clearclassics:Percy French (1854-1920)

It is time I wrote about this great Irishman whose songs I know as well as I know my Our Father and Hail Mary. ‘The Mountains of Mourne’, ‘Come Back Paddy Reilly’, ‘The Darling Girl from Clare’ and especially ‘Are You Right There, Michael’ were sung at gatherings and around the house and have always been in my head. They were my first introduction to the Ireland of my grandparents’ young adulthood, and after nearly a lifetime studying history I realize what a worthwhile and valuable introduction they were.

Two gorgeous books about French appeared in 2015-2016 by Alan Tongue and Berrie O’Neill (full references below). At that stage, I had written about and lectured on this great songwriter/comedian/cultural commentator/painter/civil engineer and it was a humbling experience, reading these two books, to find out how much more there was to find out about him. I hadn’t realized he was a pioneering cyclist and editor of several short-lived comical journals, but nor had I realized that he was so fully in the mainstream of Anglophone writers of his time. One of the illustrations in Alan Tongue’s book is a seating plan for the Incorporated Society of Authors Dinner in London in 1892. On his copy of the seating plan, Percy French (who was there) drew sketches of Oscar Wilde, Gerald du Maurier, Andrew Lang, Walter Besant and many others, and got them to sign their names. Others at the dinner included William (‘up the airy mountain’) Allingham and the best-selling novelist Eliza Lynn Linton. At this stage French had been publishing ballads, skits and sketches for over 15 years. His first success, ‘Abdul Abul-bul Ameer,’ was in 1877 and was much pirated; he made hardly any money on it. The English writer Antonia White (whom I mentioned in an earlier blog) who was born around the turn of the century, records that her father, the Cambridge-educated classical scholar Cecil Botting, had two party pieces – one was a song she calls ‘Abdul the bulbul ameer’ and another was the ‘Nightmare Song’ from Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe, a very funny song which begins ‘When you’re lying awake with a dismal headache and repose is taboo’d by anxiety/I conceive you may use any language you choose to engage in without impropriety.’ It goes on to describe the kind of ridiculous frustrating dreams you have when you’re sleeping uncomfortably. Percy French belonged to the same cultural comic world as Gilbert & Sullivan (whom I also love).

Another author Percy French sketched at that dinner was Jerome K.Jerome, the author of the comic classicThree Men In A Boat which came out in 1889 and is hailed as a comic masterpiece. (I don’t find it as funny as I find French or Gilbert & Sullivan but I like it, and my father thought it was hilarious.) French, like Jerome, belonged to the generation of young(ish)men who had the kind of jobs (junior professional and civil service) which gave them just enough money and time off for cheap(ish) pursuits (punting on rivers, playing banjos, making comic verses). They weren’t well-off enough to marry, yet, so they had to fill their time with joyful and inventive leisure. They had to make their own fun.

William Percy French was born in 1854, a younger son of minor gentry in Roscommon, Protestant, like that other even more culturally-influential Roscommon man born 6 years later, Douglas Hyde. French went to Trinity in 1872 and discovered tennis, music, theatre and painting, taking the longest time then on record to graduate. His engineering degree got him a job with the Midland Great Western Railway and then with the Office of Public Works in Cavan. That was when he called himself ‘William, Inspector of Drains’, in a comical poem which his friend (unknownst to French) sent to his superior in Dublin, a Mr Le Fanu, who responded in several clever verses beginning with ‘The Commissioner thanks – and a copy retains…’ God be with the days when people in the public service had time for that kind of fun.

All those years French was still writing and putting on skits and plays and painting, and he eventually became a full-time writer/entertainer in the 1890s. He described the Ireland he saw at first-hand growing up in Cloneyquin, Roscommon, and in Cavan too. Irish people loved his songs at the time, and his poems, prose and parodies went into multiple editions in the first six decades of independence when there was a huge popular heave against ‘stage-Irishism’. French’s huge affection for and understanding of the people and topics he sang about cancelled out any trace of cultural condescension.

French chronicled the rapid modernisation of Ireland at the turn of the century. The comicality of ‘Are You Right There, Michael'(1902)rests on an expectation not only that trains will run on time (something that didn’t really happen all over rural Europe till the 1930s) but that holidays and excursions are important. The town-dweller who wants to take the air in Kilkee and Lahinch keeps being thwarted by goods trains and parcels for customers – all crucial to the economy. (In the U.S.A, today, passenger trains still give way to ‘freight’ trains.) The narrator of ‘Dear Danny I’m Taking the Pen in my Hand’ is ‘sailing in style’ in the ‘grand Allen Liner’, with good meals three times a day and a bed and obviously, writing materials; no coffin ship, this. ‘Phil The Fluther’s Ball’ is about a novel phenomenon in the late nineteenth century, the ‘paid hooley’ which could only happen in a cash economy. And it isn’t true that French was apolitical. He made fun of Queen Victoria’s visit to Ireland in a comical verse in 1900. And that verse in ‘The Mountains of Mourne’ about seeing England’s king from the top of a bus reveals him to be a Home Ruler, like the vast majority of Irish nationalists up to 1916. He threw himself with gusto into the British war effort (entertaining and fund-raising) from 1914 but then, so did most Irish nationalists; the majority of the Irish Volunteers (170,000) followed John Redmond, as opposed to the 13,000 who served ‘neither king nor kaiser’. Home Rule was on the losing side in history, but for a long time it seemed to be the winning side.

So French was first and foremost an Irishman, with a strong love for his native land, but he was also part of a wider cultural movement in Britain/Ireland in the years 1870 to 1914. It would be stretching it a bit to say he was as popular in Britain as he was in Ireland but some of his songs were certainly known, and sung there. Apparently a favourite song of the ‘Queen Mother’ (the mother of Queen Elizabeth II), was ‘Slattery’s Mounted Foot’. She was born Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in Scotland in 1900 and had a lot of older brothers who probably sang this song at home at family gatherings. One of those brothers, Fergus, died in the Great War, in 1915. This got me wondering if one of the reasons for the enduring popularity of French’s songs, and of Gilbert & Sullivan’s, and of a lot of other songs from the turn of the century, was that they were on the lips of a doomed generation, and were therefore revered in memory by the survivors.

I might come back to Percy French again – there is a lot I would like to say about him as a philosopher and a poet. There is an excellent Percy French Summer School every year in Castlecoote, Co.Roscommon, run by Kevin Finnerty, and I’ve learned a lot about Percy French from it, especially from papers delivered by the scholar Brian Griffin over the years.

BOOKS:

Alan Tongue, with a foreword by Paul Muldoon, The Love-letters of Percy French and more besides (Dublin:Lilliput 2015).

Berrie O’Neill, Tones That Are Tender: Percy French 1854-1920 (Dublin: Percy French Society and Lilliput Press 2016).

Percy French, Prose, Poems and Parodies (Dublin: Talbot Press 1959) – there are multiple editions of this book, and many have different songs and poems in them. I still have to find one that has ‘Abdul’ or ‘Drumcollgher’, but no doubt it is out there.