Desmond Moore, wellknown author of OffBeat Ireland, Dublin, Dublin's Yesterdays, fiction and much journalism, has done a good deed in rescuing from relative obscurity an Irishman, a man from Offaly, who has certainly gladdened the hearts of millions. And yet, today, the man is little remembered in his own country: James Lynam Molloy, composer of such enduring songs as Love's Old Sweet Song, The Kerry Dance, Bantry Bay and many, many others.
Molloy (1838-1909) spent most of his life in England. Born in Cornalaur, not too far from Clara, he went to school at St Edmund's, the oldest Catholic school in England, then to the Catholic University in Dublin, in 1855, the year of its opening.
The family seemed to have money. Al the middle of the 19th century, Clara, with a population of 1,400 and containing 11 distilleries as well as several flour mills, the author tells us, was a prosperous town. But Molloy's life was to be in England. Further studies brought him to London, Paris and Bonn. He was called to the English bar, did not practice, but was secretary to one attorney general, Sir John Holker. As if all this were not enough, he covered the FrancoPrussian war for a London daily. (His brother Bernard, by the way, became a Parnellite MP.) James, a man of parts, wrote a book Our Autumn Holiday on French Rivers, four years before Robert Louis Stevenson produced An Inland Voyage.
But music was Molloy's life. He moved, now with wife and children, to a lovely house, still very much there, on the Thames at Henley; he was sociable: tennis, shooting parties and, of course sculling. His songs and operettas made him a famous figure in England. "Considering the universal popularity of his songs, which have been sung wherever our language is spoken," wrote the Globe newspaper on his death, "it is not going too far to describe James Molloy as a famous composer." The Irish Times wrote briefly of him, "but many of his earlier compositions will last as long as ballad concerts are held." And harvest homes and just any ordinary singsong, it might be added.
The family, like many other Irish who moved to the next island, became merged in that society, but a debt is owed to Desmond Moore for this monograph, which was the result of an enormous amount of patient delving in archives and parish records. It was launched in Tullamore on May 15th by the Offaly Historical and Archaeological Society which has its offices at Bury Quay, Tullamore. The monograph, Love's Old Sweet Song, costs £3.99 in shops in the town. Elsewhere too, you hope.