Among the collection of 19th-century antiques in a house I visited a while back was a magnificently racist piggy bank from 1882. Made in Connecticut, it was officially the “Shamrock Bank”. But its inspiration was another, unlovelier Hibernian stereotype.
The Irishman depicted in it had an outsized head on a leprechaunish body, and tucked into his pocket was a jug of whiskey.
The central feature, however, was a pig, wedged between Paddy’s thighs with its snout in the air, so positioned you could rest a coin on it.
Then you pulled a lever, and with an overhead flick of its left trotter, the pig deposited the coin via Paddy’s mouth, which opened to receive it, communion like, on a pink tongue.
Pork scratchings – Frank McNally on racist piggy banks, the decline of thrift, and the joy of building playgrounds
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As he swallowed the money, Paddy rolled his eyes in delight.
This was one of several mechanical banks made by the J & E Stevens Company, based in a town named – wait for it – “Cromwell”.
Other models included the “Reclining Chinaman” and one from 1883 in which a native American chief offered a pipe of peace to a newly arrived immigrant from Europe, Christopher Columbus.
Paddy’s piggybank was popular with New York saloon keepers, apparently, but not – we presume – in Irish bars. Either way, it is now a collector’s item. One I saw on eBay had an asking price of $2,450.
Commercial value aside, the antique may also serve a social role these days: a useful reminder that for many in Donald Trump’s New York, not so long ago, Irish immigrants were as much despised as Puerto Ricans and others are by some people now.
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The piggy bank is doubly apt this week because October 31st is World Savings Day, aka World Thrift Day, an event still marked in many countries, although no longer – it seems – here.
In fact, the latest instalment is the centenary of the original, the First International Thrift Congress, held in Milan on this date in 1924.
The new Irish Free State was an enthusiastic supporter of the idea that saving money was the surest path to prosperity. Not surprisingly, early champions of Thrift Day included Belfast-born minister for finance, Ernest Blythe, now best remembered as the man who took a shilling off the pension in 1924.
In 1931, addressing the Irish Thrift Congress, Blythe invoked the parable of the “Wise Virgins” who stocked up on lamp oil for emergencies.
Alas, Ireland’s wise virgins were already a threatened species by then. A motion to the congress warned of “serious, if not fatal, results to the national thrift movement . . . from the stimulus to gambling given to all classes of our people by the recently organised [hospital] sweeps.”
Sure enough, the Irish Hospital Sweepstakes went on to be vastly popular not just here, but in Britain and America too, using big horse races as the basis for a lottery in which the prizes could be enormous.
This may help explain why the national thrift movement appears to have withered away in the 1930s. There is no mention of it in The Irish Times after 1936. No doubt a few wise virgins held out longer elsewhere, but the most recent newspaper reference I can find is from the Strabane Chronicle in 1961.
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Perhaps the sweepstakes’ success in the US was Paddy’s revenge for pig-related offences past (although the biggest beneficiary of the scheme, notoriously, was not a Paddy but a Joe – McGrath, the politician who founded it).
Then again, one measure of its cultural fame was a 1939 Columbia Pictures cartoon called “Lucky Pigs”.
This depicted a down-and-out porcine family whose fortunes are changed when the feckless father (“Peter Pig”, although I suspect there were debates in studio about which P-name to give him) wins the “Irish Sweepstakes”.
The family wallows in vulgar wealth for a time, until 98 per cent tax rates and other misfortunes reduce them to penury again. Finally, only their son’s full piggy bank survives. Then – plot spoiler alert – a horse turns up at the door and claims that as his share of the winnings.
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In a much greater movie from 1952, Ikiru, Japanese director Akira Kurosawa portrays a frustrated, terminally ill Tokyo bureaucrat who finds meaning and happiness at the end of his life by championing the cause of a children’s playground.
I was reminded of this by the organisers of a Dublin table quiz next month (Wednesday, November 13th), who point out that participants will have a unique opportunity to share the joy experienced by the film’s Kanji Watanabe, but without the inconvenience of dying.
The event aims to raise funds for a “special autism playground” at the Red Door School, Monkstown. And it’s no mere table quiz: it’s a “gala quiz night”.
Which means that if the promise of adding joy and meaning to your life is not enough, there will also be spectacular prizes and auction items, not least an original painting by artist Tom Byrne and a dinner party cooked in your own home by a two-star Michelin chef, Damien Grey from Liath restaurant.
Quiz master will be a certain Paul Howard (possibly assisted by Ross O’Carroll-Kelly) of this parish.
All the other details are on the event website, reddoorschoolquiz.com.