“May I have your autograph?”
My friend Clive Murphy, Oral Historian, Novelist, Writer of Ribald Rhymes, Philumenist, Snapper and Exhibitionist, was once also an Autograph Hunter. “I was already collecting at eight, writing around to radio personalities for their autographs,” he recalled fondly, “When I went to Castle Park Prep School it became my craze. Although it was a lot of work writing the letters, it was very exciting waiting for the replies.”
Recently, when Clive gave many of his personal papers to the Bishopsgate Institute, his childhood Autograph Album from the late forties came to light and we spent an hour going through it together. With its pages of inspirational verse written by teachers and autographed studio portraits of radio personalities from long ago, this modest volume is a poignant evocation of the post-war affluent middle class world in Dublin that Clive left behind. “It was a phase I went through,” he assured me with finality, once we had studied the Album.
Growing up in a sheltered suburb, Clive’s well-connected mother hoped he might eventually become Solicitor to Trinity College but instead, once he qualified, Clive ran away to London in search of the bright lights and became Lift Attendant at Lyons Corner House in the Strand.
Subsequently, Clive won success for his novels and a ground-breaking series of oral history books, entitled ‘Ordinary Lives.’ Thus he rejected the privileged world of his upbringing – and the fascination with celebrity incarnated in his Album – for a modest existence comprising menial jobs and rented rooms, while exploring his personal interest as a writer in the lives of working people.
In 1974, Clive moved into a tiny flat above the Aladin Curry House on Brick Lane where he lives happily to this day. “There I was living in a goldfish bowl, but here I am a non-entity,” he admitted to me without regret.
(Clive is currently working on the oral autobiography of Joan the Cat Lady of Spitalfields, entitled ‘Angel Of The Shadows,’ as dictated to him over twenty-five years)
Jimmy O’Dell - “The most famous Dublin comedian that ever was – I stood at the Stage Door of the Gaiety Theatre to get that. I went there every year to the Pantomime. The great shame at school was if you went to a matinee, everyone wanted to go in the evening when the jokes were much dirtier. I don’t know why they call it ‘adult’ humour because the jokes are exceedingly childish. It doesn’t say much for adults does it?”
Leslie Malcolmson - “The most gifted teacher of English who would go to infinite pains upon behalf of favoured pupils such as myself. He thought I might have some talent. He directed me in the role of ‘Dopey’ in ‘Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs.’”
Donald Wormell - “This was my cousin. He became Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, but he didn’t like it and had to be relieved of it. All public speeches were done in Latin.”
Sandy McPherson “A popular organist, the kind of music that would be played in the cinema before the film begins. I heard him play many times on the radio.”
“My Latin teacher”
Kenneth Horne - “He was with Richard Murdoch in ‘Much Binding in the Marsh.’”
“It’s not ribald!. This was written by my English teacher”
Gracie Fields – “I was a terrific fan of Gracie Fields, she had a gift of being terribly funny. The biggest aspidistra in the world, she made it sound terribly rude. But she could sing ‘Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye’ and be terribly serious. She had this marvellous untrained voice.”
Tommy Handley – “We listened in to ‘I.T.M.A’ at Prep School.”
“This was first teacher at eight years old. We called here ‘Braddy Depth Charge’ because she was a large lady. She wrote this when I left at thirteen.”
Stephen Goodin, Coin Designer - “He designed the coinage for the Queen. He was a close friend of my mother and we went to the Pantomime together. I called him ‘uncle.’ When he died I got his cast-offs, his tailcoat and his dinner jacket.”
“I especially like this picture of Richard Murdoch star of ‘Much Binding in the Marsh’, because he was kind enough to send it to me even though I couldn’t enclose a stamped addressed envelope as Irish stamps were no use in the United Kingdom.”
Richard Dimbleby, Broadcaster -“I asked him to get me the signatures of everyone else on the show and he wrote ‘You must ask the others!’”
“This is a drawing by Marcus Clements, my best friend at Castle Park Prep School. We went everywhere together but when he went to Eton, he never spoke to me again, not even when he returned to the school on a visit. It’s a pretty little drawing.”
“My mother’s housekeeper, Maureen McDonnell, was my favourite person in the world, apart from my mother. Although she worked in Woolworths, she devoted her life to taking care of me and my mother. I’m very happy to read what she wrote because she really did mean it.”
“I haven’t the slightest idea who this chap is, I think it’s a conjurer”
“When I was thirteen and moving on to Public School, my mother wrote the last verse of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If” on the last page of my autograph book. Even though she was not a famous person, she was famous to me. If you live by that poem, you’ve got principles to last your whole life. There’s nothing in it that isn’t useful.”
Clive Murphy at his Public School in Dublin
Images courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute
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