ARTHUR GRIFFITH, or Dan, as he was known to his friends, was a Dubliner, who lived for most of his life in the North inner city, first at Dominick Street, and as family fortunes declined due to his father’s ill-health, at Little Britain Street. He was born with a congenital foot disorder causing him to walk on the balls of his feet in a waddling or tramping fashion. He attended primary school at Strand Street CBS, leaving school aged 12 to seek work as a messenger boy. The family relied greatly on their Whelan cousins for a better social life. Music and food were regular Sunday features there, as Dan gained a vast knowledge of Dublin tunes and ballads.
He first got his first job as an “office boy” with Underwoods Printing Company at 12 Eden Quay. Aged 15 he became an apprentice printer with the company. Jane Underwood was a Protestant who took a particular interest in the youth. They were printers for the Masonic lodges and their apprentices were thought by some to have acquired an occult knowledge. Griffith himself acquired an almost superstitious dread of the influence of Masonry. He became a member of the Dublin Typographical Society. A fellow trainee, Bob Mangan, recalled him having a habit of reciting Shakespearian quotations as they walked out with girls. Aged 23, Dan wrote to his young soprano girlfriend: “Jan. 18th 1894.
Dear Miss Sheehan, The Lily of Killarney is announced for Saturday night. Do you remember your promise? If you are not better engaged for that evening, I would be delighted to meet you at, say, a quarter past seven o’clock at the corner of Winetavern Street and Merchant’s Quay. Sincerely yours, Arthur Griffith”.
Maud Gonne came to recite at the Rooney-Griffith Celtic Literary Society. She said of Griffith, “He was a fair, shy boy one would hardly notice, but I was at once attracted to him, I hardly know why, for he did not speak, and I got to know him well only in 1899 when he and Willie Rooney came to me with the first copy of the United Irishman. They had collected £30 and hoped it would be enough to start the paper, and found they had not even enough for a second number”. Gonne became his “Queen” and when she was later accused by the Figaro of being an English spy, Griffith beat the editor with his sjambock, brought back from a sojourn in the Transvaal. In court he was fined £1, refused to pay and spent 14 days in jail. Willie Yeats wrote to Maud, “The editor of the UI seems to have exceptionally decided views on the responsibilities of an Editor”. Maud organised a ceilidh-reception with Inghinidhe na hÉireann on his release. Griffith was a man of great physical strength, who swam out into Dublin Bay with Oliver Gogarty and rowed two of the Gifford sisters around Dalkey Island, while staying at the Martello Tower.
Griffith never had much money and though he became engaged to Maud Sheehan in 1904, the possibility of being able to afford to marry and set up house and have a family was not practical for him. Maud had little interest in Griffith’s work but their common interest lay in musical evenings at his friends, the Williams’s household. Some of Griffith’s most beautiful extant letters were written from prisons (where he spent two of his last five years), to the Williams sisters, Lily, Norah and Flo. The Williams lived on Marlborough Road. They were friendly and hospitable. Griffith was most expansive in their company. Their father, a great conversationalist, was a Protestant unionist businessman. Lily was a painter and her portrait of Griffith (now on display in the Hugh Lane Gallery) gives the formal side of the man.
Griffith surprised everybody by announcing in 1910 that he was to marry. His devotees understanding his economic situation only too well, purchased a house for him at 122 St Laurence Road, Clontarf. Among those friends were two Jews, the lawyer Michael Noyek and Dr Bethel Solomons of the Rotunda Hospital. Griffith later intimated that he would have preferred cash so that he could have invested it in his paper. His friends had realised this and acted accordingly.
Arthur wrote from the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations in London to his wife, using her pet name, for their wedding anniversary, “Dear Mollie, I am sending a little token to you of the day eleven years ago . . .”. She visited him later in London and noticed that his hair was turning white. Together they relived their younger days by attending some Gilbert and Sullivan light operas.
Griffith had been in hospital at 96 Lower Leeson Street, under an assumed name, but his death on August 12th, 1922 was sudden. Maud Griffith said, “I was the one person who saw his death coming. For four months beforehand I had to watch him declining day by day and he as quiet and accepting in the face of death as he had been in life . . . The children are now company and are too young to realise the Daddy’s loss. He was cheated of their company and all that meant home.
Arthur wrote many poems and ballads, most of which, like himself, have been forgotten. However, he is remembered by the current trad rock group, The Spook of the Thirteenth Lock, who take their name from one of his poems, The Spook of the Thirteenth Lock.
Anthony J Jordan has written biographies of WT Cosgrave & Éamon de Valera