JOSEPH EMILE DILLON was never destined to become one of Ireland’s finest foreign correspondents. His father planned a vocation in the priesthood for his sole surviving son, who was born in Dublin in 1854. Michael and Mary Dillon had come to Dublin from rural backgrounds. The couple lost at least one child at birth while another died at eight years of age. The family ran a hardware shop on Charles Street on the north side of the Liffey quays in Dublin. The shop fronted onto the cobblestoned street, and hardware of all descriptions covered the stands, cluttered the footpath and filled the rooms of the house. The shop sold new and second-hand tools for carpenters, joiners, locksmiths and miners.
“The main purpose of the building was the warehousing and display of the goods, the lodging of the owners was secondary,” Joseph Dillon later recalled. “Our house was gloomy, uncomfortable and scantily furnished.”
Dillon’s childhood was little happier, although there were outings to the Strawberry Beds, the Phoenix Park and the Donnybrook Fair. These Sunday afternoon trips left memories of bagpipes, dancing, tumblers of Guinness and the beating of drums.
But, in general, life in the Dillon household centred on making a living – the shop was open from 7am to 10pm seven days a week – and religious worship. Michael Dillon took his religion very seriously.
His son later wrote that his father’s life was all about the preparation for death and meeting his maker. The family attended Mass every weekday and twice on Sundays and Holy Days. They never missed a holy day of obligation or failed to fast or abstain in Lent and Advent. They lived within earshot of the deep-toned bells of Christ Church and, at Dillon’s estimation, another dozen Catholic places of worship – the bells of each he learned to distinguish.
“Our faith in God’s continuous government of the earth was firm, intense and naive,” he admitted. Dillon followed his father’s wishes and entered the priesthood. He proved a bright and capable scholar, and was soon a student in Paris and New York. It was a huge transformation for a boy from Dublin’s north-inner city.
My research into Dillon’s life is not yet complete. I am still unclear why he abandoned his vocation.
There were some discussions about a political career. He met with advisers to Parnell about running for a parliamentary seat but nothing came of these meetings.
Then, without as yet a proper explanation, he arrived in St Petersburg in the mid-1880s as a special correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. It was an extraordinary career change.
OVER THE following quarter of a century, Dillon filed articles for the London newspaper and several journals in the United States as he mixed with ambassadors, prime ministers and presidents. He was a friend of Trotsky – about whom he later wrote a book – and was a regular dinner guest of the princess of Monaco who, from surviving correspondence, appears to have been very taken with the journalist from Dublin.
Dillon died on June 9th, 1933, in Barcelona. The following day obituaries were printed in the Daily Telegraphand The Timesof London.
It would take another 18 years before a substantial biographical profile appeared in a Dublin newspaper.
After Dillon’s death, his widow (and second wife) Kathleen Dillon edited and compiled his notes and papers. But her attempts to attract the interest of a publisher were unsuccessful. In the type of commercial ruthlessness we tend to associate with modern commerce, one literary agent concluded: “There is no question that it [the book proposal] is full of interest, but these biographical studies today really must be done during a person’s lifetime. It is all far too dated.”
Some years later, Kathleen Dillon was befriended by a Fr Eugene Laws, who took up her late husband’s cause.
Laws seems to have been instrumental in getting the National Union of Journalists to erect a plaque outside the Dillon family home at Charles Street. The inscription described Dillon as a “Most Learned Journalist and Publicist”.
Three years later, in 1954, Laws visited Dublin to mark the centenary of Dillon's birth. He wrote a profile article for The Irish Times, and delivered a lecture in St Michan's Church on the life of its famous son. The local parish priest was pleased to discover more about Dillon, but his subsequent correspondence with Laws provides excellent evidence of how far The Irish Timeshas been transformed even since 1954.
Laws was firmly scolded by the parish priest for his choice of publication for the newspaper article on Dillon. "You did not know that The Irish Timesis the journal of the Protestant 'Ascendenacy'," the priest wrote.
"Of course it was proud and glad to get your article on the 'Great Dubliner' and to snap its fingers at the Irish Pressand Irish Independent. At all events we were proud to see the full-length account of the great little man [in The Irish Times], though in the wrong journal."