{"id":414595,"date":"2026-04-24T04:18:19","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T04:18:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/414595\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T04:18:19","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T04:18:19","slug":"the-real-ginger-man-and-dublins-secret-kingdom-of-alcohol-and-lawless-camaraderie-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/414595\/","title":{"rendered":"The real Ginger Man and Dublin\u2019s secret kingdom of alcohol and lawless camaraderie \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

When JP Donleavy stepped off the boat on to Irish soil in June 1946, he found himself entering a country that was still figuring out how to be itself. The Free State<\/a>, not yet 25 years old, was unsteady in its footing in the wake of a bitter Civil War<\/a>, leaving wounds yet to fully heal. To the dismay of many, the Catholic Church, without firing a shot, had been gifted the nation, and exerted a firm grip over the tempo and morals of daily life.<\/p>\n

For Donleavy, a former US marine who had come via the GI Bill to study at Trinity College<\/a>, it was a Dublin that by daylight must have seemed austere and tightly buttoned-up. But just around midnight, beneath its respectable and pious surface, another version came alive. One known only to those with a taste for forbidden fruits. <\/p>\n

By the end of the 1930s, McDaid\u2019s on Harry Street had become the gathering place where Civil War veterans, artists and mavericks forged friendships over pints. After closing time and a short walk away, a blossoming Bohemian Dublin sprang to life in the basement of 13 Fitzwilliam Place, soon to be named the Catacombs.<\/p>\n

Entrance was down a narrow staircase where behind an unmarked door a hidden, nocturnal republic awaited those who dared knock. Inside a warren of smoke-filled rooms, morals were tossed aside as quickly as overcoats, and drink flowed as conversations wandered into territories forbidden in polite day-time bar talk. The city\u2019s exiles, artists, and sexual nonconformists gathered to carve out a lifestyle denied to them above ground.<\/p>\n

It was to be the most curious of Dublin\u2019s tolerated secrets, and at the centre of it all stood another outsider, Dickie Whyman, a flamboyant English \u00e9migr\u00e9 whose taste for nightlife had been fashioned in the London club scene of the 1930s. There Whyman had managed one of Soho\u2019s popular late-night haunts until tragedy upended his life in 1941, when his lover, a British army officer, was killed in France. Grief-stricken, Whyman fled to Dublin, and set out to remake himself. No one knows exactly how he made his way to McDaid\u2019s, but it was inevitable that he would. After all, if you lived out of step with respectable society, Harry Street was where you made your way to. Soon Whyman was in the thick of it all and about to make things very interesting.<\/p>\n

One night as closing time approached Whyman invited a group of fellow drinkers back to his flat to continue the revelry with brown paper bags crammed with bottles of stout by McDaid\u2019s barman, Paddy O\u2019Brien. <\/p>\n

The following morning, surveying the wreckage, he found dozens of empties scattered. Glass bottles carried a deposit, so when he hauled them back to McDaid\u2019s he found himself unexpectedly richer by a pound or two. Instantly recognising an opportunity, Whyman set out to transform his basement into a would-be Soho night club where the only price of admission was to leave your empty beer bottles behind.<\/p>\n

By the time Donleavy found his way into Dublin\u2019s inner bohemian circle, along with fellow US veteran Gainor Crist, the Catacombs was a subterranean kingdom of alcohol and lawless camaraderie, throbbing beneath the streets of a pious Dublin above. A yet to be famous Behan was a regular, as was Patrick Kavanagh; even Tony Cronin had managed to rent a room there. Almost everybody in the Catacombs, it seemed, was a writer or at least wanted to be.<\/p>\n

It was there that Donleavy encountered the raw material for a book that he had in mind, The Ginger Man. And in Crist\u2019s unruly charisma and personality he saw the makings of Sebastian Dangerfield, the dazzling, dissolute antihero of the book, who would become one of modern literature\u2019s most loveable rogues. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Bilingual Brendan Behan and the bards of GlasnevinOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

By the time the 1950s came to an end, the Catacombs had closed its doors after Whyman left Dublin for the United States. By then Donleavy\u2019s book had become an international bestseller, Behan was a spent force, Kavanagh had one more collection in him and Cronin would recall it all in his biting memoir, Dead As Doornails, published in 1976. Little else is known of Crist, except that he took ill on board a ship near the Canary Islands, died on the quayside and lies buried in Santa Cruz, Tenerife. <\/p>\n

But to mark Donleavy\u2019s 100th birthday on Thursday, Grogan\u2019s will unveil a rare photograph of Gainor Crist. A tribute to the real ginger man, whose wild legend still lingers in the city\u2019s literary imagination, a little like Grogan\u2019s itself perhaps, part memory, part myth and best told with a drink in the hand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When JP Donleavy stepped off the boat on to Irish soil in June 1946, he found himself entering…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":414596,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[79016,615,93,61,60,91463,15342],"class_list":{"0":"post-414595","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-brendan-behan","9":"tag-dublin","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-patrick-kavanagh","14":"tag-trinity-college-dublin-tcd"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/414596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}