The best medicine – Brian Maye on a lighter side to Arthur Griffith

December this year marks the centenary of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the foundation document of Ireland's independence. The person who led the Dáil delegation to negotiate that treaty, and who was the first on the Irish side to decide to sign it was Arthur Griffith, who was born 150 years ago on March 31st. Griffith was a prolific journalist, writer and nationalist propagandist and much analysis has been devoted to those sides of his personality, but it's with the lighter side of the man, his sense of humour, that this piece is concerned.

Some who knew Griffith but slightly found his shy, reserved manner off-putting and they considered him humourless but his writings demonstrate, as do those who knew him well and have written about him, that there was a palpable strain of humour in him.

One of his early contributions to Eblana, the manuscript journal of the Leinster Literary Society, entitled "The Vagaries of the Printer", was an amusing look at how printing errors could be deadly. He took this example from the Daily Telegraph account of the battle of Majuba Hill during the first Boer War: "After the death of Sir George Colley, the laughter was dreadful", where "laughter" should have read "slaughter". He found another gem in the same newspaper: "Mr Chamberlain's voracity was unquestionable", where "voracity" should have been "veracity". The Morning Post offered up "Sir Robert Peel and a party of fiends have gone to shoot peasants in Ireland"!

Seamus O’Sullivan (pseudonym of James Starkey), a poet and editor of the Dublin Magazine, who knew Griffith well, testified that he wrote a great many pieces “of a delightful humour, which are scattered anonymously through the various journals which he edited”. Some of the best were to be found in the series of satirical articles published anonymously under the title At the Poets’ Agency. Grififth’s lighter writing was “full of a very delightful humour which seemed to spring from an almost inexhaustible source,” according to O’Sullivan.

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He sometimes included humorous nuggets as fillers in his newspapers. One example is: "If a man be a featherless biped, is not a plucked chicken a man?" Another would be: "By a striking coincidence, the chief witness for the prosecution in the case of the Board of Works versus the Gaelic Athletic Association was named Woodenhead and the police magistrate's decision in favour of the Board was delivered on All Fools' Day."

The humorous side of some of the serious political issues of the day struck him. Six months after the Irish Volunteers were set up, under the leadership of Eoin MacNeill, Griffith had the following passage under the heading "Moral Benefits of Volunteering": "Sir Edward Carson has assured some Englishwomen that he regards the National Volunteer Movement with a rather favourable eye. It is a moral regenerating factor. Better, he says, these people should come out and drill in the open than maim cattle, burn houses and murder the inoffensive unionists. There is something in this. It is a fact that since Professor MacNeill became a Volunteer he has not assassinated a single person nor even cut off as much as a cow's tail."

Griffith tended to regard his periods of imprisonment as holidays and treated them accordingly. After the 1916 Rising, he was initially incarcerated in Richmond Barracks, where he reported hearing the following conversation between two London soldiers on guard duty. “‘Eh, mate, these ’ere blokes aren’t ’arf as bad as we were told.’ ‘Wot are you talking abaht? These ’ere are only the city blokes. The ’ill tribes ’aven’t come in yet.’”

Part of his post-rising internment was spent in Reading Gaol. On Sunday mornings, when most of the other prisoners attended Mass, Ernest Blythe, who was Church of Ireland, had the task of having breakfast ready for their return. One Sunday, Griffith slept it out and called Blythe to his cell just as the other prisoners were returning. He got Blythe to fetch his Bible and when the others came shouting to his cell to see why he hadn't gone to Mass, he replied that he'd finished with Mass and was taking instruction from Blythe.

From his imprisonment in Gloucester Jail in 1918-1919, he wrote to his friend Lily Williams about the people of the city: "Some disappointment, we hear, was occasioned to the citizens when they discovered that the Irish prisoners were white in colour and did not possess tails. But stringent precautions are still observed against the possibility of our breaking out and devouring the children."

A practice of his while in prison was to compose ditties about his fellow-internees.

He did the following limerick on Sean MacEntee: “A committee appointed to see/Who most patient of all men might be, /After searching the globe /Gave ‘commended’ to Job, /And first place to Sean MacEntee.”