Page 12 - The 16th Percy French Festival: Our Great Disconnect

NOTES

1 James N. Healy, Percy French and His Songs (Cork: Mercier Press, 1966), pp 4–30;
Brendan O’Dowda, The World of Percy French (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1981), pp 5–12;
Berrie O’Neill, Tones that are Tender: Percy French 1854–1920 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2016), pp 35–63.

2 Emily de Burgh Daly (ed), Chronicles and Poems of Percy French (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1922), pp 50, 56–57, 101.

3 de Burgh Daly, ibid, pp 66–67. French’s earliest Irish Cyclist piece appeared in the newspaper on 1st February 1888.
It was a single page of cartoons from an illustrated story titled ‘How I Didn’t Find Stanley’, a special issue of The Irish Cyclist
which was produced to mark the opening of the Stanley Cycle Show, the largest cycling show in the United Kingdom.
This page of cartoons was published in The Irish Cyclist to advertise the Stanley Show special issue; unfortunately,
no copies of the latter publication appear to have survived.

4 Several examples are reproduced in Bernadette Lowry, Sounds of Manymirth on the Night’s Ear Ringing. Percy French
(1854–1920): His ‘Jarvey’ Years and Joyce’s Haunted Inkbottle (Dublin: Self-published, 2021), pp 64–102.

5 French later gave a slightly different version of this quotation and ascribed it to Jakes McCarthy of The Freeman’s Journal:
de Burgh Daly, Chronicles, pp 67–68. French appears to have been mistaken, as one cannot locate this quotation in online
searches of The Freeman’s Journal. Sport was a companion newspaper to The Freeman’s Journal.

6 Irish Society, 12th January 1889.

7 de Burgh Daly, Chronicles, p. 67.

8 Evening Telegraph, 7th May 1892.

9 The drawings were the work of Richard Caulfeild Orpen.

10 She wrote under the pseudonym of ‘Angela’, which French mistakenly referred to as ‘Amazon’ after she ceased writing
the column.

11 Ettie wrote under the pseudonym of ‘Magpie’.

12 Some of the text and drawings in the ‘social diary columns’ in The Jarvey are reproduced in reproduced in Lowry,
Sounds of Manymirth, pp 69–72, 84

13 The troupe’s first performance was in Drogheda in February 1889. This was followed over the course of the following weeks
by performances in Dundalk, Portadown, Lurgan, Lisburn, Belfast, Larne, Ballymena, Ballymoney, Coleraine, Derry, Omagh,
Enniskillen, Dundrum (Co. Dublin), Dublin’s Rotunda, Cork and Queenstown (Cobh today). Some concerts were also given
in Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire today) in August 1889. The troupe began its 1890 concert tours in Cavan in April, before
performing in Clones, Enniskillen, Omagh, Dungannon, Oldcastle, and Navan.

14 An admirer later wrote that ‘the little paper seemed to suffer from a plethora of wit, and was crammed with such
Illus. 7. A comment on the Land War in The Jarvey, 24th Augut 1889.
reckless profusion of good things that its jokes seemed to jostle each other in the brain of the reader’: Social Review,
10th November 1894.

15 One reader mischievously suggested ‘Potheen, or the Dublin Jarviari’ as an alternative title: The Jarvey, 11th October 1890.
This was a play on Punch’s full title, which was Punch, or the London Charivari.

16 Robert Shail, ‘ “For the Benefit of Old Boys, Young Boys, Odd Boys Generally, and Even Girls”: The Irresistible Rise of the British
Comic, 1884–1900’, in John Storey (ed), The Making of English Popular Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 157.

17 Some of these are reproduced in Lowry, Sounds of Manymirth, pp. 88–91.

18 The ‘League’ that is mentioned in the second verse is the National League, the organisation that replaced the Land League
in 1882 after the latter body was suppressed in 1881. It functioned as the ‘party machine’ of the Irish Parliamen tary Party at the
local level. The Plan of Campaign which is referred to in the third verse was an attempt by tenants on scores of estates to force
their landlords to lower rents. The tenants combined to offer rents that they considered to be fair, and if these were refused the
money was paid into a joint fund to support tenants who were evicted for non-payment of rent. It lasted from 1886 to 1891,
with mixed results.

19 de Burgh Daly, Chronicles, p. 68.

20 French mistakenly stated that this was the Christmas 1891 issue. No copies of this publication appear to have survived.

21 de Burgh Daly, Chronicles, p. 2.
Illus. 8. Front cover illustration ‘French Plums’, the 1890 final issue of The Jarvey, 27 December 1890.
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