One Sunday afternoon in the late Summer of 1977 I went to Mass in Westminster Cathedral. During the Collection I noticed two pews ahead of me a gentleman who put American “greenbacks” into the plate. He was dressed in a fawn pullover and trousers, with the lack of colour I associated with some friends of mine, brothers who were colour blind. I thought, rightly, that it was Bing Crosby, whose colour-blindness was complemented by perfect pitch and thus needed only one take to record a song.
It was not a Sung Mass, luckily for the Old Groaner, for had I been singing he might well have groaned his last, and I mighta been a contender in a trial for homicide. As it was, Bing Crosby died more happily, playing golf, about six weeks later.
I tell this story because of the confusion Endafeckin’ History has spread with the story told at Beal na Blath that, when the British were hunting Michael Collins, Lenin took a sabbatical from his own work in Russia to slip into Ireland for a tutorial in economics from him.
Imagine the headline- COLLINS, MAN OF CORK, PROVES IRELAND CAN FLOAT A LOAN
Followed a few years later by- STALIN, MAN OF STEEL, BUILDS SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTTRY.
In fact both Lenin and Collins shared time and space in London.
Collins worked in Mount Pleasant Sorting Office, and when the Irish Volunteers were founded, drilled in the German Gymnasium, a still handsome hall between St Pancras and King’s Cross Stations. Others drilling there were Sean Nunan and his brother Ernie, and Joe Good, who in the 1940s wrote a memoir for his family, published by his son in recent years. All of them took part in the 1916 Rising.
In the late 1940s or early 1950s the owner of a cafe or greasy-spoon in the King’s Cross/Gray’s Inn Road area, remembered a Russian gentleman, who used patronise it “before the War.” When asked about it he said “the 1914-1918 War”. He was speaking about Lenin.
When interned with Collins in Frongoch, and Collins got talking about economics, Good asked him what he knew about the subject. It transpired that both of the intellectually curious young men had attended a lecture by Lenin.
Both Collins and Good were released from Frongoch almost a year before the Oktober Revolution when Lenin’s name became better known.
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