Bailieborough’s Bad Boy Bachelors’ Club
In the first of a two-part piece, historian Jonathan Smyth looks at the Bailieborough Bachelor Club in 1929...
The first Culchie Festival grabbed Irish headlines in 1989. But, the question remains, were we star struck by such a show? The election of the annual King of the Culchies was the highlight that concluded each annual Culchie Fest. Anyway, these Culchie shenanigans were all in the name of good-humoured entertainment. The same could not be said about the Bachelor Club they formed in Bailieborough. Perhaps they were just acting like grouches playing hard to get, who knows.
Sadly, there are peculiar modern day male groups like ‘incel’ who congregate online with their brand of hate wielded towards women. Such despicable groups and the multimillionaire individuals who sponsor this mantra of malintent should be rooted out for what they are.
In the late 1920s, Cavan saw a series of benign sounding bachelor clubs spring up across the county and the one in Bailieborough made national headlines; unfortunately, it was for the wrong reasons. It certainly was not a culture club. On closer scrutiny it was more of a stone age club. Last year, I subscribed to the radical news archives and happened to pick up on an Irish publication titled ‘Honesty’. This aptly named paper provided unvarnished opinions, especially when it came to the activities of the Bailieborough Bachelor fraternity who had just formed an assemblage of like-minded men.
Honesty’s opinion piece had the pleasure to announce the formation of Bailieborough’s new Bachelor Club, which has deprived Dublin's Zoological Gardens of a visitor and, to explain, they quoted from a letter to The Anglo-Celt. While it does paint a frightful picture, I am aware that it is not a true representation of the of the decent gentlemen of that district. But, as they say, a paper rarely refuses ink.
The erstwhile Honesty paper stated: ‘I would like to see the sort of men that are in the Bachelor’s Club in Bailieborough. They have such a hatred to womankind that I cannot believe that their mothers were women. They must have sprung from a breed of apes. I had intended on visiting the Zoological Gardens on my next trip to Dublin, but I think I will go to Bailieborough instead. It should be much more interesting; provided I come across some of the curios who form the Bailieborough Bachelor Club. My next port of call was The Anglo-Celt archives where I hoped to discover the original letter.
Shercock too, set up a bachelors’ club when organisers from the Bailieborough Club formally opened the branch. After thorough investigation of the males in attendance, they admitted 22 suitable lads when they pledged themselves to ‘forever renounce the wiles of the other sex'. One of the brethren from the Bailieborough contingent began spouting the kind of gibberish that gets applause from the weak minded, telling his hearers: ‘that were it not for Eve, he would that day be able to pull his dinner from a tree, and go through life without physical exertion.’ He got some applause and a rebuff by someone connected to roadworks in the locality.
In clownlike fashion, your man continued to express his generalised half-baked theories, supposing that many tragedies that befell men down the centuries were to be blamed on the ladies, which of course as any sane person will know is complete rubbish. Quaker communities have had centuries of equality between women and men, and it works out well. Some wit piped up and asked the speaker if he ‘lived on his wife’s earnings’, which seemed to knock his speech off course.
The Bailieborough delegate continued: "I would say let there be no backsliding… let you men hold together like one man’ and ‘keep your hands down deep in your trousers pockets and, above all, avoid dances and other gatherings."
Having concluded, someone sneeringly called out "is that all you’ve got to say?"
More members of this misery brigade formed a group at Cootehill in September 1929. A member of the Bailieborough Club proposed to give a lecture the following week on the topic of ‘Why Men should not Marry.’ Without some form of entertainment, the Cootehill bachelors thought the meeting rather cold-blooded when a man spoke and said, with the chairman’s permission, he would sing a song he wrote.
Some time ago, probably in the 1980s, Ballyconnell Bachelor Festival drew an array of competitors including the unforgettable Mr. Gerry Drumm, a strongman bouncer, who did door security at the Riverdale Hotel, Ballybay. They captured Gerry’s inimitable character on film and the segment can be seen on YouTube. The cheerful men at the Ballyconnell competition were utterly different to the cranks that spoke to the Bailieborough Club.
Spinsters’ Clubs
And not to be out done by the menfolk, some towns formed Spinsters’ Clubs. One wonders if they harboured any bitterness towards the men. In September 1929, the Bailieborough Spinsters’ Club’s 57 members met to ‘make arrangements’ for what they termed ‘breach of promise actions’ whereby the bachelors had been writing love letters to them. To prove the violation, they produced a canister filled with letters that was up to four pounds in weight. Next week, I will reveal more about the non-compliance of the bachelors and the world of the Spinsters’ clubs.
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