If Germany had won the war ‘there would be no Geldofs’, said Bob jnr at a celebration of the life of his principled and passionate father
THE FUNERAL mass of 96-year-old Robert A Geldof, or the “real” Bob Geldof as celebrant Fr Gerry Byrne dubbed him, took place yesterday in St Joseph’s Church, Glasthule, in south Dublin.
His coffin entrance was timed for the Angelus bells at noon, to honour his devotion to the prayer and it set the tone in a church where Mr Geldof had been a regular Mass-goer.
The sole deviation from the programme of sacred and classical music was the old Heyman and Young song When I Fall in Love, played by organist John Hughes as the coffin was borne from the church.
Apart from Mr Geldof’s son Bob and his granddaughters – including Fifi Trixibelle, Pixie, Peaches and their half-sister Tiger Lily – the only hint of celebrity was Ali Hewson. A wreath of lilies and white roses sent by her and her husband Bono bore the message: “Road Warrior – till the end and beyond”.
Otherwise, the church was filled with family, friends and representatives of Mr Geldof’s many interests, from sailing clubs to the Migraine Association.
The Taoiseach was represented by his aide de camp, Comdt Michael Treacy, while Lt Commander Cormac Rynne represented the Navy.
“There are more people in this church than come to one of my f***ing gigs,” said Bob during his eulogy.
In his 37-minute tribute – which included a recitation of The Shooting of Dan McGrewin its entirety – Bob jnr said his father had "wanted out earlier than this . . . The pugnacity that allowed him to stand up, to have deep respect for people as individuals, that didn't acknowledge class, or politics, or hairstyles . . . that great will, that great excitement, that great fun . . . life wouldn't let him go. But eventually he demanded that he be allowed to leave – and he left."
His father had no fear of death, believing it was just a continuation of life. “Dad was absolutely secure in the knowledge that he was going to meet the towering exuberant love of his life, mum” – upon which Bob the son suggested to a laughing congregation that there was going to be a problem: Eve would be 40 (her age when she died) and his father 96.
Bob gave a short history of how his Belgian grandfather and English grandmother ended up in Ireland, in which his grandmother’s Jewish blood was a recurring theme.
Mentioning that his father had signed up to the Irish marines (in the second World War), he noted that had the Germans achieved victory, “there would be no Geldofs. We’d have been in the camps because of my [Jewish] grandmother.” And part of his father’s motivation in helping to found the Dublin Motor Yacht Club was to have a place where Jews would be welcome. That calm but tenacious nature of his father was evident in his first meeting with his future wife, Eve, in Cork. She was already engaged, but “this wasn’t a problem for Bobbo”, said his son. Bob snr’s repeated invitations to dine resulted in a boxing match with the fiance. “My father won, and here we are.”
There were intimations of terrible grief in recollections of his father’s “muffled weeping” after losing Eve suddenly to a brain haemorrhage and the desperate efforts to “re-establish” the family by trying to trigger a response in the Friday night silences, as the friction between father and son grew: “I was becoming deeply unpleasant to him, as he was to me.”
Bob acknowledged with “absolute amazement” the achievement of his two sisters, Cleo and Lynn, in making their father’s life “a great joy and pleasure”, adding that he himself had been away most of the time and “didn’t want to know about that stuff . . . selfishly”.
Apart from Dan McGrew, his last tribute to his father was to recite John Masefield's Sea Fever. He finished with a line from a Philip Larkin poem tattooed on his daughter's arm: "What will survive of us is love."
