Trevor White - Alfie: The Life and Times of Alfie Byrne

Trevor White

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ALFIE

The Life and Times of Alfie Byrne

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First published 2017

Copyright Trevor White, 2017

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover photo courtesy of Peter Matthews, Matthews Museum of Cycling History Design by Simon OConnor

ISBN: 978-0-241-98231-0

In memory of Tim White, 19762017

If one awoke a Dubliner in the middle of the night, and asked him the name of the Lord Mayor, the chances are that he would mutter, without opening his eyes, Alfie Byrne.

Irish Times, 3 November 1956

Since the year 1876, the Freedom of Dublin has been given to eighty-one people. These fourteen played a part in the life of Alfie Byrne.

The greatest of our evils, and the worst of our crimes is poverty; our first duty a duty to which every consideration should be sacrificed is not to be poor.

George Bernard Shaw

Dublin was an Irish village, a Viking town and an English city. In the eighteenth century, some people called it the second city of the British empire, but that claim was always more impressive than accurate, rather like Dublins conversation. An English actor, Samuel Foote, once said that he didnt know what the beggars of London did with their cast-off clothes until he saw the beggars of Dublin.

After the Act of Union, when the parliament on College Green achieved the ignoble distinction of voting itself out of existence, Dublin was politically castrated. In the nineteenth century, the heart of the city the area governed by Dublin Corporation became a refuge for the victims of famine, and the middle classes fled to suburbs like Rathmines, Pembroke and Clontarf. By the 1880s, Dublin had the worst urban adult mortality rate in the United Kingdom. Sen OCaseys neighbours bought the cheapest tea and the cheapest fat, and waited for unsold bread to grow stale [so] that they might buy that cheaper, too.

The year 1882 saw the birth of amon de Valera, who would become Irelands most influential statesman; of James Joyce, who would become its greatest writer; and of Alfie Byrne, who was the most popular Dublin-born politician of the twentieth century. They all made a singular impression, but one of these men is now forgotten. This is the story of his life and times.

Alfred Byrne was born on 14 March 1882. The second of eight children, he had one sister and six brothers. His childhood home was at 36 Seville Place, a five-room terraced house in the workers parish of St Laurence OToole One of Byrnes younger brothers died as an infant. Another died at birth.

Byrne had tangled roots, like many Dubliners: town and country, Catholic and Protestant.

His father and grandfather were born less than a mile from his own birthplace, which allowed him to claim that he was a third-generation Dubliner. His mother, Frances who was known as Fanny was the granddaughter of Colonel Dowman, a Protestant soldier in the British army who had lived in Cork. Alfie was named after his mothers older brother, Alfred, who died at the age of thirty that same spring.

Byrnes father, Tom, worked in Dublin port, just as his own father had done before him; he was variously described as a ships engineer, a docker, an engine fitter and a ships pilot, and the last printed reference to Tom Byrne described him as shore engineer to the Dublin Port and Docks Board. He saw the cargo of the world arriving in Europes largest village. There is As a fugleman for higher pay and more rights, he overstepped the mark at a time when organized labour was struggling to assert itself in Dublin.

As a result of this indignity, the family moved to an even smaller, two-bedroom house at 28 Lower Oriel Street, and two of the boys, Lar and Alfie, had to leave school to find work in order to support their parents and six younger siblings. At the OConnell School on North Richmond Street, run by the Christian Brothers, Alfie was briefly a contemporary of James Joyce, and of Sen T. OKelly, who would go on to become something of a political nemesis. But now, his formal education came to an end. He was thirteen years old.

Leaving school at such a young age was not unusual at the time, and Byrne quickly found his feet. Within a few weeks he was selling programmes outside the Tivoli Theatre on Burgh Quay, and serving an apprenticeship as a mechanic in a bicycle workshop on Dawson Street. The business was owned by Charles Findlater, a scion of the well-known Dublin grocers, and his partner, a man called Martin, whose wife, Emmy, was a sister of Fanny, Byrnes mother.

As the birthplace of the pneumatic tyre, Ireland had a central part in the cycling craze then sweeping the world. On Dawson Street just down the road from the grand official residence he would occupy as Lord Mayor Byrne worked on some of the earliest safety bicycles, and later in life he would pride himself on the fact that he always carried out running repairs on his own bicycle. At a dinner for the motoring industry, Byrne spoke about earning his first half-crown as a wheel-builder. Years later, the Sunday Chronicle summarized his reverie:

In the spring of 1900, the ageing Queen Victoria made a visit to Dublin. When the Lord Mayor, Thomas Pile, proposed a formal welcome to the queen, thirty-two members of the City Council agreed with Pile; twenty-two disagreed. A young Dubliner called W. T. Cosgrave condemned the result of the vote in a letter to the Irish Independent: It should be remembered that within three years of her majestys accession the population of Ireland was nine million. Now it is only four million.

The news of the monarchs visit came as a shock: the city had only three weeks to prepare. A mock castle gate was hastily erected on Leeson Street Bridge, so that the queen could make a dramatic entrance into her city, and the visit was a festive occasion, with Union Jacks fluttering on rooftops and gates. But the jollity was not universal. W. B. Yeats derided those Dubliners who welcomed Victoria, while his great love, Maud Gonne, offered a trenchant critique of the Famine Queen, who had taken a shamrock into her withered hand to recruit Irish soldiers to fight for the British army in the Boer War.