When it first launched itself on the Dublin social scene, 80 years ago, the Mount Street Club must have sounded like the kind of place wherein wealthy men could dine and smoke cigars while ordering the affairs of the world.
That indeed was the joke. The name was a sideswipe at another gentlemen’s establishment, altogether more exclusive and self-regarding, in nearby Kildare Street. But in reality, the new club was far from being a rival for the custom of the rich and powerful. Its target clientele were Dublin’s down-and-outs. And in recruiting members, it was unusual among clubs in also wanting to get rid of them, sooner or later, having first equipped them for a better life.
The club was the initiative of two men, Jim Waller and Paddy Somerville-Large, both engineers and idealists, and both influenced, like many of their era, by the ideas of the 19th-century Welsh reformer, Robert Owen.
The basic aim was to give homeless men food and shelter and a place to do something useful with their days. But the club went much further than that, developing into a commune and a micro-economy, where workers exchanged goods and skills, without (it was hoped) threatening jobs outside.
It even had its own currency, the “tally”, the basic unit of which was a working hour. A man who clocked up an hour’s labour at the club could exchange it for, say, lunch and a shave, each of which cost half a tally. A suit, by contrast, might cost 75 hours’ work.
When the then lord mayor Alfie Byrne performed the opening in 1935, the backdrop could hardly have been grimmer. The Great Depression and Economic War had multiplied Dublin’s unemployed. The city’s slums were still the worst in Europe.
It was to be close to those same slums that Mount Street was chosen as a base. But the club’s headquarters, formerly a hotel, was itself slum-like. An epic renovation job had been required to make it habitable.
Once opened, however, the club quickly thrived. To workshops on the premises were added two vegetable plots in south Dublin. A 130-acre farm was soon acquired in Clondalkin. When the second World War broke out, turf was also harvested, for sale in the club shop at a tally a bag.
By then, club graduates included tinkers (in the original, tin-smithing sense), tailors, soldiers (31 of the club’s farm workers joined the Army in 1941), and many others. And having been inspired by Robert Owen, the enterprise in its turn drew admiration from another great reformer, William Beveridge, architect of Britain’s welfare system.
But it peaked early – 1940 in fact, when its several hundred members generated an annual gross domestic product of 300,000 tallies. It was now spawning similar initiatives in other Irish cities. But by the war’s end, productivity was already falling, and from the late 1940s onwards, the club’s story was one of decline.
That, of course, was good news, or should have been. As Ireland’s fortunes rose, so the relevance of institutions like the Mount Street Club should have lessened. But in truth, there was plenty of work for it still. The problem, as always, was lack of resources.
Still, as late as the 1970s, this newspaper carried regular small ads advising those in need of gardeners, kitchen staff, porters, and the like to contact the Mount Street Club for “reliable men”.
The club name was a misnomer by then, because the institution had moved to Fenian Street in 1972. A decade later, it ceased to be a club, the headquarters henceforth leased to other charities and business start-ups. Then, finally, in 2006, the premises was sold. That top-of-the-market sale left what is now the “Mount Street Club Trust” flush with funds for the first time in recent history. In the years since, it has diversified into backing a range of projects for unemployed adults and disadvantaged children. In the meantime, the inheritors of its mantle have also been reflecting on the club’s 80-year legacy.
The story of this extraordinary experiment in self-help has now been told in a book of essays, The Mount Street Club: Dublin's Unique Response to Unemployment 1934-Present.
It includes fascinating contributions from the writer Peter Somerville-Large, the journalist and film-maker Colin Murphy, and the history professor Mary E Daly, among others. A related website mountstreetclub.com has also been established. And the book is available via that website, and from good bookshops, priced €19.99.
@FrankmcnallyIT