THE PLAQUE reads “BERNARD SHAW AUTHOR OF MANY PLAYS WAS BORN IN THIS HOUSE 26 JULY 1856”. It is a modest enough tribute to a great man, and the admirer who sees it for the first time might think it somewhat miserly of the city fathers who presumably put it up. In fact, the plaque was not put there by the authorities or even by rich admirers but with the pennies collected on his rounds by a humble Dublin dustman.
Shaw himself made a dustman famous in his play Pygmalionand in the screen version, My Fair Lady.One of his characters was Alfred P Doolittle, a London dustman and father of Eliza, the Cockney flower girl whom the snobby linguist Prof Henry Higgins was challenged to turn into a society lady.
The other dustman in Shaw's life was Patrick O'Reilly, who emptied dustbins around the Synge Street area for 40 years before retiring in 1953. The following year I interviewed him for the Edinburgh magazine Chambers's Journal.
O'Reilly's connection with Shaw had started more than 40 years earlier when he saw Shaw's Man and Supermanin the old Rotunda Theatre. In his tiny and scrupulously clean municipal cottage around the corner from Synge Street, he showed me the tattered volume of Shaw's plays he had taken down each day for 40 years, as well as the 26 letters and five postcards Shaw had written him.
In 1944, Dublin presented Shaw with the freedom of the city and sent representatives to Ayot St Lawrence with the roll of freemen for Shaw’s signature. Two years later Shaw celebrated his 90th birthday. The postman brought him a small present from Ireland, a little gold shamrock the Dublin dustman had bought in a pawnshop.
Back from Ayot St Lawrence came a card. “A golden shamrock!” Shaw wrote. “What a charming gift! It is on my watch-chain and it will remain there until I myself drop off it.”
In 1947, O’Reilly wrote to Shaw saying he had collected enough from his bin customers to erect a plaque to him on the Synge Street home where he was born.
Would Shaw approve the inscription, “He gave his services to his country, unlimited, unstinted and without price”? Shaw’s reply was typical. “Dear Pat: Your inscription is a blazing lie. I left Dublin before I was twenty and I have devoted the remainder of my life to Labour and International Socialism and for all you know I may be hanged yet.” Shaw then sent over a drawing showing the design he wanted for the plaque – a wreath of shamrocks in marble with the inscription mentioned above.
The plaque as designed by Shaw was erected on the house. Later that year, O’Reilly had a cherished wish come true when he travelled to Hertfordshire and met Shaw in his own home. His greeting to the housekeeper, Miss Blanche Patch, was: “Tell Bernard Shaw the dustman has come to bring him home on his back.”
He was ushered into the garden, where Shaw greeted him effusively. “Hello, Pat,” he said. “Come on in. I’m a bit thin but my muscles are good.” Then the two Dublin men talked about the city where they both grew up and about the streets they played in as children.
“And do you remember the Pottle at all?” asked the dustman. (The Pottle was a narrow alleyway near which Swift lived as dean of Christ Church Cathedral.) “Yes, indeed, I remember it well,” Shaw replied. “I often played marbles from Synge Street, up the Pottle into the Coombe and back by the ‘Barn’ past my father’s mill at Rutland House. I remember, too, robbing an orchard at the back of Portobello Bridge on the way home.”
When the dustman asked him if he wanted anything from the people of Ireland, Shaw answered: “I have everything that money can buy and all I want from my Irish friends is their prayers, which are unpurchaseable.”
O’Reilly criticised Dublin’s failure to honour Shaw as it had honoured Burke and Goldsmith with statues in front of Trinity College. Fifteen years earlier, he said, an eminent Polish sculptor presented a life-size statue of Shaw to the National Gallery. “They just put it away in a back room. Why can’t they bring it out and put it someplace where the people of Dublin can see it? It should be up on top of Nelson Pillar right in the centre of the city, or in front of Trinity College. It’s a terrible thing that Shaw is held in honour all over the world but the people of his native city won’t raise a finger to do honour to his memory.”
Shaw himself approved the suggestion of the statue at Trinity College. He wrote to his dustman friend: “If they want to put me with Burke and Goldsmith, the pious and the immortals, who have been there for so many years, they can get a copy of my statue out of the National Gallery for about two hundred pounds.”
Eventually O’Reilly had his wish. Years later, the National Gallery put the statue outside its building on Merrion Square West, afterwards taking it inside, where it is now in the centre of the atrium on the first floor.
Shaw’s name is also there in the little park beside St Patrick’s Cathedral on one of a series of plaques honouring Irish writers. And Shaw admirers can still visit his Synge Street home. It is open on Tuesday to Saturday from June to August. But the spot in front of Trinity College is still free.
In November 1950, when the dustman heard that his friend Shaw was dying, he walked up to the Shaw family grave in Mount Jerome and took flowers from the grave to send to the author. But he never heard if Shaw received them.