A worried father complained to Patrick Pearse that all his son was interested in was playing a penny whistle. “Buy him a penny whistle, then” suggested Pearse, to whom it never occurred that in later times a fellow playing a penny whistle might “make a bomb.” Nor, I imagine that “making a bomb” would one day signify making a fortune.
Pearse told that story in his essay “THE MURDER MACHINE” which, I’m sure was much influenced by “HARD TIMES,” the novel in which Charles Dickens attacked Utilitarian schooling designed to crush the individuality and imagination of children and prepare them for servitude in mills and mines and the military. For Pearse, the Murder Machine was “education” as it existed in Ireland under the Union.
For over a decade Pearse edited the Gaelic League’s journal, and for the seven years before his death he ran his own school, St Enda’s in Rathfarnham. His pupils won a schools’ hurling championship and staged plays, some of them written by himself, and pageants, art and sculpture, and were given talks by many of the leading literary figures of the day, such as W B Yeats. Indeed Yeats staged a play in St Enda’s -“The Post Office,” written by the renowned Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, the first non-European to do so. It was the first time any of Tagore’s plays was staged outside India.
I’m not convinced the title of Tagore’s play had anything to do with the choice of headquarters for the Republic in Eater Week.The Dublin GPO had just been refurbished as a high-tech communications centre and the insurgent leaders were extremely media-savvy, as we might say today. Tom Clarke was alive to the power of cinema as later revolutionaries and politicians were and he had ensured that the funeral of O’Donovan Rossa was well covered. I suspect that John MacDonagh, who had worked with D.W Griffith in America, as scriptwriter for THE FUGITIVE, in 1910, was involved in that filming, as Thomas MacDonagh, his brother was the organiser of the funeral.
The insurgents used radio as well, in a novel way as a broadcast to the nations of
the world. This was no fugitive appeal from abroad for a defeated nation’s citizens to revolt, as De Gaulles’s was from London in 1940. This was letting the whole world know that a Republic was established in the very heart of Dublin.
In all I have read and heard about the 1916 Rising I never heard of the insurgents using grenades, landmines or other explosives. Though Tom Clarke and O’Donovan Rossa were among the first to embrace Alfred Nobel’s dynamite, Republicans were woefully remiss in ignoring its virtues, most republican land-mines used before the 1921 Truce failed to explode.
I’m told that RTE’s new drama “REBELLION” has Pearse teaching his pupils in St Enda’s how to make bombs. Pearse had a sense of humour and would approve the use of imagination there. After all, it was Gradgrind, the villain in HARD TIMES who had a pendant’s obsession with facts.
Would that be “pedant” instead of “pendant”,, Jude …. said the pedant to his wife .The world really can be your lobster after all…..a great story nonetheless….
Sorry about the TYPO. That should be “a pedant’s obsession with facts.”
I knew that Donal and we’ll agree it was a cheap shot on my part …but i couldn’t resist it ,of course…and i thought it worked very well in the context…again ..a great story nonetheless..
I like to have readers in suspense.
Then again, maybe I was thinking of the old story of Aristotle Onassis presenting an ancient pendant to Jackie.on their marriage.
You are a naughty man, Donal…
Come to that , I wonder what Jerry Hall will hand Rupert Murdoch, eh?
Do Antipodean pendants point upwards, towards the SUN?