I’m sorry to hear that Baker’s pub in Kill of the Grange has disappeared from the map of Dublin. It’s a personal matter for Michael Baker, who wrote to me saying: “They demolished my father’s former pub the other day”.
But even for those of us who had never been inside the premises, it was a geographical landmark.
A few years ago here, I wrote about the ultimate accolade available to Dublin pubs or shops: having a corner named after them. My list then included Doyle’s, Hart’s, Hanlon’s, Kelly’s, and Leonard’s. One I forgot was Baker’s Corner. Although the name may survive a while longer, the bar that spawned it is now gone.
This might also have saddened Brian O’Nolan, aka Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, whose remains rest in nearby Deansgrange Cemetery. He frequented the pub in his younger days and again in the 1960s when he and his wife Evelyn migrated from Donnybrook (where she thought their house too dark) to a bungalow in Stillorgan.
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Evelyn worried that a suburban bungalow was beneath the dignity of a writer. On the plus side, it was brightly lit. And crucially, as Anthony Cronin notes in his biography of the by then hard-drinking O’Nolan, it “had no stairs for him to climb or fall down”.
Disadvantages – for O’Nolan if not for his wife - included the lack of local pubs. He considered the nearest one, The Leopardstown Inn, disconcertingly vast: “like Croke Park roofed over”. Unfortunately, he was soon barred (in writing) from Byrne’s of Galloping Green.
Which left only Baker’s, although he had rows there too. Michael’s email attaches a screenshot of a letter O’Nolan dictated to Evelyn from his bed in November 1961, concerning a supposedly unpaid bill and an allegedly purloined bottle of whiskey (whose disappearance had coincided with a visit from O’Nolan and his brothers).
Of the former, he insisted the bill had been paid and attached a copy of the cheque involved. Of the latter, he protested ignorance: “I know nothing about the bottle of whiskey and half doz. stouts connected with our visit. It is quite true that I am quite capable of drinking the contents of a bottle of whiskey, but not the bottle itself. There is no empty bottle in my house.”
He went on, however, to suggest a line of inquiry involving his “brother in Tuam”, who had given him a lift on the night in question. It was possible the drinks had been put in the back of the car “and forgotten”. Further inquiries were promised.
Michael Baker remembers serving several of O’Nolan’s, including Brian. Of the siblings, he says: “Micheál was grand, but another brother used to take his drink facing the wall.”
Also attached to Michael’s email is a dramatic photograph of Baker’s Corner in action. It’s from 70 years ago this month, and the action is provided by a race in the then annual Dun Laoghaire Cycling Week, as competitors take a sharp left onto Rochestown Avenue.
But for Flannoraks, the picture’s chief interest may be the presence of O’Nolan – the man who coined the immortal question “Is it about a bicycle?” That’s him in the doorway, apparently, under the ‘A’ in Baker, looking dapper in three-piece suit and hat.
Dun Laoghaire Cycling Week was the subject of An Irishwoman’s Diary in this space in July 1955, under the then standard pseudonym for female contributors, “Candida”.
I’m not sure who that Candida was, but according to Flann O’Brien’s theory of molecular interchange, especially for those who cycled a lot on hard roads, she may have been part-bicycle. Struggling to understand the rise of recreational cycling in Dun Laoghaire, for example, she wrote:
“Those of us who cycled despairingly from here to there during the war, when the push-bicycle solved our independent transport problems satisfactorily, if uncomfortably, can hardly [consider it] a very enjoyable pastime.”
Female competitors in the 1955 events included one from England whose name, “Joy Bell”, hinted at infiltration by bike. But the competitions also included one, for the title “Miss Cycling”, that took the merging of personalities to a new level.
Contestants had to “parade in their cycling club outfits, wheeling their machines”. The winner would be the one judged “smartest and prettiest, and with the most glamorous bicycle”.
Although Baker’s Pub may be gone, cycling dramas at the corner continue. The location has been central of late to something called the Dun Laoghaire Central Active Travel route, which is adding bike lanes, walking paths, and greenery. Emotions ran high at a public meeting last March. “Traffic and anger at Baker’s Corner,” reported IrishCycle.com
It’s a source of some regret to the Flannorak community, meanwhile, than an earlier version of the nearby Deansgrange cycle lane was not adopted. That would have involved routing part of the bike lane through a cemetery where, if its most famous literary resident is to be believed, some of the remains are majority bicycle anyway. O’Nolan would have enjoyed the joke. Relatives of the rest of the dearly departed were less amused.
