Cork In 50 Artworks, No 8: John Mandeville statue, Mitchelstown
John Mandeville Memorial, Mitchelstown, Co. Cork. Picture Denis Minihane
There is a recurring legend in North Cork involving some unnamed person – usually 'found-on' in a public house, or caught coming from one without a light on their bike - giving their name to the gardaí as “John Mandeville, the Square, Mitchelstown”.
The humour derives from the notion of the garda not knowing the most famous person in Mitchelstown, even if those telling or hearing the tale sometimes know little enough themselves about Mandeville beyond his big green statue in the Square.
The Mandeville Memorial, to use its correct title, commemorates Irish National Land League icon John Mandeville, who died at his home in Clonkilla, Mitchelstown, on July 8, 1889, exactly two weeks after his 39th birthday, having served two hard months in Tullamore Jail the previous year.
Mandeville was born near Carrick-on-Suir in 1849 to a fiercely Fenian family: his maternal uncle, John O’Mahony, would later found the Fenian Brotherhood.
As a baby Mandeville was splashed on the ear by molten lead from a broken mould being used to manufacture bullets, and it left him with a scar he bore proudly through life.
By his thirties a tall, burly farmer working a 200-acre freehold farm in Mitchelstown, Mandeville became the local leader of the Land League, and in October 1887 Mandeville and Mallow-born William O’Brien MP were sentenced to two and three months in prison respectively for inciting tenants on Mitchelstown’s Kingston Estate to resist eviction.
The men were denied the status of political prisoner, but the well-known O’Brien was treated better than Mandeville, who was subjected to brutal abuse in Tullamore Jail. Left semi-naked in draughty, filthy conditions, and fed coarse bread and cold water, Mandeville became terribly ill, losing three stone in weight by the time he was released on Christmas Eve.
Mandeville left prison, as O’Brien put it, a broken man, never recovering his health, and he died six months later. To ensure his friend would be remembered, O’Brien pledged £100 toward a monument, and over the next decade-and-a-half money was raised in Ireland and in America, with the eventual memorial costing £1,050.
On Sunday, September 9, 1906, O’Brien unveiled a seven-and-a-half-foot-tall bronze sculpture by London-based Francis William Doyle Jones, atop a ten-foot-high plinth of Ballinasloe marble, in New Square, Mitchelstown.
This newspaper, then called the Cork Examiner, reported that some 20,000 people attended the unveiling, while the Times of London put the crowd at 25,000, saying the unveiling was the biggest event in Mitchelstown within memory.
(The Cork Examiner report is an interesting read, the second half consisting entirely of a lengthy list of names. It was accepted journalistic practice at the time for a reporter to pass his notebook around the crowd and to invite people to write down their names, and the names of those who should have been there.)
Mitchelstown-based historian Bill Power, who two decades ago chaired a committee to renovate the statue, says the Mandeville Memorial bears subtle and historic details.
“Mandeville is wearing a tie-pin on his cravat, and it’s a shamrock, something which was much more a symbol of Ireland then.”
The statue’s left leg bears a bullet-hole from a British shot fired during the War of Independence, but Power says that hole should not be confused with holes in the statue’s finger and foot, both of which are designed to drain rain-water.
Mitchelstown lore recalls marauding Black and Tans painting the statue red, white and blue, and Power says that when the statue was being renovated, they found traces of blue paint on the top of the plinth.
“A local farmer actually protested this act of vandalism by painting one of his cows green, white and orange and parading her up and down the street.”
The statue’s current green colour, Power says, is a result of the natural aging of bronze: verdigris, as it’s known. As to the legends of people giving their name to gardaí as “John Mandeville, the Square, Mitchelstown”, Power claims to know personally a man in Clonmel who did it.
“In fact, several guards in Mitchelstown told me they regularly got summonses for 'John Mandeville, the Square, Mitchelstown', so it must have gone on wholesale,” he says.
William O’Brien was determined that his friend would not be forgotten, and whether people really did falsely use his name or not, the persistence of the yarn surely shows just how synonymous John Mandeville, and the Mandeville Memorial, have become with Mitchelstown. There are worse legacies.
