Sticky wicket – An Irishman’s Diary on Arnold Bax, 1916 and the ‘googly’

As with Joseph Mary Plunkett’s roller-skating career (Irishman’s Diary, April 15th), I’m indebted to Declan Kiberd for another fascinating vignette from Ireland’s revolutionary period – about a cricket exhibition in one of the rebel garrisons of Easter Week.

The scene was Jacob’s Factory, which was under the command of Thomas McDonagh but saw very little fighting. The insurgents had, however, captured two British soldiers, and it emerged that one of these was adept as a cricketing spin bowler, something in which McDonagh took great interest.

Specifically the soldier knew the secret of the “googly”, a fiendish delivery then still new to the sport. So out of curiosity, and to pass time, the rebel commander improvised a cricket bat from a piece of floorboard and, with a tennis ball deputising for the real thing, asked his prisoner for a demonstration.

Kiberd first heard the story some years ago after a talk in St Enda’s, Padraig Pearse’s old school, where McDonagh also taught. He had been commenting on Pearse’s ecumenical attitude to sport, for example allowing students to vote every summer on whether they wanted to play hurling or cricket.

This in turn prompted a member of the audience to share the memory of McDonagh’s 1916 bowling tutorial.

And the story came from a well-placed source, since the audience member turned out to be a relative of Sean Lemass.

The Googly, by the way, was invented (circa 1900) by one Bernard Bosenquet, an Eton-and-Oxford type whose even more splendidly named son, Reginald, would become a household name as a TV newsreader in the 1970s.

The ball’s fame derives from the fact that it at first appears to be another type of spin-bowling – the “leg-break” – until it bounces, whereupon it moves in the opposite direction to where the batsman expects it. Hence the ball’s alternative nickname – the “wrong ’un”.

This may be an apt link to yet another story from 1916, of which the same Prof Kiberd reminds me. It concerns Arnold Bax, the very English composer who at an impressionable age (19) fell in love with the poetry of WB Yeats, and thereafter became very Irish, living in Glencolmcille for many years and occasionally adopting the pseudonym of Dermot O’Byrne.

Bax was equally smitten by another poet, Padraig Pearse, on their first meeting, recalling him afterwards as a “strange, death-aspiring dreamer” whose eyes were “lit with the unwavering flame of the fanatic”. As for Pearse, he was quite taken with Bax too, if less less poetically, confiding to friends at the same gathering that the Englishman was “one of us”.

So after the Rising had been suppressed, the composer (in the guise of O’Byrne) responded with a bitter ballad about the failure of Pearse’s fellow countrymen to support him:

“Well, the last fire is trodden down,/Our dead are rotting fast in lime,/We all can sneak back into town,/Stravague about as in old time [. . . ]And when the devil made us wise/Each in his own peculiar hell,/With desert hearts and drunken eyes/We’re free to sentimentalise/By corners where the martyrs fell.”

Also, writing as Bax, he composed a concerto for Pearse, In Memoriam (1917), which, whether by his own wishes, or because it was politically controversial, was not given much airing at that time.

But fast-forward to the 1940s, when the once-considerable popularity of Bax’s romantic music was in decline. He was back in England by then, fleeing London for holidays in Scotland rather than Ireland, although he still hoped to die here (and he would).

Among the honours his career had earned, he was now “Master of the King’s Musick”. But he was also doing occasional – and reluctant – work for the cinema, which in common with the modern world in general, he disliked. He complained that film directors had no respect for music, and that his work was often used as mere background to “quite unnecessary talk”.

Nevertheless, he did agree to write the score for David Lean's 1948 version of Oliver Twist. And although he found no inspiration in the book, he was able to recycle parts of In Memoriam for use in the film.

Thus what started out as a lament for Padraig Pearse was respun, subtly, as a musical version of the Googly. When it finally hit the ground, it had become the accompaniment to – among other scenes – the mental torment of Bill Sikes, after he murders poor Nancy, and just before the lynch mob arrives.

@FrankmcnallyIT