Here comes everybody – Oliver O’Hanlon on the versatile acting career of Paddy Joyce, James Joyce’s nephew

James Joyce is not often associated with the small screen but there is a familial link between the writer and television. His nephew, Paddy Joyce, starred in a range of popular British television programmes in the 1960s and 1970s. These include Z Cars, Eastenders, and Coronation Street.

Born 100 years ago this year in the Italian port city of Trieste, his birth name was not Paddy Joyce but Patrizio Schaurek. His father was a Czech banker named Frantisek Schaurek and his mother was Eileen Joyce, a younger sister of James.

Eileen moved to Trieste in 1910 at age 20. She lived in the Joyce’s flat, did most of the housekeeping and looked after the two Joyce children, Giorgio and Lucia. Describing her move to Trieste as a “new life opening out”, Eileen learned Italian and practised her linguistic skills with her brother Jim, as she called him.

In an interview in later life, Eileen said that the years spent in what she termed the “gay little city” were the happiest years of her life. At parties in the flat, everyone would sing and play musical instruments. “We were lighthearted”, Eileen recalled and added that “we were all young people together”.

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Eileen met her future husband when he attended English classes given by James Joyce in Trieste. Joyce was the best man at their wedding in 1915. Misfortune visited Eileen, however, and she had to return to Ireland with her three children in February 1928 following the death of her husband.

The family lived on Mountjoy Square and young Paddy was sent to school in nearby Belvedere College, just like his writer uncle. It has been said that he sat at a desk which had the initials J.J. carved into the lid.

Whatever about Eileen returning to Ireland after living abroad for a number of years, Dublin must have been a bit of a shock to the system for her children who had only really known continental European languages, cultures and customs up to that point.

Paddy was around five years of age when he arrived in Dublin and could only speak Italian, much to the amusement of some of the local boys. When they heard him speak, they would chide him with chants of “gowwa that” but he quickly picked up the language of his peers.

In a sign of how the Schaurek children were so used to what was happening in Italy politically at that time and the all-pervasive cult of personality of Il Duce, one of Paddy’s sisters told the story of what happened when she attended the Capitol Cinema located off O’Connell Street.

Bozena and her sister Nora stood to attention and gave the fascist salute when Benito Mussolini appeared on the screen in a newsreel. They did it out of “force of habit”, Bozena said and added that they sat down again when they realised that nobody else in the cinema was standing.

During his time in Belvedere, Paddy acted in Gilbert and Sullivan operas, including The Gondoliers and The Mikado. In the 1940s, with the Old Belvedere Musical Society, he performed in Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera, Iolanthe and in the Edwardian musical comedy, The Arcadians. He was also a member of the UCD Players.

After school, Paddy turned his attention to singing. Initially, he formed a close harmony quartet with three other gentlemen named Four Dots and a Dash, subsequently renamed The Four Ramblers. In 1949, he was part of a trio with two ladies named The Humoresques, which toured Canada with the popular English comedian and actor George Formby.

Names were important for Paddy. He adopted his mother’s maiden name of Joyce when he went looking for acting roles. He claimed that because of his Czech surname, he kept being considered mostly for central European roles.

Paddy treaded the boards on London’s West End. He spent a year and a half performing in the long running stage show Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be in the early 1960s. His first film role was in the 1953 war-time adventure, The Cruel Sea, which starred Jack Hawkins and Donald Sinden. He played a soldier in the 1969 film, Oh! What a Lovely War.

As regards the small screen, Paddy appeared in several plays that were made for Telefís Éireann but he did the bulk of his television work across the water.

One of his longest running roles on British television was as a rag-and-bone man in the popular soap opera Coronation Street.

Appearing on screen between 1968 and 1974, his character, Tommy Deakin, trawled the streets of the fictional town of Weatherfield collecting scrap on a cart which was pulled by a donkey.

Paddy lived in Muswell Hill, London, with his Canadian wife, Dorothy, and two children. He died of a stroke in London in the year 2000.