The curse by which you wished an enemy to “die roaring”, as mentioned yesterday, was more or less general in Ireland once. The variant, “die roaring like Doran’s bull”, was particular to Kilkenny, at least in origin. And as I now know, that was based on a grimly prosaic story from real life.
According to The Antiquities of Ullard (1893), there once resided locally a farmer named Doran, who had a famous bull, “the admiration of the district”.
He also had a favourite dog. The animals got on well together until, one day, “a wandering mad dog bit Doran’s dog and [the latter] bit his friend the bull, who went raging mad”.
The bull was somehow herded into an outhouse “with a low thatched roof” and the door barricaded. Alas, incarceration made him even wilder, until there was nothing for it but to shoot him.
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To that end, a neighbour named Devine, “a daring young fellow”, clambered on to the roof with a gun and made a hole in the thatch. This only enraged the bull further. Attempting to escape Devine’s retribution, he made such a wild leap at the hole in the thatch that his horns got stuck in it.
Finally, as the bull roared in the manner that became proverbial, Devine fired a single, well-aimed shot. The poor animal was thereby put out of its misery and into the language. Eventually, the expression spread well beyond Kilkenny. Patrick Weston Joyce records it without explanation in his book, English As We Speak It In Ireland (1910).
Although Doran’s bull launched only a phrase, his sad demise reminded me of George Orwell’s famous story, Shooting an Elephant (1936), which didn’t launch any phrases but foretold the fall of the British Empire.
And by impure coincidence, I now see, that was based on real events from 100 years ago this month. Or was it? Biographers remain divided as to whether Orwell, then a colonial policeman in Burma (modern-day Myanmar), ever really shot an elephant that had been driven wild by “must”.
Or if he did, whether it was in the manner described: reluctantly, and unnecessarily, under pressure from the eyes of a large crowd of Burmese natives who he knew despised him.
Alternative theories include the possibility that he read or heard about the story from someone else, then adapted it for his own artistic ends.
And as recorded by the Rangoon Gazette of March 22nd 1926, under the headline “Rogue Elephant Shot”, there was indeed a similar incident around that time, involving a policeman with an Irish-sounding name, Major EC Kenny.
Kenny is said to have dispatched the raging animal to the “delight” of a watching crowd. The paper also reported that, like Orwell’s, “the elephant had killed a villager and caused great havoc to the plantation".
It may or may not be helpful to our enquiries that when the writer’s second wife Sonia Brownell was asked about the veracity of his story, she was contemptuous of the question: “Of course he shot a f***ing elephant. He said he did. Why do you always doubt his word?”
On the other hand, Orwell’s account was partly corroborated by a police colleague of the time, George Stewart, who recalled that when reports of a rampaging elephant came in, Orwell “went off in his old Ford to pick up a rifle” and go in search of the animal.
He was “very nonchalant about the whole affair”, said Stewart, but got into trouble afterwards because elephants were so valuable and the timber firms that owned them were feared by government. Hence Orwell’s transfer to a less popular posting later in 1926.
But as the Orwell Society notes, in an essay by Jeffrey Meyers, the narrator of the story is not at all nonchalant. Nor does he drive to the scene: he rides there on a pony, which he must then send back in case it smells the elephant and panics.
His misjudgments also include bringing a rifle too small to do the job, hence the story’s grim denouement, painful for the elephant and uncomfortable for the reader.
Elephants and camels are the only animals, apparently, in which males “come into heat” too. The resultant surge in testosterone can indeed make a usually placid elephant very dangerous.
But Meyers is unconvinced by the manner in which this elephant, after its month-long must, is suddenly becalmed by the time of Orwell’s arrival and now eating grass “with a gentle, feminine” air.
Also, contrary to Stewart’s version, there are no disciplinary consequences in Orwell’s story. He had done the right thing, legally, “for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if the owner fails to control it”.
In any case, for the purposes of literature at least, there had to be an epiphany, in this case about the enslaving effects of colonial rule on the rulers themselves.
There are varying opinions afterwards about the manner of the elephant’s death. But as Orwell concludes laconically: “I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.”
