Looking back in ’06

Both were born into the Protestant middle classes — though 50 years apart — left their homeland in early adulthood, lived long lives abroad and, having begun as novelists, are remembered chiefly as playwrights.
Indeed, the plaque on the house where George Bernard Shaw lived for his first 10 years — after his birth on July 26, 1856 — notes simply that he was the “author of many plays.”
That first family home on Synge Street, off the South Circular Road, is now a museum. It’s a 25-minute walk from the city center and Trinity College, which Shaw, who hated formal education, did not attend. He worked instead from age 16 in a land agent’s office, saying later that places like the National Gallery were his real university.
Shaw’s early literary efforts in London — to where he’d followed his mother and sister — were failures. Nonetheless, he made his name as a brilliant orator and witty pamphleteer for the socialist Fabian Society and as a city councilor. His theatre criticism established him finally as a writer in the 1890s before he became world famous as a dramatist. Shaw is the only person to have won an Academy Award (for the screenplay for “Pygmalion” in 1938) and a Nobel Prize (1925).
His reputation was more than secure by the time his fellow laureate Samuel Beckett was born at home at Cooldrinagh, in Foxrock, Co. Dublin.
Beckett claimed he first saw the light of day on Good Friday, April 13, 1906, and his date of birth is most often listed as such. His birth certificate in fact says May 13 and was registered on June 13. Anthony Cronin, a recent biographer, has written: “Since it was the Irish custom to allow a clear four weeks to elapse between birth and registration, this fact would if anything tend to confirm the May rather than the April birth-date, but of course there is always the possibility of error…”
Beckett inherited his pessimistic view of the human condition, which so marks his work, from his depressive mother. His love of sports came from his gregarious, fun-loving father, who was a quantity surveyor by profession. At Trinity, the future writer not only excelled academically, but he was also a first-rate cricketer and a fine rugby player.
After graduation Beckett went to Paris, where he joined James Joyce’s circle. He returned to Trinity to teach for a couple of years, before leaving Ireland again to travel around Europe, settling finally back in Paris. During the war, however, he fled to the South of France after his underground resistance group was betrayed to the occupying Nazis. In the post-war years, he remained an obscure figure until the 1953 success of “Waiting for Godot” made him a literary star. He won the Nobel Prize in 1969.
Throughout 1930, the year Beckett returned to Ireland to lecture, what would become New York’s most famous landmark was being built at a frantic pace. The Empire State Building opened on May 1, 1931 and was to remain for 40 years the tallest building in the world.
Its construction was associated very much with Irish labor, and its planning with an Irish hero, the former Democratic governor of New York State, Al Smith, who had recently been the first Catholic to make a serious bid for the presidency.
The movie “King Kong” contributed to the building’s early fame, and the big-budget remake now showing can only help add flavor to its 75th anniversary in the spring.
Twenty-five years before the opening of the Empire State Building another iconic American event, a calamitous one, took place. The San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906, started fires that all but destroyed the city. Irish Americans were prominent in the city’s political and businesses classes, as author Dennis Smith has pointed out in “San Francisco is Burning,” but also dominated the fire department that ultimately managed to save the city’s wharves and railway sheds, allowing rebuilding later. The recent catastrophe that struck New Orleans is likely to give the 100th anniversary of San Francisco’s trial greater resonance that it might otherwise have had
Ninety-year commemorations don’t have the same appeal as centennials. Yet, it’s likely that both the 1916 Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme, which began on July 1 the same year, will be marked both officially and unofficially. Various strands of nationalism are vying to be seen as the legitimate heir to those who proclaimed the Irish Republic in Dublin. But they are also increasingly acknowledging, as unionists have traditionally done, the sacrifice of Irish soldiers who fought in World War I.
The spring and summer will see commemorations that have even greater potential for provoking controversy and recalling raw emotions: the 25th anniversary of the deaths of 10 hunger strikers in Long Kesh. Writing in the early 1990s, Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams said: “I cannot yet think with any intensity of the death of Bobby Sands and the circumstances of his passing without crying.”
Those events won many recruits for both the IRA and Sinn Fein, but the growth of the latter is usually traced to the electoral mobilization of that time – in particular the success of the first hunger striker, the 27-year-old Sands, in the Fermanagh-South Tyrone bye-election.
Sands wasn’t the only elected Westminster MP to die in 1981 as a result of the Troubles. On Nov. 14, the Rev. Robert Bradford, the 40-year-old Ulster Unionist member for South Belfast, was shot dead by the IRA at a community advice center, as was the building’s caretaker.
Bradford, who gave up league soccer in his early 20s for the Methodist ministry, had called for tougher security measures by the British government against the IRA and had taken a no-concessions line during the hunger strike.
Referring to the MP’s murder in his book “Hope against History,” the late Echo columnist Jack Holland wrote: “The fact that the republican movement was involved in the electoral process did not stop them from attacking its very basis.”
And there is a strong case, too, for the 40-year anniversary. One commentator suggested in November 2003 that that month was witnessing the last real public commemoration and reflection of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Forty years on, a good number of key players were still living and a significant proportion of adults, say those over 50, still had vivid memories of it. (To mark the 40th anniversary on JFK’s assassination, this newspaper interviewed people who were mainly in their 20s at the time and had retired by November or were about to.)
By that token, there might in 2006 be much reflection about 1966. That year, for instance, saw the destruction of Nelson’s Pillar in the heart of Dublin by an IRA bomb and the return of murder to Belfast streets, thanks largely to loyalist extremism. There were three victims that year, including an 18-year-old Catholic barman, Peter Ward, who died in a UVF ambush.
But many remember 1966 primarily for the lavish 50-year commemoration of the Rising. So we might just see, in coming months, an anniversary of an anniversary.