FROM THE ARCHIVES:The editor of The Irish Times, Bertie Smyllie, recorded his memories of Jim Larkin in an Irishman's Diary a couple of days after the Labour leader's death – JOE JOYCE
MY JOURNALISTIC career has brought me into contact with many great orators.
I think that during the past thirty years I have heard most of the world’s most famous public speakers, from President Woodrow Wilson to Mr. Winston Churchill, I have listened to them all.
At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 I heard Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and, possibly the most impressive of them all, the Italian Orlando, who still is alive. But I never heard anybody who moved me quite so much as Jim Larkin. He had a terrific personality. His detractors say that he was merely a mob orator, which he probably was; but there was more to him than that. He believed in what he was doing, and had the knack of making other people believe in it as well. He was put in prison in Sing-Sing for some years; and never was quite the same man again. But he still believed in his star. During the last general election in Ireland, when he stood and was defeated in a North Dublin constituency, I was waiting in a queue one day for a Delgany bus in College street.
Suddenly Jim emerged from his Union headquarters in the Thomas Ashe Hall. He was getting into a motor car en route for some meeting or other, when I decided to have a word with him. “I wish you good luck, Mr. Larkin,” I said; and I happened to mean it. “Thanks,” he answered laconically; “but I don’t need it. I have always made my own luck.”
That was Jim Larkin. He did not mean to be rude, and I did not think that he was rude. But he had complete faith in his role as a man of destiny, and probably regarded me as a rather presumptuous young man. The fact that he did not retain his seat in the Dáil would not have worried him. He would have attributed his defeat to the stupidity of the electorate – and he would not have been very far wrong.
Two great Irishmen welcomed Larkin into their august company. One was Yeats and the other was Shaw.
I remember during the Civil War period, I happened to stray into the wrong room in the Shelbourne Hotel, and whom did I find there? Mary MacSwiney, Lennox Robinson, W.B. Yeats, and Jim Larkin! What they were doing I never could find out; but there they were. The only survivor now is Lennox Robinson, who one day may unravel the mystery.
Like his friend Shaw, he was a rabid teetotaler; but, unlike G.B.S., he smoked almost incessantly, even a fouler brand of tobacco (the idea of Jim Larkin smoking a cigarette is preposterous) than myself; and when we both were on the bus our fellow-travellers must have had rather a trying time.
Jim Larkin, with the possible exception of Eamon de Valera, was the most picturesque figure of our epoch in this country. And for a’ that, he was a man.
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