Local History: History and art merge in life and works of Percy French

If local history is about anything it is about lives lived, and in this sense it overlaps with biography. Berrie O'Neill's Tones That Are Tender: Percy French 1854-1920 (Lilliput Press, €25) recounts the life of one of Ireland's most illustrious celebrities – although The Irish Times once referred to his songs as "bucolic burlesques demeaning to the Irish people".

Music was at the forefront of French’s life, but he had a spread of creative talents as a poet, painter and parodist. His versatile career is presented through 29 short cameos by an admirer of his work.

Born at Cloonyquin, a shooting lodge in Co Roscommon, French as a young boy attended Elphin Cathedral for Sunday worship, where a pocketful of gooseberries helped get him through the dean’s services.

He spent his time at Trinity College Dublin playing lawn tennis and the banjo, as well as painting, all of which, he later wrote, “must have retarded my progress a good deal”.

The road to becoming a professional entertainer began with the Kinnypottle Komics, a minstrel group named after the Kinnypottle stream in Cavan, where French worked as an inspector of drains.

He went on to embrace many roles, including editing the Jarvey magazine, producing a comic opera, The Knight of the Road, about the Irish highwayman Jack Freeney, and painting (ambidextrously) romantic landscapes in Ireland, England, Europe and North America.

But it is for his enduring songs, reflecting social history and philosophical humour, that French is most remembered. At their height his one-man entertainments touched every part of Ireland, and he performed in more than 180 towns.

His audiences loved Are Ye Right There, Michael?, Phil the Fluter’s Ball, Slattery’s Mounted Fut and – his most successful song of all – The Mountains o’ Mourne, which Pigotts of Dublin initially turned down because it was “not serious enough for a ballad, not funny enough for a comic song”.

The biography has a strong cultural frame of reference, bringing out French’s ingenuity and eclectic side. Handsomely illustrated, it features 30 of his delicate watercolours, many inspired by the sprinkled effect of light.

French died in 1920, a decade before the arrival of the golden era of the cinema, which brought with it a new form of entertainment coupled with a fantasy world. This is reflected in Goin’ to the Pictures (€15), by Frank O’Donoghue, which concentrates on Waterford but covers an area from Wexford to east Co Cork. It celebrates the central role of the big screen in the lives of locals in the middle decades of the 20th century and the days before television.

Since the 1950s the author has kept a diary of his cinema visits, and he notes the classic westerns and romances, as well as some of his favourite lines (“You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din”), which he went around repeating for some time.

He discusses the managers, doormen, projectionists, apprentice operators and ushers. Staff at the Rex in Tramore, for example, wore military-style uniforms with brass buttons and pillbox hats.

A doctor in Waterford, Billy O’Keefe loved the cinema, but in the 1950s his work occasionally spoiled his enjoyment. “Dr O’Keefe Wanted” was flashed up by the projectionist on the screen of the Savoy cinema, which meant his services were required to deliver a baby; when he attempted to watch the film for a second time, to find out how it ended, he was again called away to help another mother through her labour.

Postcards from tourist-haunted parts of Munster are the raison d'etre of two new books. Ring of Kerry: The Postcard Collection (Amberley, €17), by Kieran McCarthy, focuses on south Co Kerry and the Iveragh Peninsula, a dramatic landscape with Ireland's highest mountains, which has fascinated publishers.

Since the late 19th century postcards have framed a world for visitors, and many images have entered the collective memory. In those days a trip around the Ring was called the Grand Atlantic Tour, a Victorian precursor to the 21st-century marketing of the same route by Fáilte Ireland.

The postcards all tell a story and have much to offer students of cultural landscapes. Many images of Killarney and its lakes were mass produced by the leading publisher Raphael Tuck & Sons. Those in the Oilette series were impressionistic and were described as “veritable miniature oil paintings”.

The author suggests that poverty was romanticised, showing harsh life in rural cabins or an impoverished family fending for themselves; other photographs, featuring the Killarney cooperage, idealised the workaday life.

Factual notes, with nuggets of historical information on the built heritage, such as Pugin’s cathedral in Killarney, complement each image. Pictures of Muckross Abbey, the burial place of prominent Kerry poets, depict it as “the epitome of an ancient ruin of civilisation”.

In the second book Well, Here I Am in Ballycotton: A History Through Postcards (Lettertec, €15), Peter O'Shea tells the story of the popular east Co Cork seaside resort through the prism of more than 100 black-and-white postcards, as well as maps, photographs and advertisements.

The illustrations track the town’s changes from the early 20th century up to the arrival of John Hinde with high-quality colour. The images are juxtaposed alongside accounts of angling, regattas, lifeboat rescues, and the popular excursion steamers that brought people from Cork or Cobh.

The curious story of the sighting of a 60m-long sea serpent, or “marine monster”, by a man on a boat off Ballycotton Island in 1850 is recounted. The creature is vividly described as “an eel of monstrous magnitude . . . not by any means ferocious; on the contrary its aspect was rather benevolent and indolent.”

Paul Clements is the author of Wandering Ireland's Wild Atlantic Way: From Banba's Crown to World's End, recently published by the Collins Press