Maurice Craig is one of the most important chroniclers of Dublin's architectural heritage and history, writes Frank McDonald
Timing is "absolutely everything", as Maurice Craig discovered many years ago. When his marvellous book, Dublin 1660-1860, was first published in 1952, hardly anyone noticed. But by the time it was re-issued in 1969, there was a whole lot of new readers who were hooked on Georgian Dublin.
The battle for Hume Street was well under way, with 18th-century houses at the corner of St Stephen's Green occupied by a group led by Duncan Stewart and the late Deirdre Kelly. Even Charlie Haughey (then minister for finance) sent around a Christmas hamper, though he did nothing to save the houses.
Now aged 87, Dr Craig was delighted to see the tide turning. Though he never uses the term "Georgian" because of its connotations of British rule, he had told the fascinating story of how Dublin was transformed into a grand neo-classical city, starting with the Duke of Ormonde's return in 1661.
It was, as Prof Mark Girouard notes in a foreword to the latest edition, "a Dublin of warm hospitality and enjoyable rows, of bitter social and religious divides, of good parties, good stories and good funerals, of eccentrics and individualists, of bucks, bullies and rakes, of sudden wit and savage satire".
Prof Girouard, an architectural historian like the self-trained Dr Craig, ranks Dublin 1660-1860 alongside Sir John Summerson's Georgian London (published seven years earlier, in 1945) as the firm foundations for "a completely new way of writing about cities and the buildings in them".
What they had in common was a discipline based on meticulous examination of all sorts of sources such as building leases and regulations, analysis of building and town plans, and research into the lives of the landlords, politicians, clerics, merchants and "people of fashion" who shaped the two cities.
Both books are enduring classics, Girouard writes, "yet the different characters of their authors and of the cities about which they write lead to very different books: Summerson's shaped with restrained elegance and wit, Craig's a richer mixture of analysis rising to eloquence or dissolving into laughter."
But Dr Craig says the first edition was "far too early to attract the attention of anyone other than Elizabeth Bowen and a small number of people whose taste had been formed by Summerson's book, which had been out for a little while by then. We had the same publisher, Dennis Cohen, who was Jewish, of course."
Cohen's literary adviser, John Hayward, had been at Magdalene College in Cambridge with young Craig. "He had been exiled to Cambridge because he was an MS sufferer and lived in a chair. A great friend of TS Eliot, he went on to become a big name in the rare book world as well as working [ with Cohen] at Cresset Press.
"Hayward said 'If you ever feel like writing a book, send it to us.' I had collected a PhD for my work on [ English poet Walter Savage] Landor, and learned from it how not to write a book.
Because if you're trying to impress an examiner, you have to prove that you have not missed anything, and that's the perfect recipe for an unreadable book.
"It was after I came to Dublin to do the PhD at Trinity that I began to get seriously interested in architecture. I got hooked on the Casino [ in Marino] and found that all the personal papers of Lord Charlemont were in the National Library. As a Protestant nationalist of the 18th century, he appealed to me, so I wrote a book about him - The Volunteer Earl.
"I sent it to Cresset Press, where Hayward read it and said they would publish it - provided that I wrote a book on Dublin. I had no thought of anything like that at the time. I think they expected a chatty book of literary gossip, politics and cultural history. What they didn't expect was that it would concentrate so much on architecture."
WHILE WRITING THE book, Dr Craig learned to draw. "Harold Leask [ the State's first inspector of national monuments] taught me how to do perspective in 20 minutes - all you require then is exact observation and obedience."
Thus, he was able to draw all of the perspectives, elevations and plans in Dublin 1660-1860.
"It's not a book that I'm terribly fond of in some ways; I have written books that are much better. But I realise that the Dublin book has a special place. When I meet people, they say 'Reading your book about Dublin changed my life,' which is shorthand for changing the way they look at this. There was also a need for such a book on Dublin.
"Constantia Maxwell had done Dublin under the Georges, but it's quite clear that she never looked at buildings. But then, hardly anyone else did at the time, other than architects or engravers. The artist Flora Mitchell [ whose Vanishing Dublin was published in 1966] couldn't draw. And if the artists couldn't draw, the laity were even less observant."
Ironically, Mitchell's work and the 1969 edition of Dr Craig's book were both published by Allen Figgis. His was one of a series of Irish reprints. "All were flops except two, [ Robert Lloyd] Praeger's The Way That I Went and my Dublin book. And I don't mind saying that had Figgis not reprinted the book, it would have been forgotten."
He still detests the way it was produced. "It was a horrible little book, which fell apart. But the 1980 edition is much better. Having used the paperback version of Peter Harbison's book The Archaeology of Ireland, I specified the material in the cover, which was a plasticised fabric that will stand up to an awful lot of punishment."
He has high praise for Neville Figgis, however. After Dr Craig's wife, Agnes Bernelle, died in 1999, he decided to sell their Regency house in Strand Road. It was full of books, so he asked Figgis to help him get rid of a lot of them - including a very large Grierson Bible, printed in Dublin in 1715.
"He thought it was not a saleable item, and gave me £15 for it. Six months later, completely out of the blue, I received a letter from him saying it was a good deal more interesting than he had thought, and 'enclosed please find a cheque for €1,000.' Now who would do that, especially after a deal had been done? I think it's a beautiful story, and I tell it whenever I get the chance. An honest man is the noblest work of God, as the old saying goes."
FOR THE PAST six years he has been living in a small modern bungalow in the rear garden of Alma House in Monkstown, a nursing home opposite Seapoint Dart station. "The entrance [ to the station] is so secret that you wouldn't know it was there unless you tripped over it", he says, adding that his arthritis doesn't permit him to go out much.
Maurice Craig is a perfectionist. "I would normally compose a sentence inside my head before putting anything on paper, and only occasionally produce a whole page in an afternoon. I never learned touch-typing, but I was able to rattle away on my old Royal portable for nearly 50 years." Although he now has an iMac, he finds the keyboard "hyper- sensitive".
He's also a stickler for detail, even of pronunciation. When I used the word "research", pronouncing it as "ree-search", he immediately corrected this "Americanism". He also corrected how I pronounced Belfast - which is, after all, where he was born - saying the accent should be on the second syllable, as in "May the Lord in His mercy be kind to Bel-FAST."
He maintains that anyone who lists Ireland's four provinces in alphabetical order is "an ignorant fellow". For him, it's simple: "Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connacht. North, south, east and west. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Or if you're blessing yourself - spectacles, testicles, watch and wallet!". (The watch, of course, being in your waistcoat pocket.)
As for Georgian Dublin, he thinks it has "fared better than I feared. North Great George's Street has survived through individual effort and Mountjoy Square has been rebuilt in facsimile, although Henrietta Street is in a more parlous state. But I would be very worried about the Liffey quays" - the "essential Dublin", according to the Architectural Review.
"I remember the brother of the French ambassador saying to me 60 years ago 'C'est un petit Paris'. It was a huge compliment, as I understood immediately. So I think it's very important to keep the quayscape. In that context, Liberty Hall was a disaster, but I heard with delight that they're going to pull it down. It's not the right place for a high building."
Dr Craig likens the vulgarity of much of what's been built during the "Celtic Tiger" era to English Jacobean architecture, which he always regarded as "hideous . . . simply because a lot of people who had very little architectural education became very rich very quickly with hideous results. It will correct itself in the end, although I won't live long enough to see it."
Neither, I said, would I.
Dublin 1660-1860: The Shaping of a City will be published by Liberties Press in early December (€14.99)