An extract from Dillon Rediscovered: The Newspaperman Who Befriended Kings, Presidents and Oil Tycoons by Kevin Rafter (Martello)
Emile Joseph Dillon witnessed some of the most dramatic events the world has ever seen, including the assassination of a Russian Tsar, the Dreyfus court martial, and bloody massacres in Armenia. In his new biography Dillon Rediscovered, Kevin Rafter uses never-before-seen letters and notebooks to tell the story of this famous foreign correspondent who was born in Dublin in 1854.
The Dillon family home was a three-storied, weather-beaten building on a narrow little street not far from the Liffey river in Dublin. Michael Dillon, his wife Mary and their three surviving children, Emile, Mary Agnes and Elizabeth, shared two bedrooms in Charles Street. A large print of the Madonna and Child adorned a wall in a tiny back parlour room where a yellow canary perched in its cage. The residential dwelling coexisted with Michael’s hardware shop, which fronted onto the cobblestoned street.
Ten families lived on Charles Street. Their struggles, as Emile recalled, were harsh and relentless
The shop opened from 7 am to 10 pm seven days a week. Tools not only cluttered the footpath but also filled the rooms of the family’s small dwelling. ‘The main purpose of the building was the warehousing and display of the goods, the lodging of the owners was secondary,’ Emile recalled. The house was ‘gloomy, uncomfortable and scantily furnished’. The contrast between this humble background in Dublin and the glittering life in later decades across the capitals of Europe is dramatic.
Ten families lived on Charles Street. Their struggles, as Emile recalled, were harsh and relentless: ‘The lives of almost all of them were tragic failures: bankruptcy, beggary, the Workhouse and the consequent breakup and dissolution of the family. […] Insensitive to hardships they led the lives of galley slaves, rising early in all weathers, toiling tirelessly, eating sparingly, hurriedly and at irregular intervals.’
Michael Dillon was a daily mass-goer, rising for 6am mass, and insisted that his wife and children join in worship. They would attend church twice on Sundays and on Catholic holy days. The family’s day always ended by reciting the rosary, kneeling together on the floor of the dimly lit back-parlour room in their house on Charles Street.
The tenor of Emile’s memory of his childhood remained deeply negative. Family life was hard while Dublin was ‘dull and drab’ but there were some positive recollections. There were outings to the Strawberry Beds, the Phoenix Park and the seaside. He also evoked happy times travelling by jaunting car to a fair in Donnybrook in south Dublin. For the young boy there was the excited fear of falling out onto the uneven roads, and upon arrival the sights and sounds of bagpipes, tumblers of Guinness, ginger beer bottles, and the beating of drums.
Throughout these years, Emile’s father held the upper hand – and everything was couched in terms of a vocation as a Catholic priest. Few concessions were made: the boy was warned to shun female company, to despise dancing, to see cards as the ‘Devil’s Prayer Books’ and to hold ‘the theatre in abomination as a half-way house to Hell.’
Restrictions on reading material were strictly enforced. Novels and dramas were prohibited.
Childhood misbehaviour was met with the refrain: ‘Joe, Joe, think of your holy vocation!’ He was punished for stepping out of line: ‘You, who expect to enter the Church one day, dare to carry on like that. Be ashamed of yourself!’
Restrictions on reading material were strictly enforced. Novels and dramas were prohibited. Approved books included the new testament bible, a history of the Reformation, an account of Irish rebellion against British rule in Ireland and Thomas Moore’s biography of the revolutionary Lord Edward Fitzgerald. But with a growing quest for learning, Emile sought out other reading material. Unbeknownst to Michael Dillon, at school his son was exposed to Greek tragedies, the plays of William Shakespeare and the poetry of John Donne, an Anglican cleric.
A neighbour secretly lent him periodicals and novels. At night by candlelight he covertly devoured the medieval adventures in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and pored over the pages of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, ‘reading by stealth, reading it under the pillow.’
For one shilling, he purchased a copy of the complete works of Shakespeare. A blazing row erupted between father and son when this ‘priceless treasure’ was discovered. ‘What demon possessed you to buy that scurrilous work?’ Michael roared. Emile replied that his school teacher had recommended the book.
‘the censorship exercised by my father over my reading was excessive and I resented it’
Emile recalled the scene in this bedroom as his father raged: ‘He tore the volume to rags before my eyes, flung the tiny fragments on the floor and stamped upon them.’ Michael Dillon warned that financial support for his son’s education would cease if there was a repeat of his stipulation on books.
Emile, however, failed to heed the warning. He would wait for the house to go quiet at night before slipping out of bed, lighting a tallow candle and sitting down in a chair to read. ‘I would then pore over my books for a couple of hours and go back to bed, but now and then the rising sun would find me still on my chair.’
But Michael Dillon was vigilant. One Sunday night he burst into his son’s bedroom and seized the book that lay open before him. The crime of reading an unapproved book was heinous enough but was further aggravated at having been committed on a Sunday.
Emile was ‘in utter disgrace’ and was not allowed to have meals with his family. Mary Dillon became an intermediary in interactions between her husband and child. The young boy was unrepentant and deeply frustrated, ‘the censorship exercised by my father over my reading was excessive and I resented it’.
Emile’s predicament was ultimately rooted in the limited opportunities available for working and lower-class Catholics in nineteenth century Ireland. ‘The priesthood was the most exalted profession that one of our faith could choose,’ Emile later recalled.
Michael Dillon ultimately got his way. ‘The choice lay between the Seminary and starvation, and I recoiled from starvation,’ Emile admitted. Father and son would eventually be ‘sundered by an abyss’ but not before Emile spent several years in search of a vocation he never really had. The decision to strike out in a different direction eventually brought Emile to Tsarist Russia where his life took another dramatic turn when he was appointed as a foreign correspondent with the Daily Telegraph of London.
This is an extract from Dillon Rediscovered: The Newspaperman Who Befriended Kings, Presidents and Oil Tycoons by Kevin Rafter (Martello)
