The Misses Flynn’s grand annual concerts

 

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U 8.417: There is not in this wide world a vallee. Great song of Julia Morkan’s. Kept her voice up to the very last. Pupil of Michael Balfe’s wasn’t she?

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In November 1883 Mary Ellen Callanan played at another of the celebration concerts in Dublin. This time it was a concert arranged by her aunts Elizabeth and Anne Flynn, doubtless with the assistance of her mother Ellen. It is well-known that Joyce’s father, John Stanislaus Joyce, also sang at this family-arranged concert for the people of Dublin, held at a venue they all knew very well, the Antient Concert Rooms:

     Amongst the list of artists performing that night is also listed another old friend of the Joyce’s, Bartle M’Carthy (see Harald Beck, “The man behind Mr Bartell d’Arcy”), who also sang at the musical evening recorded in “The Dead”. It seems that the evening was a reasonable success, with Bartle toasting his host with “Annie dear” and Mary Ellen performing admirably on the piano:

     Many of the same artists performed at the next of the Misses Flynn’s concerts, in November 1884. The Freeman’s Journal lists some of them:

     Mary Ellen Callanan performed regularly in the city. In late September 1885 she gave a piano recital at the Irish Artisans’ Exhibition, and a month later she was performing again (with Bartle M’Carthy) at another of Mrs Maughan Henchy’s concerts.¹

     The next Misses Flynn’s concert seems to have moved from November to mid-year – May 1886. It was well-advertised with multiple adjacent small ads in the press:

     The Misses Flynn’s concert for 1887 (now in late April rather than May) is now an “Annual Benefit Concert”:

     This time John Joyce is not in the advertised cast list, but Mary Ellen Callanan and the Joyce’s family friend are praised for their performances:

     John Joyce joins several other well-known local singers again for the Misses Flynn’s Annual Concert in 1890 (still in April), with “Miss Callanan” now well into her twenties:

     Perhaps the last of these annual Misses Flynn concerts took place in 1892, this year in January:

 

As the old century drew to a close…

In “The Dead” Mary Jane “had the organ in Haddington Road”². Her real-life counterpart, Joyce’s first cousin (once removed) Mary Ellen Callanan “had the organ” at the local church in Meath Street, where so much Flynn business had been conducted in the past:

     References to Miss Callanan “presiding” on the organ at St Catherine’s continue throughout the final decade of the nineteenth century.³

     But time was running out for the older generation of Flynns. Since the early 1880s the sisters Julia, Ellen, and Annie, along with Ellen’s daughter Mary Ellen, had lived together at 15 Usher’s Island overlooking the Liffey, giving music lessons and sharing in the musical life of the city. On 25 January 1895 “Nannie”, one of the original Misses Flynn, and the youngest of the Flynn children, died there after a long illness:

     The magical life that Joyce and others remembered there was coming to an end. It was no longer the young Miss Callanan who performed as a pupil in the Royal Irish Academy of Music concerts. These days her own pupils performed there:

     As it says in “The Dead”, she “gave a pupils’ concert every year in the upper room of the Antient Concert Rooms”.⁴ Soon it was Aunt Eliza’s time to go, aged 70:

     Within six weeks the Flynns ended their association with the majestic old house on the quayside on Usher’s Island. They saw an advert – perhaps this one in the Freeman’s Journal – for a “choice house” to let at 41 Aughrim Street, back in Stoneybatter between Manor Street and the North Circular Road, and convenient for the tram service into town:

and within months Mary Ellen Callanan was advertising her piano lessons from her new home:

     The 1901 Ireland census shows the two sisters, Julia and Ellen, with Ellen’s daughter, at 41 Aughrim Street. By now Ellen is 60, the “head” of the household, and describes herself as a “teacher of pianoforte and singing”, whereas her elder sister Julia (75) is of “no occupation”. Mary Ellen gives her age as an optimistic 29, though she is now in her mid thirties, and a “teacher of pianoforte and organ”. Later that year Mary Ellen Callanan meets up with another family friend, Mervyn Browne, also outlined as “Mr Browne” in “The Dead”, aged 48, a “professor of music”, organist and choirmaster at Christ Church, Blackrock, and also the leader of a string band in Dublin:

     Aunt Ellen was the next to leave. Joyce, clearly not enamoured of this aunt, wrote to Nora from 7 St Peter’s Terrace in Cabra on 1 September 1904: “You will be sorry to hear that my great-aunt is dying of stupidity” (Letters, vol. 2). She died on 4 December at 41 Aughrim Street, aged 72:

     In the next year the last of the Flynn sisters passed away, with the death in mid-year of Aunt Julia, aged 75. She too was buried in Glasnevin with her sisters. With the death of his own mother in 1903, and Ellen and Julia soon after, the old Dublin was crumbling. It was at this time that Joyce began to record aspects of its passing in Dubliners. On 10 March 1909 Mary Ellen Callanan died, too, of "valvular disease of the heart" at the age of 38, at Dr. Steevens' Hospital in Dublin, and the last of the old Flynn inhabitants of 15 Usher’s Island had departed.⁵

John Simpson

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