An Irishman’s Diary about Tom Clarke, James Joyce, and the ‘Tit-Bits’ magazine insurance scheme

In a famous photograph, much reproduced in recent months, the 1916 leader Tom Clarke stands in the doorway of his shop on Great Britain (now Parnell) Street, looking the very picture of a nationalist revolutionary.

His name, over the door, is in Irish, and in Gaelic script to boot. And the sign alongside him advertises Irish Freedom, a militant newspaper run by fellow conspirators in the IRB, which used his premises as a meeting place and communications exchange.

But the effect is spoiled a little by the sign's other prominent ad, for Tit-Bits magazine, the popular English weekly that delivered light entertainment for the masses. While waiting for the right moment to reveal itself, clearly, even revolutionary newsagents had to make a living.

Begun in the 1880s, aimed at the commuter that the train age had created, Tit-Bits was by 1916 near the height of what would be a century-long existence. In fact, 12 years earlier, it had earned a compliment of sorts from James Joyce, who gave it a memorable cameo in the Dublin of June 16th, 1904, as immortalised by Ulysses.

‘Prize Tit-Bit’

Along with hoovering up amusing or sensational snippets from other journals around the world, the

Tit-Bits

formula included publishing original short stories. And its weekly “Prize Tit-Bit” paid very well, perhaps to the envy of Joyce, even if the forum was beneath him.

So in Episode 2 of Ulysses, when Leopold Bloom needs some reading material to accompany him on an important mission (to the outdoor toilet at the rear of 7 Eccles Street), he reaches for an old copy of the magazine, in which the prize story is by one Philip Beaufoy, of London.

Beaufoy was a real-life contributor, who won regularly. And in enjoying his latest offering, “Matcham’s Masterstroke”, Bloom also marvels at the prize – “Three pounds thirteen and six” – while wondering if he could concoct such a story himself.

He notes the importance of the plot having a “moral” conclusion. But his visit to the bathroom ends with him tearing out the prize story, or half of it. Then, in what may be Joyce’s moral, Bloom uses the page for purposes other than entertainment.

Its qualities of absorption, various as they were, were not the only appeal of Tit-Bits. It also offered an extraordinary life insurance scheme, as advertised across the masthead, which always boasted of the accumulated payout, thereby including an implied body count, updated every issue. This strange scheme arose from the same thing that had created such magazines, the railway age, which brought with it a new range of ways in which people might die accidentally, and by extension a new cause of financial worry.

In response, from 1885 onwards, Tit-Bits offered £100 to the next of kin of anyone killed in a rail accident, provided a copy of the magazine was found on the body.

There were fraudulent claims occasionally. But by June 1904 (I'm indebted for this to James Joyce in the Nineteenth Century, edited by John Nash, in particular an essay by Jaya Sivage), the reported payout to date was "£15,200", suggesting 152 successful claimants.

Nor was Tit-Bits alone in this kind of business. On the contrary, even then, the competition was increasing. Elsewhere in the June 1904 issues, there was an ad for a new penny magazine, Horner's Weekly, which offered a pension to the widow of anyone killed "by train, bus, tram, boat, streets accidents of all kinds, in the workplace, in the factory, or in any place whatever".

I don't know if the Horner's scheme was still running 12 years later or whether Irish newsagents even stocked the title. But I wonder if there were people walking around Dublin in 1916 with copies of Tit-Bits or Horner's stuffed in their pockets, just in case?

Anyway, the revolution came and went, and among its results was that the city had one less newsagent than before.

Some things never change, however, as George Orwell would lament 30 years later. In Animal Farm, his satire on Soviet communism, the agrarian utopia is gradually sold out by Stalinist pigs, who first learn to walk on their hind legs and then start carrying whips, just like the humans used to do.

After that, it's all downhill for the sheep and horses. Eventually, as Orwell wrote: "It did not seem strange to learn that the pigs had bought themselves a wireless set, were arranging to install a telephone, and had taken out subscriptions to John Bull, Tit-Bits, and the Daily Mirror."