The Little Museum of Dublin is set to reopen this week after a year-long, €4.3 million makeover.
The museum’s Georgian town house at 15 St Stephen’s Green has been made fully accessible on all floors, and the interior has been refurbished and redecorated.
But the contents, a gloriously eccentric and eclectic clutter of ephemera, charting the life and times of some of Dublin’s great characters and events, remain largely unchanged, though much enhanced.
It’s a visitor experience that has made the Little Museum one of Europe’s most popular destinations.
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“We are just behind the Acropolis and ahead of the British Museum [on Tripadvisor],” says director Trevor White. “It’s a handmade museum – people want to touch, feel and handle exhibits and that openness really resonates with our guests.”
The refurbishment, which was part financed by Dublin City Council, the Department of Culture, Fáilte Ireland and private donations, has allowed for the introduction of new items, as well as reimagining popular displays, including the U2-dominated Made in Dublin music room, which now has a striking maquette of Vera Klute’s head statue of Luke Kelly, his face looming out of a spotlit dark corner.
New items also include Tara’s Palace, a 2.5 metre by 4 metre miniature modelled on Leinster House (among others) that was in storage for years following its departure from Powerscourt House in Wicklow. The palace dominates a ground floor-over-basement room devoted to Georgian Dublin.
Last weekend, contractors added the finishing touches to the refurbishment as head of museum design Dara Flynn and deputy curator Daryl Hendley Rooney reset the displays, aided by former Little Museum curator Simon O’Connor, until recently director of the Museum of Literature.
The entrance to the museum is via the basement, off which a tiny rear garden will be home to an old K1 telephone box. A stairwell devoted to former Dublin lord mayor Alfie Byrne leads to the Little Library, a non-fiction archive and reading area.
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Adjoining the Tara’s Palace/Georgian Dublin room on the ground floor is an Animals of Dublin room, aimed at primary schoolchildren.
Brendan Bracken and Christy Brown dominate the stairwell returns up through the house. A first floor room overlooking Stephen’s Green is dedicated to Dublin – from Victorian times through the city’s Little Jerusalem Jewish quarter, Oscar Wilde, Nelson’s Pillar and the 1916 revolutionary era.
Other new items are more personal in origin.
When Frankfurt-based lawyer Claire Lloyd was home in Glasgow last year to visit her father Christopher Thomson, he handed her an envelope, remarking: “You’ll like this.”
Inside, there was a copy of a cartoon showing a rather portly fellow riding a bicycle while simultaneously tapping, two-finger style, on a portable typewriter balanced on the handlebars, pipe in mouth and a large-brimmed hat perched on his head. Nearby, the scene also depicted a policeman looking on, slightly aghast at the spectacle.
A handwritten note across the top of the cartoon read: “Irish Tatler sketch. December 1940.” And across the bottom was added: “Really, it is somewhat libellous!”
The writer identified himself merely as “B”.
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Another of the envelope’s contents was a tiny newspaper cutting, a single column short, as small news items used to be known in newspapers, this one a mere 12 lines long. “Honour for Irish Journalist,” said the headline.
The piece recorded that on February 5th, 1939, the president of the Czecho-Slovak Republic, as it was known then, had conferred the honour of Officer of the Order of the White Lion on none other than “Mr R M Smyllie, Editor of The Irish Times”.
This too had a handwritten note.
“A Timida, a chara!” it said. “I know this will interest you,” and it was signed “Bertie”.
It was posted to Ms Lloyd’s great grandmother’s cousin, Alexandra Smyllie, with whom Robert Maire Smyllie, known as Bertie Smyllie, corresponded regularly. Glasgow and Ayrshire-based Alexandra was evidently a little introverted, hence the Latin greeting – a timida – meaning shy one.
Glasgow born but Sligo reared, Bertie Smyllie was a huge figure in Dublin. As editor, he shepherded The Irish Times from its soft, middle-of-the-road unionist background outlook, to one of being comfortable with, and accepting of, Irish independence. In the process, he imbued the paper with a distinctive literary bent, giving free rein to characters like Brian O’Nolan, aka Flann O’Brien, who wrote a column as Myles na gCopaleen.
Smyllie’s place in Irish history was a revelation to Ms Lloyd and her father.
“We had no idea,” she said during a recent visit to Ireland, including to Delgany Golf Club where Smyllie was captain in 1945 and 1946.
“I remember my grandmother telling me about him back in the 1980s when I was a child, ie, ‘You know about Bertie, don’t you? Bertie went to Ireland. He was a journalist.’ Or ‘Bertie was an editor. He worked for The Irish Times.’ That was all I knew, and I forgot about him over the years ... until recently when we came across a few documents, letters and clippings in my grandmother’s old files.”
The cartoon and award story are now in the museum’s Irish Times room, along with other items from the newspaper’s history (including Smyllie’s famous V-for-victory front page with which he wrong-footed the paper’s wartime censor) and several new items, notably from former foreign correspondent Conor O’Clery’s distinguished career.
A Chesterfield couch will encourage visitors to delve into books by Irish Times writers or just lounge a while, viewing Martyn Turner cartoons or photographs selected by retired picture editor Brenda Fitzsimons, and other newspaper ephemera.
Beside the Irish Times room is at the top of the house will be rotating exhibition space – a selection of Mick Brown’s photographs of Dublin from the 1960s through to the early 2000s and, later, an exhibition marking 200 years of the Coombe Hospital.
The museum has one tiny room, space for a single chair and just one person. The occupant will be able to watch, on screen, as Mary Merritt, a survivor of a Magdalene Laundry, talks on camera about her life, much of it memorialised in the groundbreaking play, You Can Leave at Any Time.
All part of the mosaic of Dublin.
The Little Museum reopens to the public on Thursday
