Whatever happened to Galoshes? No, it’s not another typo. They were not French cigarettes, but rubber overshoes and extremely useful and convenient.
I may be a senior citizen but not antediluvian. Galoshes were depicted by perhaps the greatest Modernist writer as the most up-to-date invention since newly baked bread. It’s in THE DEAD, regarded by many as the best of the superb collection of stories – DUBLINERS, set at the beginning of the twentieth century. The great film director, John Huston (whose cherished, unfulfilled ambition was to be a writer) made a film of THE DEAD, itself a masterpiece .
He had long before that become an Irish citizen having been born and reared an American. I suppose you might call him an a West Hibernian. Shortly after completing the film he died. The complete film is available on YOUTUBE.
The central character in THE DEAD is Gabriel Conroy, a Dubliner with roots in the West of Ireland, a man of cosmopolitan pretensions who holidays in Belgium. Perhaps where he got his new-fangled galoshes? The Belgians were fattening on rubber extracted from the Congo at the cost of millions of African lives. There were other cultural currents in Dublin, where some with the leisure and means took holidays in the West of Ireland to learn the Irish language. Employers were not legally obliged to give workers paid holidays until the 1930s. Anyhow, Conroy is challenged on his blindness to Ireland’s Gaelic heritage, by a young woman, Miss Ivors, and rewarded for his writing reviews for a Unionist paper and denounced forcefully as a
“WEST BRITON.” Miss Ivors was based on KATHLEEN SHEEHY, one of three daughters of a Nationalist MP. One of her sisters married Tom Kettle, killed in France in September 1916 leading a platoon of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Her other sister, Hannah, married the Pacifist, Frank
Skeffington, murdered by Captain Bowen-Colthurst of the Royal Irish Regiment during Easter Week 1916. Kathleen herself married Francis Cruise O’Brien and gave birth to Conor.
I just checked WIKIPEDIA for Conor Cruise O’Brien, which features a photograph of him wearing a UK UNIONIST rosette.
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