Patrick Comerford
When death comes at Christmas-tide to a family it has a searing impact that can never be erased or forgotten. The death of my eldest brother, Stephen Comerford, at the age of 24, 54 years ago, just a week before Christmas on 18 December 1970, had an emotional impact on my parents that I can never forget. They had celebated their 25th wedding anniversary just three months earlier.
Steve’s death came just four days after my father’s 52nd birthday, which may have compounded my parents’ grief.
This week has also marked the 20th anniversary of the death of my father, Stephen Edward Comerford (1918-2004), who died shortly after Christmas 20 years ago.
My father was born on 14 December 1918 at 7 Swanville Place, Rathmines, a neat end-of-terrace house off Lower Rathmines Road, behind the Stella Cinema and close to Leinster Square, Leinster Road and Rathmines Town Hall.
Stephen was the youngest in a large family, with a half-sister and two half-brothers (one already deceased) and two older brothers and an older sister. He was named Stephen both because he was born so close to Christmas Day and Saint Stephen’s Day (26 September) and also after his father, Stephen Edward Comerford (1867-1921).
My grandfather was also born close to Christmas Day and Saint Stephen’s Day, on 28 December 1867, at 7 Redmond’s Hill, between Camden Street, Wexford Street and Aungier Street, Dublin, and he was baptised soon after in Saint Andrew’s Church. Later, he lived on Upper Beechwood Avenue and at Old Mountpleasant in Ranelagh, before moving to Rathmines.
My grandfather was in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers during World War I, but was sent home in May 1916 – in the days immediately after the Easter Rising in Dublin – after contracting malaria in Thessaloniki. That malaria eventually killed him, and he died shortly after my father’s second birthday, on 21 January 1921.
My father grew up without any real memories of his own father, and spent his childhood years first in Rathmines and then in Ashdale Park, Terenure. As he was growing up, he was close to both his mother’s family, the Lynders family in Portrane, north Co Dublin, and to his Comerford cousins in the Clanbrassil Street and ‘Little Jerusalem’ area of Dublin, between Clanbrassil Street and Camden Street.
He went to school in Dublin, and throughout his childhood days was familiar with the narrow streets of ‘Little Jerusalem’. There his childhood friends included the Levitas brothers, who lived on Longwood Avenue and Warren Street in Portobello, and whose family attended the Lennox Street synagogue, one of the many small synagogues in the area.
One Saturday evening in the mid-1920s, the synagogue almost went up in smoke. It was not, however, attempted arson. Four boys had been anxious to bring the Sabbath to a speedy conclusion in order to resume playing on the street. So they came back into the synagogue to hastily say the final prayers, and accidentally knocked over a candle that set a cloth alight. Fortunately, it was quickly extinguished. The ‘culprits’ were three brothers – Max, Maurice and Sol Levitas – and Chaim Herzog. The Levitas brothers later became heroes of the Battle of Cable Street in the East End of London in 1936; the fourth boy was Chaim Herzog – the Chief Rabbi’s son and a future President of Israel.
Other childhood and school friends and contemporaries who he shared memories of with me included Dr Kevin O’Flanagan (191-2006) who played both rugby and soccer for Ireland, Johnny Carey (1919-1995), also an Irish international footballer, the actor Jack MacGowran (1918-1973), the writer Cornelius Ryan (1920-1974), former Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave (1920-2017), and the RAF flying ace and war hero Paddy Finnucane (1920-1942).
During those schooldays, my father also travelled by boat to Italy, in what turned out to be a lengthy odyssey for the Boy Scouts he was part of, and in adulthood he continued to recall how the ship had passed through the Straits of Gibraltar and stopped off in Spain.
When he left school, he began a career in the insurance sector with the London and Lancashire, first working as an insurance clerk at the London and Lancashire office on College Green, Dublin. In those years immediately prior to the outbreak of World War II, he also become actively involved in An Óige, the Irish Youth Hostel Association, founded in 1931 by Thekla Beere, Shane Bodkin and Terry Trench.
The founders of An Óige were inspired by the success of the Youth Hostel Association in England, founded the previous year, and the Jugendherbergen in Germany, and were motivated by inter-war efforts to promote peace among young people on these islands and in Germany. My father had a particular interest in An Óige’s early youth hostels at Lough Dan, near Roundwood, and in Glencree, Co Wicklow. He was also a keen rugby player.
At the outbreak of World War II, the 11 Cavalry Squadron LDF (Local Defence Forces), later the 11 Cavalry (FCA) Regiment, was formed, with Captain JN Farrell forming a Cyclist Squadron based in McKee Barracks with of cyclists from Dublin clubs. Shortly after, my father joinned the 42nd (An Oige) Cyclist Squadron when it was formed. It was led by Aidan Pender, later editor of the Evening Herald and the Irish Independent, and alongside my father the other members included his childhood friend George Kerr, a journalist and later assistant news editor of the Irish Press, Brendan O’Shea, Sean O’Briain, Jim Dillon and Stan O’Grady.
Some of these men had been friends and neighbours since schooldays, many remained lifelong friends, and George Kerr became my ‘uncle’ and ‘foster father’. Their regimental symbol was Pegasus, and a Pegasus trophy remained on my father’s sideboard for many years.
At the end of World War II, all members of the LDF became the new Forsa Cosanta Aituil (FCA), and the new 11 Cyclist Regiment was renamed the 11 Cavalry Regiment FCA. Many of the 11 Cyclists were commissioned almost immediately, and the FCA was integrated into the regular army structures. Stephen was promoted but turned down the offer of a full-time army commission, and continued to work in the insurance sector. In the days immediately after the war, he and my mother Ellen (Murphy), a civil servant from Millstreet, Co Cork, were married in Blackrock, Co Dublin, on 8 September 1945. They had met while she was staying in a bed-sit in the home of his half-brother Arthur Comerford on Rathgar Road.
They first lived on Putland Road, Bray, but spent much of their life in houses on Lower Kimmage Road in Harold’s Cross, and in Rathfarnham Wood, and were the parents of six children. At one time in 1950, he drove to Rome with a group of friends – I think they included George Kerr, his first cousin Patrick ‘Sonny’ Linders, and (perhaps), his brother-in-law Michael Murphy – stopping along the way in Paris, Milan, Bologna and Florence.
Back in Dublin, he continued to work with London and Lancashire, specialising in fire insurance, and becoming an insurance surveyor. London and Lancashire merged in 1960 with Royal Insurance, Britain’s largest insurance group, which became a takeover by Royal Insurance in 1962, and now part of Royal Sun Alliance. His work took him throughout Ireland and regularly to London and Liverpool.
He was also an active trade unionist, becoming a branch chair in the Guild of Insurance Officials (GIO), a union founded in 1919 – both his father and grandfather before him had also been active trade unionists. The union affiliated to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the Confederation of Insurance Trade Unions, and became the Union of Insurance Staffs in 1969. The following year, it merged with the Association of Scientific, Technical and Management Staffs (ASTMS), and after various mergers and amalgamations was absorbed into Unite.
His colleagues when he was a union activist in the 1960s included Noel Harris, who was also active in the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement and who died in 2014; and Clive Jenkins (1926-1999), who once described his recreation in Who’s Who as ‘organising the middle classes’ and who was instrumental in getting Neil Kinnock nominated to the leadership of the Labour Party.
There were union conferences in seaside towns like Scarborough, Blackpool, Skegnesss or Brighton, and on one union or business trip to England he brought me back my first transistor radio so I could listen to Radio Caroline and Radio Luxembourg. Little could I, his union colleagues or his friends have imagined how my father’s political views would take a different direction in his later years.
He took advantage of his office locations on College Green and Dame Street to give the children in his family prime viewing positions for the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in Dublin. Family holidays during summer months involved what seemed like long weeks in Kilcoole, Bettystown and Termonfeckin, on the east coast and close to golf courses – rugby had given way to a passion for golf, and he was active in the Castle Golf Club in Rathfarnham, where he seemed to spend much of his weekends and where he always seemed to win a turkey each Christmas.
My brother Steve and I joked that he had chosen to send us to school in Gormanston in the hope that as adults we would play golf with him – neither of us did. He tried to encourage me to play rugby, and I have memories of him teaching me to row on Lough Ramor in Virginia in 1967. That summer he listened with pride to broadcasts during the Six-Day War featuring his childhood friend Chaim Herzog, who was just two months older than him.
He passed on his enthusiasm for youth hostelling, and I hitch-hiked throughout England Ireland in my late teens. He never managed to persuade me to join the scouts or the FCA, but his GIO was the first union I joined after I left school. I remained an active and committed union member all my working life, in the National Union of Journalists and then the Irish Federation of University Teachers.
Former colleagues told me he paid the price for his union activism when he was denied opportunities for promotion and advancing his career. He was an insurance surveyor with Royal Insurance until he took early retirement at the age of 55 in 1974. But he continued to work as a surveyor with Donal O Buachalla and Company on Merrion Square, Dublin, where he became a director and the company secretary.
He encouraged me to train as a chartered surveyor – although those hopes produced as much fruit as his hopes that I might play golf with him. My relationship with him as a child and as a teenager were difficult and usually fraught, though perhaps I was less than kind when I wrote about these memories a few years ago.
His boyhood voyage by ship through the Mediterranean may have given him a lifelong love of travel, visiting France, Spain, Portugal, Croatia and the US, though I failed to persuade him to visit Greece with me. He found it difficult to understand why I never continued as a chartered surveyor and instead became a journalist, first with the Wexford People and then with The Irish Times. Although his close friends George Kerr and Aidan Pender and other members of his family were journalists too, he regarded journalism as too ‘arty’. He never acknowledged my successes in The Irish Times, even when I was appointed Foreign Desk Editor, and he would constantly ask when I was ever going to get a ‘real day job’.
In a similar vein, he was critical of my high-profile involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1980s, although that may have been where his sympathies lay in the late 1950s or early 1960s. It was hurtful that he never came to my graduations, conferrings or book launches, or to milestone family events. In his final days, there was one glint of acknowledgement when I shared with him my research on Comerford family history and genealogy, and his family gathered to celebrate my parents 50th wedding anniversary in their home in Rathfarnham in 1995.
Many years later, the Royal Insurance building on College Green was acquired by Trinity College Dublin, and in my academic career I had mixed emotions when it came to attending MTh course management meetings in what probably were his offices 40 or 50 years earlier.
Stephen Edward Comerford died suddenly at the age of 86 from a rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurism at his home in Rathfarnham Wood this week 20 years ago, a few days after spending Christmas 2004 in Cork. He is buried in Bohernabreena Cemetery, Co Dublin.
His gravestone says he died on 27 December 2004, but his death notice in The Irish Times says he died on 28 December 2004 – 137 years to the day since the birth of his own father in 1867. He never knew his own father, and 20 years later I wonder whether I really knew him.
