Crutch moment - Frank McNally on the mysterious origins of a Border Country phrase

Reader Des Shaw writes hoping that I can resolve “a long-standing source of annoyance” concerning something he often heard from his father (a Dundalk man, born 1918), at or of decisive moments.

These would be always prefaced with the phrase: “When it comes to the whipping of crutches . . .”. And although the general meaning is clear, the particular one – and its origins – have escaped Des, despite long searching.

The nearest he got was a reference, found somewhere during his college years (circa 2000) and since lost again, which suggested this was a very old expression, from a game played in plague times, when people used crutches as a prophylactic to avoid touching the ground with their feet.

Children then “would make life more entertaining by carrying a whip with which they could attempt to snag one another’s crutches”.

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But that must have come from an academic search engine, Des thinks. The standard sources don’t mention the phrase. As for literature, the only place he’s found it is in Patrick Kavanagh’s novel Tarry Flynn. Hence his last resort of inquiry, the Diarist: “you being a Monaghan man”.

Alas, any slight familiarity the expression holds for me is probably from having read the same Tarry Flynn a few times.

There, sure enough, the hero and his friend Eusabius are discussing a matter of mutual concern (the sexual lives of their eligible female neighbours), on which subject Flynn reassures himself that “when it comes to the whipping of crutches”, chastity is still widespread.

The phrase seems to be unknown elsewhere in literature, or in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, or indeed in The Irish Times archive. As for Irish newspapers generally, I can find only a single reference anywhere, from 1977.

Intriguingly, that too was from Ireland’s northeast, in local newspaper reports of a fraught meeting of Ardee Town Commissioners.

At issue was a proposal to build traffic islands on the Main Street. This had proved divisive, but a crisis had been reached. Or as the chairman of the commissioners was reported saying: “It has come to the whipping of crutches as far as I’m concerned.”

Having triangulated the phrase with reference points in Dundalk, Ardee, and Inniskeen, I referred the matter to the Oracle of Kavanagh Country, Art Agnew. Had he ever heard the term?

He has, often, “over Crossmaglen way”. But as to the original meaning, he could only guess it related to the “exposure of a fraud” generally; and more precisely to the exposure of somebody using crutches on the pretence of being, for example, a war hero.

This sounds plausible to me, although unless the north-east/Border region had an unusually high incidence of fraudulent crutch use once, it seems odd that the phrase should have survived only there.

In any case, this explanation dispenses with the need for actual whips in the original scenario. To whip something in the Border areas, typically, would be to steal it, or at least take it quickly.

That usage was illustrated (Art reminds me) by the other Inniskeen poet, John McEnaney (1872-1943), aka the Bard of Callanberg, who once satirised a local grocer for repossessing goods bought on overstretched credit (when he saw them on the bard’s cart outside a pub):

“The welkin was ringing/And off I went singing/For in Inniskeen I’m well pleased for to be/But in less than an hour/Male, pollard, and flour/Was whipped off me cart by consaitey Magee.” (For “male” there, read “meal”; for “pollard”, “bran”; for “consaitey”, “conceited”.)

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Meanwhile on Twitter, in like vein, Hugo Brady Brown wondered in passing this week: “I presume there is, somewhere in the archives of the Irish Times, an Irishman’s Diary about the term “(worn) on the Kildare side”.

Strange to say, Hugo, there wasn’t, until now. But that phrase too is mysterious, at least on the question of Kildare’s involvement. “A colloquialism of uncertain derivation”, Brewer calls it, while agreeing with the consensus that “Kildare” in this context means “right”.

The phrase is typically limited to the tilting of hats or the lapel placement of other fashion accessories. You can’t be on the Kildare side of God, I don’t think.

But the concept is mentioned in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, where a character is “got up regardless, with a cock on the Kildare side of his Tattersull”. And in After the Wake, by Brendan Behan, it takes on a vaguely religious quality.

“His hat he wore on the Kildare side, even in bed, because he had not a rib between him and heaven,” Behan writes of somebody. The rib there is of hair, however, and the choice of hat tilt would seem to be secondary to the 24-hour head coverage forced by follicular embarrassment.