Читать книгу The Enigma of Arthur Griffith - Colum Kenny - Страница 11

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An ‘Un-Irish’ Personality?

During negotiations for the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Michael Collins was filmed impatiently pacing a back balcony at the Irish delegation’s house in Hans Place. Griffith was photographed standing quietly at its front door with his wife, facing a little park on the other side of the building (Plate 15). He was not excitable, being ‘one of the calmest appraisers of men’, and ‘not lavish of his praises’.1 He reluctantly granted interviews to journalists, and could prove difficult to interview due not least to his falling silent.2 Yet to shy young people he was fatherly and kind. When the Butler sisters first approached him as teenagers at his ‘grimy’ office in Fownes Street, for example, ‘suddenly his face lit up with a smile that had something paternal in it – though he was quite a young man’.3

Patrick Carey said ‘I often had a conversation with him, but he was a very silent and retiring man, not pushing. His parents were nice and respectable people. They had no time for gossip. Griffith was a hard-working man and had nothing to give away.’ Carey, a crane operator along the Liffey, was a tenant at 83 Summerhill in the early 1900s, when the Griffiths also rented rooms there.4

Griffith being a Dubliner of artisan or lower middle-class origins and of low income, his formal education was undistinguished. He left school in his early teens as was common then, but he read widely, buying books cheaply from barrows along the quays. He facilitated, argued with and was surrounded by confident men who had completed secondary school and attended college. They included John O’Leary (Tipperary Grammar School, TCD and QCG), W.B. Yeats (Erasmus Smith High School and the Metropolitan School of Art), James Joyce (Clongowes and Belvedere, UCD), Patrick Pearse (Christian Brothers’ School, UCD, Trinity and King’s Inns) and Éamon de Valera (Blackrock College, the Royal University of Ireland and lectures at TCD and UCD).

Neither his features nor his temperament marked Griffith as exotic. He did not pose in a studio with a gun, as Constance Markievicz did with her revolver, thus bequeathing future generations an image of her as a dramatic revolutionary icon. Griffith was photographed not as he collected his rifle from a boat at Howth, but bent over a desk at work. ‘Griffith’s Sinn Féin policy was improving the morale of the people but it was plodding work, not revolution,’ wrote Maud Gonne, somewhat dismissively, of the hard grind of everyday politics.5

When Michael Lennon was gathering information about Griffith in the early 1950s, a correspondent wrote:

I think the man in any Irish revolutionary movement who is likely to be remembered longest is the one with a romantic sounding name. O’Donovan Rossa is spoken of now when James Stephens [1825–1901] is forgotten – the latter was the more prominent in the Fenian days. De Valera is another instance of this Irish tendency. The name had an irresistible fascination for the crowd.6

De Valera’s name also evolved, from George de Valero on his New York birth certificate to Edward at his baptism, to Eddie Coll when sent back to live with his mother’s people in Ireland, to Éamon (sometimes spelt by him with two letters ‘n’) de Valera (sometimes spelt by him with an accent/fada). His ‘exotic name helped him to stand out in later life’, thinks his most recent biographer.7 And perhaps his birth overseas even strengthened de Valera’s appeal at some level in the national psyche, by associating him with that salvation from abroad that Gaelic poets had long anticipated in the form of exiled Irish lords returning with Spanish or French help?

For his part Griffith was a common Dubliner, born and bred in the heart of a city long set apart from Gaelic Ireland. He had no exotic name, no Anglo-Irish sheen of a George Moore or Yeats, and no barrister’s wig like Patrick Pearse. Although a city boy, he had not the working-class profile of his socialist friend Connolly or of ‘Big Jim’ Larkin. Yet H.E. Kenny (‘Sean-ghall’) admired his dedication, writing to Alice Stopford Green in 1915 ‘He has remained voluntarily poor in a venal age’ and ‘I love him with as rich a love as my nature can yield.’8

‘Un-Irish’?

Among the papers that Seán Ó Lúing left to the National Library of Ireland are two reports for his publishers that implicitly raise an interesting but disturbing question: was Griffith’s artisan and ostensibly Protestant background a factor in how he was assessed by Irish Catholics among others?

One of the reports refers to Ó Lúing’s manuscript for his book on Griffith, and the second to his manuscript for an essay subsequently published in a collection edited by the historian F.X. Martin.9 The first reader, who is unidentified, wrote ‘I have heard it said … that Griffith in his early stage flirted with theosophy or neo-Buddhism. The text rightly says he was given to private judgement.’10 The second reader, identified as F.X. Martin himself, asked ‘Was he [Griffith] not intolerant? Un-Irish in character and application? Was he not either vain or rigid so as to be caught by Lloyd George on the point of “honour” in the Treaty negotiations – any typical Irishman would have dismissed Lloyd George’s objection.’ The question of whether or not Griffith was ‘caught’ by Lloyd George into giving his word will be considered later. What is relevant here is the suggestion that keeping one’s word (assuming that this was what Griffith actually did) might not be ‘typically’ Irish.

The two reports raise the spectre of someone suspected of having rather too carefully weighed up moral decisions and then taken them unduly seriously, who relied on a very non-Catholic ‘private judgement’ rather than follow dogma (nationalist dogma) and who, being given to sipping quietly just a glass or two of Guinness when gathered with voluble friends in a pub, was ‘un-Irish’ in an ill-defined but communally understood way (being not ‘one of the lads’ as it were).

Griffith’s widow mentioned an ancient relative of Griffith who contacted her and invited her to Cavan.11 Griffith’s Ulster Protestant antecedents were mentioned in broad terms when he was a candidate in Cavan for Sinn Féin, as candidates often accentuate local connections if they can do so at election time. However, biographers have pinned down little or nothing definite about Griffith’s ancestors or his father’s family outside Dublin. At one point, as files in the National Library show, the district justice Michael Lennon went to considerable lengths searching for that information. Griffith’s acquaintance Dan McCarthy told Ó Lúing that Griffith ‘was extremely reticent about his family, ancestors, etc.’.12

Lennon was, for some unknown reason, made aware of the story of one ‘Billy Griffith’ of Co. Tipperary that had appeared in Young Ireland.13 Attributed to ‘Mrs J. Sadlier’, this told how a Protestant farmer Billy Griffith had long ago hidden a Catholic priest from men hunting him.’14 To Irish Catholics of Griffith’s day, Arthur’s own name and that of his brother Billy (William) would seem more likely to be Protestant than Catholic. Indeed, according to Ó Lúing, when Griffith’s son was presented for baptism, a Catholic priest challenged the choice of the name Nevin: ‘Huh? What? Naomhán! My goodness, I never heard of it. Was Naomhán a saint?’ Griffith reportedly answered simply that he did not know but that ‘He was a bishop, anyway’, and the priest laughed.15 His laugh suggests discomfort. Occasional speculation that Griffith’s ancestors came from Wales to Ireland as settlers is no more than gossip, but the kind of gossip that might do damage to one’s Irish nationalist credentials.

The series of articles about ‘notable graves’ that Griffith and Rooney wrote for a Dublin newspaper in 1892 included those of Lord Clare and Charles Lucas, two persons who would not occur to many Catholic nationalists to be praiseworthy but whom Griffith respected as independent spirits.16 He also had kind words for Lord Russell of Killowen on the latter’s death.17 Griffith’s advocacy of a system of government for Ireland akin to that which had existed before the Act of Union, including a monarch but now with a Catholic majority in a restored Irish parliament, echoed Douglas Hyde’s desire ‘to render the present a rational continuation of the past’.18 It left the door open to northern Protestants to support independence, not least by maintaining a link with the Crown.

Was Fr F.X. Martin unconsciously painting the ostensibly Catholic Griffith as a morally severe Presbyterian who took life too seriously, as even being akin to those Protestants whom some Catholics found ‘un-Irish’ in their sensibilities and termed ‘sourpusses’? Griffith prided himself on basing his arguments rationally on economic and other statistical evidence. However, when the conscience of Catholics was expected to be primarily ‘informed’ by the hierarchy, ‘private judgement’ was a fruit of the Reformation that might raise suspicions.

Any suspicion that he was ‘un-Irish’ may have been coloured too by his being not only a Dubliner but also a trade unionist printer before he became an editor. In 1943 Michael Hayes commented to Seán Milroy, ‘Griffith was a remarkable man but he had essentially the outlook of the Dublin skilled worker. It would be interesting to see from his writing whether he had any rural touch at all.’19 The respective definitions of ‘a rural touch’ and ‘a Dublin skilled worker’ might include reference to class, personal attitude and anglicisation among other factors. For implying that someone is not ‘one of us’ is a way of marginalising that person. Thus, for example, John Devoy described Éamon de Valera as

the vainest man intellectually that I ever met. He is really a half breed Jew and his mother was a ‘Palatine’ – that is, of German descent. His temperament is not Irish and no man can get along with him except on the condition of absolute submission to his will … he has not an original mind nor any real grasp of politics.20

Such descriptions tell us at least as much about the person making them, and that person’s understanding of their community’s imagined identity, as they do about the object of their description.

Or was Ó Lúing’s reviewer simply acting the part of devil’s advocate, taking his cue from Lloyd George’s stereotyping? In December 1922 the latter wrote of sitting in Downing Street opposite ‘a dark, short, but sturdy figure with the face of a thinker. That was Mr Arthur Griffith, the most un-Irish leader that ever led Ireland, quiet to the point of gentleness, reserved almost to the point of appearing saturnine.’21

Allied to Griffith’s ‘un-Irish’ character and moral decisiveness was a certain perceived intolerance or narrowness for which he was criticised by Bulmer Hobson and Patrick Pearse among others. He impatiently filled columns of his papers with articles dismissing humbug and ‘sunburstery’, a term in use then to denote fine words spouted by those who are elated by their own bright ideas and rhetoric.

Yet, in at least one way, he was quintessentially Irish. For he bristled when facing an English opponent, and the memory of past slights and wrongs was never far from the surface. On 10 January 1922, in Dáil Éireann, he was challenged on a point by Erskine Childers. Born in London and educated in England, Childers had been reared partly by his Barton cousins in Co. Wicklow. Although secretary to the Irish negotiating team in London, he joined the anti-treaty side.22 Griffith struck the table before responding angrily ‘I will not reply to any damned Englishman in this Assembly.’ It was an uncharacteristic outburst.

Griffith does not fit neatly into an Irish stereotype. James Owen Hannay, the Church of Ireland clergyman who wrote novels as ‘George A. Birmingham’ and who also wrote fiction for Sinn Féin, became acquainted with him first through the Gaelic League. He found Griffith

utterly unlike any Irish politician that I knew. He had no gift of private conversation and indeed talked very little. He used to look at me through pince-nez glasses which always seemed on the point of falling off his nose. When he did speak, it was briefly and coldly. Yet, from the first time I met him I was greatly attracted by him. He was a man of absolute honesty and no idea of self-glorification or self-advancement ever seemed to enter his head. He had a very clear intellect and was one of those rare men who never shrink from the logical conclusion of any line of thought or seek to obscure meaning with misty words.

Hannay thought Griffith to be unrelentingly serious: ‘I never discovered in him a trace of a sense of humour. Things seemed to him right or wrong, wise or unwise, but they never seemed funny; though that is what most things are.’23 Others disagreed.

Sense of Humour

Unlike Hannay, other acquaintances discerned in Griffith a keen if sometimes caustic sense of humour. His wife found him ‘such fun with friends’.24 James Joyce took pleasure in Griffith’s tilting at the windmills of parliamentary verbiage. For Griffith such humbug was well represented by the standard graphic above the daily editorial column of Dublin’s Freeman’s Journal. This showed the sun shining above the building that had once housed the old pre-Union Irish parliament. Joyce was prompted to write mischievously in Ulysses:

Sunburst on the titlepage. He smiled, pleasing himself. What Arthur Griffith said about the headpiece over the Freeman leader: a homerule sun rising up in the northwest from the laneway behind the bank of Ireland. He prolonged his pleased smile. Ikey [Jewish] touch that: homerule sun rising up in the northwest.25

Griffith jokes at his own expense (Sinn Féin, 9 April 1910).

Griffith’s satirical streak is evident also in certain verses or poems that he wrote, as well as from a witty if lengthy article on the Royal Irish Academy that appeared under his pen name ‘Lugh’ in 1901, and another on the ‘Royal Academy Auf Musicke’ that spoke up for Irish compositions that same year. A ‘delightful’ piece on Professor Atkinson of Trinity College reportedly filled readers with ‘great glee’.26 His ability to quip is also evident in the United Irishman. On 16 March 1901 he wrote ‘The Australian Leader is wrong in supposing that the United Irishman would back the devil if that personage attacked England. The United Irishman would not interfere in a family quarrel.’ He published a cartoon of himself as the devil, to please his detractors.

Liam Ó Briain, a founder member of Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe, the Irish-language theatre, insisted that Griffith could be delightful company.27 On one occasion Griffith brought an old acquaintance with him to meet friends. He extracted much amusement from pretending that his companion was a Hungarian baron interested in Griffith’s proposal to adapt the Austro-Hungarian constitutional model for Ireland.28 And for all the economics and politics he read, he sometimes liked to help sleep come by reading a popular romance such as Charles Garvice’s Her Heart’s Desire.29

When interned in Reading in 1916, Griffith grew a beard, about which he joked, and kept up the spirits of fellow prisoners by organising games of handball and other activities that included the writing of verses. A fellow prisoner later thought that Griffith was ‘never depressed in jail, or never appeared to be depressed’.30 Even during the tense weeks at 22 Hans Place in London, lodged with his team negotiating an Anglo-Irish treaty in late 1921, his private secretary found evidence of his sense of humour and composure.31

Shyness and Obstinacy

Maud Gonne wrote that she got to know Griffith well in 1899: ‘He was not an orator, and was at first very shy and inaudible when addressing meetings’.32 George Lyons too met him then, at a session of the Celtic Literary Society after Griffith’s return from South Africa:

Griffith, from his studious and bookish habits and his long spells of solitary companionship with his pen, became somewhat shy and retiring, and to many who knew him but slightly appeared cold and unsocial, but this was not his true nature. He would pass through the streets of Dublin without noticing his associates or even his friends. He would enter a hall or a crowded meeting place and pass through without saluting any one. There were three reasons: firstly, his eyesight was extremely defective … secondly, he was usually preoccupied in his thoughts, but, strongest reason of all was, he really never thought that anyone wanted a nod from him; he really believed himself to be an unknown and an unnoticed man and he was entirely oblivious of the fact when he walked through a crowd that anyone paid the slightest importance [sic] to his actions.33

Seán T. O’Kelly, later president of Ireland, was an assistant in the National Library when he first encountered Griffith – whom he said made ‘constant’ visits and spent many hours researching there in the 1890s. They subsequently worked together in Sinn Féin, and O’Kelly wrote ‘He was a very difficult man to know. He was always very reserved. His friends were few – that is, those he took into his intimate confidence. It was some years before I could say I had won his confidence.’34

Lyons thought ‘In organisation affairs he oft-times failed to check an abuse through his inability to realise that he held any sort of authority, and in no possible circumstances could he ever be conceived in the position of ordering people about their duties.’35 Griffith wrote in the United Irishman of 24 June 1899: ‘We have at all times opened our columns to our critics. The want of a free, tolerant, and intelligent public opinion in Ireland is directly traceable to the Irish politicians and their press.’ This willingness to permit a range of views to be expressed in his papers, however admirable, allowed people such as F.H. O’Donnell and Oliver Gogarty to indulge their prejudices in a manner that continues to dog Griffith’s reputation. Maume believes that ‘Like many professional unmaskers, Griffith’s scepticism shaded into paranoia, and he was susceptible to demented cranks.’36

However, Griffith was also at times stubborn in his interpretation of a question, and this offended some nationalists who failed to change his mind. Tongue-in-cheek, his friend Padraic Colum later wrote:

People in Dublin said he was intolerant of ideas, and that he preferred to have with him second-rate men who accepted the whole of his doctrine rather than first-rate men who differed from him on a point. I must say that I never knew any of the first-rate men who differed from him on a point offering their services to him.37

Colum may have had in mind persons such as Patrick Pearse. Pearse, like de Valera, did not join Sinn Féin before 1916. Indeed, in an open letter that he published as editor of An Barr Buadh on 18 May 1912, Pearse admitted ‘I have never loved the same child [Sinn Féin].’ But this did not deter him from urging Griffith to change before it was too late. As Sinn Féin weakened, Pearse wrote he was ‘sorry to see its father being killed.’ While he described Griffith as narrow-minded, distrustful and overbearing, he confessed that the latter was also best placed in Ireland to lead the movement, and thought it a great pity that Griffith might fail because nobody else could work under his leadership.

If some found Griffith difficult, others were more sanguine. In 1917 the socialist Cathal O’Shannon told the Irish Labour Party leader Tom Johnson,

Arthur Griffith of course is narrow and stubborn – always was and I suppose always will be. I, however, have found that I can always get along with him even when we differ. Most of our people on both sides have a way of saying things that might be more effectively said in another way – there is a great deal in the way a thing is said.38

Notably, even a number of those who supported the opposing side during the civil war, such as Seán T. O’Kelly and Maud Gonne, later wrote kindly of Griffith.

One of those who disliked Griffith was the writer Sean O’Casey, who opposed the treaty. He mocked Griffith’s championing of Thomas Davis, the hero of Young Ireland, and even sneered at Griffith’s gait:

Right enough, there was Up Griffith Up Thomas a Davis, hunched close inside his thick dark Irish coat, a dark-green velour hat on his head, a thick slice of leather nailed to his heels to lift him a little nearer the stars, for he was somewhat sensitive about the lowness of his stature. His great protruding jaws were thrust forward like a bull’s stretched-out muzzle; jaws that all his admirers spoke of, or wrote about, laying it down as an obvious law that in those magnificent jaws sat the God-given sign of a great man … As plain as a shut mouth could say, he said he was Erin’s strong, silent man. What was he thinking of as he stood there, grim and scornful?39

Dan McCarthy, who worked with Griffith, also thought that he put a cork wedge in his boots to make himself higher. Griffith did walk unusually, in footwear made for him by Barry’s of Capel Street, perhaps because of a minor disability. In South Africa from 1897 to 1898 he was nicknamed ‘Cuguan’, an approximation of the sound made by doves and attributed alternatively to his gentleness with black employees who were accustomed to brutality and whippings or to the manner of his walking.40 He often used ‘Cuguan’ as one of the pseudonyms on his articles.

James Moran, an early acquaintance of Griffith, described him as ‘One of the finest men it was ever my good fortune to meet; modest, sensitive, courageous, clean-minded, with a keen sense of humour, he was utterly selfless, a friend in need, and a boon companion, who could discuss almost any subject without obtruding himself.’41

Reading, Swimming and Chess

Throughout his life Griffith treasured time with books. At the National Library, for example, he and a friend spent many nights searching in old papers for poems by James Clarence Mangan that were hard to identify because of the widespread use of pen names then. Mangan greatly appealed to Griffith, as he did to James Joyce who spoke publicly about him in 1902.42 Mangan’s classic poem ‘Kathleen-Ni-Houlahan’ was a source of inspiration for Yeats’ play about that particular personification of Ireland, a play with which (as will be seen) Griffith said he helped Yeats. On Saturday afternoons Griffith also visited booksellers on the quays, and bought many ‘twopenny or threepenny bargains’: ‘In his humble home’, wrote one friend, ‘he was the despair of his mother – books for breakfast, books for dinner, and books by the light of a halfpenny candle after the rest had gone to bed’.43 Another friend, James Starkey (the writer ‘Seumus O’Sullivan’), visited him when he lived in Summerhill: ‘Sometimes I would accompany him to that old house, a strange house with a low wall in front of it, and talk far into the night amidst the chaos of books with which his room was heaped. For he was an omnivorous reader.’44 Patrick Carey, Griffith’s fellow tenant in Summerhill, described him as ‘very quiet and hard-working’. He added that Griffith ‘used to work till all hours of the night … in a little front parlour room, facing Buckingham Street. He called it his “den”. He had a table and chair in it and did all his research and writing there. He would be up till two and three o’clock in the morning.’45 But Griffith liked fresh air too. He was a keen swimmer all his life, bathing regularly at Clontarf or the Bull Wall or further afield in Sandycove:

Although he worked in his office like an insect, although he would round off his day by going into the National Library and reading until ten o’clock, Arthur Griffith was very much an open-air man. Every day, when the water was not absolutely chilling, he swam in the sea; the vigorous constitution that he had and his persistent exercise kept him in good condition: often, however, he showed weariness and strain.46

He had ‘amazingly strong muscular arms’, declared Robert Brennan ‘which he attributed to his early gymnastic training and his regular daily swim’. He also had something of a reputation as a boxer, and he surprised Brennan and other fellow inmates interned in England by the ease with which he scaled a ten-foot wall, on which there was apparently no foothold, in order to retrieve a handball.47

He enjoyed playing chess, a pastime that suited his reserved demeanour and his reputation for calm, strategic thinking. He wrote to thank friends who, for his thirty-eighth birthday, gave him a ‘beautiful chess board and chessmen’. True to type, he feared that it might distract him from his work. He sometimes played with friends in a popular café on O’Connell Street – the ‘DBC’, later destroyed during the 1916 Rising. One friend with whom he is said to have ‘often’ played chess was Abraham Briscoe, father of Dublin’s first Jewish lord mayor, Robert. Griffith, when interned, also passed time playing or teaching chess. On the train from Holyhead to London with the treaty team in 1921, he produced a portable set and played chess with Desmond FitzGerald.48

Lower Sackville/O’Connell St, Dublin, after the 1916 Rising, with Nelson’s Pillar and (first on right) the shell of the Dublin Bread Company (DBC). As noted in Ulysses, nationalists met for chat and chess in the DBC tearooms, a haunt of Griffith (National Library of Ireland [KE116]).

Nights at The Bailey

Seán T. O’Kelly recalled that ‘Griffith, though never a heavy drinker, would take one or two bottles of stout during the course of the night’, while friends sat around and discussed literary and political topics.49 He liked to meet his acquaintances at an establishment just off Grafton Street that Parnell had also frequented, as one of them later wrote:

Griffith made The Bailey his own particular haunt, all the more so since his other rendezvous, Davin’s pub, The Ship, in Fleet St., had been destroyed in the Rising … He generally arrived some time after seven o’clock and made for the smoke room upstairs on the second floor. This was a small room, with two windows looking out on Duke St … Griffith had his own special seat … on the leather couch that ran along the inner wall that divided that room from the dining-room, between the fire-place and the window.

Should you enter the smoke room early in the evening, you would be sure to see ‘A.G.’, as he was always referred to, ensconced in his corner, a cigarette in his mouth, a silver tankard of stout on the table before him, going through a great pile of newspapers and journals. As he scrutinized the printed matter, he would now and again mark, with a blue or red pencil, passages that struck him for reference in his articles … When the last paper was duly scanned, A.G. would put them aside with a sigh of relief and join in the talk and discussions with his friends … And of friends he had many and diverse, attracting them from every class and level, high and low, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, atheists. Indeed, their social, religious and political variety was as astonishing as their personal and temperamental differences not to say clashes and contests.

However, having so written, the barrister and land commissioner Kevin O’Shiel noted that ‘Griffith’s part in those discussions was mainly that of a listener … speech he only resorted to when he felt he had something to say that was worth saying, and then he said it in the fewest possible words and with a most un-Irish lack of adjectives.’ O’Shiel added:

Griffith had two marked habits that one could not fail to notice. One was a habit of blinking his eyes. He was short sighted and always wore pince-nez; but I think the blinking was not due to his sight but to his innate shyness and sensitiveness. The other habit was that of every now and again pulling up his neck-tie. He could never make the usual tie knot, and so had to confine his tie through a gold ring which required constant adjusting.50

At closing time Griffith seldom walked alone to O’Connell Street. Usually one of his friends walked with him to Nelson’s Pillar where he boarded a tram.51 Some people who encountered him in public felt ignored. George Lyons wrote ‘he often confessed to me that he never knew who a person was until he heard their voice.’52 One evening, for example, Griffith was with a group when Eddie Lipman, a young doctor on leave from the war in Europe, joined them in uniform. Griffith did not give him a look of recognition. Lipman wanted to chat with Griffith but misunderstood Griffith’s demeanour as coolness towards the uniform and left. When Griffith heard of this a moment later he went to find Lipman, and stood talking with him in College Green.53 However, not everyone who hailed Griffith respected him. His solicitor and ‘close friend’ Michael Noyk told the Bureau of Military History of an occasion when Griffith was walking home with Seamus O’Sullivan from The Bailey and ‘an Irish-Party man, or maybe an A.O.H. man, made some nasty remark as Griffith was passing and pulled his hat. Griffith turned round and gave him a punch, knocking him down, even though Griffith had very bad sight and had to wear glasses.’54

James Moran remembered that one day, as he and his friends swam, ‘a very powerful shower of rain came down. We made for the dressing boxes for cover, but noticed that Griffith remained in the water, and was swimming in circles. Showing off was a thing he was never known to practise, so we shouted at him to come in.’ Immediately Griffith made for them, and they found him exhausted. They helped to dry and dress him before heading off for the nearest pub ‘where after a drop of good whiskey he was himself again’. Moran says Griffith explained ‘When the shower came down it splashed the water into his eyes, and his sight, always a little weak, became blurred. He couldn’t see what direction he was swimming in, but he gave no sign he was in distress. A most remarkable man!’55