“Sliding on his bottom he approached his sister who was holding the chalk. He lifted his left foot towards her and took the stick of chalk between his toes. Everybody was surprised and waited as Christy prepared. His mother noticed what he had done and quickly taking another piece of chalk she wrote ‘A’ on the floor. Copy that she said– after several efforts a rudimentary ‘A’ was visible on the floor.” (from Christy Brown’s Women).

Christy Brown was born in June 1932 at Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital. About forty years later he wrote:

“A thing of remorseless gluttony of immense invincible vacuity is my muse”.

These extracts from Anthony J Jordan’s biography of Brown draw on letters acquired as a result of a Christy Brown Commerative Day at Sandymount organised by Jordan after Brown’s death in 1981. Jordan was principal teacher at the Cerebral Palsy Ireland’s Sandymount School Clinic.

A Mayo man who lives in Sandymount, Jordan says “private letters never intended for publication were brilliant and are all in the book, Brown’s philosophy of life shone through and I felt they had to be put in the public domain.”

Christy Brown in a letter to Katriona Maguire, March 1962 wrote: “a girl once told me, a very beautiful girl, that it was dangerous for people in my position to indulge in romantic fantasies. I do not see why a physical disability should preclude any romances in one’s life.”

Sometimes Brown’s imagined woman and real one were at odds and Brown writes about facing up to reality and how it can be a liberating experience.

Eoghan Harris after reading the biography wrote in the Irish Times that that is what the IRA have to do. This is the bind they are in, the reality is there staring them in the face and if they take it on board they will find it liberating, just like Christy Brown.

Christy did get married and lived for a time in Kerry and England. Marriage was a major achievement in his life. Christy befriended Betty Moore an American woman (previous to his marriage to another woman) and she played an important part in his independent development physically and as a literary person. After the publication of ‘My Left Foot’ he went to her in America. He dedicated ‘Down all the days’ to her.

When I asked Jordan if he was fond of Christy Brown he replied “No”– because of the way he treated Betty Moore, after he met a younger woman.”

“Writing biographies is awful hard work,” says Jordan and compares it “to doing a jig-saw puzzle. You have to be accurate because of its factual nature and you might have to do so much intensive research about one item that somebody might not pay attention to at all. I am very disciplined and would write for 3 solid hours every morning, without fail, five days a week, with research in the afternoon.

“I was ploughing a lone furrow, now I am regarded as an expert on Major John McBride but when Yeats is criticised, academics would knife you for that because many are making a good living out of him.”

In 1990 he was given a biography of Maud Gonne and it made him wonder if the author was absolutely fair to Major John McBride. “When I went to look for information I found that there was absolutely nothing written about him and that’s what started me off.”

Having completed biographies of Major and Sean McBride he found “he was being treated by some people as a republican with a big ‘R’, so he sat down one night and had a look at Boylan’s dictionary to find someone as far removed from republicanism as possible but it wasn’t much use as all the people were dead.” So it didn’t take him long to come up with the very much alive Conor Cruise O’Brien. He had had contact with him in writing the McBride’s biographies and found that he was most fair to John McBride.

A diplomat, newspaper writer and editor, university professor, politician in the same constituency as Charlie Haughey, writer of plays and a Unionist, Jordan relates that “initially I didn’t go to Conor Cruise but subsequently I did and he was very helpful and in some cases he gave his version of events and these were included.”

Jordan sees O’Brien as a man with “abundance of intelligence and courage” with a great knowledge of his subject and “an ability to argue logically, a very rational man.

“O Brien in very difficult times warned people and guarded against the republic becoming involved in any kind of violence or militaristic way vis a vis the North.” In 1972 “when Bloody Sunday happened in Derry his attitude was that the British should leave Ireland that was the solution but very shortly after that he saw that this would be a recipe for civil war and he changed tack and it is to his credit, many people find it difficult to change but he did and he was vilified by the IRA and by nationalists to a great extent for that and delivered a great service to the country.”

The title of his book ‘To Laugh Or To Weep’ is apt because some people didn’t know what position to take with O’Brien.

A two-volumned biography of John F Kennedy by William Manchester ‘Death in November’ led Jordan to another subject– Churchill. Manchester named his biography of Churchill ‘The Founder Of Ireland’ and Jordan quickly realized that that didn’t sound quite right, so his own biography places him as ‘a founder of Ireland’.

“Churchill was in a pivotal position in the British government at crucial times in Irish History. He was secretary for war in 1921, he was secretary for the commonwealth a year later when Ireland was negotiating the treaty.” explains Jordan.

Also “his earliest memories were of Ireland– he lived in the Phoenix Park for 3 or 4 years as a child, he saw Dublin as the second city of the empire and Ireland as an integral part of the British Empire and he couldn’t understand why the Irish didn’t see themselves as that and be happy in it.”

Churchill was captured during the Boer War and was a prisoner of war, He was a journalist-cum solider and “that’s how he really made his name initially.”

At a dinner set up by Prime Minister Atlee in 1948 with Churchill and Sean McBride to discuss partition, Churchill began by saying to McBride; “I believe you were at the treaty negotiations in London in 1921.” (McBride was a bodyguard to Michael Collins). McBride said he was. Churchill continued: “Well we were on opposite sides then and we’re still on opposite sides,” and he went on: “I believe your father was in the Boer War.” McBride said he was. Churchill went on: “I was there and we were on opposite sides and we’re still on opposite sides.”

Jordan likes to work on at least two books at one time so that he can swap from one to the other. At the moment he is editing a collection of John McBride’s writings, putting his writings into the public domain again “because of the way he has been demeaned by Yeats in particular, and biographers.

“The vast majority of people wouldn’t know that McBride wrote anything, he wrote a very long account of the Irish Brigade in the Boer War which is interesting historically.

“I’m putting things on the record and I can give my interpretation and hope that biographers writing about Yeats, Maud Gonne, etc. will have this material available to them, so they can get the two sides or however many sides there are and not just one point of view.”

W.B. Yeats’s Anniversary is on 13th June, and Sandymount according to Jordan would be an ideal place to do something even on a small scale. “It is an asset from a tourist point of view.” Jordan says his work could be done by anyone, and from an Eavan Boland expression ‘he is putting down time’ with a useful exercise which is enjoyable but hard work