Ogs and Ends - Frank McNally on Michael Collins’s other nickname, the Liffey on film and a Dublin dialect dysfunction

One of the odder items in Whyte’s online history auction, now running until November 11th, is a caricature of Michael Collins from circa 1921/22, identifying him by the nickname “Ogs”.

Thereon hangs a tale. It appears that the Big Fellow, as he was more famously nicknamed, had a funny accent (even by Cork standards), which was all his own and exaggerated for the amusement of friends.

A keynote of this, as mentioned in Tim Pat Coogan’s biography of Collins, was the broadening of the vowel in the word ‘eggs’, so that the result “came out something like ‘ogs’.”

In an IRA field report during the War of Independence, Collins even applied the nickname to someone else, with satirical intent.

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Amid bad news from the provinces, he affected encouragement at one man’s actions, viz: “However, the great thing is that there is fighting in Mountbellew [Co Galway] Ogs Hanratty, Egg Merchant [and] Peace Resoluteer.”

This was a derisive reference to a then recent resolution by Galway County Council, asking Sinn Féin to seek a negotiated settlement because all the shooting was bad for business.

The caricature, by Collins’s secretary Ellie Lyons, shows him bustling around with a suitcase in one hand and a document in the other, while giving order and identified only as “Ogs!!!”

The nickname was a short-lived phenomenon, clearly – a bit like the moustache he wore for a time then. That too was also somehow beneath his dignity. Even so, the cartoon carries a quite dignified estimate: €800-€1,200.

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Further to the Ulster-Scots word ‘glit’, which we were discussing here earlier in the week (Diary Wednesday), Betty Flanagan writes from north Monaghan to report it unknown in her locality, where locals instead have to make do with ‘clabber’.

That too describes a kind of muck, but of the “runny, wet” variety and so perhaps lacking the stickiness of glit, as identified 2,200 years apart by Cato the Elder and Seamus Heaney.

Clabber has not yet, to her knowledge (or mine), featured in the work of any Nobel Prize-winning poets. But it has been celebrated in verse of a kind, thanks to WF Marshall (1888-959), Presbyterian minister and “Bard of Tyrone”.

Marshall’s best-known work, Me and Me Da, is a the lament of a man living in reduced circumstances – and blaming his father for it – in a place called ‘Drumlister’, which may be fictional (although Logainm.ie has two near namesakes, Drumlesters, on either side of the Monaghan-Tyrone border). Here’s one of the verses:

“I’m livin in Drumlister,/An’ I’m gettin’ very oul’/I have to wear an Indian bag/To save me from the coul’./The deil [devil] a man in this townlan’s/Wos claner raired than me,/But I’m livin’ in Drumlister/In clabber to the knee.”

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This newspaper’s week-long feature series on the river Liffey, Source to Sea, which I inaugurated last Saturday, evoked fond memories for reader and one-time film maker Mike Lawlor.

Back in 1968, he and a few colleagues in Guinness’s brewery produced a film called Liffey Faces, also tracing the river’s course from Kippure to Dublin Bay.

A 27-minute silent movie – there was no dialogue or commentary, at least, only music by the folk group Emmet Spiceland – it follows a child’s model sailing boat as it floats downstream, mingling with canoe racers, swimmers and other hazards, including a bottle thrown by a drunk on Victoria Quay.

The work was hailed by one critic as the best amateur film ever made in Ireland. And Mike tells me that the original has recently been remastered by the Irish Film Institute with the help of €40,000 from the Port & Docks Company and the Heritage Council. You can view the result online via Irish Film Archive – Guinness.

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My use of a certain Dublin dialect word in Friday’s column about the sounds of the city, as overheard in conversation recently, reminded reader Robert Hyland of an incident some years ago in Bray, as related to him by the owner of a specialist food shop.

Into this shop one day came a “a very confidently middle-class lady” who – I’m assured this really happened - asked the young female assistant: “Have you any ghee?”

The poor assistant, perhaps from a different social circle vis a vis her questioner, was rendered temporarily helpless by hilarity: forcing the owner to intervene and, himself struggling to keep a straight face, explain there had been a misunderstanding.

While Robert is at it, on foot of my reference to the continued sexual harassment of Molly Malone’s statue by tourists, he also tells me he has rewritten her eponymous ballad to campaign against the outrage. It concludes as follows:

“A sign must be erected/So that Molly’s protected/From the pawers and maulers/Who are lowering the tone/There must be no delay/And here’s what it should say;/’Attention! Please leave/Molly’s mammaries alone!’”