Cast 95. Page 269, line 1314.
And he took the last swig out of the pint. Moya. All wind and piss like a tanyard cat. Cows in Connacht have long horns. As much as his bloody life is worth to go down and address his tall talk to the assembled multitude in Shanagolden where he daren’t show his nose with the Molly Maguires looking for him to let daylight through him for grabbing the holding of an evicted tenant.
—Hear, hear to that, says John Wyse. What will you have?
—An imperial yeomanry, says Lenehan, to celebrate the occasion.
—Half one, Terry, says John Wyse, and a hands up. Terry! Are you asleep?
—Yes, sir, says Terry. Small whisky and bottle of Allsopp. Right, sir.
Episode 12. In Barney Kiernan’s pub, the nationalist known as “the Citizen” is in conversation with the others. Lenehan (a freelance racing journalist) and John Wyse Nolan arrive together, and Terry is behind the bar.
They have been lamenting the decline of Ireland, once a great power. The Citizen has just been thundering about filling Irish harbours with warships again. This passage follows immediately after.
It is the Citizen who drains the pint. The unnamed narrator of this episode mocks his grandiose rhetoric. These inner comments are not heard by the other characters. The lines following the dash mark the spoken dialogue.
The narrator’s vigorous colloquial style makes this passage especially lively, though in the end much remains elusive.
All wind and piss like a tanyard cat
Then comes the problem of “a tanyard cat.” There is a slang expression “big dog of the tanyard,” meaning an important or influential person or thing, though its origin is unclear.
However, it turns out—surprisingly—that dog excrement was historically an important raw material in tanning. Up until the nineteenth century (indeed, until around the First World War), there were even people who made a living collecting it from the streets.
From this, one might suppose that the “dog of the tanyard” came to signify something important. If so, the narrator’s use of “tanyard cat” could be a deliberate inversion—suggesting something useless or insignificant.
The Molly Maguires were a secret society formed in early eighteenth-century Ireland, organizing resistance by tenant farmers against landlords—for example, opposing evictions. Later groups of the same name appeared in the United States and became known for violent resistance to exploitation in mining communities.
“As much as (one’s) life is worth to do …” means that doing something is dangerous—risking one’s life.
The Citizen is presumably anti-landlord and anti-Protestant, so why he would be targeted by the Molly Maguires is not entirely clear.
Why does “imperial yeomanry” mean a drink, and what drink is it? From Terry’s reply, Nolan has ordered whisky and Allsopp beer—but which does the phrase refer to?
The “imperial yeomanry” were a volunteer cavalry force of the British Army, active mainly in the Second Boer War (the most recent British war as of 1904, the present time of the novel). They were also recruited in Ireland. Members were drawn from the middle classes and from yeomen. The term “yeoman” originally referred, from the mid-fourteenth century onward, to independent smallholding farmers; from the sixteenth century it came to denote a middle stratum of producers between the gentry and small peasants, but by the mid-eighteenth century many had fallen, through land consolidation and other pressures, into the ranks of urban or rural laborers.
After extensive searching, I found the match-holder shown below. It is a novelty item for a whisky called Usher’s Old Vatted Glenlivet, and it depicts a wounded British soldier from the Boer War.
The poem printed on it is The Absent-Minded Beggar by the English novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). It was written in 1899, at the request of the Daily Mail, in order to raise funds for soldiers fighting in the Boer War and for their families. This match-holder may well be connected with that campaign.
In other words, “imperial yeomanry” here means whisky. One can imagine such a match-holder lying on the counter of the pub.
As noted in Cast 47 of this blog, Lenehan is someone who is always being treated. Here too, brazenly, he orders the more expensive whisky, while Nolan cuts it down to a half. An Irish single measure is said to be 35.5 ml, so a half would be half of that. Most likely, the half whisky cost about the same as the small bottle of beer Nolan ordered for himself; one would hardly treat someone to something more expensive than one’s own drink.
For more on the method of this blog, see Here.
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