AN INTRIGUING detail in Bertie Ahern's autobiography, mentioned in passing, is that one of his most famous fellow Socialists – Lenin – spoke English with a Dublin accent. A "Rathmines accent", to be precise. The claim is attributed to Roddy Connolly, son of the executed 1916 leader, who, according to Ahern, also claimed to be responsible for teaching it to the Russian leader, writes FRANK MCNALLY
The last bit, at least, appears to be an exaggeration. In a 1976 profile in this newspaper, Connolly jnr claimed no responsibility for the way Lenin spoke English, which predated their first meeting in Petrograd in 1920 (when they were introduced by John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World). Connolly is indeed quoted as saying that Lenin had a "Rathmines accent", but that this was "the product of his Irish tutor, who had lived in Leinster Road".
The question of what exactly a Rathmines accent is, or was, arises here. As the latter-day capital of Dublin’s flatland, the suburb has long been a melting pot of accents from all over Ireland and the world. During my own few years there, I don’t recall meeting many natives, if they existed at all. But I certainly wasn’t aware of there being a way of speaking locally that was indigenous to Rathmines alone, as opposed to – say – Rathgar or Harolds Cross.
Again, The Irish Timesarchives may throw some light on the subject. From the very few references to the term, the Rathmines accent seems to have been no ordinary accent, nor was it confined to Rathmines. It may even have been a forerunner of that modern-day scourge, the Dart accent, which arose from nowhere about the same time as the eponymous light rail service and has been annoying people with sensitive ears ever since.
At any rate, here is the Irishman’s Diarist (who else?) complaining about the phenomenon in 1949. “Many of the Radio Éireann announcers are guilty of frequent lapses into the genteel, mincing manner of speaking known as the Rathmines accent. One announcer keeps referring to Pakistan as ‘Pawkistan’, several of them talk about ‘fawther’, [for ‘father’] ‘curless’ for ‘careless’, and worst of all ‘infearm’ for ‘infirm’.”
Perhaps it is because he was speaking in this strange manner that, according to his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin had difficulty making himself understood in London during his time there.
Although she doesn’t mention Rathmines, her memoirs do offer some indirect support for Connolly’s claim. They also note that both she and Lenin could speak English as early as 1902; or at least that they thought they could: “When we arrived in London we found we could not understand a thing, nor could anybody understand us [...] It amused Vladimir Ilyich, but at the same time put him on his mettle. He tackled English in earnest. We started going to all kinds of meetings, getting as close as we could to the speaker and carefully watching his mouth. We went fairly often to Hyde Park at the beginning. Speakers there harangue the strolling crowds on all kinds of subjects [...] We particularly liked one such speaker – he had an Irish accent, which we were better able to understand.”
So there you have it. It could be that, even in 1902, Lenin’s English was delivered in the style of a future RTÉ announcer, and that consequently nobody in England (and few people in Ireland) could follow a word of it. Not that Roddy Connolly seems to have had any trouble. But I wonder if, when he expressed his admiration for Connolly snr, Lenin referred to him as the young man’s “fawther”.
Maybe the Christian Brothers got to the great revolutionary too, somewhere, during his travels. Or some missionary Jesuits, even. This might explain his variation on the latter order’s famous motto: “Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevik forever”.
And it would also explain the story about the atheist Lenin blessing himself on the night he and Trotsky unleashed their revolution from Petrograd’s Smolny Institute.
AJP Taylor describes the dramatic moment in his introduction to Reed’s book: “At two o’clock in the morning of 7 November, Trotsky pulled out his watch and said: ‘It’s begun’. Lenin said: ‘From being on the run to supreme power – that’s too much. It makes me dizzy’, and he made the sign of the cross. Then the two men lay down on the hard office floor with a rug over them, while they waited for the news which, they hoped, would change the face of the world.”
It’s tempting to hear the father of Russian communism delivering his part of dialogue in Rathmines English. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. According to Trotsky’s version, which is slightly less dramatic than Taylor’s, although it also mentions the sign of the cross, Lenin made the last remark in German.