Down around World’s End Lane on Wednesday, for the Dublin Festival of History table quiz, I was struck by a sudden gloom. It was cast not just by the onset of October but also by the Loop Line Bridge, which was over my head at the time.
“The what lane?” you ask. Oh yes. Well, “World’s End” is an old name for what is now Foley Street. It featured on John Roque’s 1756 map of the city and others of that era. The lane was then renamed Montgomery Street, and as the main drag of Dublin’s red light district, became notorious as “Monto”.
To be honest, I didn’t know the bit about World’s End until it came up in the quiz. But I’m an expert now. It turns out that “World’s End” was once widespread in these islands as a name for the edge of town. There is still one in London, among many other places.
The pub quiz was just around the corner from World’s End, in fact, in Cleary’s of Amiens Street. And nondescript as it looks, that’s one of the more famous corners in world literature, thanks to James Joyce.
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His protagonists in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, turn not just a new leaf there but also a new chapter. At the start of it, Dedalus is recovering from being punched to the ground by a drunken British soldier in the previous scene, set in “Nighttown”.
Now they pass the “Signal House” (Cleary’s in a former guise) and Amiens Street railway terminus en route to the Cabman’s Shelter and a restorative coffee.
Cleary’s was an apt venue for a history quiz. It’s a pub-cum-museum, displaying one of the most impressive collections of material relating to Ireland’s Home Rule and Revolutionary periods, with a strong emphasis on Michael Collins (and no De Valera anywhere as far as I could see).
But what was I saying when you interrupted me about the street name? Oh right – the Loop Line bridge, which crosses the street here and only narrowly misses the pub.
So close are they, according to Cleary’s website, that the railway company “was forced to pay the electricity bills on the proprietor’s behalf due to the lack of natural light coming through the façade”.
My quiz team could have done with a bit of added enlightenment too. Still, we fumbled our way through the Nighttown darkness and emerged with a fighting second place.
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Long-time correspondent Terry Moylan takes me mildly to task for committing an Americanism earlier in the week by referring to a “square dance” (Diary, October 6th).
Guilty as charged. I should have known that when the characters in Joyce’s The Dead take the floor for a thing called “Lancers”, they are performing a quadrille – or a set of quadrilles, to be more exact.
Hence set dances, a latter-day, hibernicised form of the steps, which includes the Clare (aka Crusheen) Lancers, now widely performed not just in Ireland but throughout the Irish dancing empire.
Still, everyone makes mistakes, even Joyce. And Terry suspects the author of The Dead erred in having Molly Ivors – a feisty Gaelic Leaguer prone to calling opponents “West Britons” – join Gabriel Conroy for Lancers.
“At the time, the Gaelic League banned the practice of quadrilles from their social occasions, condemning them as ‘foreign dances’,” he writes. “A committed member of the League such as Miss Ivors would have refused to participate.”
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While I’m correcting myself, Jim Doherty – the great piano man – tells me that The Siege Of Sidney Street (1960), which was shot in Dublin and which he first watched when 21, is not exactly a “thriller”.
It’s more a historical drama, depicting real-life events involving Latvian revolutionaries in London’s east-end circa 1911.
But it was shot in Dublin in more ways than one. According to an online fan account, it set a British record for the quantity of ammunition used. And at one inner-city Dublin film location, this evoked nostalgia. Between many takes of a shoot-out, a local woman in a shawl was heard to comment: “It’s just like old times.”
Anyway, Jim’s main point was to recall a story about a scene filmed among the redbrick terraces near (he thinks) Westland Row.
It was supposed to be a scene-setter, of an empty street. But every time the director said “Action!”, a certain resident with too much time on his hands would come out his front door and ruin the shot, just for badness.
Soon, others started doing the same and take after take was sabotaged. Eventually a man named Charlie Roberts, who worked with RTÉ but was with the film crew as a fixer, hit on a solution. He went to the ringleader’s door with a job offer.
The film’s “CCO” – crowd control officer – was temporarily indisposed, he explained. They needed an emergency stand-in, for the going rate of £20. The man was duly hired and went on to perform his duties zealously, threatening violence against any neighbour who broke the curfew.
