An Irishman's Diary

THE ANGLICISED “Hooligan” is one of those Irish names that seems to have disappeared from the face of the globe. Perhaps the last holders of it, first stigmatised by the word’s modern meaning, were then hunted to extinction. More likely, discretion persuaded them all to adopt the more standard English spelling, Houlihan; or to go the whole hog and revert to the Irish Ó hUallacháin.

Either way, it must be some consolation to such un-Hooligan-like Houlihans as Con that the hard “g” never had any place in their real name.

It got there only because of the well-known English difficulty in pronouncing what linguists call “the voiceless velar fricative represented by the Irish ‘ch’.” The same problem explains why the brothers in a certain Manchester-based rock group are known as “Gallagger”. And why Ireland used to have a world snooker champion called “Ken Dockerty”, at least according to the BBC.

Despite their notoriety and hard “g’s, the Gallaghers have not given their name to the English language (yet). But according to some explanations, it was a single Irish family – based in London in the 1890s – that bequeathed “hooliganism” to the world.

They must have been interesting neighbours. Although several synonyms for “hooligan” also started out as proper names – “Hun” and “Vandal”, for example – the units of humanity involved were whole Germanic tribes. And yet, all we know of the original Hooligans is a euphemistic mention in a 1912 book, which called them “a spirited Irish family [that] enlivened the drab monotony of life in Southwark about fourteen years ago”.

An earlier book, from 1899, also fingers Southwark as the word’s origin but credits an individual, Patrick Hooligan. The latter was a bouncer and small-time thief who organised other small-time thieves in and around a pub called the Lamb and Flag.

He eventually hit the big-time by murdering a policeman and died in prison soon afterwards.

A third explanation is that hooligan derives from the “Hooley Gang”, a collection of roughs either featuring the surname Hooley, or getting their title from the Irish word meaning “party”. At any rate, most accounts agree that “Hooligan” as a term first appeared in London newspapers and police reports in 1898 to describe the city’s then growing problem of street violence involving young men.

THE FIRST mention of the surname in The Irish Times, incidentally, suggests the noun might have older origin. It was in 1865 and the Hooligan in question was a fictional character – "Larry Hoolagan" – the stage Irishman in a play called More Blunders Than One, then packing them in at the Theatre Royal.

The play piece dates from 1824, when it was conventional for characters’ names to express their natures. So Hooligan may already have been a loaded term decades before the English press adopted it (in which case Larry Hoolagan was a double-barreled load, the reputation of Irishmen called Larry giving rise to the Australian ‘Larrikin’).

A real-life Jeremiah Hooligan featured in The Irish Timescirca 1896, in a report on the Munster Assizes at Cork. Unfortunately, from the extended clan's viewpoint, he was not a judge, or even a lawyer. Instead, he conformed to the emerging type by getting three years penal servitude for manslaughter.

Around the same time, a greyhound called "Hooligan" featured regularly in reports of coursing meetings. But it was not until 1900 that the name as a noun appeared in the IT, in reports of "another hooligan outrage" in London. In this case, two young men named "Key" and "Praud" were indicted for "rioting and fracturing a lady's skull".

I mention their conspicuously un-Gaelic surnames only to raise the possibility that the bad reputation by then credited to Hooligans might be another miscarriage of British justice.

After all, as noted here before, the notoriously eclectic English language is equally notorious for bring devoid of loan words from Irish (unless you believe Danny Cassidy's revolutionary theories about slang), the language of its oldest and most loquacious colony. Could it be that, in abandoning its traditional policy of ignoring the language, perfidious Albion here chose to distract from an emerging social problem by framing poor Paddy? Maybe this is why WB Yeats and Lady Gregory chose 1902 to launch a PR offensive on behalf of Hooligans everywhere with their play, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, in which the central figure is the poetic representation of her nation. If so, it was futile exercise. The good name had been done down and its besmirched variety was about to become widespread in literature.

Arthur Conan Doyle used the neologism in a 1904 story, referring to “one of those senseless acts of Hooliganism which occur from time to time”. H G Wells deployed it in a 1909 book, featuring: “Three energetic young men of the hooligan type.” And, soon afterwards, most impressively, it turned up in Russia.

In his 1918 film, Baryshnya i Khuligan(Baryshnya and the Hooligan), the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky inadvertently captured the fate of this maligned surname.

The eponymous hooligan, played by Mayakovsky himself, falls in love with the teacher of his adult literacy class. But of course their relationship is bedevilled by misunderstanding. And although he wins a kiss from her eventually, making for a somewhat happy ending, the triumph is tragically undermined by the fact that, moments earlier, he has been stabbed to death by the other students.