The Duke’s quiet return
QUESTION
Did John Wayne, star of The Quiet Man, ever return to Cong, Co. Mayo, where the movie was made?
AFTER making The Quiet Man film, released in 1952, John Wayne often made return trips to Ireland, especially the West of Ireland.
But those trips were kept very low key and Wayne, surprisingly, kept out of the limelight. For those return trips, he spent most of his time fishing and he was also introduced to shark fishing on Achill Island. Some of those trips back to Ireland were made in the company of his great friend, IrishAmerican film director, John Ford, who had a house in Co. Galway.
The two of them did make various clandestine trips to Cong, to see where the box office hit had been largely made, as well as to other locations that were used in the West of Ireland.
Wayne is on record as saying that when he came back to the West of Ireland, what he enjoyed doing most was spending a lot of time on his boat, fishing, as well as playing cards and enjoying the company of his friends.
Wayne’s real name was Marion Morrison, born in Iowa in 1907. By the late 1920s, he was working in the movie industry as a props man and a film extra. But he moved swiftly up the scale and by the time he was 32, he was a major movie star. In the process, he got his nickname ‘The Duke’.
Out of the 200 films he made, his favourite was The Quiet Man and for years afterwards, he promoted the virtues of Ireland. He often said that this country was the best place in the world to make movies in. However, The Quiet Man nearly never got made.
It had been touted around every studio in Hollywood and was turned down on every occasion. Eventually, it was picked up by Republic Pictures, whose president, Herbert Yates, painted a gloomy forecast for the film. He said that it was a ‘silly little Irish story that wouldn’t make a dime’.
After the film’s release, he was proved dramatically wrong, as The Quiet Man turned out to be the biggest grossing film Republic Pictures ever made.
While he made several surreptitious visits to Cong himself, so too did his Quiet Man co-star Maureen O’Hara. After Wayne’s death, his widow, Pilar Pilatte, his third wife (all his wives were of Hispanic descent), came to Cong herself. Hardly surprising, a statue of the great actor was put up in Cong.
Apart from John Wayne’s fishing trips to the West of Ireland, he also made a much more public visit to Dublin in 1974, when he stayed at the Gresham Hotel.
It had been three years since he’d made a movie but his reputation as a bona fide star meant that he was widely recognised wherever he went. He died five years from cancer in 1979.
Peter Daly, Westport, Co. Mayo.
QUESTION
Which would be more devastating? Two cars, each travelling at 30kph, colliding head-on, or one car travelling at 60kph colliding head on with a stationary one?
IN BOTH cases, the cars have the same closing speed of 60kph, so if you were unlucky enough to be a passenger the initial impact would look and feel the same. However, the 60/0 cars have twice the kinetic energy of the 30/30 cars (assuming the cars weigh the same).
The average speed of the 30/30 wreckage after impact would be roughly zero because the total momentum before impact is zero, while the average speed of the 60/0 wreckage would be 30kph (the average of 60 and zero).
So, the 60/0 crash would be much worse as the extra energy would be dissipated by the wreckage continuing to travel after the crash, possibly hitting other things or causing the cars to roll.
J. F. Smith,Stratford-upon-Avon.
QUESTION
I read the Beano and the Dandy as a child, but I don’t recall any Irish comics. Were there any?
IN the 1950s and 1960s, the Beano and the Dandy, produced in Dundee, Scotland, held sway over the comics market both here and in Britain.
They had very little competition in Britain and even less here, where publishers considered it folly to try to take on the Beano and the Dandy, such was their popularity. But both before and after the heyday of those two comics, Ireland did have a comic tradition of its own.
In the early 20th century, the best-known Irish-created comic was a magazine called The Lepracaun, which first saw the light of day in 1905. The publisher was a cartoonist called Thomas Fitzpatrick and among the writers he signed up was James Joyce.
After Fitzpatrick died in 1912, the comic was taken over by his daughter, Mary Fitzpatrick O’Brien, who ran it until it closed down in 1919.
A further comic creation came in 1922 when Dublin Opinion was founded. Often described as a ‘comic for adults’, two of its founders were cartoonists Arthur Booth and Charles E. Kelly. It was an almost instant success. By its third issue it was selling 40,000 copies and at the height of its fame, sales were 60,000 an issue.
It then went into decline in the mid-1960s and closed in 1967. Then in 1968, it was sold to a publishing entrepreneur called Louis O’Sullivan, but the revival was very short lived and it closed for good that same year.
During the boom years of the Beano and the Dandy, they had the market to themselves, but in more recent years, as they went into decline, something of a boom began with Irish comics.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a publication called Clann Disney was produced, showing many Disneyland stories in Irish.
The first modern Irish comic was GakBag, launched in 1988.
In 1990, some of our best-known cartoonists, including Martyn Turner, Jim Cogan, Aongus Collins and Gerard Crowley came together to publish The Crack.
Yet another comic was launched in 1995, called Fitz, then between 2003 and 2007, Longstone Comics produced Havoc 21, a mix of everything from science fiction to humour. Then in 2009, yet another Irish comic came out, called Rirá.
But all these creations were short lived. Now that so much material is published online, the idea of publishing another paperbased comic for the Irish market is considered far too risky.
No Irish publisher ever managed to rival the Beano and the Dandy, so that for many people here, their memories of childhood comics consist of those two titles.
Andrew Delaney, Dublin 18.
IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Irish Daily Mail, Embassy House, Herbert Park Lane, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. You can also fax them to 0044 1952 510906 or you can email them to charles.legge@dailymail.ie. A selection will be published but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.