The Blindboy Podcast - Bonus Porpoise Torture

Episode Date: January 28, 2020

Mad stories from Irish history. A woman from Cork who gets kidnapped and becomes the Queen of Morocco. The tale of a a famous dancing bear in France Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to episode 121 of the Blind By Podcast, you cunts. We're going to begin this week's episode with a poem which was written by the actor, Timothee Chalamet. I dribbled hot butter on my knee in a theatre in Portugal. We were there to see a performance of the Phantom of the Opera. The butter caused my kneecap to enlarge in a proud blister filled with my fluids. At night I could hear the waters of the blister slash around. My knees sounded like the oceans off the coast of Martinique. I drew a little beard and some eyes on my blister with a sharpie. The blister began to talk to my other kneecap,

started telling it what to do, where to go. And this is why I am here tonight, at your door. That poem was called My Blister, and was submitted by the French actor, Timothee Chalamet. Thank you very much, Timothee, for submitting that. You may notice, the background music is different this week

normally I have that little piano thing going on which I've done for a hundred and fucking twenty podcasts and I just figure why not change it up, why not for the crack, for the laugh? I mean, the piano's there for the podcast hug.

I want to relax. I want you to relax and to kind of hypnotize you into a space of contemplation and relaxation with the piano loop. But I figure I might as well shake things up you know add a little salt to the podcast by putting some some new music this week and you can tell me what you think whether this enhances your experience or does the opposite of what enhancing is. De-hensing.

I know some of you are probably wondering if I'm still doing dry January because it's like a month into January. I am. I have abstained completely from the drinking of alcohol for 28 days and it's joyful. It's joyful and it's pleasurable. I have abstained completely from the drinking of alcohol for 28 days. And it's joyful. It's joyful and it's pleasurable. I'm a big fan of it.

Am I going to continue not drinking alcohol? No. How do I explain it? It's... I'm nearly doing dry January, not for abstinence, but for a love and appreciation of alcohol, here's the crack, I've been off it for a month, fucking fantastic, better sleep, more energy, em, and my weeks are, are longer, cause it's like, I'm not drinking six cans on a Saturday therefore I have Sunday free with no hangover so it's magnificent

getting way more exercise done all the positives outweigh the negatives and my thing with alcohol or whatever as I've always said it's not the substance it's your personal relationship with it so dry January now is causing me to reassess my personal relationship with alcohol and what it's causing me to do is I'm no longer now gonna just have cans on a Saturday night out of routine

and boredom because that's that's what I was doing, it's like Saturday comes along, and it's like I've done a lot of work all week, I deserve a reward, let's have cans on a Saturday, but I was doing it out of routine, so fuck that, I'm not gonna do that anymore, so I'm now gonna have cans when I truly really want them, and if I'm being honest with myself I haven't had this month of no cans I definitely don't want cans once a week might want them once a month twice a month

and when you abstain from a substance when you make it rarer in your life then you can appreciate it more. So there's an element of that too. Okay, this week's podcast is, it's not a hot take podcast, I suppose it's a historical podcast, a ramblings on history podcast. A historical podcast.

A ramblings on history podcast. So what happened was. About a year ago. I'd heard. I was in a pub or whatever. I'm not sure where I was. But I'd heard a fact. About Irish history.

More a rumour. a little anecdote from a trusted source. From a person who knew their shit about history. So if they said this thing to me, I know they didn't pull it out of their hopes. There had to be some origin to this story. And the story that was told to me was so utterly fucking bizarre that I had to find out was this true but when I went googling for it

I couldn't find any evidence of it and then I kept searching and searching until I eventually came across one little mention of it which pointed to a book that was written in

1888 and the name of the book is Souvenirs of Irish Footprints over Europe and this book is mad like it's out of print very hard to fucking find I couldn't

get any online version of it so I went to Twitter and a few people helped me get the actual fucking book and I just want to give a thank you to Pumpkin Spice Bag on Twitter

and also Nick Daly who sent me Pumpkin Spice Bag works in the library and they sent me some photocopies of the book and then Nick Daly who I believe is an academic managed to find the

PDF of the actual book, which was from some fucking American library, and he sent me that. So within the pages of this book contained a bizarre story, which I heard about, which I'm not going to reveal to you right now what this story is, I'm going to reveal it later on in the podcast, but here's the crack, so I had this book, I have it now, Souvenirs of Irish Footprints over Europe from 1888, and I'd seeked out this book for this one fact, but as I started to read the fucking book, it becomes more than just this one fact that I was looking for, it's actually, it's an incredibly interesting and unique book, and I want to dedicate the podcast to speaking about this book, speaking about the author, and recounting to ye some

of the class shit I found inside the book so I've mentioned to you before I'm not a historian but I'm very passionate about history I like I love history because it's like time travelling empathy do you know what I mean

and what I especially adore is when I'm going to the original source like it's one thing to go online you know and read articles about history and things like that and it's another thing to take advantage of the fact

that like with things like Project Gutenberg and shit like that there's a lot of books hundreds of years old, that have been digitally transferred and are available for free online. So there's all this shit out there. So, you know, I did a podcast, about 20, 30 podcasts back about faction fighting. You know, faction fighting in Ireland. faction fighting you know

faction fighting in Ireland I was going back to books that were 100 and 150 years old and reading the actual accounts, I also like to use online resources like Irish newspaper archives where I can type in a subject and find a newspaper article

going back 300 years so this book, this is what this felt like and it's a strange little book in that it's a travel book if that makes sense in the vein of I mean travel literature

is a genre of itself it's kind of diminishing now but travel literature as in a person would travel the world and then recount the tales of what happened on their travels and then people would read this for two reasons number one to escape and number two if that person had the resources to travel themselves and to become a tourist. And travel literature has always existed, but around the time when this book was written, which would be the mid-1800s onwards,

travel started to become accessible to normal people, we'll say. Like, so this book was written fucking what was it 1887 i think 1888 sorry it was written around then and prior to 1888 travel would have been reserved for very much the moneyed classes there was a cultural thing called the Grand Tour which I've spoken about it before but the Grand Tour would have started around the 1600s it was an English thing really but very young wealthy nobility

would travel to places of antiquity they'd go to Greece, they'd go to Rome they might go to Rome, they might go to the far reaches of the British Empire, what they'd refer to as the Orient. And this was a thing that young, wealthy men did at about the age of 21, and then they'd return. And ultimately what the Grand Tour was, is it's about cultural capital.

The Grand Tour emerges in the 1600s. It emerges out of the Industrial Revolution, right? And the thing with the Industrial Revolution and Britain, or England, whatever the fuck, is before the Industrial Revolution, like, there would have been massive wealth inequality would have been more extreme wealth would have been in the hands of nobility but what the industrial revolution did is wealth became accessible to people who weren't considered noble. Wealth became accessible to people who weren't considered royal. A middle class emerged essentially. People who would have owned factories or things

like that started accruing wealth. So what you always see when that happens, when wealth becomes threatened by a new class of people who accrue wealth the only thing you have left is cultural capital so what you see is the nobility going on these grand tours

going to the ruins of Pompeii or the Acropolis in Greece it was a way to, it's like anyone can have money but not anyone can have culture, you still see this today, you know, people were well trying to, I suppose you'd call it what they'd refer to as class. It's like the wealthy Brits were like, well, if I travelled all of antiquity, and the thing with the Grand Tour as well,

it was an opportunity to see works of art. Like, in the 1700s, the Mona Lisa might be something that was described to you, and you had to go to Paris to see it. Or there were pieces of music that you had to travel somewhere to hear and that's what the Grand Tour did so it was a way for the upper crust to educate themselves to become cultured and for this then to be able to differentiate themselves from someone of equal wealth it was a way to say I'm classy you're not even though you

have the same amount of money as me around 1850 1860 onwards company started called Thomas Cook Thomas Cook actually went into insolvency this year last year 2019 but Thomas Cook were the first ever travel agent they were the first proper travel agent so now you had not just the wealthy who could afford grand tours but now you had kind of what would have been by the 1850s onward standard that the regular kind of middle class now being able to travel because of thomas cook holidays and he used to take people on cruises to fucking down to morocco or again it was very much within the confines of the british empire so travel literature became a thing but it was still very british and this book irish footprints Over Europe appears to be an Irish travel

book which is strange because the Irish didn't have a lot of wealth in 1888 but what you did have is the emergence of what you'd call a Catholic Irish middle class. The political environment of 1880s in Ireland, you're talking post-famine, the land wars are happening, and also home rule is a thing. And it's a time where an Irish Catholic middle class is emerging for the first time ever. And I think that's who this book was for.

But what Irish Footprints Over Europe is, is that it's a book about Irish people who travelled kind of all over Europe. The book was written by a fella called Eugene Davis, who was born in Clannachilty in Cork in 1867 the book was written in 1888 which would make him about 21 when he wrote it and by the looks of things this Eugene Davis chap was

would have been an example of this emerging Irish middle class I don't know either his fucking parents had a bit of land, or I'm not sure exactly, but he was sent, when he was about 18, to the Irish colleges in Paris, right, which, for an Irish Catholic family in 1880, bear in mind that's 20 years after the fucking famine, for an Irish Catholic family in mid 1870s to be sending their young fella away to Paris to study in the Irish colleges is a fairly bougie move, do you know what I mean, so they probably, they wouldn't

have been wealthy but they wouldn't have been dark poor living in a shack. Often in those times, how kind of Irish Catholic families, for them to accrue what would have been deemed, we'll say, middle class in an Ireland that's run by the British. They're teaching professions and becoming priests. So your man Eugene Davis was sent to Paris to study ecclesiastical studies, which means his parents probably wanted him to become a priest. But when he got to Paris, he wasn't too interested in his fucking studies. And he appears to have used the money that he was supposed to be using for ecclesiastical studies to kind of just

hang around Paris and become a freelance journalist. He was someone who had his eyes and his ears open, you know, looking around to see what the crack was. When Davis was in Paris he started to kind of mix within Irish circles and a lot of the Irish circles then would have been kind of Irish political radicals he was mixing with a lot of people who were in the Irish Republican Brotherhood that was a secret society that would have been a precursor to the IRA he was mixing with people who would have left Ireland because of their involvement in the land league.

These would have been groups that were kind of quasi-political, quasi-violent, organising action against landlords and rent and absentee landlordism back home. So he began to move in fairly radical circles when he was supposed to be studying his ecclesiastical shit. While he was in Paris, he became editor of United Ireland, which would have been a kind of a nationalist Irish magazine

that would have had the idea of being free from Britain at its heart. But he doesn't appear to be, like, into violent republicanism. Like, violent republicanism would have been a thing in the 1880s, obviously. You had the likes of O'Donovan and Rossi. But mainly in the 1880s, the general mood of Ireland, and especially with this emerging Catholic middle class, was home rule. The Irish wanted home rule, which was a civil, political fight for Ireland to rule itself with the eventual goal of independence from Britain.

The home rule, that vision ended with 1916 and the explosion of violence of 1916 and what Pierce would refer to as the blood sacrifice. But this Eugene Davis fella, he appears to be nationalist but not physical force republicanism. But nonetheless, because of his associations in Paris he was hanging around with Irish Republican Brotherhood fellas and drinking with them some of them who would have been implicated in IRB actions and assassinations British intelligence ended up keeping a close enough tab on him so anyway he wrote this fantastic book called Irish Footprints Over Europe. And it's a travel book which contains, it's the stories about the impact of various Irish people all over Europe, right?

And it tells all those stories and there's many different stories in it. And it has a kind of a nationalistic bent to it. There's a lovely sentence in it and it has a kind of a nationalistic bent to it there's a lovely sentence in it i mean ultimately what it does is it's it's a story about travel for the people who you wouldn't think would want a travel book nor have the economic mobility to be able to travel, but yet this book exists. There's a lovely quote in it that kind of underpins the thesis of it. He denounces the absurdity of a proposition that a people whose children could rise to the highest rung of the social ladder and could rule and govern abroad,

that they're unworthy of ruling and governing at home. So a kind of central tenet of the book is in Ireland in an Ireland that's searching for home rule you've got this continual message from the Brits that's or that you know the British power that sure Ireland can't have home rule how could you give home rule to the Irish? They're a savage, stupid, unorganised, drunken people. We can't give them home rule, it's chaos. In fact, Britain should rule Ireland for the safety of the Irish people, because if you allow the Irish people to govern themselves, it'll be chaos, so we're actually protecting them. and that would have been a dominant narrative at the time it was a very racist anti-Irish narrative

and for Davis you get the vibe from this book that he's showing hold on a second Brits why is it that when the Irish people in this book leave the country and go to fucking Italy and France and Germany that so many Irish people are able to gain success and influence and all of this shit surely this means that we're an equal people and that's the vibe within the book and the stories within it so the vast majority of the book it's about you know

people from the flight of the earls there's a huge amount of priests and fucking monks who've travelled all over Europe and established monasteries and established centres of education Irish celebrities at the time mostly male

but there's a few really fucking interesting stories and people in it that stuck out to me and that's who I want to talk about so I did go looking through the book specifically to see if he'd spoken like you know these footprints over Europe these Irish footprints that he's speaking of all these Irish people where were the women, and there weren't many, but I found one, and it's just a fucking fascinating story, so he appears to have met this, she would have been an elderly woman at this point when he met her in the 1880s, and she was in Madrid, and she was kind of like what you'd call a celebrity in Madrid.

She had a salon. And a salon would have been, not like a hair salon, just like her house or her gaff would have been a stylish place. It would have been frequented by important people. So she would have, she'd have been an influencer within 1880s. But she was from Cork. And her story is fascinating. So sometime around the early 1800s, there was a girl from rural Cork who, her name, her second name was Skiddy.

We don't know her first name, her second name was Skiddy which she then changed to Thompson because there just would have been a lot of shame around having an Irish name, Thompson would have been a more British sounding name, she assumed the second name Thompson but she was from rural Cork

she would have come from 1800s early 1800s Irish Catholic extreme poverty. But she was apparently absolutely gorgeous to the point that people would just talk about her. She had blue eyes and black hair and all this carry on. And she obviously fit into whatever was considered the beauty standards of the time. So one day anyway right was she from fucking Kinsale

I think she was from Kinsale so whatever happened wherever she was from there would have been a bit of merchant ships coming in and out right so this fella called Mr O'Shea

who was Spanish Irish and i think he could have traced his spanish irishness to something to do with the flight of the earls so mr o'shea was from cadiz in the very southern part of spain cadiz is it's almost in africa it's a real southern southern port of spain so this fella O'Shea. Was a merchant from Cadiz. So he had a load of money. He arrives into Kinsale I think it is. And he's spending a week or so in the town.

And he sees this girl. And he's just head over heels. Like this one is a fucking ride. So he becomes obsessed with her. And immediately proposes um now this is where so i'm reading a book from 1888 and that the issue is it's written by a man who doesn't want to write a book he doesn't even want to mention fucking women in the book like even even when he brings up like this is this is a book that contains 90 stories about men irish men and

even when he talks about the story of this woman from cark he has to almost apologize for it he says the career of this creature is so interesting as to merit at least a paragraph at our hands he's apologising for mentioning a fucking woman in the book. I've scoured the entire book and this woman's story is by far more interesting than a huge amount of the males that are in the story or in the book but regardless. So this fella O'Shea who's Spanish-Ir Irish arrives from Cadiz proposes to her she says yeah because again all I have to go on is the book so the book kind of leads me to believe that she's dark poor and now a wealthy fucking merchant from Spain wants to marry her so she goes fuck yes

so she arranges to get married to your man. And a month afterwards, right, so her name is Thompson at this point, which is a bullshit name. She gets on a ship, which he's paid for, which is supposed to take her to Cadiz in Spain. But on the way, the ship that she's on is intercepted by pirates from Morocco right and the mad thing about this is this isn't the first time this has happened

to Cork in the 1600s 200 years previous to that the town of Baltimore in Cork the entire population of Baltimore was once kidnapped by Barbary pirates from North Africa and sold as slaves in the 1600s

but this one, Miss Thompson, Miss Skiddy so she's off down to fucking Spain to get married to O'Shea the merchant, the rich merchant and her ship is captured by pirates and herself and everyone on the ship is then brought to

Morocco and are at a slave market right where everyone on the ship is now being sold into fucking slavery she's just some young girl who thought she was getting married in Spain and now she's in Morocco being sold as a slave so she's in the town of Fez with the rest of all the other Irish people So she's in the town of Fez with the rest of all the other Irish people. But apparently she was so beautiful, so insanely gorgeous, that the entire town of Fez began speaking about there's this fucking woman who's been kidnapped, an Irish one, and she's the hottest woman you've ever seen in your fucking life

and it travelled around Fez so much that it ended up getting to the ears of the Sultan Muli Muhammad, who'd be like the king of Morocco at the time, right? So the king of fucking Morocco goes, I need to see

this bior, whoever this slave one is is if she's as gorgeous as everyone is saying if the whole fucking town is talking about her being beautiful I need to meet this woman now I'm trying to assess this situation personally the problem is is that so the only account I have of this story Eugene Davis's book that I'm speaking about, and then when I went on to Google, the only other mention of her existence is

in issue number seven of the New Yorker magazine from about 1830, I think. Those are the only two mentions in the world about this woman. And... I think those are the only two mentions in the world about this woman and like Eugene Davis's account is it's it's it's wrought with misogyny so it's hard to fucking it's hard to pin down the emotions of the situation so she's in the slave market the fucking king of Morocco hears about her he calls for her to which Eugene Davis writes, her womanly vanity was highly tickled, of course, by this offer, and she agreed to meet his majesty. Like, she's after getting fucking kidnapped by pirates.

She's in a slave mart. Like, I don't think vanity comes into it. I'd imagine for her this was fucking terrifying she's just some girl from Cork and every man who sees her is drooling over her and now she's a slave and the king wants to fucking meet her

so the king thinks the king of Morocco thinks she's such a fucking ride that he says you have to be one of my consorts now which means the king of Morocco would have had several wives. He asked her to be his wife. Now, the thing is, I don't think she has a choice there.

She's a dirt poor slave from West Cork in fucking Morocco. And the king wants her to be his wife. So she's going to say yes. What happens if she says no? She's probably going to be killed. So she says no she's probably gonna be killed so she says yes so this is what's not in davis's account which is a shame because her story is fascinating but we only have two accounts of it and none of them take into account fear trauma consent under duress all this carry on and davis managed to get another little, a dig in, so when she agrees

to marry the king of fucking Morocco, Davis says, with that fatal fickleness of some members of her sex, she had forgotten the old love for the sake of the new, and it's like, chill out Eugene, will you, sorry, sorry she didn't fucking go back to your man O'Shea the merchant because now she's a fucking slave and the king of Morocco wants to marry her, sorry she didn't say no, like give her a break will ya, but anyway she marries the king of Morocco and she becomes then a Sultana right, and it would appear that this young one from Cork ended up being, like, the number one favourite wife

of the king of Morocco in the 1800s and effectively making her queen of fucking Morocco. And the mad thing is, like, if you're listening, going, so fucking what, she got married to a king? Like, the mad thing is, like, if you're listening going, so fucking what, she got married to a king, like according to the New Yorker article about her she was his favourite fucking wife and was

would have been of considerable like, queens have fucking power, like even back then, like a queen's power might not be direct in the way a king's is. But the accounts in the New Yorker, like the favourite wife has influence on the king's decisions. And this particular king of Morocco, Mohammed IV, he was an important enough king.

He fought the Spanish-Moroccan war, which was a very important war with Spain. And as a king or a sultan, he was quite outward thinking. He was very much kind of into trade with Europe and cultural exchanges with Europe. When he left, I think Morocco went back more into feudalism, you know, rather than the more modern forward thinking so she's important she's very very important like so here's the mad thing

it's like Davis' book and one report from the New Yorker magazine do you not think we should know if a girl from Cork was the fucking queen of Morocco for about 40 years? Is that not something we should all know? There's nothing.

Nothing exists. I've searched for it. So, your man anyway, her husband, ended up... I don't think he was killed, but he was usurped. Someone else came in and said that they were going to be king of Morocco. And she then fled Morocco and that's when the author Davis met her as an elderly woman in Madrid so she'd fled to Spain and because she was royalty the people of Spain looked after her and she had a successful kind of salon so she would have lived as an incredibly wealthy... Davis mentioned that she lived to be an old age.

A kind of a wealthy, influential celebrity, who, whoever in Morocco had a few quid, was making sure that she was looked after, because she was a former queen of Morocco. So yeah, a fucking girl from Kinsale was kidnapped about 1800 by pirates from Morocco and became the queen of fucking Spain. And I never learned about that in school, which is just mad. And while it is, you know, it's disappointing

and it makes me angry because it's like, wow, what a fucking incredible story. And what an amazing life. But to have it not done any justice because there's only two accounts written by men that don't take into it. That are just digging at her. They're digging at her. They're just denying her humanity or feelings. We don't know her first name. or feelings. We don't know her first name. We know that her second name may or may not have been Skiddy because she comes from near Castle Skiddy and that she assumed the name

Thompson but we don't know her first fucking name. A Björn from Cork who became Queen of Morocco. Come on. The vibe is kind of, oh isn't that well for her, oh she got kidnapped did she, became Queen of Morocco though isn't that well for her em but having said that, aside from like that misogynist vibe about the book, cause it's 18 fucking 88

it does, it has it's redeeming qualities so, another thing about the book that's, that I do find quite nice is just the name of it irish footprints over europe there's a lot of humility in the name itself and it translates throughout the book when you think of the world in 1880 and the big colonial powers you know france britain portugal spain the nether Netherlands incredibly wealthy nations that accrued their wealth from expanding and conquering and marching

and destroying and killing. So to call the book Irish Footprints, there's a lovely gentle, consensual friendly vibe to it it's like the people in this book didn't get to Europe by starting wars or didn't get to Europe by killing

or stealing they didn't get to Europe as well the word footprints is used too because he critiques the new emerging British tourists, the Thomas Cook era tourists, by saying that the Brits will always use modern travel, they'll always use ships and fucking railway, which in 1880 was modern, and Davis looked down on this, saying, no, the people in my book, the Irish people, the monks, the priests, the fucking, the mercenaries,

priests, the fucking, the mercenaries, they walked so it's about the mark it's not the mark that Irish people made, it's not the mark that Irish people forced but the mark that Irish people leave through participating and being sound

and being characters which I think it reflects nicely on Irish culture and it's something that still stands today, I think it reflects. It reflects nicely on Irish culture. And it's something that still stands today. I mention it a lot. About. We're just good tourists. Irish people don't start trouble.

When we go abroad. We get drunk and we have crack. And we're seen as friendly. But. We don't have that colonial mindset. Where you go somewhere and start hassle. So before. I talk more about some of the interesting stories from this book. colonial mindset where you go somewhere and start hassle so before I talk more about some of the

interesting stories from this book and I tell you the fucking main one the one that I'm leaving to last because it blew my fucking head off I'm going to do a little ocarina pause this is the bit in the podcast where we allow

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via patreon you can patreon.com forward slash the blind buy podcast and if you're liking the podcast you can give me the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month and this is what pays my bills this is what keeps the podcast going and it's how i earn a living so if you are listening to it and you can afford that and you're enjoying it please fucking do i really mean that please um if you can't afford it you can listen for free that's how it works it's a model that's based on soundness and it seems to be working great so far

but I have to keep pushing and reminding people you can also share the podcast like it, leave a fucking review whatever you want live gigs tomorrow I am going to fucking Australia alright

I have my Australia tour which is almost sold out there's a very limited amount of tickets left in New Zealand in Auckland and in Melbourne and Sydney I think those three dates have a small amount of tickets left

go to just type it in blind by Australia podcast tour 2020 whatever the fuck you'll find those tickets um one thing an appeal right because when i do live podcasts abroad it brings the irish audience together and i know that if you're coming to my gig you're going to be around you're just going to be in a community of Irish people living in Australia. And you mightn't have had that in a while. There's a tendency, and I've noticed this, for people to get pissed drunk.

Because you're like, fuck it, I'm going to see Blind Boy. Wow, there's my Irish friend from back home who I haven't seen in ages. Because Australia is massive. Now I'm in a room full of Irish people. It's like being in Ireland. And this naturally makes us get shit-faced right it's a live podcast it's me talking to someone on stage please don't get too drunk all right because I did a gig in London on a Saturday night and all it took was 10% of the audience to be shit-faced drunk for it to be really difficult. It's not like a Rubber Bandits gig where we're up there doing songs and having a mad time. It's a live podcast. It's me speaking to another person.

It's really enjoyable. It's crack. People love it. But if you're getting shit-faced at a live podcast, you're ruining that for 10 people around you. And I'm only saying it because this is just what happens when I do a gig in another country. The risk is there of us getting carried away with our Irishness. Do you get me? I also have some dates left for my UK tour. Glasgow and London are fully sold out as far as I know, but Liverpool and Birmingham do have tickets left and that's in March, I'm also gigging Belfast, very few tickets left for Belfast, Ulster Hall, very few, and I have three dates in dublin vicar street i think one of those nights is definitely

sold out and tickets are going quickly that's for april for the other two glore theater and ennis as well why not there's my live gigs lads thank you for listening to that now back to the book irish footprints across europe and the other interesting characters within. So I want to mention this bit mainly because it's weird, but also the utter hatred that Davis writes about these characters. He says, and he's talking about Italy, he says, There is, however, in Rome, as there is on the banks of Lake Le Mans, another Irish colony of quite different traditions and characteristics, composed of people who profess to be the victims of the land war that has been going on in Ireland for the past two years.

So what Davis is describing there, apparently in Rome, right? So Ireland in the 1880s, there was this business back home called the Land Wars. And what the Land Wars were, it would have been post-famine. So one of the issues in Ireland is that native Irish people didn't own a lot of the fucking land. Post-penal laws, it was no fun being an Irish person in Ireland especially in rural areas so what you had is is huge plantations owned by a single landlord and if you wanted to live there you had to spend pay really fucking high rent for a tiny amount of land and the landlords didn't even live on their land they were absentee. They could have lived in fucking Spain.

They could have lived in Britain. They were essentially just English nobility that had huge, huge amounts of land that they would rent out and really fucking cripple the Irish people. And it made people very angry because it was an unfair system that was resulting in death. very angry because it was an unfair system that was resulting in death. So the land wars were an attempt by kind of half political, half violent attempt by the Irish people to rise up and fight the fucking landlords. And some of it worked.

So apparently Davis, when he was in Rome, said that there was this small community of, you'd call them Anglo-Irish so they're essentially British people but they might have been born in Ireland but they wouldn't have identified as Irish they would have been landed gentry that came from money that owned a lot of land and were profiting from landlordism so these people apparently had their fortunes fucked off them because the irish rebelled and said we're not paying your rent or we're stealing your don't want to say stealing we're taking the land back so davis speaks about these kind of real posh haughty taughty brits in rome who were living in groups together experiencing poverty for the first time but not really understanding it and he identifies them as having posh English accents and wearing like

really posh clothes but you can tell the clothes hadn't been washed in maybe two years years so they look like half peasant half gentry they still even though they're living in poverty in Rome won't let go of the fact that it's like it doesn't matter how posh you think you are it doesn't matter how fancy you think your clothes are you're poor but they wouldn't accept it so they were spending all their money on like fucking champagne and brandy with top hats that had holes in them and shit. Occasionally going into the local shop to see if there was an English newspaper which would give them permission to return home to Ireland

and go back to owning their land again. And Davis speaks about him with utter fucking contempt. He says throughout the week the quote unquote exiles lead a dreary and monotonous existence. The fairer portion of the community may be seen discussing small beer once in a while on the piazza di Spagna. And he says some of these silk-stockinged oddities drowned their cares at a grocer's shop, hard buy in a glass of Dunville or Jameson, the only thing Irish they cared about.

And he's pure thrilled with himself, really happy that these former English landlords who once ruled over people and were absolute pricks and let people starve during the famine, that now they've gotten their comeuppance. He says, These kings in exile,

these lords of a bygone age, are perhaps, after all, more to be pitied than absolutely condemned. For if they have committed sin, they have certainly paid the penalty thereof so now i want to i want to get to the final fucking story the story that that led me to finding this book the uh the anecdote that i heard in a fucking pub which was so utterly ridiculous that I had to hunt it down I had to hunt down whether this

was true or not and the only evidence of it exists in this fucking book and I found it so there was this old priest right and he was from Dunmanway down in County Cork born in 1729,

so he'd have been born, during the penal laws, which is not a great time to be born, the penal laws were, extreme, anti-Catholic, anti-Irish laws brought in by the British that, it was

aggressive, systematic racial oppression that meant that Irish people couldn't own land or fucking own a horse or get an education or enter certain professions. It was a complete and utter attempt at

undermining and crushing a population of people from a systematic level and surprise surprise what happens after that the fucking Irish famine you know what does a population

who is starving do when they've them or their parents or their grandparents have never even had a fucking education so this priest Arthur O'Leary is a bit of a a legend because he became see the thing is with priests back then of course obviously they're priests and they're holy people but a lot of them are just fucking intellectuals and the priesthood was a way to get out of Ireland because they

certainly want to if if if a person had an intellectual hunger about them and a desire for knowledge and learning you're not going to fucking do it in Ireland during the penal laws so Father O'Leary fucked off to France and he's fair well known like the thing is like I said about this book Footprints He's fair well known. Like the thing is. Like I said about this book Footprints. It's Irish Footprints in Europe. Like there's a lot of people in there.

Who you can read up about. And who are well known. And then you've got your more. Obscure ones. Like the Queen of Morocco. But this particular. The reason I'm mentioning O'Leary. Is it's not fucking O'Leary. That's interesting. It's something that O'Leary is it's not fucking O'Leary that's interesting. It's something that O'Leary saw on his travels.

So Father O'Leary spent most of his time in France, right, working with monks. And he became a political commentator and he was a writer and he was a philosopher and would have been world renowned. And someone who seriously left his fucking left a mark on the world you know he'd be one of these strong footprints in Europe but fucking Davis dedicates an entire chapter to him

about his travels in France so anyway O'Leary would have been known for travelling around France on foot. In the book it says, Father O'Leary, during his 25 years sojourn in France, used to spend his holidays in exploring the country on foot.

He used to walk from the convent of St. Malo to the feet of the Pyrenees, or promenade all the way from the gates of Paris to the banks of the Rhine backwards and forwards within a month. He was strolling one evening along the quays in Boulogne-sur-Mer, whatever the fuck how that's pronounced in French, I don't know. But anyway, Father O'Leary on one of his walks ended up in this town, Boulogne-sur-Mer. And he notices when he's going along the quays, right, there's this huge crowd circling around something. So O'Leary's like, right, fuck it, what's going on here?

What's everyone looking at so as he goes over he sees that the crowd is after gathering around this a bear right like a fucking a huge big brown bear and the bear's keeper okay and everyone's jaws are like dropped looking at this incredibly well-trained bear, right? And O'Leary anyway sticks around Boulogne for a couple of days. And literally everyone in the entire town, all they're talking about is this fucking bear. Have you seen this bear that's down by the quays? You have to go and see him this is unbelievable like the bear was doing shit that bears don't normally do it wasn't like

balancing balls on his nose and doing tricks the bear was like he was able to mark the hour on the clock he was able to if you said hello to the bear the bear would nod backwards and he made them as as davis says he was able to do an oriental salam to the ladies which is like a i don't know what it is but i'm guessing it's some type of very complicated greeting and the people of this town bou, were just enamoured with this incredibly intelligent fucking performing bear. So because people were so fascinated and now at this point people were travelling to see the bear, the bear was just working all day on the quays and people giving money every time the bear did a trick. So Father O'Leary goes back down

to the quays to get another look at the bear and on the day that he's there the bear like is visibly tired right but there's so many people that the bear's keeper is like anytime the bear sits down because they're tired the keeper comes up with a stick and starts poking the stick into the fucking bear right but then the keeper starts poking the bear so much that the bear starts roaring and screaming right but the bear starts talking in a language that nobody in the crowd understands except for father o'leary who who's like, what the fuck? So Father O'Leary's now in the crowd, so he shouts at the bear. Connacht sa tátú a fádraig, which is Gaeilge, Irish for how do you do, Pat?

And then the bear stops, looks over at Father O'Leary and shouts, slán go raibh maith agat which means pretty well thank you so now at this point Father O'Leary starts freaking out and going hold on a second this bear is performing tricks now he's speaking fucking Irish what the fuck is going on so he summons the mayor of Bullion to come down and see this fucking bear that's performing tricks and able to talk Irish.

Now everyone starts panicking, because they're like, oh shit, they weren't just bear noises that bears make, that bear was talking a language, and this priest can understand what it is. Now you have to remember, this is the 1800s, right? So you and I are imagining ourselves going, fuck that, if I was there, alright, I'm going to start asking questions. But like, this is the 1800s. These are just the regular poor people of France and Father O'Leary

looking at a fucking performing bear that's talking Irish. These people have never seen a bear before. farming bear that's talking Irish. These people have never seen a bear before. These people aren't opening up YouTube or looking at books to see photographs of what a bear looks like. So if you arrive with a fucking bear to 18th century France and you tell people it's a bear people are just gonna go I guess that's what a bear is isn't it? So the fucking mayor comes down and Father O'Leary and the mayor go up to the bear and then all of a sudden the keeper fucking runs away and it turns out, right, that it's a man imprisoned in a bear costume, like against his own fucking will and it turns out that like there was this dark poor Irish fella from Waterford who didn't even speak English

like from a fucking stone hut in Waterford famine fucker who only spoke Irish and he'd managed to get a job as a fisherman or something and he got onto a boat that was supposed to go from Waterford all the way to Bilbao in Spain but on the way to Spain he was delivering dried cod

it was either his own cod or someone else's cod but he was delivering dried cod to Spain. The boat like sank and fell apart right but he was down in the bottom of the boat and when the boat sank he managed to hang on to a chicken coop and he kept himself afloat on a chicken coop at sea. Just him and a lot of chickens floating in the middle of the sea and then he was found by some fishermen but the fishermen brought him in

and they somehow had a bear costume and they sewed him into the bear costume and forced him to perform as a fucking bear in France to a lot of French people who'd never seen a bear before and when the mayor and Father O'Leary, like, when Father O'Leary spoke to the man,

the Waterford man in the costume, As Gaeilge in Irish, to ask him, like, like, the first question was, why the, like, why did you let yourself be sewn into a bear costume and to perform as a bear? Why didn't you at least try and get out of that situation? Because it's an insane situation and it doesn't look that hard to get out of.

And the Waterford man said, I didn't really mind being sewn into a bear costume because they fed me really well. So being sewn inside a bear costume because they fed me really well so being inside sewn inside a bear costume was good enough for me I'll do that yeah they just they kept giving me food though but he only started getting pissed off when his act got so popular that they kept poking him with a stick and that's when he started shouting at him in Ireland or in Irish and it's just so fucking beautifully Irish and absurd, I love it it's like fucking Flann O'Brien and Samuel

Beckett and the voyage of Saint Brendan except it's real life and it really happened and it's such a beautiful, absurd metaphor it's like this fucking dark poor Waterford man who spoke Irish his life in

Ireland in the early 1800s with penal laws and the famine was so bad that performing as a dancing bear against your will and sewn into a costume is better than British rule. So that there is the story. That led to this podcast. That's the story that. I was in the pub. And someone who. Knows their history. And who doesn't bullshit.

Said to me. Did you hear about the man. In 17th century France. From Waterford. Who was sawn into a bear costume. And forced to perform. And I said, where the fuck did you hear it? And they said, I don't know, but I know it's true.

And it haunted me. It haunted me. I couldn't walk away from hearing that and not find out whether it happened or not. And that's what led me to this book from 1888, Footsteps of the irish in europe over europe by eugene davis okay that's all for this week i'll see you next week i'm gonna be in australia i've brought all my recording equipment with me so we'll see what happens hopefully i can get a fucking podcast that i record outside that has the sound of like crickets or frogs

or some shit like that I'm still waiting for that maybe Australia can make it happen alright yart Thank you. rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game, and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com.