Good, better, best – who were the Best brothers? 

Richard Irvine Best was a Librarian and Celtic scholar who was Assistant Director of the National Library in Dublin from 1904, and Director from 1924. Richard Ellmann discusses Best, and his relationship with Joyce, in some detail in his biography James Joyce, noting that Best did not like to be pigeonholed merely as a character in the novel.1  Readers of Ulysses will be most familiar with Best from the Library scene in the “Scylla” episode. But who were his “brothers”?

     Gifford’s note on the “Best brothers” has sent commentators off on the wrong path. He notes:

Best brothers – Best and Best, 24 Frederick Street, were among the most well known of Irish solicitors.

Slote consolidates this with the annotation:

Richard Best had no brothers; perhaps a reference to Edwin and J. Paterson Best, solicitors, at 24 South Frederick Street (Thom’s, p. 1808).

     There are intriguing hints. Terence de Vere White, “who knew Richard Best for almost twenty years”, says that Best had a brother who lived in Paris, but gives no further information.2 Seán Ó Lúing mentions an older brother, who was settled in France when Richard went there, but again there are no details.3

     Joyce himself, in the earliest draft of Scylla that we have, from November/December 1918, includes this text, and then deletes three crucial words:

— Yes, Mr Best said. The brother theme we find also in the old Irish epics, don't you know. Just what you say, like the three brothers Shakespeare. It's always the third brother that marries the sleeping beauty and gets the crown.

Three brothers Best

Best of his brothers: good, better, best.

     And in a letter to his brother Stanislaus written as early as 1905 (circa 24 September) he refers to his acquaintance Richard Best using the same three words in a composite tag:

If you only grant me that thing I ask you for I will go to Paris where, IH believe, there is a person by the name of Anatole France much admired by a Celtic philologist by the name of Goodbetterbest.

     There is something here that remains to be uncovered.

Richard Best’s parentage

The Dictionary of Irish Biography, in its entry for Richard Best, summarises what is known about Best’s parentage. He was:

Born 17 January 1872 at 3 Bishop St., Derry, son of Henry Best, excise officer, and his wife Margaret Jane (née Irvine), and [was] educated locally at Foyle College.

     New research for JJON can now elaborate on this. Henry Best was born in England. His birth was registered in Windsor, Berkshire, in the first quarter of 1838 (and he was the son of William Best, born in Brighton, Sussex, “musician in ordinary to Her Majesty Queen Victoria”, and his wife Caroline). Henry Best had several brothers and sisters.

     At the age of twenty-one, in 1859, Henry Best was appointed Assistant in Excise at Ipswich, in Suffolk, starting as soon as he had passed the relevant examination for the post. As a Junior Excise officer working for the Inland Revenue he was sent on various short postings around the United Kingdom over the following decade. By 1870 he was working in Derry (“Lowtherstown ride, Londonderry collection”), when he was posted to the “Bicester ride, Oxford collection”).4

     While in Ireland he had met his future wife Margaret Jane Irvine, whose family lived in and around Derry, where his job as Excise officer was based at the Waterside Distillery. They were married in Dublin on 25 May 1870. At the time of his marriage he was living in Irvinestown, Co. Fermanagh and his wife lived at 25 William Street in Dublin. He continued to be posted to different “rides”, and in October 1870 was appointed as a Third-class Clerk to Galway (Kingston collection, south-west of Galway City); over this time he and his wife had three sons (but no daughters).5

     By about 1876 he was posted finally to Londonderry, where he lived at 24 Clooney Terrace, in the Waterside area of the city. Sadly his wife died on 25 January 1878, at their home: he did not remarry.6

     Obituaries can be a good source of family information. This wasn’t the case when Margaret Best died in 1878, but a tragic accident in 1892 brought Henry Best’s life to a premature close and into public gaze. On 7 June 1892 the Belfast News-letter reported on several “Fatalities in County Donegal”:

During the Whit Monday regatta of Derry Yacht Club, in Lough Foyle, off Moville, Mr. Henry Best, of the Inland Revenue, entered the water to bathe, when he suddenly expired of apoplexy … Deceased was an Englishman, aged fifty-four, of thirty-two years’ official service, and sixteen years stationed in Derry, where he was much respected.

     The scene is somewhat reminiscent of the death of Matthew Kane (Joyce’s Martin Cunningham) in Dublin Bay in July 1904. The article continued:

He leaves three sons, one of whom is a doctor in the Royal Hospital, Dublin; one in Messrs. Arnott’s, Belfast; and one in the Northern Bank, Ballymena.

     A further article, on Henry Best’s funeral, named his three sons:7

The chief mourners were Mr. W. H. Best, Mr. R. I. Best, and Mr. Henry Best, sons of the deceased.

     How might Joyce have known about Richard Best’s family, as they did not know each other when they were growing up?  Perhaps Joyce knew about the elder brother in Paris when Richard went there in the late 1890s (though it is quite unlikely); he probably knew nothing more than that there was a third brother. But the National Library appears to have been a shrine to gossip, and with Joyce a familiar presence even before Richard Best’s appointment as Assistant Director in 1903, he would have picked up bits and pieces of information about this newcomer from Magee, Lyster, or other members of the Library staff. And by this time he could of course have spoken casually to Best about his family.

The eldest son: Mr. W. H. Best in England and Ireland

William Henry Gerard Herbert Best was the eldest son of Henry Best (“Revenue officer”) and his wife Margaret Jane, born at Bampton, an agricultural village west of Oxford, where he was baptised on 22 March 1871, ten months after the wedding. The young family appeared in the 1871 census, living in the Bampton hamlet of Weald, when baby William was stated to be four months old.

     By the mid 1870s his father’s postings at an Excise officer for the Inland Revenue had led the family to the city of Derry in County Derry. His mother died in 1878 in Derry, and so he, along with the other children, must have been brought up by his father, supported by his mother’s relatives in the city. He was presumably the “Best” listed as passing the Junior Grade of Ireland’s Intermediate Examination at Foyle College, Derry, in the summer of 1883, at the age of twelve. He is not listed in the official results as passing the Middle or Senior Grades.

     However, his education must have continued satisfactorily, despite his difficult circumstances, as he decided to train in medicine. In 1889 he passed his First Professional Examination run by the King and Queen’s College of Physicians and Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. Freeman’s Journal of 24 July says that he passed his Second Professional Examination. As we saw in the article on his father’s drowning in the Belfast News-letter of 7 June 1892, he was by then “a doctor in the Royal Hospital, Dublin” (probably Kilmainham, not Donnybrook). Reporting on the inquest on his father’s death, the Derry Journal of 8 June 1892 adds that he was “completing his final term in a Dublin hospital”. That year he became a Licentiate of Midwifery at both the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland and at the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland.

     When probate of his father’s estate (£1,935 17s 6d; originally sworn as £278 5s) was granted to his eldest son William Henry Best (“Medical Student”) on 22 June 1892 William’s address was given as 25 Bessborough Terrace, North Circular Road, Dublin. Bessborough Terrace as a name has now disappeared from the street map of Dublin, and the houses assimilated as 72-98 North Circular Road, half an hour’s walk from the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham. He became a registered practitioner in Ireland, as listed in the Medical Register, on 4 August 1892.8

Mr. W. H. Best in Ireland, England, and Paris

Lochlann: A Review of Celtic Studies (1962) notes that Richard Best went to “Paris where his elder brother had established a home”.9 When and why did William Henry Best go to Paris, and for how long?

     William Henry Best was still in Dublin at the end of 1892, as in early November he was present at a hospital dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel on Stephen’s Green.10 Then in the Medical Register for 1893-4 his address is given as the Richmond Hospital, North Brunswick Street, Dublin. It is likely that he left Ireland in 1894, or maybe even in 1893, when his aunt Alice Best died, unmarried, at 5 St John’s Road, Oxford on 16 March, at the age of fifty-one (St John’s Road is now known as St Bernard’s Road, at the southern end of fashionable North Oxford). The significance of this is that in the 1895 Medical Register, probably representing the status quo in 1894, William Henry Best gives his address, just for one year, as 5 St John’s Road, Oxford. Strands of the family must have been close: perhaps his aunt Alice left him a share of her £1,800 estate to supplement whatever he received on his father’s death (she died intestate).

     But his brief stay in Oxford was just a stepping-stone for William Henry Best. With both parents dead, his medical training complete, and probably with some money from inheritances he may have felt free to travel where he wanted, and he chose Paris. While he was living in Paris he met Marie Josephine Urban, born in Paris and by 1894 almost twenty years old. She lived with her mother at 98 Rue de Longchamps, in the 16th Arrondissement opposite the Eiffel Tour on the north bank of the Seine.

     The couple made plans to get married, and the banns were read in Paris on 22 December 1895. The wedding itself took place on 10 January 1896. William Henry Best was described as a “docteur en médicine”, and so was presumably practising as a doctor, privately or in a hospital. At the time of the wedding he lived at 14 rue Le Sueur, north-east of the rue de Longchamps, but still in the 16th Arrondisement.11 Immediately after the wedding the couple (“Dr. W. H. Best, Esq., and Mrs. Best”) travelled to Dublin for their honeymoon.12

     Sixteen months later, on 15 May 1897, William Henry Best and his wife had a son, born at home at 98 rue de Longchamps, where Marie Josephine had lived with her mother before her marriage. Best was still described as a doctor of medicine. His son, Robert Henry Best, married in Paris in July 1919 and died in the Haute-Savoie on 21 April 1991.

     From 1896 until 1907 William Henry Best’s contact address in the annual Medical Register was an accommodation address in London (c/o Messrs. Holt & Co., 3 Whitehall Place), from which it should probably be assumed that he remained in Paris and did not return to practise in Ireland or England. It was also in the first part of this period, sometime between 1896 and 1902, that Richard Best was reported to have visited his brother in Paris.

     After six years of marriage, in October 1902, he was commissioned Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), and was seconded for service under the British Colonial Office.13 He was sent to Lagos, at the time a British colony centred on the Port of Lagos, where he had a successful career. By 1904 he was the Chief Doctor in the Government Hospital in Lagos and in 1907 he was promoted to the post of Senior Medical Officer of Southern Nigeria.14 His wife and child may have accompanied him, but evidence is lacking.

     In 1908 there seems to have been an interruption in his employment, and he returned to Paris, where his address according to the Medical Register was 3 Rue de Siam, again in the 16th Arrondissement. By 1909 he was back in the Royal Army Medical Corps, but this time as a Captain in the “Special Reserve”.15 On 14 June 1910 he was initiated into the Malvern (Worcestershire) Royds Lodge of the Freemasons, but from 1910 to 1922 his Medical Register contact address changes to “West African Medical Service”, where in July 1914 he was raised from Captain to Major.16 Later that year the following notice was gazetted:

Downing Street, September 19, 1914.

The King has been pleased to appoint Major William Henry Gerard Herbert Best, Royal Army Medical Corps, Special Reserve (Principal Medical Officer, Southern Provinces, Nigeria), to be an Official Member of the Legislative Council of the Colony of Nigeria.17

The “Colony of Nigeria” had earlier that year been consolidated from the former British Southern Nigerian and Northern Nigerian Protectorates.

     He returned by ship to Liverpool from Lagos for a short stay in 1915, and back in Lagos was initiated into the Nigeria Lodge of the Freemasons on 20 June 1916. At the end of the First World War, by then a Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel, he was awarded the British War Medal and Victory Medal for service as a Major (RAMC) with the 5th Nigerian Regiment  in 1914 and the 1915 Star for service in the Duala Theatre of the Cameroons.

     After the war he is found as a Surgeon on board the Olympia in 1922 and in the same year he arrived in New York aboard the Tuscania (Race: Scottish; Nationality: British; Height: 5’ 8”), apparently without his wife and family. But from 1923 until his death in 1933 his contact address in the Medical Register is again back in the 16th Arrondissement of Paris, at 6 Boulevard Flandrin. This was his address when he died on 14 June 1933, though the death occurred at 12 Rue Boileau Paris (16th Arrondissement), and his estate of £394 17s. 1d. (from effects in Britain) was released at probate to his widow Marie Josephine. He was buried at the Cimetière des Batignolles in Paris (17th Arrondissement), where his widow joined him several years later.

Henry Best (junior)

Henry Best senior’s death notice told that he had three sons: “one of whom is a doctor in the Royal Hospital, Dublin; one in Messrs. Arnott’s, Belfast; and one in the Northern Bank, Ballymena”.18

Henry Best’s youngest son was named Henry, like his father. All three sons were born in different countries of the British Isles, as Henry Best traced his way around Excise stations the length and breadth of Britain. Young Henry was born in Campbelltown, Argyllshire, on 10 September 1873. He seems not to be listed amongst the successful candidates of the national Intermediate Examinations at Foyle College, Derry.

     Although he was the youngest son, it is the second description in this death notice that matches him, as he worked for Arnott’s department store in Belfast. He was also involved with his local church, St Stephen’s, of Millfield, Belfast, where the Priest was his uncle Canon Richard Irvine DD. In April 1898 Henry Best junior was elected to the office of Treasurer and also to the Select Vestry at St Stephens.19 His link with Arnott’s is confirmed in a notice advising people of the Anniversary Sermons to be preached by the Lord Bishop of Derry and Raphoe at St Stephen’s Church on 12 June 1898, in commemoration of the laying of the foundation stone of the church twenty-nine years earlier. Although there was no charge for the event, contributions would be accepted by Canon Irvine, the Curate, the Churchwardens, and by “Henry Best, Treasurer, at Arnott & Co.’s Ltd., Bridge Street [Belfast].”20

     Unfortunately nothing further has yet emerged about the life of Henry Best junior. Joyce clearly knew of his existence, but is unlikely to have known any details.

Richard Irvine Best

Richard Best is the Best brother that Joyce knew, and about whom quite a large amount of detail is already available. He features in Vivien Igoe’s The real people of Joyce’s Ulysses (2016) and is entered in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and in the Dictionary of Irish Biography. In addition, several articles have been written about him and he occurs from time to time in memoirs and commentary of the period.

     This section, therefore, does not review the facts of Richard Best’s life, but attempts to fill in a few gaps in the documentation of his early years, and to highlight several lesser-known sources of information.

     It is well known that Best, the second brother, was born at 3 Bishop Street in Derry  on 17 January 1872. 3 Bishop Street was the residential and trading address of his mother’s relations the Sawers, who had a “Glass & China Merchants” there. On Richard Best’s birth certificate it is the Sawers who are mentioned as present at the birth, and the address of Richard’s father Henry Best is given as Paisley, Scotland, where he was presumably stationed at the time as an Excise Officer.

     Richard’s mother died of apoplexy days after his sixth birthday. He was educated at nearby Foyle College. The Intermediate Examination results show that he passed the Junior Grade in Latin and English in 1886 and he was listed as passing the examination generally at the Junior Grade in 1887. He does not appear to be listed in other years, and no alternative explanation has yet been found. Terence de Vere White states that “some of his education had been in France”, but this may refer to the late 1890s.21

     The Dictionary of Irish Biography notes that ““He did not attend university but worked briefly in banking until he received an inheritance.”22 That he worked in banking is confirmed in newspaper reports of his father’s drowning, where it was stated that in June 1872 he was a “cashier in the Northern Bank, in Ballymena”, fifty miles east of Derry.23 It is reasonable to suppose that he received a small inheritance from the £1,935 sworn as his father’s personal estate at probate (his father died intestate, so there was no will to indicate any specific intentions).24 He may also have received money from the small estate of his aunt Alice Best, who died (intestate) in Oxford in 1894.

     We know that Richard’s elder brother William Henry Best went to Paris by 1895, when the banns for his marriage were read in December. It is likely that he was there also in 1894. Richard may have visited him then, but the only evidence we have of Richard’s visit to Paris to see his brother dates from 1898, when John Millington Synge visited him at 90 rue d’Assass in the 6th Arrondissement of the French capital:25

Synge did not know Richard Best, but when he returned to Paris in January of 1898 he went round to Best's room at 90 rue d'Assas where [Stephen] MacKenna had lived the year before, knocked on the door and announced himself to Best.

     Terence de Vere White describes the introduction:26

“Je suis Synge, pas singe”, was Best’s account of the playwright’s greeting.

     It was Synge who took Richard Best to hear d’Arbois de Jubainville, whom Best came to admire:27

Best acknowledged that his meeting with Synge was the turning-point of his life. His interest in Irish began when Synge took him to a lecture by d’Arbois de Jubainville in the College de France. Synge had recently returned from the Aran Islands. Best when he went back to Dublin began to learn Irish.

     By December 1899 Richard Best was back in Dublin, where he was elected onto the Executive Committee of the Feis Ceoil.28 In the 1901 Irish census he was living in a boarding house at 567 Upper Baggot Street in Dublin, and his profession is given as “Secretary”. Best’s annotated translation of de Jubainville’s Cycle mythologique irlandais et la mythologie celtique was published in 1902.

Conclusion

From a brief review of available documentation it is clear that Richard Best had both an older and a younger brother, of whom Joyce probably only knew the barest details. His elder brother William Henry Best worked in the Royal Army Medical Corps serving in West Africa, and rose to become a Member of the Legislative Council of Nigeria. Richard Best’s younger brother Henry Best is a more elusive character, who worked in a department store in Belfast and acted in an administrative capacity for his uncle at a local church. Neither seem to have come within Joyce’s ambit later in their lives.

John Simpson

I am grateful to Harald Beck for his suggestions and additions during the preparation of this article.