Further to Joseph Holloway’s eyewitness accounts of The Plough and the Stars riots 100 years ago this week in Dublin (Diary, January 28th), reader Eric Villiers has emailed about a less well-known theatrical controversy in which the same man played a part.
An architect by profession, Holloway attended every major play in Dublin for half a century and was blamed by WB Yeats for helping orchestrate the 1907 Playboy riots. Holloway later recorded the 1926 disturbances, also at the Abbey Theatre, in his diaries.
But in between, in June 1917, he may have helped avert trouble on the opening night of a show at the Empire Theatre (now the Olympia) on Dame Street. The occasion that time was a musical concert featuring a young woman of obscure origins who had shot to stardom as the “Dublin Street Singer”.
In fact, she was Armagh-born Mary Connolly, a childhood emigrant to Lancashire, northwest England, where as a teenage “pit brow lass” (working at the surface of coal mines) she survived the Pretoria Pit disaster of 1910 when 344 men and boys died.
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Her prodigious singing voice survived, too, at least in the short term. First, with her mother dead and her father terminally ill, she supported the family for a time as a farm labourer.
Then she and a brother James – who was of poor health – went back to Ireland, where by 1916 they were living off what she could earn by singing on the streets of Dublin and country towns.
In the wake of the 1916 Rising, her patriotic ballads struck a chord. So did the power and clarity of her voice. Emanating from such a frail body, it moved many listeners to tears, Holloway included. Hearing her for the first time from his home on Dublin’s Northumberland Road, he wrote: “I had to hold back the sob that rose in my throat.”
Such talent could not be left to the streets for long. As Eric, who is himself from Armagh and has written extensively about Connolly’s career, notes, her breakthrough came one evening in May 1917.
She was singing on Ailesbury Road, one of Dublin’s most affluent addresses, where a Miss AJ Stewart invited her in. Stewart subsequently introduced her to a leading newspaper columnist of the time. Then one thing led to another and, by June, Connolly was making her debut at the Empire where long lines queued down Dame Street to hear her.
The sudden rise to fame had spawned various rumours, however, in which she was variously a Belgian refugee or a down-at-heel diva from the Continent, forced to reinvent herself under an assumed identity.
The show’s promoter, Barney Armstrong, felt a need to reassure the public of her native credentials. To which end, he included a line on the showbills claiming she was “as Irish as the pigs of Drogheda”.
This is a curious phrase, itself worth a brief study. There is no obvious reason why the pigs of Drogheda, Co Louth, should be considered more indigenous than elsewhere.
And searching in the archives, I see that a similar expression used to be current in Glasgow: “As Irish as the pigs o’ Docherty”, which suggests there might once have been a pork butcher so named, whose products carried the Guaranteed Irish label ahead of its time.
In any case, Holloway was appalled. He looked down on Armstrong as the impresario of cliche, a cigar-chomping vulgarian who cared only for selling tickets.
But he considered the pig reference an insult to “half of Dublin” and in keeping with an anglicising tendency in Irish theatre that always reduced performers here to paddywhackery.
Foreseeing trouble on opening night if the posters were not taken down, he warned Armstrong accordingly. In the event, before the curtain went up, writes Eric, “Barney’s grovelling apology to the audience was applauded”.
A possible Empire riots of 1917 scenario averted, the show went on to be a record-breaking success. The venue had been deeply in debt, bedevilled by post-Rising curfews. Connolly single-handedly saved it.
In 28 concerts over two weeks, she sold 64,000 tickets, among other things funding a £2,000 payment by the theatre to forestall a receivership order.
When she returned to the stage later that year it was on a bill alongside Walter McNally, whose baritone voice and film-star looks had made him a transatlantic star.
Alas, the great opera career that seemed to await Connolly, too, was not to be. Her voice had been damaged by coal dust, open-air singing and now the overwork that came with meteoric success. Vincent O’Brien, the great music teacher whose students had included James Joyce and John McCormack, lamented she had come to him too late.
Connolly continued to fill music theatres for several years until her career was overtaken, as Eric has written elsewhere, by the new fashions of “dance halls, jazz, and jitterbug”. After that, she lapsed back into the obscurity from which she had sprung. The whereabouts of her grave are unknown.
