Radio Sets – Technology or Furniture?

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If the Irish Free State was to fully participate in the radio age, then its citizens would of course need to own radios.  This was in itself a new departure in mass media, given that print culture required no special technology in order to participate (although it did require the special skill of literacy, but that had of course become largely taken for granted by the 20thC).  In this sense, the arrival of broadcast media had more in common, for its first generation of users, with the arrival of recorded music their parents’ generation had experienced twenty or thirty years earlier, because it also required the purchase of expensive and perhaps rather intimidating new technology.  The gradual spread of gramophones through middle-class homes from the 1890s (when many department stores, including Arnotts and Pims in Dublin for example, began advertising and selling them) may well have helped to prepare the Irish public for the arrival of radio sets as new media technologies for their homes.

Nevertheless, radios were expensive consumer goods in the 1920s, and there was clearly an understanding among all those involved in establishing Irish national broadcasting that persuading a sufficient proportion of the population to buy a set was a necessary part of radio culture taking hold in the country.  This was perhaps most immediately true of the retailers who initially committed to selling radios, and who could be seen in the mid-1920s working hard to establish them as desirable consumer goods.  Of course the cheapest way to acquire a radio was to build it yourself, as the component parts were relatively inexpensive, especially for the more basic crystal sets of the early 1920s.  The pages of the Irish Radio Journal were full of advertisements for fuses and valves, appealing to this market of early adopters.  However, the number of people with the skill or interest to build their own radios was finite, and if the medium was to expand into the wider population, then they needed to be persuaded to buy a fully-constructed radio from a retailer.

It is noticeable that the range and variety of retail radios being advertised to Irish consumers increased from the start of 1924, once the BBC’s programmes were already within range and the country waited for 2RN to begin broadcasting, reflecting an expansion of interest among the general public.  And some retailers used imaginative means to promote the new technology.  As early as March 1924, the opticians Dixon & Hempenstall (who had branched into selling radios as soon as they arrived on the Irish market) imported a delivery van whose chassis was an exact replica of the Ethophone V model of radio they were then currently selling for the eye-watering price of £37 10/- in their shop.  It drove around the streets of Dublin with speakers attached to its roof, replaying radio broadcasts to passers-by as a taste of what they could experience at home if they purchased a radio.

Looking at advertisements and feature articles for radios during the 1920s and 1930s, you can clearly see that their design rapidly developed its own aesthetic, and one which carefully negotiated both the excitement and anxiety involved for many purchasers in introducing a completely new form of technology into their homes.  This era was one which – in tandem with the spread of electrification into middle-class suburban homes – saw a great many new domestic appliances arriving in Irish homes.  The wonderful ESB archive for example shows many advertisements for electric cookers, irons, and fridges for sale via its showrooms during these years.  These were however all kitchen technologies, and as the idea of ‘domestic science’ took hold as a method for creating more efficient and comfortable homes, technological kitchens were readily accepted (especially as these appliances which were easier and cleaner to use than old kitchen ranges and fires).  The gramophone and then the radio were, however, the first technologies to invade living-rooms, traditionally a soft-furnished sanctuary from such signs of industrialisation and modernity.  Both of these technologies – but especially the radio – insinuated themselves into living-rooms by disguising themselves as furniture, their valves and wiring invisible inside walnut and mahogany cabinets of varying size depending on how upmarket a model the consumer could afford.  Smaller sets sat on table tops like polished wooden workboxes, larger ones were free-standing cabinets the size of a chest of drawers.  If the cutting-edge technology was hidden away, it was in the lines and patterns of their cabinets that radios embraced modernity – they typically displayed the sleek lines and bold patterns of art deco design, and may well have been the first example of modernist design into many Irish homes.  In 1934 for example Pim’s department store in Dublin were advertising ‘table’ and ‘console’ models of Murphy radios for just over £20 and £24 respectively, each displaying only a few discreet controls and one small dial on the face of bold contrasted wood cabinets which were made of ‘walnut and bird’s-eye maple’.  At the same time HMV were marketing combined radio-gramophones for £31, disguised in cabinets of dramatic art deco inlaid marquetry.  Even the Irish state recognised these radios as furniture, as indicated by a 1925 letter to the Evening Herald, complaining that imported radios were taxed at a rate of 33% precisely because ‘being enclosed in wooden cases they will be classed as furniture’.  This made radios very heavily-taxed consumer items indeed, given that buyers were also expected to buy a £1 annual license, the revenue from which was theoretically used to pay for the running costs of 2RN and 6CK.  In actual fact of course, non-payment of licenses was an issue from the very start.  Richard Pine’s excellent history of the early years of 2RN cites an estimation from 1926 that while there were 10,000 sets in the country there were only 3,000 licenses.  Even after the license fee was dropped to 10/- the following year and the number of radios had reached 25,000, only approximately three-quarters of those owners had a license.

The spread of radio ownership during the 1920s and beyond was therefore affected by the cost of sets themselves.  However from relatively early on, radio manufacturers began producing a wide range of models so that the market became very stratified and allowed ‘budget’ models for those with much more limited income.  To take just one example, by 1937 Philco were boasting that they offered 24 different models, the cheapest of which was £7 15/- and was branded as a ‘People’s Set’ because of its relative affordability (it is important to stress that this was still a considerable expense to most households).  However, there were other impediments to the spread of radio across all of Ireland, most significantly the lack of electricity in most rural homes until well after WWII.  Electricity spread fairly swiftly through middle-class homes in cities and towns after the founding of the ESB in 1927 but even then what it meant to ‘have electricity’ might often have meant only lighting and a couple of sockets. The villages and cottages who had been spoken of by officials in the run-up to 2RN’s launch as being the main beneficiaries of Irish broadcasting because of the improving effect it would have on country life frequently had no electricity in their homes until the late 1950s.  For this reason, ‘wet battery’ sets which could be recharged (a service often offered by local garages) were crucial to the spread of radio across rural Ireland, and it is significant that Philco’s relatively cheap ‘People’s Set’ was itself a wet battery model.

Although we have come to think of domestic media such as radios and televisions as being for private family use, this was frequently not initially the case, precisely because of their costliness.  Edward Brennan’s social history of television’s arrival in Ireland during the late 1950s and early 1960s includes many memories of people whose family was the first in their street to buy a television set and found themselves hosting many of their neighbours for particularly popular programmes (an experience which often involved having to feed those neighbours as well, a considerable cost in itself) and similar experiences seem to have occurred for early adopters of radio.  There is a remarkable photograph available on the RTE Archive website from 1933, and captioned ‘neighbours gathered at the house of Christy O’Riordan, O’Neill Street, Clonmel in 1933, to hear the 1933 All-Ireland Senior Hurling Final on Radio Éireann’.  The photograph shows a group of men (and a few children) sitting on the ground in a garden around a large wooden radio which has been moved outside to accommodate the sheer size of its audience, all apparently listening with rapt attention.  Scenes like this, even on a much smaller scale, would have been a frequent social consequence of the gradual spread of radios throughout the country.  They were also of course a cause of that spread, as people experienced broadcasts in other homes and increasingly wanted a radio of their own.  Indeed, this aspect of radio’s spread through the Irish population had even been expressed by the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs at the Wireless Exhibition in November 1925 when he declared (in best salesman fashion), ‘Let every owner of a wireless set allow his friends to hear 2RN’s programmes, and we shall be quite safe, for each non-owner of a set will promptly decide that he must have one.  Christmas will soon be here – the ideal Christmas present is a wireless set complete with licence’.

References

Richard Pine, 2RN and the Origins of Irish Radio (Gill & MacMillan, 2002)

Edward Brennan, A Post-Nationalist History of Television in Ireland (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019).

Irish Broadcasting Hall of Fame Blog, at https://ibhof.blogspot.com/

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The Irish Free State and the Radio Age

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Official radio broadcasting in Ireland began on New Year’s Day 1926, when the Dublin station 2RN was launched, followed in April 1927 by the 6CK station in Cork to provide something closer to national coverage for what would become the national broadcaster Radio Éireann in later years.  The history of radio in Ireland is much older than that however.  Indeed Guglielmo Marconi himself had personal connections to Ireland, his mother having been a member of the Jameson family, and had done some of his initial testing of radio ranges from special stations set up in County Cork from 1902.  By the start of World War One, being a wireless operator for ship-to-shore communication (radio’s first purpose, before its broadcast possibilities were realised) had become a job possibility for some aspiring young men and there were businesses offering training courses for this new form of communication.  One such was the Irish School of Wireless on O’Connell Street, which holds the distinction of being the (probable) site of the first proper radio broadcast in Ireland when, during the 1916 Rising, the rebels took it over and used its equipment to broadcast James Connolly declaring ‘Irish Republic declared today in Dublin.  Irish troops have captured city and are in full possession.  Enemy cannot move in city’. 

Before this electrifying message could be sent however, Connolly’s troops in 1916 had to reconstruct the Wireless School’s decommissioned broadcasting equipment, because such apparatus was reserved for military use under special wartime regulations.  The end of World War One, far from ending official concerns about civilian possession of radio equipment in Ireland, only increased it as the country moved into the War of Independence and then the Civil War, although it seems inevitable that there were in fact many sets constructed from the fairly easily-available parts by the technology enthusiasts (ironically many of them deploying skills learned in the military during wartime) who drove the early development of radio in Ireland as elsewhere.  One of the reasons to believe that there were a significant number of ‘illegal’ radio sets in Ireland before the law was changed by 1924 was that as early as December 1923 Ireland’s first radio enthusiast’s magazine appeared.  Cheerfully undaunted by the longstanding  illegality of their readers’ hobby, the Irish Radio Journal: the Official Organ of the Radio Association of Ireland began appearing as a monthly publication full of articles about building, improving and using radio sets, evaluating the various parts needed to do so, and many advertisements for valves, fuses, and specialist wiring.  This magazine lasted only until January 1927, but by then it had been joined by the Irish Radio Review, the Irish Radio and Electric Journal, Irish Radio News and the Irish Radio Trader, as well as a variety of British radio enthusiast publications which were available in Ireland.  Most didn’t last very long, but Irish Radio News and the Irish Radio and Electrical Journal became well-established and both ran more or less until the television era.  A readership which could support these publications was obviously very keen on radio even while it had been technically illegal, a situation which was finally resolved (not without some turf wars between different government departments) ahead of the start of 2RN’s January 1926 broadcasts – thus avoiding a farcical situation in which the Irish state would have been broadcasting programmes which its citizens could theoretically have been prosecuted for listening to.

Just ahead of 2RN’s launch, a Wireless Exhibition was held at the Mansion House in Dublin in November 1925.  This was in part a trade fair for those in the new radio industry, but it was mainly intended to raise public interest in the new medium, encouraging new buyers to purchase radio sets in advance of Irish broadcasting beginning in the new year (the next post on this blog will be about radios sets themselves as expensive consumer items in the 1920s and 1930s).  Many retailers of component parts and complete sets took stands at the Exhibition, including the Marconi Company themselves, and there were also broadcasts by the BBC relayed into the Mansion House, as well as talks and lectures on the entertainment and educational value radio would bring to Ireland. 

Although the early days of radio in Ireland were relatively low-key in terms of the quantity (or, judging by some contemporary commentary, the quality) of programming, it is important to recognise what a watershed moment this was in Irish media history.  Radio broadcasting was at least as dramatic a change in mass media as the arrival of the internet some 70 years later – it was the first time that non-print media became available, it would rapidly come to offer programming formats unthinkable in print form (music, live sports coverage and breaking news), and it would offer it to a genuinely national audience, all listening to the same programme at the same time, in their homes.  You can sense even in ministerial speeches which refer to the opportunities radio will offer for enriching life in the Irish countryside where there are few other amusements, a shadow of the more robust excitement that must have been felt in those country homes as they tuned in their new radio set (usually powered by a rechargeable wet battery since most houses did not yet have mains electricity) and first heard broadcasts from Dublin, London and Hilversum, a world of broader horizons opening up directly in their homes.  

The recognition of radio’s immediate and widespread power also seems to have driven official Ireland’s responses to the new medium as well, in tones of  both approval and deep concern.  Many of the concerns were well-rehearsed during the work of the Wireless Committee which discussed and eventually decided to establish radio broadcasting in Ireland during the very early years of Independence.  Not surprisingly in the aftermath of nine years of more or less continuous warfare between 1914 and 1923, and especially given the anxieties about propaganda that those wars had caused (it is not a coincidence that the first modern assessments of propaganda, such as Harold Lasswell’s work, were published in the decade after WWI ended), some of the concerns about allowing radio into Ireland were driven by a fear of the power which might be exercised by those voices issuing directly into living-rooms and kitchens all over the country – a view ultimately undermined by the fact that Irish listeners could, by 1926, listen to foreign radio broadcasts but not ones regulated by their own government.  The importance of maintaining control of the national airwaves and also a more enthusiastic recognition that 2RN would be understood as the ‘voice of a nation’ by those who heard it internationally also motivated the Irish government’s refusal of several offers to establish commercial stations based in the country by ‘businessmen’ of varying degrees of shadiness.  Given how limited the budget for 2RN was, these offers to bear all the costs of providing radio services might have been very tempting for the Free State government, but the fact that these entrepreneurs’ principal aim was to broadcast intensive advertising across the Irish Sea to the otherwise advertising-free British airwaves discouraged them, as they were acutely aware that this would have resulted in the ‘voice of the nation’ being dominated by advertisements for patent medicines and processed food.

Another concern about the potential power of radio was that the new medium would promote foreign cultural forms and damage ‘native Irish’ culture at just the moment that national sovereignty had been achieved.  This anxiety would be reflected in on-going conflicts during the 1920s and 1930s about broadcasting time given (or not) to the Irish language and Irish music, as well as particular campaigns against popular music in particular – the unintentionally-hilarious Anti-Jazz campaign of 1934 is well worth exploring for anyone unfamiliar with it.  The early years of radio in Ireland were often marked by this tension between official (or self-appointed) guardians’ anxieties about its impact on Irish culture, language, morals or politics, and the fairly enthusiastic response to 2RN and other stations which could be picked up in homes around the country.  As JJ Walsh, the first minister to preside over Irish radio put it, in his own burst of considerable enthusiasm in his speech at the Wireless Exhibition in 1925,

“Hearing is surely the most precious sense mankind possesses; through it he receives the most rousing appeals that can be made to his reason and to his imagination.  Powerful as the written word may be, how much more powerful is the living voice which adds to the matter of the discourse the impetus of that subtle quality, the personality of the speaker?”

References

Richard Pine, 2RN and the Origins of Irish Radio (Gill & MacMillan, 2002)

Maurice Gorham, Forty Years of Irish Broadcasting (Talbot Press, 1967)

Johannah Duffy ‘Jazz, Identity and Sexuality in Ireland During the Inter-War Years’, Irish Association for American Studies, No. 1 (2009)

Irish Broadcasting Hall of Fame Blog, at https://ibhof.blogspot.com/

The Media Landscape of the Irish Free State

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The early years of Irish Independence (especially after the Civil War ended in 1923) coincided with one of the most significant moments in international media history – the arrival of broadcasting.  Radio broadcasts by enthusiastic amateurs rapidly developed into nascent stations all over the world, and by the mid-1920s many countries (Ireland included) regulated these by creating state-regulated stations such as 2RN, which began broadcasting in Ireland in January 1926.  The world’s newest nation-state was therefore partly formed by the structures of the broadcasting era, especially the sense that a country’s radio station was the ‘voice of the nation’ among the international community.

The arrival of radio changed Irish mass media dramatically, bringing it directly into people’s homes in real time, and offering all of the possibilities of sound rather than print.  Nevertheless, printed mass media remained the dominant form in very many respects, not least because of the sheer volume of print choices available to readers who might typically have access to just one Irish radio station (along with the uncertain reception of British and other European programming, depending upon geography and weather conditions).  In Ireland, the first decade or so of the Free State brought some very significant changes to the mass media landscape even aside from the arrival of radio.

The first major change was the demise of the Freeman’s Journal, in publication since 1763 and the dominant platform of mainstream Irish nationalism until the arrival of William Martin Murphy’s Irish Independent in 1905.  The Independent ruthlessly targeted the Freeman’s readers and advertisers over the coming years and this, along with the Independent’s embrace of modern journalism and advertising techniques, resulted in the older paper’s fairly rapid decline until, in 1924, it closed.  This left the Irish Independent in an undisputedly dominant position in the national newspaper market (the Irish Times being well-established but with a much smaller circulation and in any case a little uncertain of its footing in the new state) until the 1931 arrival of the Irish Press.  Established and owned by Eamon de Valera using money obtained under very controversial (and legally complex) circumstances, the Irish Press held very different party political views from those of the Irish Independent, but it was nevertheless competing directly for the Independent’s readers and advertisers, and the 1930s were marked by fierce competition between the two for market share.

The popular press, aside from newspapers, also changed a great deal during the Free State years.  There were of course many existing publications which continued, including for example dozens of local newspapers.  However, the 1920s saw the end of some long-running titles.  Story papers were beginning to fade from view as a significant form of popular media – their target market of young working-class or lower-middle class readers looking for cheap entertainment of romance, thrillers and comedy had been stolen wholesale by the movies, and those which survived at all into the 1920s generally didn’t last long.  The Shamrock and the Emerald (both giants of the late 19thC Irish popular press) merged for survival in 1914 but had folded completely by 1922.  Our Boys, a late arrival on the market in 1914, lasted until 1990, but this was clearly because it was not competing in an open market – published by the Christian Brothers, its financing was opaque but its access to a captive audience of boys attending the many Christian Brothers schools of 20thC Ireland was clear, and obviously helped it to survive.  The exception which proved this rule of failing story papers was of course Ireland’s Own, the story paper which still survives (and apparently thrives) today in the 21stC, although the secret of its success lies not, as it is often argued, in never changing, but in the fact that it did change a great deal.  During the decades after Independence, Ireland’s Own moved from targeting a younger readership with racy stories of excitement and adventure towards targeting an aging readership with cosier and nostalgic stories, a shift which proved very successful.

The other magazine format which faded from commercial success was that of ‘society papers’, which had flourished during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and catered to the small but wealthy segment of Irish society which revolved around Dublin Castle, country houses and debutante balls.  Their claim to be ‘popular’ was always doubtful given how small a percentage of the Irish population they catered to, but they had certainly been commercially successful based on how highly-coveted their wealthy readership was by many upmarket advertisers, and it’s likely they also had an aspirational readership among those fascinated by aristocracy and high society however excluded they were from it.  The founding of the Irish Free State and the ending of Dublin Castle’s political influence also meant the decline of its social power however, and as many of the Anglo-Irish retreated either to their country houses or to England, the press which had reported on their parties, marriages, and social engagements also retreated.  The simply-named Irish Society magazine ceased publication in 1924, for example, and Irish Life, which had always focused on hunting, shooting, fishing and more lately the newer interest of motoring, ended in 1926.  Some of these magazines’ typical stories were transferred to hobbyist publications such as the Irish Cyclist and Motor Cyclist, which had begun before independence and continued into the 1930s, as well as Irish Golf, which began publication in 1927 and was later absorbed by Social and Personal, one of the last attempts at ‘high society’ publishing in Ireland.

If ‘story papers’ were largely ended by the arrival of the movies, and ‘society papers’ were ended by the collapse of high society’s influence in independent Ireland, it was women’s magazines which saw something of a boom during the 1920s and 1930s.  The original Irish women’s magazine was Lady of the House, begun in 1890 and still in existence in the very early years of the Irish Free State.  Although it had been quite innovative in the early 20thC, and certainly in some of its views on ‘the woman question’ of that era, it was not a publication for the Jazz Age, and by 1924 the title ceased – although after it was bought and renamed a couple of times it eventually re-emerged as Irish Tatler, very much a modern version of a ‘society paper’.  Lady of the House had always tried to stay out of party or national politics, but it had primarily addressed the women likely to have been customers of the magazine’s original funders, Findlater’s grocers – urban, middle-class, and mainly if not entirely Protestant.  The founding of the Irish Free State shifted the balance of power not only in politics but in business, culture and everyday life towards the Catholic middle-classes, and this was as evident in publishing as it was in other aspects of Irish life.  Perhaps the most obvious example of this was in the appearance of Dublin Opinion in 1922, a satirical, knowingly humorous monthly magazine of Irish politics and metropolitan life in the new state, and very definitely published for the new elite of the Free State – the middle-class Catholic men of business, politics and the civil service.  Similar changes could be seen in publications for Irish women.  As Lady of the House faded away in the early years of the Free State, it was replaced by a series of new women’s magazines – such as Model Housekeeping, Modern Girl, Woman’s Life, and Irish Women’s Mirror, as well as a new type of ‘home and gardens’ magazine such as Ideal Irish Homes and Irish Home, which catered to the growing numbers of new homeowners in Ireland by adding DIY and decorating sections to the recipes, childcare and household hints of traditional women’s magazines.  As might be expected from the greater number of women’s magazines available during the 1920s and 1930s, they appealed to an increasingly stratified readership, with Modern Girl and Ideal Irish Home assuming their readers owned their own homes, held dinner parties and even travelled abroad, while Irish Women’s Mirror often suggested recipes that would make good use of leftovers, and published advice on how to makeover last season’s clothes to this season’s styles.

As these and other magazines appeared (some remaining for decades, others being replaced after just a few years), Irish radio programming also expanded.  The Dublin-based 2RN (and its Cork counterpart 6CK) became fully national during the 1930s and were eventually renamed Radio Éireann, and although the national broadcaster’s production budgets remained inadequate for the scale of their role as a public broadcaster, by the 1930s they were earning more advertising money and producing more programming – live broadcasts of GAA matches, music performances, plays, sketch shows and magazine shows.  Alongside these schedules, there also flourished a lively array of radio magazines, some aimed at real enthusiasts who built their own sets, some more focused on programming reviews for ordinary listeners.

Future posts will discuss many of the papers and magazines discussed here, as well as the development of radio shows, the selling of radio sets as expensive pieces of media equipment, the development of modern advertising as the financial underpinning of all commercial media, and eventually the arrival of television.

As I Was Saying…

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…well, that was a MUCH longer pause than I anticipated since my last post!  A few other aspects of work took up my time more than I’d hoped, but mainly it was because I began new research. After quite a few years focusing on late 19thC and early 20thC Irish media history, in 2017 I decided to change focus to mid-20thC media, and since then I’ve been researching and writing a book on Irish advertising and consumer culture of that period – which should appear in early 2022, so more about that some other time. But the shift in focus and time necessary to write the book caused a long pause but has also provided a lot of new material for the blog! So over the next while the posts will resume, mainly about post-Independence Ireland and its changed media landscape, beginning with a survey of what the landscape looked like and the extent to which the years immediately after Independence saw some dramatic changes in Irish media.  Not only did radio broadcasting begin within a few years of the founding of the State, but during the 1920s many older publications came to an end and many new ones began.

Upcoming posts will focus on that new world of radio – the 2RN station, its programming and advertising, and of course radio sets themselves – as well as on individual newspapers and magazines, the growing advertising industry which was underwriting most Irish media, as well as what we know about Irish readers and listeners of the mid-20thC.

The long life and after-life of ‘Mick McQuaid’

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As previous posts have discussed, some of the Irish story papers ran for decades – in fact for well over a century now in the case of Ireland’s Own. But even aside from that astonishing instance of longevity, the Emerald ran for more than 20 years, the Shamrock for over 50 years, and Our Boys lasted for almost 80 years. Perhaps not surprisingly therefore, there were also some serial stories which ran (and re-ran) for years and decades as well. All of these stories had certain common characteristics – they all featured a recurring central character whose name was always in the title of the story, and although some of them ran for many series, each story or series of stories was a self-contained episode which meant they could be read in any order. The most successful and long-running were also all strongly Irish-themed – and with a heavy reliance on village life, stock Irish ‘characters’ such as landlords, tenant farmers, gombeen men and comely maidens.

One example which would still be remembered by some readers today was the Kitty the Hare series – sub-titled ‘the Famous Travelling Woman of Ireland’, the elderly Kitty recounted her tales episode by episode, including adventures and strange tales from all over Ireland, many of them blending rural social realism with aspects of the supernatural including banshees and pookas. They were written by Victor O’Donovan Power, a popular and extremely prolific writer now almost completely forgotten, and were first published in Ireland’s Own in 1914, before moving to Our Boys (a story paper run by the Christian Brothers and intended as an Irish Catholic alternative to the very English Boys’ Own Paper) from 1924, where they continued to be printed regularly for decades – despite the fact that O’Donovan Power himself died in 1928, thus ending the supply of new Kitty the Hare stories.

Arguably even more popular and long-running however were the tales of Mick McQuaid. They were written by William Francis Lynam – a soldier, writer and editor who was born in Galway in 1833 and died in Dublin in 1894. Little is known about his background (or his military career), but by the 1860s he was living in Dublin and was – it appears – the owner and editor of the Shamrock story paper.   One of the earliest Irish story papers, it was established in 1866 as a penny weekly ‘companion’ paper to the Irishman newspaper. The Irishman, a very advanced nationalist paper, was established in 1859 by Richard Pigott – a very colourful character in Irish journalism who would acquire infamy as the forger of the damning letters supposedly written by Parnell in the 1880s. The exact editorial and proprietorial relationship between the Irishman and the Shamrock is rather murky – some sources imply Pigott owned them both, while others insist that Lynam owned the Shamrock, in which case the precise nature of their connection is unknown. Pigott and Lynam may have been actual business partners, or simply had an informal alliance.

The 1860s was of course the era of the Fenian movement in Ireland and abroad, and under Pigott’s editorship the Irishman was a very popular voice for Fenianism. If the Irishman was aimed at an adult readership seeking radical political news and commentary, the Shamrock was its more entertaining younger sibling, intended to instil a sense of national pride and identity in its boy (and occasional girl) readers. To do this, it specialised in exciting Irish historical fiction serials, set at key moments of Irish nationalist history such as the 1798 Rebellion or the Jacobite Wars, and usually centred around an ordinary Irish boy who readers could identify with as he became swept into political and military excitements and encountered historical figures such as Wolfe Tone or Redmond O’Hanlon. But as well as historical fiction, the Shamrock also published romances and vernacular tales of Irish life.

The most successful of these vernacular tales were, by a very long way, the Mick McQuaid stories. A series of comic tales (although to be quite honest the modern reader might take some convincing of that description) set in what was then contemporary Ireland, they all featured the adventures of central character Mick McQuaid – a quick-thinking, wise-cracking chancer who nevertheless usually managed to save the day and prevent the more straight-forward villainy of figures such as agents for absentee landlords, or local gombeen men. Each story saw Mick in a new role and setting, such as ‘Mick McQuaid, Money Lender’, ‘Mick McQuaid, Member of Parliament’, ‘Mick McQuaid, Detective’, and ‘Mick McQuaid, Evangelist’. Each story was long, with (overly) complex plots, many characters, comic tangents and multiple narrative threads to be resolved, so they were serialised in short instalments over several months of weekly issues. These kind of serial stories were crucial to story papers, designed to bring readers back week after week and build a loyal and regular readership, and the Mick McQuaid stories were a classic example of their type.

It has to be admitted it would be difficult to that claim the stories deserve to be ‘rediscovered’ by modern readers. They are an interesting window into popular fiction of the era, especially in terms of their representations of Irish life and society – however their plots are unwieldy, their humour has not aged well and they are written in an almost impenetrable ‘Irish’ dialect which was obviously part of their appeal in the 1860s but which is extremely difficult to read now. Instead what is most interesting about the Mick McQuaid stories is their extraordinary popularity across many decades. Lynam reportedly became bored with the stories after just a few years, and indeed replaced them with tales of another very similar ‘charming Irish rogue’ anti-hero, the Darby Durkan series, which in their turn were also fairly popular. But popular demand for continued Mick McQuaid stories forced him to write more of them (a common experience for authors of popular fiction, most famously in the case of Conan Doyle’s reluctant resurrection of Sherlock Holmes). Indeed, the circulation of the Shamrock reportedly dropped sharply when he attempted to end the McQuaid stories, so they had to be revived and reprinted. It is difficult to be sure exactly how many stories there are in total (perhaps ten or so), each one lasting up to 6 months of weekly instalments – but for a youthful audience this was enough to keep printing and reprinting them over years and eventually decades. Rather like the endlessly circulating repeats of television sit-coms in our own era, which happily rewatched by fans and watched for the first time by successive generations (Faulty Towers being the obvious example, with just twelve episodes ever made in the 1970s, but which are still being screened 40 years later) these very popular serials played on an endless loop in the story papers.

Lynam died in 1894, but his serials lived on without him. The Darby Durkan stories appeared in the Shamrock’s rival story paper the Emerald in the early 20thC, and after the two papers merged in 1912 the McQuaid stories also continued in the new paper until its demise in 1919 – and may well have continued to appear in other publications after that although I have yet to find them. Their popularity was such that in 1889 Carroll’s Tobacco company in Dundalk named a new brand of pipe tobacco after Mick McQuaid, who often smoked a pipe in the stories as he held forth with his distinctive folk wisdom. The brand was itself a great success (presumably the tobacco and the stories amplified each other’s standing among readers and smokers in ways that benefitted both), and by the 1920s Carroll’s had commissioned a cartoon version of Mick McQuaid for their packaging and advertising – the photograph accompanying this post is of a tobacco tin from the mid-20thC. So while the stories had not had significant illustrations during their 19thC hey-day, the Mick McQuaid character took visual form years after his author’s death, and in fact became one of mid-20thC Ireland’s most successful brands, only being discontinued in 2016 – a strange afterlife for a fictional character first invented in 1867.

References

Margeret O’Callaghan, ‘Richard Pigott’, Dictionary of Irish Biography.

Patrick M Geoghegan, ‘William Francis Lynam’, Dictionary of Irish Biography.

Mass media, High Society and the invention of Celebrity

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These days a great deal of the popular press is locked into a reciprocal and lucrative relationship with a wide variety of celebrities. The press needs stories (and above all else, photographs) of celebrities in order to sell their publications, while most celebrities need press coverage in order to maintain the public profile without which they would not be celebrities. In recent years this closed loop has reached its logical conclusion, resulting in complaints about celebrities who are ‘famous for being famous’, apparently having no public life or career beyond the pages of tabloid newspapers and gossip magazines.

Celebrity is a complex cultural concept (there is for an example, an entire academic journal, Celebrity Studies, dedicated to it), which takes different forms at different moments. However, in all its forms it has a specific history, and one which is inherently tied to the development of mass media. Celebrity in any recognisable form requires a mass media in order to create fame and instant recognition, as there can be no celebrity without an audience. Equally, before mass media and its creation of that audience, there was no real need for celebrities – they were an invention of the popular press and its need to appeal to segmented audiences who must be persuaded to buy each new issue. Celebrities whose star personae were carefully tailored to a particular audience proved to be an exceptionally successful and long-lasting way to attract regular buyers.

Late 19thC mass media – in Ireland and elsewhere – provides an opportunity to watch modern celebrity develop, as publications, advertisers, readers and the proto-celebrities themselves negotiated its form and purpose. The earliest category of famous individuals whose names (and later photographs) could sell newspapers were of course aristocrats. This was entirely logical, as they already possessed many of the characteristics which would later become associated with the celebrity format – they were drawn from a demarcated group whose very names, in the form of their titles, differentiated them from ordinary readers in a parallel fashion to the way that very famous modern celebrities’ very names are also brands. Aristocrats also lived lives of barely imaginable glamour (at least in theory, on the pages of newspapers and magazines), in castles and palaces, with carriages, servants, jewels and other luxuries. Perhaps most appealing of all to those following their lives in the press, they lived a life of permanent leisure. If the earlier Victorian period had struggled with the moral implications of leisure (and how it might be differentiated from idleness, which in the more religious times of the mid-19thC was of course a sin), then the late 19thC had fully resolved that struggle in favour of leisure as something to enjoyed at every opportunity. This could be seen in the rise of music halls, department stores, day-trip tourism and of course the media itself, which were all forms of entertainment which required leisure-time to enjoy. The reality for most people however was that their opportunities for leisure were still extremely limited. The majority of the population left school by 14 at the latest, the working week was typically still 6½ days, paid holidays were unusual, and the old age pension wasn’t introduced until 1909, so even retirement wasn’t a common experience. So fin-de-siècle culture was saturated with leisure activities which most people had a very limited chance to enjoy. The aristocracy’s life of total leisure, only emphasised by the ways they invented to fill it – moving from their country estate to their town-house and then on to the south of France according to the season, and attending court, country house parties, racing meets, grouse shooting or regattas as they went, all the while changing their clothes several times a day – was therefore a source of fascination in itself to over-worked readers of the popular press.

Women’s magazines and society papers, not surprisingly, were the most avid reporters of aristocratic celebrity. In Ireland, these included Lady of the House and Irish Society, among others. The two papers were different from each other in many respects – Lady of the House was more firmly positioned as a women’s magazine, and one which often expressed quite progressive social views, as well as catering to a slightly broader readership. Irish Society’s name probably speaks for itself – it focused entirely upon the activities and interests of the social elite, although it would have been read more broadly too, and that broader readership would have been specifically attracted by the high society lifestyles and individuals it reported on. Both magazines participated in the use of the aristocracy as proto-celebrities however, devoting considerable column inches to news of their lifestyles, fashions and travels. Although the activities of British (and even sometimes continental European) royalty and aristocrats featured fairly regularly, the Irish press tended to give much more attention to Irish aristocrats and the other upper-classes, with much of the narrative centring around the social life of Dublin Castle. In February 1903, for example, Lady of the House reported on the opening of that year’s ‘season’, which always began with the presentation of debutantes at the Castle. Under the headline ‘The First Dublin Drawing Room of the Season’, they printed a double-page photo spread of debutantes in their regulation white ball gowns. In the same issue there were reports of some of the ancillary social events of the season, including the information that ‘Mrs Garrett-Walker gave a ball at her residence, 38 Fitzwilliam Square. She is a daughter of Canon Leeper.’ Often there were minute descriptions of the precise gowns and jewels worn by each of the most important guests at these parties, along with general fashion commentary such as ‘The old-fashioned cut-work, which formed such an important Irish industry during the 1850s, is once more a la mode, and placed more prominently en evidence than of yore’. As the season wore on, and high society marriages were arranged, magazines such as Lady of the House and Irish Society covered those too. In January 1902, Irish Society informed its readers that ‘Miss Kathleen Blake Squires, youngest daughter of Mr WA Squires, of 61 Dartmouth Square, was married on Thursday last, the 2nd, to the Rev FC Day-Lewis, BA, senior curate of Stradbally, Queen’s County…’. As well as these local (and less illustrious) announcements, the magazine concerned itself too with events in the very highest circles, such as its announcement in the same issue that the Marquis of Bute was expected to come into his fortune (estimated at £6m, an immense figure) in that year.

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Although publications which gave importance to high society would have actively monitored events such as the presentation of debutantes at the Castle court, it is worth noting that most of the information they published giving details of private parties or engagements and marriages – let alone formal photographs of debutantes and socialites in ball gowns – were supplied to the editors by the subjects themselves. Not that long before the end of the 19thC, the upper echelons of Irish (and British) society would have resisted publicity of this kind, especially for women, and seen it as a severe failing of etiquette and good breeding, but by the start of the 20thC it was becoming increasingly common for members of the upper class to be profiled in magazines, or even to endorse specific products in advertising. In women’s magazines in particular, profiles of and interviews with ‘notable women’ were a regular and popular feature. For example Lady of the House opened the new century with a series of aristocratic profiles under the remarkable title ‘Some Men’s Wives’, and just a few years later in 1904 produced an article on ‘The Ladies of the Guinness Family’, lavishly illustrated with photographs of Lady Gwendoline, Lady Evelyn and the Hon Mrs Ernest Guinness, all of whom frequently appeared in press as a result of their social position and philanthropic activities. Indeed, the increased public profile of many upper-class women by the turn of the 20thC was often predicated on their involvement in heavily-publicised charity events to raise money for good causes – another aspect of contemporary celebrity culture which can be traced to this era. In the 1890s a series of grand-scale ‘charity bazaars’ were held in Dublin in order to raise money for a range of hospitals in the city. These were lavish affairs (mainly held at the RDS) with music, performances, cafes and above all else, stage-set ‘villages’ in which each house was a stall selling souvenirs and goods, all of which were managed and staffed by society girls in full costume. Of these the most famous is the ‘Araby’ bazaar held in 1894 and immortalised in James Joyce’s story of that name. Staged over a week and attended by 80,000 people, ‘Araby’ was a significant popular event in the city from numerous perspectives, but at the time there is no doubt that most of the enormous free publicity it received from magazines such as Lady of the House was a result of its very public display of marriageable young women from the upper-middle-classes and aristocracy. The magazine covered ‘Araby’ obsessively, profiling each stall and its ‘lady stallholders’ in the run-up to the bazaar’s opening, and afterwards published many photographs of them in costume. Given that ‘Araby’ attracted a great many members of the public to buy tickets and attend it, it is not surprising that the press was able to use the bazaar’s proto-celebrity society girls to sell magazine copies.

Interviews with well-known women were also common in both women’s magazines and society papers. In 1902 Irish Society published a series of interviews collectively titled ‘Gentlewomen at Home’, including one with Lady Nixon, who was the wife of Sir Christopher Nixon, then the president of the Royal College of Physicians. Defined primarily by her husband, Lady Nixon was nevertheless interviewed also as the mistress of her grand home at 2 Merrion Square, and praised for her roles as a hostess, mother and philanthropist, the interview mentioning in some detail the charities whose committees she was a member of. An interviewee such as Lady Nixon was beyond reproach as a paragon of upper-class femininity, but many magazine interviews with ‘notable women’ were keen to emphasise their ladylike qualities – all the more so if the women were active beyond the domestic sphere. This tension, between the need to create a public profile for aristocratic women in order to mobilise their celebrity for sales, and the competing concern that publicity and a public life might undermine their respectable femininity, became more and more visible as the years went by and the categories of female celebrity expanded beyond the real aristocracy, whose rank alone provided considerable protection to their reputations.

As a result of this, many interviews with and profiles of famous women worked hard to emphasise their domesticity and traditional femininity. Subjects were typically interviewed in their own homes during ‘afternoon tea’, which prompted the commonly recurring headline for female celebrity interviews, ‘Over the Teacups’, a phrase used for decades by many different magazines to conjure a cosy domestic tone. These highly-staged domestic interviews not only worked to underline their subjects’ femininity, but also allowed readers a pleasing glimpse into their homes. This concern about the effect of a public life upon the private reputation of female celebrities was especially evident in 1892 when Lady of the House included Maude Gonne in a society news column called ‘What Women Are Doing’ and added rather anxiously that, ‘Whatever may be said against Miss Gonne’s politics and methods…no man or woman can otherwise breathe a word against her…she has never been known for a moment to lose or jeopardise her self-respect as a woman’.

As time went on, the categories of women profiled and interviewed in women’s magazines expanded to include more and more non-aristocrats. As women began (very gradually) to enter higher education and the professions, relatively progressive magazines like Lady of the House began to profile some of them, and interviews ‘over the teacups’ appeared with ‘lady graduates’ and ‘lady doctors’. Stage performers such as Lillie Langtry or Nellie Melba also achieved a very modern form of celebrity in the pages of popular magazines, as their glamorous lives were profiled and ever-more photographed. Famed now for their beauty, talent and lifestyles rather than for their birth and breeding, they slowly began to edge out the aristocratic celebrities, a process which was rapidly accelerated by the arrival of film as the dominant leisure culture which would create ‘stars’ of actresses who no longer needed to emphasise their domesticity or traditional femininity. New publications dedicated to film star news, photographs and gossip had begun to emerge by the end of World War One, the forerunners of today’s magazines dedicated to celebrity culture.

The Catholic Truth Society of Ireland: Making Morality Pay

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Earlier this month it was noted in some newspapers that the only religious education textbooks approved by the Catholic Church for use in the primary schools they control (which is 90% of public primary schools in the country) are published by the Church’s own publishing house, Veritas. This was felt to be particularly worthy of comment because those textbooks are believed to be the only profitable part of Veritas’ business these days, and therefore very important to its survival. This is a far cry from its hey-day in the mid-20thC, or even its early-20thC origins in the Catholic Truth Society.

The Catholic Truth Society of Ireland was established in 1899 (an English equivalent had been founded a few years earlier) with the intention of ‘the diffusion, by means of cheap publications, of sound Catholic literature in popular form, so as to give instruction and edification in a manner most likely to interest and attract the general reader’, as explained by its first President, the Bishop of Clonfert an address to members that year. In terms very recognisable to anyone familiar with the social purity movement of the era, the Bishop went on to assert that ‘It is well known that various printing presses in Great Britain daily pour out a flood of infidel and immoral publications, some of which overflows to this country. We have a confident hope that the Society’s publications will remove the temptation of having recourse to such filthy garbage, will create a taste for a pure and wholesome literature, and will also serve as an antidote against the poison of dangerous or immoral writings’. As this statement suggests, the CTSI was a first cousin to the Irish Vigilance Association and the wider social purity movement, all of whom saw great threats to Irish morals from popular culture, especially that imported from England.

Leaving aside the Bishop of Clonfert’s uncompromising address at its founding however, the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland generally left thundering condemnations of ‘evil literature’ to other branches of the social purity movement, and instead focused on producing and distributing its own publications. It focused on books (or more truthfully, pamphlets), perhaps realising that the production of weekly or even monthly periodicals was difficult to sustain and less likely to be successful in a market of fiercely competitive commercial penny papers. In its early years, the CTSI focused primarily upon non-fiction publications which mainly fell into two categories – the history of the Catholicism in Ireland, and the lives of saints. Examples included A Short History of some Dublin parishes (1905), St Frigidian: an Irish Saint in Italy by Michael O’Riordan (1902), The Church and the Working Classes by Peter Coffey (1906) and the intriguingly-titled The Manliness of St Paul by the Very Rev. Walter MacDonald. After the first few years of the Society’s existence, more contemporary topics of social and even political interest were addressed. These included Socialism by Rev. Robert Kane (1909), Marriage by Rev. John Charnock (1910) and The Management of Primary Schools in Ireland by Right Rev. Monsignor Hallinan (1911). It is noticeable that in its earliest years the CTSI published almost no fiction. This was despite its stated aim of competing with the ‘infidel and immoral publications’ flowing into Ireland, most of which focused on fiction – as has been discussed here on this blog before, short and serial fiction, along with cheap novels, were the dominant popular cultural form of the early 20thC, not yet having yielded their place to movies as the source of most people’s leisure entertainment. Instead, the Society’s initial output mirrored the non-fiction content of many popular journals and magazines, the informative articles about history and culture, in this case with a very strong Catholic inflection. And although they were longer than the short factual articles published by the Irish Packet or Ireland’s Own, they were still brief – pamphlets rather than books. For example, The Manliness of St Paul was only 27 pages, and The Management of Primary Schools in Ireland was 36 pages, both of these being typical lengths for CTSI pamphlets. This was probably motivated by a combination of factors – shorter publications could be cheaper (many CTSI pamphlets were only 1d), but in the era of short and disposable popular literature, this format may also have been more appealing to readers. Like other branches of the social purity movement in this era, the CTSI appear to have had a fairly clear grasp of the popular culture they were attempting to compete with (this, it might be argued, is one of the most important distinctions between the Church’s interactions with popular culture a century ago, and their efforts to make similar interventions in more recent years), and paid attention to their publications’ appeal to potential customers. As well as encouraging subscriptions, they also utilized the pre-existing network of Catholic churches and schools to display and sell their publications, even advertising and selling display cabinets for this purpose, from 15 shillings for a small set of wall shelves, up to 36 shillings for a freestanding cabinet which would display 18 pamphlets.

The Society did begin publishing fiction well before World War One, and this became a more and more important part of their output over the coming years and decades. Like their other publications, most of their fiction was short – one of their earliest stories for example was Avourneen by Rosa Mulholland (Lady Gilbert), published in 1905 and only 16 pages long. In effect, they were publishing in stand-alone, pamphlet form, the extended short stories which were so popular in weekly penny papers like Ireland’s Own. Indeed, many of the same authors wrote for the Irish popular press and the Catholic Truth Society, including Mulholland herself. By 1919, that inveterate cataloguer of Irish literature Stephen J Brown had commented in his exhaustive annotated bibliography Ireland in Fiction that the CTSI’s principal purpose ‘is religious and moral propaganda’, most of which were ‘distinctively Catholic in tone’, observations which from Browne, who was himself a Jesuit, were intended to be complimentary. He also gave an indication of the scale of the Society’s publications by that point, asserting that in the 20 years since its founding in 1899, it had already distributed more than 7 million copies of its publications.

Less well-known Irish writers seem to have been able to use the CTSI as a platform for their work too, suggesting that the Society may have had to actively seek out writers who would produce work of the kind they were looking to promote. One example of such authors was Patrick Ivers-Rigney, a National School teacher from Cork. Born in 1879, Ivers-Rigney contributed stories to several story papers before he was 30, including (in 1907) a murder-mystery serial called ‘The Mystery of a Railway Car’ for the Irish Emerald, which the paper tied to a competition inviting readers to guess the murderer and how they committed their crime. By 1915, he was also writing for Ireland’s Own, a complicated serial called ‘The Mystery of the Yellow Lough’ which featured an attempt at forced marriage, a contested legacy from America and the revelation of murder when the local lough is drained to reveal multiple skeletons. These stories were hardly the kind of ‘sound Catholic literature’ the CTSI had promised when they were established, but despite this (and perhaps because Ivers-Rigney also had a parallel career writing about education policy for Catholic journals), during the 1920s and 1930s they published 23 of his stories, including Circumstantial Evidence (1927), The Church Street Mystery (1930), The Mysterious Portmanteau (1931) and The Rahaniska Ruby (1931). Like most other CTSI fiction, these stories were all less than 30 pages long, and were extended short fiction very similar to the work he had published in story papers. Ivers-Rigney’s work, along with that of many others, suggests that as the decades went on the CTSI broadened their scope from ‘moral propaganda’, presumably in order to attract readers.

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Indeed, the Society’s activities during the early years of the Free State appear to have become both more commercial and more wide-ranging, as they began to include the sale of vestments and religious artefacts as well as the sale of their publications, and by the mid-1920s they were also organising pilgrimages. This prompted the setting up of the Veritas Company as a commercial operation, run from the CTSI’s shop on Lower Abbey Street (and which is still open to this day). Probably inspired by the success of the 1932 Eucharistic Congress in Dublin (which saw visitors and press from all over the world and a mass for one million people in the Phoenix Park), their religious travel agency became a significant business during the early 1930s. In 1933 they organised a 10-day pilgrimage to Lourdes which consisted of 2,500 pilgrims (including several TDs and government ministers), accompanied by an officially-deployed detachment of the Irish Army to oversee the logistics of their movements and accommodation. Tickets for the pilgrimage cost £14 15s (with a discount for invalids), an enormous sum for most ordinary Irish people at that time.

While the arranging of pilgrimages and selling of religious artefacts was overseen by the Veritas Company as a separate business, a keen business sense also seems clear in the CTSI’s publishing operations during the mid-20thC. For example during these decades they not only increased their output to include a wide range of fiction, as well as pamphlets on religious education, social issues and personal advice, but they also placed considerable emphasis upon the cover art of their pamphlets – which would also have helped their publications to compete in the crowded market of popular magazines and pulp fiction. Many of these covers (such as the ones shown here) were of very high quality, so much so that in 2013 some were reproduced as limited edition prints and collected into a book, Vintage Values, which is available here (and definitely recommended for anyone interested in graphic design).

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In 1969, the Veritas Company effectively took over the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, taking on all of its publishing activities. As the decades passed, they became less and less of a force within popular culture (despite having set up a broadcasting operation during the 1960s in a very explicit attempt to keep up with new media technologies). Nevertheless, as the only publishers of religious textbooks approved for use in Catholic-controlled primary schools, the legacy of the CTSI’s commitment to ‘sound Catholic literature’ continues, as does its strongly commercial purpose.

References

Stephen J Brown, Ireland in Fiction: A Guide to Irish Novels, Tales, Romances and Folklore (Dublin: Maunsel, 1919)

Lir Mac Cárthaigh, Vintage Values: Classic Pamphlet Cover Design from 20th Century Ireland (Dublin: Veritas Publications, 2013).

Deserters and White Slavers: Emigration in the Irish popular press

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In August 1912 Julia Curran, a young Irish woman from Kilkenny, was brutally murdered in a New York brothel. Later that year the case would become a significant scandal when it emerged that corrupt police had tried to help the brothel cover up her death as being from ‘natural causes’, but long before then the story was widely reported in the Irish press. The victim (frequently described as being from a ‘good family’ and having worked as a governess in aristocratic homes in Ireland) had been travelling in America as a lady’s companion to a wealthy family when she made the acquaintance of a ‘foreign’ man and abruptly left her employment to travel to New York with him. She was later seen arriving at the brothel in his company in a visibly ‘drugged’ condition, her body being found in their room the following day (she had been strangled), her male companion having disappeared.

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This grim story would have seemed eerily familiar to many readers of the Irish press, where it was avidly reported in papers from the Kerry Reporter to the Strabane Chronicle under headlines such as ‘New York Horror’ and ‘Irish Girl’s Fate, Pretty Governess Murdered’. It read like an exact real-life example of the tales of ‘white slavery’ they had been hearing for years, but with a particular intensity around the time of Julia Curran’s death. ‘White slavery’ was the deliberately emotive term used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to warn young women of the reputed threat they faced of being seduced, tricked or even kidnapped into prostitution. These threats were, it was argued, especially great for young women who moved to big cities looking for work, away from the protection of their families and supposedly becoming vulnerable to the cunning wiles of procurers who would target them at train stations, ports and even in busy streets. As Katherine Mullin describes in her book on the Irish social purity movement, a pamphlet entitled The Horrors of the White Slave Trade: the Mighty Crusade to Protect the Purity of Our Homes, which was published in 1912, used a photo-story reconstruction of how unwary girls could be fooled into prostitution. In the first image, a charming stranger engages the innocent young woman in conversation in a city street. In the second image, he has persuaded her to accompany him to a restaurant where ‘the smooth-tongued villain tells of his affection and undying love for her’ while, of course, drugging her food. And in the final photo, she is seen dazedly following him into a building, now ‘incapable of self-control and is easily led to her ruin. Awaking she will find herself in a house of shame’. The following year not one but two films on the topic, Traffic in Souls and The Horrors of the White Slave Trade, were released into the increasingly-popular movie theatres. The international campaign to ‘rescue’ unwitting girls from the clutches of ‘white slavery’ was of course a close relative of the broader social purity movement which was previously discussed here on this blog in relation to its campaigns against ‘evil literature’. In Ireland, this had actually begun as a late-19thC campaign against the brothels in Dublin’s Monto district, involving street pickets and attempts to identify and shame male customers – but from around 1900 the focus of Irish purity campaigns moved to an emphasis on popular fiction, photographs, crime and divorce reporting. However, the moral panic about innocent young women being tricked into ‘white slavery’ did have considerable resonance in Ireland as a cautionary tale of what might result from emigration, especially emigration to big cities such as London or New York.

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The decades immediately before and after 1900 were periods of enormous emigration from Ireland – often from rural areas to the huge cities of Britain and the United States. Not only were Ireland’s emigration rates extremely high, but young single women constituted an unusually high proportion of those emigrants, and this made awful warnings of the moral dangers they faced a popular theme of anti-emigration rhetoric. Not that female emigrants were the only targets of warnings against leaving home, however. Ireland’s Own in particular maintained a steady flow of anti-emigration rhetoric through its fiction, factual articles and editorials from its earliest years, and many of these were aimed at young male readers as well as female. Ireland’s Own’s principal demographic, young working-class or lower-middle-class readers (both male and female) were of course also the principal demographic who were emigrating, and this was therefore a sensitive topic for the paper to raise. Nevertheless it did so regularly, and in ways which left no ambiguity about its editorial position on the subject. Within its first few months for example, an opinion column of December 1902 claimed that every day 108 people left Ireland ‘with much patriotism on their lips but not any in their hearts….there was a time when the word ‘emigrant’ was nearly synonymous with “martyr”. At the present day, in view of the arduous labour and risk of moral degradation that a life outside of Ireland entails and the obvious opportunities for work that await the willing hand at home, it is an abuse of the words to call deserters “emigrants”. Here emigration is painted not only as a moral risk to the individual emigrant, but also as such a significant loss to the national body politic that it can be characterised as unpatriotic or even as ‘desertion’, a highly emotive term. In another article in the same vein more than a decade later, the paper would rail against the ‘terrible drain on our resources that has been made by the constant emigration of the strong and the young to America’. Here then emigration was a betrayal of Ireland, and something of an accusation from the paper to its own readers, many of whom must have emigrated each year, or had siblings and friends who did. Perhaps aware that calls to remain in Ireland for purely patriotic reasons were unlikely to deter many potential emigrants, Ireland’s Own frequently invoked the difficulties and disappointments of life abroad, especially in the United States. This was an anti-emigration narrative particularly aimed at male emigrants, who were assured that ‘few, very few, ever earn more than a living wage’, along with warnings about the high cost of living in cities like New York, and the competition for jobs they would face from Russians, Swedes, Germans or Italians, who it was claimed were hired in preference to Irishmen and would work for less money. These points were reinforced in fiction as well, with stories about emigration gone wrong. In 1908 for example, the paper published ‘A False El Dorado’ by Thomas Geraghty, about a young man who leaves his family home in Ireland for New York, in part to search for his brother who had emigrated some years before and not been heard of since. Our hero struggles to make a living, but perseveres, until one day he rescues from the river a man attempting suicide – who of course turns out to be his brother, aged and defeated by his failure in New York, and too ashamed to stay in contact with his family. The story has a happy ending in which the brothers return to the family cottage in Ireland, but the moral for readers contemplating emigration was clear.

Nevertheless, for all the dire warnings of the economic hazards awaiting male emigrants, the fate conjured for young women was definitely even worse. In 1903 the paper’s women’s page warned of difficulties in finding work and lodgings, or even a suitable church to attend, concluding that it was ‘far better to stay at home and make the best of things’. More sensational warnings would follow in later years however, ones very similar to those contained in white slavery pamphlets such as The Horrors of the White Slave Trade: the Mighty Crusade to Protect the Purity of Our Homes. In 1915 a correspondent to Ireland’s Own from Montreal warned that girls who emigrated alone lacked moral guidance in their new life, and would spend their time going to movies on their nights off as well as reading ‘cheap literature which is very far from being up to standard. As time goes on she makes an acquaintance, and then what’s the result? In this way Ireland loses sight of the daughters she’s so proud of’. This warning was coy however by comparison to that from 1909, which had described Irish girls who emigrated to New York being forced to work in service for families ‘who have no God’, and associate with other girls ‘who mock purity, girls who are morally dead’. Ireland’s Own went on, ‘the rest of the story is too horrible. In very many cases the unprotected girl sinks lower and lower, until her condition is that of social outcast’. This it was argued would inevitably lead to arrest, imprisonment, alcoholism ‘to sustain her exhausted body, and then one night she runs to the river and goes to be judged’.

Such melodramatic predictions of the fate awaiting young Irish women in New York and other cities were sometimes tempered by more sober acknowledgements that female emigrants (in particular) had their reasons for leaving in such large numbers. It is noticeable that these acknowledgements tended to come from women journalists, who probably had personal experience of some of the limitations women faced in Ireland. In 1906 Ireland’s Own published a long article entitled ‘Country Homes and Home Makers’ by Mary EL Butler, which directly addressed the issue of young female emigration. Butler was one of the most successful women journalists in early 20thC Ireland, as well as being an active member of the Gaelic League. She had a long-running column in the Irish Independent, was regularly published in nationalist papers (she had a particular commitment to the Irish language and published in Irish), and also wrote at least one novel, The Ring of the Day in 1907. In her 1906 piece for Ireland’s Own, Butler acknowledged that for many young women a desire to escape from a dull rural life to something ‘gayer, more exciting’ was an important incentive to emigration. She argued that ‘distaste for country life with us amounts to a national danger’ because of its influence on emigration rates. While her tone is disapproving of these emigrants’ decision, she does go on to argue that ‘if the exodus which is bringing our country to its knees is to be stopped it is absolutely necessary to make home and village life attractive’. A similar attitude was displayed the following year in an article in Lady of the House by Mary Costello. Far less is known of Costello than of Butler, but she published at least one novel (Peggy the Millionaire in 1910) and several long pieces with Lady of the House over many years, including an investigative journalism series called ‘A Woman’s Life in the Dublin Slums’ during the 1890s which contained fierce denunciations of the social and political failures responsible for the city’s tenements. Her 1907 article for Lady of the House was called ‘Fore! The Modern Woman Demands the Clearing of the Way’ and was a bold assertion of Irish women’s new-found confidence, illustrated with a drawing of a Gibson girl playing golf. Costello argued that ‘in no other English-speaking part of the globe have women been more kept down than they have among us, more handicapped in education and in the means of earning an honourable livelihood.’ Noting the high levels of female emigration, she described them as starting ‘alone and dry-eyed across the Atlantic into the heart of life, undismayed by the pictures of hard work, failure, and loss of health which anti-emigrationists forcibly depict.’ While mourning the loss of such energetic young women, she added that nothing would be more likely to stop it than ‘giving Irishwomen an interest and a voice in all that goes on at home’.

None of this would have been much consolation to Julia Curran, whose death may have seemed like the (mainly invented) propaganda of the anti-white slavery campaign but which was for once all-too real. As a final indignity, her death was then used to sell Irish newspapers using sensational headlines like ‘How Miss Curran Was Lured to Death’, along with graphic descriptions of how she was killed. Even Ireland’s Own, which did not print such details, did discuss her death, the editor commenting that ‘it is a sad satisfaction to me to know that “Ireland’s Own” consistently and strenuously warned its readers against the dangers and pitfalls that await the unwary in the huge and seething attics of the New World’.

References

Katherine Mullin, James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

The Inside of the White Slave Traffic (1913) available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZHihjo_eBQ

Traffic in Souls (1913) available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLZLhdqQXug

Clifford Griffith Roe, The Horrors of the White Slave Trade: the Mighty Crusade to Protect the Purity of Our Homes (London and New York, 1912).

The Curious Case of Sherlock Holmes and the Irish Crown Jewels (or not)

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In 1907, in what remains one of the great unsolved jewel thefts, the Irish Crown Jewels were stolen from inside Dublin Castle. None of them have ever been recovered, and no one was ever arrested for the theft. It was one of the mass media sensations of its day, in Ireland and beyond – the combination of spectacular royal jewels, an apparently perfect crime, and rampant speculation about the possible involvement of senior figures of the Irish and English establishment meant that it received enormous press coverage, resulting in at least one libel case as a result of over-enthusiastic theorising about the culprits.

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The jewels themselves consisted of two star and badge regalia of the Order of St Patrick (one of which was reserved for the Sovereign) and five collars belonging to Knights of the Order. They were large pieces of ceremonial jewellery, consisting of diamonds, emeralds and rubies, and were collectively valued at more than £30,000 (well over £3m today). They were kept in a safe inside the office of Arthur Vicars, the Ulster King of Arms and therefore a senior government official at Dublin Castle. The jewels’ disappearance was discovered just 4 days before the arrival of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra for the Irish International Exhibition, and prompted enormous royal embarrassment, an official commission of enquiry and by 1912 had become the subject of acrimonious exchanges in the Westminster parliament when it was alleged (under cover of parliamentary privilege) that the solution to the theft had been covered up by authorities because it was connected to “criminal debauchery and sodomy being committed in the castle by officials, Army officers…of such position that their conviction and exposure would have led to an upheaval from which the Chief Secretary shrank”. Over the century since the theft, accusations have been made against individuals including the Lord Lieutenant’s son Lord Haddo, and the explorer Ernest Shackleton’s brother Francis as well as Vicars himself (like Vicars, Shackleton was employed in the Castle and had access to the safe from which the jewels disappeared). It has been described variously as a conservative plot to discredit and embarrass the Liberal government (represented in Dublin Castle by Lord Aberdeen, the Lord Lieutenant) and as an IRA plot to embarrass the entire British administration and raise funds by selling the jewels in America. While it seems most likely the jewels were smuggled abroad immediately to be broken up and sold, as late as 1927 some official Irish sources appeared to believe they were still extant and available for sale on the black market, whereas yet another version of the story suggests that the British royal family secretly bought them back not long after they were stolen, again in order to hush up a homosexuality scandal most likely involving Francis Shackleton and another Castle official with access to the jewels. Neither they nor anyone else was ever arrested or charged with the crime, although Shackleton was imprisoned and disgraced some years later for another theft. After dominating newspaper stories in Ireland and England in 1907, the story has continued to reappear every few years for more than a century, whenever a new theory emerges as to the culprits or the jewels’ fate. My personal favourite can be found here, but a cursory search will produce many more, and there have also been fictional versions (including a very salacious novel called Jewels, published in 1977) and a 2003 television documentary.

It may even have attracted the attention of Sherlock Holmes, as it has been suggested that Conan Doyle’s story ‘The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans’ (published in December 1908) was inspired by the theft of the Irish crown jewels, an argument that is certainly plausible. While no details of the story reflect the case, its basic structure (the theft and smuggling abroad of top secret military plans from a government safe, which turns out to have been the work of a trusted establishment figure) is similar in its main points. It is beyond the scope or expertise of this blog to adjudicate on whether the case was an influence on Conan Doyle, though the timing of the story’s publication eighteen months after the jewels’ disappearance does add credibility to the idea. What is certain however, is that the theft’s resemblance to a Sherlock Holmes story was clear to others at the time. In March 1908, a story entitled ‘Sherlock Holmes in Ireland, or The Diamonds of St Patrick. From the French’ had appeared in the story paper Ireland’s Own. The faithful Dr Watson who narrated most Holmes stories was here abandoned in favour of an unnamed French narrator, who nevertheless recounts the tale in the typical first person style of other Sherlock cases. According to this (very) short story, Holmes was asked to investigate the jewels’ disappearance, prompting his first visit to Ireland, of which the narrator comments, “he resembled in that nine-tenths of the English, who are keen travellers, but Ireland, poor and unhappy Ireland, in place of attracting them, repulses them. Without doubt they feel themselves culpable in this place, and they fear to see the pleasures of travelling spoiled by their regrets”. Having arrived in Dublin, Holmes and his narrator attend a levee at Dublin Castle, which provokes some republican disapproval from the French narrator, who is proud to describe himself as a ‘citizen of a Republic’. The plot then follows (extremely rapidly) a series of fairly standard Holmes detection techniques, including Holmes faking a faint outside the strong-room from which the jewels were stolen in order to be carried inside to inspect it, and then appearing in not one but two apparently convincing disguises (as both a country squire and a plumber). Finally he announces to the narrator that he knows who stole the jewels – but when asked to name the culprit, he responds “Wait until tomorrow evening…There is a great ball at the Viceroy’s Castle. At the particular moment when Lord Aberdeen, accompanied by his court, shall make his entry into the hall…I shall unmask the robber”. However, the next evening Holmes shows the narrator a telegram he has just received from some unnamed but senior member of government, begging him not to reveal the thief’s identity ‘for the safety of your country’. Holmes complies, explaining “I strongly suspect that there is underneath some affair of the State. If I made public my inquiry terrible calamities would happen. Perhaps we would have war with Germany”. And there the story ends, Holmes and our mysterious French narrator returning to London and the jewels remaining lost.

The story is thin, especially by the standards of Conan Doyle’s own prose, but its invention was in itself very clever – the theft of the Irish crown jewels from inside Dublin Castle, the failure to recover them, and the rumours and accusations swirling around several suspects who would normally have been considered above suspicion was itself highly reminiscent of a Sherlock Holmes case, and whoever wrote the story had obviously understood this very well. The story’s resolution of Holmes knowing the culprit’s identity but withholding it at the request of a very senior member of the establishment in order to protect matters of State also sailed tantalisingly close to some of the rumours about the theft which would have been widely-known in Ireland by the end of 1908, while remaining vague enough to avoid charges of libel from the individuals concerned. Of course, by 1912 some of those rumours would be publically stated in Parliament, but those statements had the benefit of parliamentary privilege, which Ireland’s Own did not.

But to modern readers, perhaps the most remarkable feature of this story was not its avoidance of libel accusations, but instead its cheerful breach of copyright law. In 1908, Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the best-selling writers in the world, and Sherlock Holmes was so popular that Doyle had famously had to bring him back from the dead in 1903. The stories had always been serialised in the Strand magazine, for whom they had been exceptionally lucrative, and were then collected in book form which also sold in enormous numbers. The publishing of a story using Holmes’ name, persona and distinctive detecting style was therefore an obvious attempt to take advantage of readers’ enthusiasm for Conan Doyle’s work – and was blatantly illegal. International enforcement of copyright claims such as this was still difficult, if not quite as impossible as it had been for most of the 19thC, when for example the American publishing industry had been largely founded on the wholesale pirating of English material. But Ireland and England operated under effectively the same copyright regimes in 1908, and had Conan Doyle or his publishers been aware of ‘Sherlock Holmes in Ireland, or The Diamonds of St Patrick’, they would have been in an unquestionable position to sue Ireland’s Own and its publisher, John Walsh. Given that Walsh ran the story paper so successfully – and indeed owned several newspapers and a large printing works – it is inconceivable that he and his staff did not know that their ‘Sherlock Holmes’ story was an actionable breach of copyright. By contrast, it is not entirely certain that the Ireland’s Own readership (many of whom were barely out of school) would all have understood that the story wasn’t actually by Conan Doyle, a point which would surely have enraged the author all the more had he ever known of it. The story’s publication is therefore an indication that the editorial staff of Ireland’s Own felt secure that it would not be seen by anyone with a professional interest in the authentic Sherlock Holmes stories – a sign perhaps that despite their occasional attempts to promote sales among Irish emigrants in Britain, in reality the paper did not circulate significantly outside Ireland.  This appears to have been an accurate prediction on their part, as the story seems to have generated no legal action – and remains the occasion of Sherlock Holmes’ only visit to Ireland.  And the Irish crown jewels remain missing.

References

The Theft of the Irish ‘Crown Jewels’ Online Exhibition 2007, National Archives of Ireland http://www.nationalarchives.ie/digital-resources/online-exhibitions/the-theft-of-the-irish-%E2%80%9Ccrown-jewels%E2%80%9D-2007/

Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans’, His Last Bow and the Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (Penguin Classics, 2008).

Robert Perrin, Jewels (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977)

The Strange Case of the Irish Crown Jewels (dir. Gerry Nelson, 2003)

Why Go Bald (or Grey)?: Advertising, Hair, and the Cult of Youth

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The ‘Why Go Bald’ sign on South Great George’s Street in Dublin is one of the city’s most-loved landmarks. One of the few remaining examples of neon advertising, it consists of a man’s head and shoulders, in which as the lights flash on and off he alternates between a full head of hair with a big smile, and total baldness with a frown. Designed in 1962 for the hair restoration clinic which still operates underneath it today, it is an icon of design history and also a reminder that our own era’s obsessions and anxieties about hair as an indicator of youthfulness and vitality are nothing new. In fact, advertisements for hair restorers, hair dyes, hair ‘food’ and even hair removal techniques were among the most frequent and visible examples of modern advertising, from the end of the 19thC.

capsuloids

Hair products were a very distinct sub-group of heavily-branded ‘personal grooming’ products, and the range and frequency with which they were advertised was striking. It is also noticeable that although some products simply claimed to clean, style or perfume hair, far more were focused upon eliminating the twin horrors of baldness and greying. Where baldness was concerned this was where, in an era of almost unregulated advertising, hair products intersected with quack medicine. A range of ‘hair restorers’ promised men (and sometimes women) that their thinning hair would be revived and grow like new. This was often accompanied by pseudo-scientific claims to have discovered the cause of thinning hair, and found a solution to it. Capsuloids, for example, claimed that hair loss was caused by ‘harmful germs’ in the hair roots – their product would not only kill these germs, but ‘…so nourish the hair roots that two hairs will grow from each root where only one hair grew before’. Their adverts often included a diagram of the scalp and hair root drawn at dramatic magnification, in order to demonstrate exactly where the harmful germs were lurking prior to taking Capsuloids. By contrast, their competitor Harlene Hair Drill claimed to have made an ‘Appalling Discovery Which Affects Your Hair. National Danger of Baldness’. Rather than germs, Harlene identified ‘scurf’ as the cause of hair loss, sternly warning that ‘no hair can withstand the insidious attacks of this loathsome scurf’ and illustrating the point with ‘before’ and ‘after’ drawings of baldness cured. In other adverts Harlene, obviously keen to let no hair restoration possibilities pass them by, also promised that their product was ‘unequalled for promoting the growth of the Beard and Moustache’, and even ‘Curing Weak and Thin Eyelashes’. Capsuloids and Harlene were advertised with British addresses for the placing of postal orders, but some enterprising Irish firms produced their own products, such as Boyd’s Oriental Hair Restorer, which also claimed that it would prevent baldness by curing dandruff, and could be purchased from their premises in Mary Street, Dublin.

boyds

If hair loss was perhaps the greatest concern to be exploited by the purveyors of patent cures, then going grey came a close second. If the adverts in papers and magazines are any indicator, both the men and women of early 20thC Ireland were routinely dying their hair, presumably with varying degrees of skill and subtlety. In 1911 the front wrapper of an issue of Ireland’s Own contained no fewer than 4 separate advertisements for pharmacies selling hair dye. These included J Leonard & Co on North Earl Street Dublin, who assured readers that ‘There Is No Need to Look Old’ and JJ Fitzgibbon of Kingstown who chose the more imperative ‘Don’t Look Old’. The alarmingly-named Necroceine hair dye made the highly unlikely claim in its advert that it ‘restores colour to the root, making detection impossible’.

necroceine

 

If the loss of hair or hair colour was one age-related anxiety to be addressed through patent cures, then the appearance of hair in the wrong places was another. By the start of the 20thC, there were plenty of electrolysis practitioners advertising their services in Ireland – and here perhaps we might pause to contemplate just how painful and downright dangerous early 20thC electrolysis probably was – to those keen to remove ‘unsightly hair’.

pomeroy

Mrs Pomeroy, who had a beauty salon on Grafton Street and sold her own range of ‘skin foods’, offered it, as did the city’s most upmarket hair salon, Maison Prost on St Stephen’s Green (which sometimes advertised itself as being ‘coiffeur, parfumeur, etc to his Excellency the Lord Lieutenant’, and remained in business until the 1960s). Alternatively Miss Hulbert of Ballsbridge regularly advertised her electrolysis service, and Miss Read of Dawson Street offered electrolysis and facial massage. Most alarmingly of all, in 1907 readers of Irish Society were invited to purchase a ‘Tensfeldt Apparatus’ in order to perform electrolysis on themselves in the privacy of their own homes. Amazingly, no accounts of fatalities appear to have been recorded!

 

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As was discussed here in an earlier post, the development of branded products (of which hair restorers and dyes were examples) led not only to an increase in the quantity of advertising in order to embed the brand in customers’ memories, but also to a more important shift in tone of that advertising. The move was from an ‘informative’ tone which emphasised the availability and nature of products customers were already looking for, towards an ‘emotive’ tone which sought to create markets for products customers did not yet know they wanted by highlighting a need or problem which only that brand could solve. Inevitably this change of tone meant that advertising increasingly played upon people’s fears and anxieties (‘psychoanalysis in reverse’, as Leo Lowenthal would famously describe the profession in the mid-20thC). It was therefore no coincidence that products promising to make people look younger and better-looking were those suited to this new style of advertising, and upon which the modern advertising industry was built. Aggressively branded, with wildly imaginative names and logos, their advertisements developed some of the first uses of an appeal to emotions, aspirations and fears in order to convince customers that their product – and only their product – could make them happier, healthier and more successful. This had an obvious logic to it – it is not particularly difficult to invoke fear and anxiety in most people regarding their health, youthfulness and physical attractiveness, and this is why products such as soaps, quack medicines and beauty products were those which pioneered this approach to marketing. Soap advertising is often credited with effectively pioneering the principles and techniques of modern advertising, and with good reason. A product easily mass-manufactured cheaply and on an industrial scale, and also one which was small, simple to package, transport and sell cheaply, it was an obvious vehicle for mass advertising and in Ireland as elsewhere the pages of every newspaper and magazine were dominated by soap adverts by the end of the 19thC. Not only were these often lavish, full-colour illustrations such as the famous use by Pears Soap of Millais’ painting ‘Bubbles’, but they were also pioneers of brand-names, advertising slogans and images which sought to play on the emotional possibilities of their product – promising sunshine (‘Sunlight’ soap), brightness and health versus grime and disease without them. In a world which still had high levels of infant mortality, medical care of limited effectiveness, and few of the labour-saving devices we consider necessary to clean our homes, our clothes or ourselves, people had good reason to fear dirt and disease and advertisers rapidly learned to prey upon those anxieties. While the international brands such as Sunlight and Lux were the dominant advertisers, an Irish brand called McClinton’s soap (manufactured in Donaghmore, Co Tyrone) achieved considerable success as a luxury brand which was heavily (and inventively) advertised using a fake Irish village called Ballymaclinton, and images of Irish ‘colleens’ whose soft complexion was attributed to their use of McClinton’s soap.

colleensdancing

Then as now advertisements were often a revealing indicator of the anxieties of a particular cultural moment. The frequency of advertisements for hair restorers and dyes – and the fact that they appeared across an enormous range of Irish publications – suggested that what all of these potions, tablets and treatments had in common was their ability to prey upon the anxieties of a population keen to appear young and vigorous. The prices, style of adverts and range of publications they appeared in demonstrate that this quest for youthfulness crossed class, gender and other demographic lines. While electrolysis was only advertised in the upmarket publications (and offered at upmarket salons such as Maison Prost) and was presumably an expensive treatment, most of these brands were cheap, a shilling or less per bottle, so apparently fears about personal appearance (and aging) were pretty much universal across otherwise significant divides of class, gender and location. The cult of youth we often associate with post-World War One (with its flappers, jazz babies and dramatically more adolescent-looking beauty ideals for women) had actually begun to manifest itself much earlier. The ‘new woman’ who became the subject of so much discussion and agonising from 1890 onwards took various forms, but perhaps most frequently was a very young woman who challenged social conventions about work, dress and relationships as she first reached adulthood. In America this emphasis upon female youthfulness was particularly evident in the early 20thC fascination with that beguiling creature the college ‘co-ed’, often depicted in the style of the famously vigorous ‘Gibson girls’. While Ireland did not share the ‘co-ed’ phenomenon, its leading women’s magazine, Lady of the House, did make reference to changing conventions of female beauty in 1907 by citing the ‘Gibson ideal’, suggesting that it was an internationally-understood concept by that point. Less light-heartedly, a widely-pervading sense of anxiety about being ‘left behind’ was clearly evident in the wider culture of the early 20thC, in a society increasingly framed by a sense of competition. For women, this took the form of concerns about being left ‘on the shelf’, as the popular press frequently stoked fears about the declining marriage rate, alternatively blaming ‘new women’ for being poor wife material, or blaming men for not wanting to take on the responsibilities of marriage – at one point the Irish Packet even discussed a proposal (made in all seriousness) for a ‘bachelor tax’ to resolve this problem. Either way, in a world in which marriage was still the primary ambition for most women for both cultural and pragmatic reasons, the fear of being an ‘old maid’ overtaken by younger competitors on the marriage market was real. For men, the fear was of being thrown ‘on the scrap heap’, especially for working-class or lower-middle-class men at the mercy of employers who could almost always find a younger and cheaper replacement. Those doing manual labour had an obvious incentive to wish to appear young and strong, but the rapidly-expanding army of clerks and other low-ranking office workers also had reasons for anxiety about being seen as over-the-hill and expendable. The combined effects of these all of these cultural currents then, was a market of both men and women apprehensive about visible signs of aging – and therefore receptive to the promise that their youthfulness could be regained for the price of a shilling bottle of hair restorer.

References

Stephanie Rains, ‘“Do You Ring? Or Are you Rung for?”: Mass Media, Class, and Social Aspiration in Edwardian Ireland’, in New Hibernia Review, 18/4 Winter, 2014.

Stephanie Rains, ‘The Ideal Home (Rule) Exhibition: Ballymaclinton and the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition’, in Field Day Review 7, 2011.

Juliann Sivulka, Stronger Than Dirt: A Cultural History of Advertising Personal Hygiene in America, 1875-1940, Prometheus Books: New York, 2001.