Alex Woodock, an artist and cathedral stonemason, wrote recently about learning his craft. As he browsed the architecture shelves of the library at the college where he was studying carving, he found five copies of one book, “all very well read judging by their parlous condition”. He took a copy home – “and part of me has lived within it ever since”.
The book was Stone Mad, by Seamus Murphy, which Mercier Press is republishing this month, three-quarters of a century after it first appeared.
By the time of his death, in 1975, Murphy was a renowned sculptor in Ireland and abroad. Described by the film-maker Louis Marcus as a man unforgettable and irreplaceable, he was born near Mallow in 1907. At school in Cork city his inspirational teacher Daniel Corkery encouraged him to take night classes in life drawing at Crawford School of Art while beginning, at 14, a seven-year apprenticeship in the Blackpool yard of John Aloysius O’Connell’s Art Marble Works.
Awarded a Gibson Bequest scholarship by the Crawford in 1931, Murphy studied in Paris for a year and then, in 1934, opened his own studio, back in Blackpool. The first of his sculpture exhibitions followed, including one at the New York World’s Fair of 1939. In 1944 he married Maighréad Higgins, daughter of the sculptor Joseph Higgins.
What may have been unpredictable in those early years was that Murphy wrote a book about his workmates at O’Connell’s yard. Stone Mad is full of esteem for the stonies, his fellow “men of the dust” – the cutters and polishers of stone, the carvers of altar rails, memorials, nameplates, pulpits and headstones, an almost vanished tribe of once-honoured craftsmen.
As he wrote, “I have exaggerated nothing, not even their talk about stone. I would not have attempted it at all but that I know nobody else is likely to do it.”
The book took time to come to light. Written in longhand in soft pencil on thin green paper, the manuscript sat on the table in the big room upstairs at the family home on Wellesley Terrace in Cork.
“It sat there and it sat there,” says Murphy’s daughter Bebhínn Marten, who was about five years old when the saga of Stone Mad’s publication began. She also remembers that for nearly all his working life Murphy took in four or five newspapers a day, six days a week. The death notices told him where to expect orders for a headstone or memorial plaque. “Stone Mad is about carving,” she says of these liturgical and often poignant inscriptions.
What young Murphy had entered was not so much a workplace as a congregation, a parish of believers enlivened occasionally by journeymen, the tramp stonies sustained by the notion that they had cut the tablets for the Ten Commandments.
Almost legendary in this tribe was the Goban: “I asked him where was his kit of tools as I did not see any with him, and he produced out of his pocket three lettering splitters and a mouth-organ … The inside of his hat was his office; he carried in it his letters and odd bits of information he had cut out of newspapers. But what interested me most were his drawings of famous Irishmen, small pencil sketches stuck in the leather band of his hat.”
How sternly Danny Melt, Ferker, Blueskull, the Tumbler, the Gargoyle and Facemould – the names of fellowship among these men – appraised their own labour, how gently they tutored this youngster working unpaid for his first year and for whom they organised a “national”, a weekly whip-round to make up a wage for him. At work they shared their lives, their argot, their wisdom. Above all they shared their skill in lessons so well learned that we meet their legacy throughout this country and elsewhere.
After the funeral of a stonie the men would spend the whole evening in the graveyard, going from tombstone to tombstone, “nodding their heads in approval of the good work, running their thumbs down the scotias, pulling away ivy branches or briars that obscured the work. The cemetery was their sculpture gallery. They knew all the artists and were part of the same tradition.”
Murphy’s younger daughter, Órla, has written of spending many sunny hours during holidays in the west of Ireland among the warm lichened stones of forgotten cemeteries: “His feeling for letters was as intense as his feeling for words, the spaces between them as important as the letters themselves, spaces, like punctuation, to add clarity, to strengthen the meaning, while, like punctuation, going almost unnoticed in themselves.”
By 1950 Stone Mad had been typed up by Maighréad, who as an artist and teacher herself put her talents and energy at the service of her husband’s work. Gradually the book took shape. Three hundred copies were printed by Golden Eagle Books, with chapter-end drawings by Fergus O’Ryan; it was dedicated to Murphy’s close friend Seán Hendrick.
By this time the house had become what it remained – like a railway station with the comings and goings through the decades, as Maighréad put it. A succession of artists and scholars, neighbours, friends and colleagues could be encountered there. Later visitors included the American actor Anjelica Huston and her husband, the sculptor Robert Graham.
Also among the visitors was the Cork-born engraver and sculptor Robert Gibbings, writer of Lovely Is the Lee and Sweet Cork of Thee, among many other books of illustrated travel and adventure. Marten believes it was through Murphy’s friendship with Gibbings that the bibliophile Colin Franklin – brother of the biophysicist Rosalind Franklin – arrived at Wellesley Terrace in search of a book. He found Stone Mad.
For its publication in a well-received revised version by Routledge & Kegan Paul, where Franklin worked, Murphy insisted on the vigorous illustrations by William Harrington; he himself drew all the initial chapter letters.
Although subsequently published by Blackstaff Press in 1997 and by Collins Press in 2005, Stone Mad went out of print after Collins was bought by Gill & Macmillan in 2019. Ever since, Bebhínn Marten has kept up a tenacious – and, now, ultimately successful – campaign to return Stone Mad to bookshops.
Although he was too young at the time to have specific memories of Stone Mad’s gradual emergence, Murphy’s son, Colm, recalls a childhood visit to O’Connell’s yard where the stonies were “all over grey, covered in dust”.
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Bebhínn and Órla were both early aware of the arrangement of tools, including mallets and a horsehair brush to sweep away the ubiquitous dust, in their father’s studio. They saw the right way to sharpen a chisel so that it could be used with a hammer to create a perfect full stop.
Among the joys of Stone Mad, as in his sculptural works, is Murphy’s inherent sense of the relationship between hand and rock, the feel of it and its creative pulse somewhere within.
Ferker would hold forth in the yard about the quality of the rock they worked with: Firies, from Co Kerry, was “a hoor of a stone” equalled in worthlessness only by the stone out of Templemore. Even their tools seem sensate: “Not a day would pass but someone would find a reason to borrow the penny-faced hammer,” Murphy writes. “It was a hammer with personality.”
There was a passion in their work: a retired carver confessed on his deathbed that his two unforgivable enemies were “knots in white deal – and the stumps of old nails”.
Among its many advocates, Louis Marcus describes the book as an enchanting record of the slow, reflective process of stonecutting from which Murphy graduated to the art of sculpture. “Reading Stone Mad offers a golden prelapsarian glimpse of a world before the robotic, electronic and digital maelstrom in which we live today.”
It was Danny Melt who brought the bad news: “Concrete is the coming thing.” Cork’s new church at Turner’s Cross was going to be built in concrete. Worse, an Italian altar had been imported to the city. Protesting at a trade-union meeting, Ferker recalled Daniel O’Connell’s protest that he wouldn’t take his politics from Rome: “Well, we’ll not take our altars from Italy.”
Perhaps we did, but there is at least one important exception: the Church of the Annunciation, in Blackpool, which Murphy designed in 1945, may have been built in concrete, but the altar is of Connemara and white marble.
The young apprentice at O’Connell’s yard understood that he was on his way to becoming a stonecarver – “the only legitimate stonecarver turned out in Cork for 25 years.” But Stone Mad hides the artist who was comprehensively and combatively modern, a sophisticated professional participant in his contemporary environment.
In this elegy Murphy almost deletes himself, except to insist in his preface that art grows out of good work done by men who enjoy it. “There is,” he writes, “something about men with whom you have done many a hard day’s work that makes them very dear to you ... They put me on my road. But it is a lonely road now.”
Stone Mad by Seamus Murphy is published by Mercier Press on Thursday, April 17th; it is also Cork’s One City One Book for 2025
