Michael Moynihan: Frank O’Connor’s book cover images show Cork life through a lens

Cork author Frank O'Connor. His stories about the Cork he grew up in are often claustrophobic, with all the petty snobberies born of narrow streets,

 I've mentioned the famous clip of Frank O’Connor and Huw Wheldon here before, and most readers are surely aware of it by now. The footage comes from the BBC show Monitor which was shot in Cork back in 1961, and in the clip O’Connor talks about the city’s influence on him, and its general significance.

“You don’t have to sell Cork to me, Huw,” he says to the interviewer. “After all, to me it’s the most important city in the world.”

The two men are filmed speaking high above the north channel of the Lee, with Merchant’s Quay behind and beneath them. The footage dates from 1961, so the shopping centre is quarter of a century in the future, and a varied streetscape is lurking in the background either side of Patrick’s Bridge.

This is part of my reason for raising the matter here again: the glimpse of a city long gone, literally over O’Connor’s shoulder.

His stories about the Cork he grew up in are often claustrophobic, with all the petty snobberies born of narrow streets, but by definition they reach back to the early decades of the 20th century, 50 years before the BBC cameras arrived. And even though those few minutes of film show recognisable locations such as the Grand Parade and St Peter and Paul Place, they seem impossibly distant to us now, as that footage is over 60 years behind us.

Memory and O’Connor combine to help to construct one of your columnist’s narrowly-focused obsessions. I refer to those evocative photographs of Cork which adorn the Pan Books collections of his short stories; my interest goes so deep that I wondered if the folks at Hairy Baby might put some on a T-shirt until they reminded me of the small matter of copyright.

Anyway, they came to mind again very recently when Victoria Anne Pearson tweeted out pictures of an impressive haul from an Oxfam shop in Belfast: copies of The Mad Lomasneys and other stories, Masculine Protest and other stories, as well as A Life Of Your Own and Other Stories.

(A side note: if this is the quality on offer in Belfast then the mythical buses carrying shoppers to Kildare Village may soon be superseded by book-hunters swarming from the deep south.) In order, those books mentioned above show scenes around the city such as Parliament Bridge looking east along the river, with the Holy Trinity Church in the background; the very bottom of Shandon Street where it meets the North Gate Bridge; and a street scene in the third, curving downwards — is it Blarney Street linking up further down the hill with Shandon Street?

Your columnist’s obsession is rooted in those particular images, which redefine the term ‘atmospheric’. The books were published in the mid-seventies and, judging by the clothing styles and car models which feature, the pictures themselves were taken shortly beforehand.

There is a particular sheen to these pictures which is difficult to convey in words because it’s all in the image. 

It isn’t just a matter of the colours on offer — or the lack of colour, which is the point. It goes deeper than that.

A good comparison, one which sums up the attraction, would be the difference between the covers of The Mad Lomasneys and Masculine Protest. In the latter Nosey Keeffe’s shop at the bottom of Shandon Street is lit by sunshine, a stark shadow cast by its awning; it’s so bright that the stones of the quay wall can be made out on an individual basis.

The cover of The Mad Lomasneys is altogether different: the sky is cloudy, but that alone hardly accounts for the blueish tinge to the landmarks on offer — the railing along the riverside, the grey bridge, and beyond, in the middle distance, the bulk of Holy Trinity inclining to vagueness.

This is what makes these book covers irresistible to me — not the sun-splashed vista at the bottom of Shandon Street, which was surely driving people into Keeffe’s for ice cream — but the half-gloom of the view down Father Mathew Quay, the impression of a veil hiding the church as though you were looking out of a window through the lace curtain.

If this were Instagram or TikTok you’d be inclined to ask about the filters involved but, of course, there aren’t any. Not in the way we understand those filters, at least.

There is a reality to those photographs as they are — not in a lazy ‘weren’t the seventies grim and grey’ cliche, but in a real delineation of the colours and the shapes of the city. Cork was like that — obviously it was, we have the photographic proof — insofar as those pictures are true to what you might see depending on your angle; when you turned down a quayside that you didn’t often visit then buildings could be seen receding into the middle distance. The blue tint might be explained by smog — the city certainly ran on coal at that time — but it’s both more and less tangible than smoke.

There’s another terrific example of this on the cover of Fish For Friday And Other Stories, which shows the end of French’s Quay with Saint Fin Barre’s Cathedral in the background. Again, there’s almost a hint of a mist, with the lines of the cathedral blurring slightly, thrown into relief by the sharper image of the buildings huddled in the foreground. (Did the photographer grab his image of the Holy Trinity in the morning, realise the effect the light was having on his pictures, and hotfoot it up to the South Gate Bridge to get his second pic of the day?)

My favourite of the books cited above is the cover of A Life Of Your Own, however. The little boy running downhill; the woman — his mother? — turning back in an embodiment of patience, the shawl on a woman further down the street, the unironic headscarves.

Drill further and there’s more detail. The slightly uneven paving stones of the footpath. The PYE sign on a shopfront. Even the car straining its way uphill could only be labouring out of the early seventies, surely.

Other O’Connor book covers from the same Pan stable were surely taken by the same photographer, if not the same camera. The cover of An Only Child shows a child in short pants and sensible jumper contemplating Shandon — from Bell’s Field? — and one wonders what he was thinking.

(A couple of correspondents suggested to me that he — and the two girls rampaging across the back cover of A Life Of Your Own — are still in Cork. If so, do get in touch.)

Why do those covers resonate so strongly with yours truly? Is it a tribute to the eye of the photographer, whose identity remains unknown? Is it because the pictures are 50 years old, about the same temporal difference between O’Connor on the Metropole and the Cork he remembered?

Or is it just that they prove what he said about Cork’s importance?