973), it is an imaginative eulogy on the joys of growing up carefree. It is a picture of innocence – and full of allusions to the movies that were becoming an important part of his life. He loved losing himself in films, whether they were action, adventure, gangster or even romance.
In the poem he also spoke about rugby, which was as important to him as the fantasy world of the silver screen. In his fantasies he saw himself in the green jersey, leading Ireland out against the old enemy, England, at Lansdowne Road. He was big, fast and strong; there was no reason why it shouldn’t happen.
But the poem also foreshadowed the changes that were coming over the large family, of which he was a middle child of eight. Wearing hand-me-downs was the norm, but not for a family of the supposed wealth of the Harrises. By the 1940s the family were in decline, and the signs were becoming obvious. But they were happy.
It was perfect, except for one small problem. With eight siblings it was hard to get the attention of their parents. As a reaction to this, Dickie became the family show-off. His father could be a bit forgetful at times, and would often drop his newspaper, look over the top, and ask: ‘What’s his name again?’
‘Dickie,’ an exasperated Milly would reply.
Ivan Harris, by all accounts, could be a bit distant from his kids. That was how things were with Irish fathers. They provided the money, ate the dinner at the table with the family, and disappeared behind the paper. They spent their days out working, and their nights bemoaning their fate in the pub. Their weekends were spent on the golf course, or following the local rugby or hurling team.
Ivan was into hockey and tennis, and these sports gave him an outlet away from the family. He was a figure who was only called in when discipline was needed. Physical contact between an Irish father and his son was more likely to be a slap than a hug. It made Dickie all the more determined to raise hell and be noticed.
But the signs were there that the security of home would not last forever.
‘I remember great wealth and opulence when I was small but I also remember it disappearing. My mother, who once had servants coming out of her ears, was, in the end, down on her knees scrubbing floors. That’s how I knew it was going,’ Dickie recalled years later.
Another way he knew it was going was by the choice of school when he finished in St Philomena’s. His father had gone to Downside, near Bath. But the British Benedictine school was not considered when Dickie came of age. At around 9 years old he was transferred from the cosseted environment of the co-ed little primary school near home to the tougher environment of a city-centre school.
True, it was at the start of the war. But the Blitz was more than a year away, and no one could have known the six years of horror that Europe would be plunged into. And anyway, Britain would be expected to escape the worst of it as it was not part of mainland Europe. The city of Bath did escape relatively lightly. There were two terrible nights of bombing in April 1942, because the city manufactured tanks. Over 400 people were killed. But the destruction was small compared to that in London and other cities. The only time the war touched the school was when two RAF pilots were showing off by buzzing the cricket field during a game in May 1943. One clipped a tree and crashed. Ten people were killed and fifteen injured.
The real reason Dickie was kept at home had nothing to do with the war; it was down to money. By the late 1930s the family fortunes had entered the final stages of their terminal decline. It had taken a decade, but the Harrises were no longer a wealthy family.
Ivan Harris and his brother had worked hard to keep the business afloat, and they were shrewd businessmen. But neither man was their grandfather; they were too easy-going, and lacked the killer instinct and drive of the true tycoon. Perhaps they overstretched themselves, but they didn’t know how bad the depression would get, or how long it would last. And, as has already been mentioned, the final straw came when the giant British company Rank decided to monopolise the milling business in the UK and Ireland by targeting their successful rivals. In Limerick there was one obvious one: the Harris mills.
By the time Dickie came of age to attend secondary school the strain was beginning to tell on his father, who had already seen the mill and the bakeries close. He was still working around the clock to keep his wholesale and retail outlets open on William Street and Henry Street. In a poem written by Dickie in 1942, a few years later, he asks Santa Claus for a real aeroplane, a horse like Trigger, real guns and a car that won’t hit the gate if he arrives home drunk like Daddy.
Seeing his father occasionally arrive home drunk may have desensitised Dickie and his brothers to drink. His father later battled alcoholism and there is no doubt that drink played a part in the early death of his brother Dermot. Children often repeat the mistakes of their parents. And there was a wild streak in the family anyway.
‘One half of the family were kind of wild, and the other side were dead sound. Dickie was on the wild side,’ said Kevin O’Connor.
For a while the family’s local businesses – such as the bakery on Henry Street – continued to turn a profit, but the servants and the gardeners were a thing of the past. Milly Harris washed her own clothes, cooked the family meals and scrubbed the floor. And her younger sons lost out on the chance of a British public school education.
Dickie was sent to a local school, right in the heart of Limerick.