Madmen, Dublin-style

Oh for the days of the working lunch that went on until 5pm and the raft of great characters, major and minor, who once worked in Ireland’s advertising industry. That was in the pre-digital days when all the ad agencies were locally owned, before the multinationals moved in.

The standard had been set in this newspaper, around 65 years ago, in the days when GJC Tynan O'Mahony was the general manager. He had a wooden leg; the story goes that in the early 1920s, he got trapped in a lift in London and performed a DIY amputation with his penknife. Never lost for a bon mot , years later, he announced one night that he was going to go to a fancy dress ball dressed as a toffee apple, an excellent example of lateral thinking. He was also said to have burst into a meeting of Freemasons in Molesworth Street, Dublin, bringing fraternal greetings from his Holiness the Pope.

Unsurprisingly, O’Mahony set the pace for a legion of characters in the Irish advertising industry. He prepared the stage for his son, Dave Allen, the TV comedian.

One of the best of the characters in advertising here wasn’t Irish, but American, Mack Kile, the man who ran the Irish International agency until he left Ireland in 1975. It was he who created the perennial conundrum about how you get the figs into Jacob’s fig roll biscuits.

Many other stories were told about Kile, including the apocryphal one about how he arrived at a presentation for Dunlop tyres curled up inside a gigantic tyre.

Some of the characters attracted apt nicknames. The late Peter Owens had learned much from his time working in Madison Avenue, New York, when the Madmen there were in full swing. After he set up his own agency here in Dublin, he used to glide around town in a very posh car. Not for nothing was he known as “the little grey gnome from the West (Mayo)”. He was noted for the sharpest elbows in adland.

On the other hand, the late Bill Walshe of the Innovation Group, was known as the greatest and most amusing spoofer in advertising.

Any deficiencies in the jokes department were always made up for further down the line, as some of the copywriters and artists in the agencies were always up for a little jape or two. One of the well- known agencies in Dublin in the old days was Janus, then based at Parnell Square. One day, Denis Garvey, its boss, gazed out of his window with not a little bemusement, to see a brassiere dangling from a line. It turned out to have been a little prank devised by certain members of the creative department.

The old McConnells, founded by Charlie McConnell, was then the number one agency in town and, handily, the Red Bank restaurant was nearby, in D’Olier Street. Deals were often done and creative themes dreamed up over interminably long lunches, heavy on drink and wreathed in smoke, a typical scenario for ad agencies in those innocent days.

This prediliction for drink extended to the annual advertising awards festival, founded in Kinsale, Co Cork, in 1962. In its early years, it was notorious for the sheer quantity of drink consumed. In one famous incident, in Acton’s Hotel, late one night during one festival, a suitably inebriated senior advertising sales figure from RTÉ astonished everyone by appearing among the multitude dressed in nothing but a paper hat.

This tradition of outrageous behaviour carried on until quite recently.

Once, the late Don O’Connell, the former seaman who walked with a decidedly imperfect gait and who ran the old Doherty Advertising agency, was entertaining a potential client in his office. He took the man’s very expensive overcoat, then promptly flung it out of the window; it was caught by someone stationed on the pavement below. O’Connell’ s reasoning behind this bizarre act was that even if he didn’t get the advertising account, the man who had come to see him would never forget Doherty Advertising.

The original madmen of Madison Avenue have been well captured in the television series of the same name. But the truth is that once, we had a cast of great characters in the Irish advertising industry who were among the best of the breed.