Only Our Taxis Run Free - Frank McNally on a funny thing that happened on the way to the Goldsmith Festival

Irish Times

03-06-2025

Collecting a rental car to drive to the Goldsmith Festival on Saturday, but running late, I had to get a taxi for a distance I would usually walk and found myself in the company of a very friendly driver from Bangladesh.
He'd been in Ireland 19 years and, as I told him, his accent was now located halfway between Dhaka and Dublin. But he had an extraordinarily sunny disposition for a Dublin taximan, which was infectious.
As always when meeting people from other parts of the world, I tried to remember all the things I knew about his country, which wasn't many, but enough that the driver seemed delighted about that too.
In the back of my unworthy mind, of course, I suspected he was only being friendly in the hopes of a tip. Hence my surprise when we got to the rental car place and he turned the meter off waved away my offers to pay with a smiling 'no charge'.
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Guessing the fare would have been only seven or eight euro, I now determined to throw him a €10 note as I got out. Except I only had a twenty. 'Here – give me a tenner back out of that,' I tried to insist. But still he refused.
Humbled, I shook his hand and thanked him, remembering that the talk I had to give later would be under the theme – from The Deserted Village - 'Where wealth accumulates and men decay.'
There was one man who was in no danger of decomposition, I thought, as the only Dublin taxi driver ever to give me a freebie drove off.
***
On the bill before me in Ballymahon, Professor David O'Shaughnessy discussed 'The Benefits of Goldsmith'. This was a play on words, for while implying that Goldsmith is good for you, O'Shaughnessy's talk turned out to be on the fascinating subject of 18th century theatrical economics, and specifically the 'benefit nights' by which playwrights earned their share of the profits.
In the case of his classic comedy, She Stoops to Conquer, those were good for Goldsmith. But the play succeeded against the odds, and even against the hostility of the Covent Garden Theatre manager, George Colman, who didn't want to stage it.
With the author too nervous to attend opening night, meanwhile, his friends led by Samuel Johnson organised a counter conspiracy to ensure success. Central to their plot was a man who, according to Johnson's biographer James Boswell, 'was gifted by nature with the most sonorous, and at the same time the most contagious, laugh that ever echoed from the human lungs.'
This two-legged hyena was also, however, somewhat deficient in wit, and would not by himself know which bits of the play were funny. So the plan was to wait for Johnson to laugh, whereupon Boswell would nudge the hyena – placed in a box where he would be seen and heard by the whole theatre - into action.
It worked well for a while, until the laughing began to draw more attention than the play. Boswell urged his neighbour to tone it down, but it was too late. Having not recognised any jokes at the start, the hyena now found every line hilarious. 'These were dangerous moments, for the pit began to take umbrage,' recalled Boswell, 'but we carried our play through, and triumphed not only over Colman's judgment but our own.'
***
I was too late for the Saturday morning tour of Goldsmith Country, which was to include the 'hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade/For talking age and whisp'ring lovers made'. So I'm not sure how confident the guide was – or could be – about whether it was the right bush.
The same question arose 125 years ago when William Bulfin did the tour, as later recorded in his travelogue Rambles in Eirinn. Then, his guide was adamant:'Well, that's the hawthorn tree. Some people that doesn't know the differ will tell you that it is the bush there to the left, farther away; and some visitors believes them and marches off with sprigs from the wrong bush. Aren't you going over to get a sprig?'
But Bulfin wasn't interested in sprigs because he thought the whole concept of Goldsmith Country existed only in Goldsmith's mind until later relocated to England.
He was especially dismissive of the notion that 'Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain' was located anywhere in the Ireland of the Penal Laws. If it was, Bulfin argued, there is no way the villagers could ever have been as happy as Goldsmith remembered them, even before a greedy landlord ruined everything.
***
Bulfin wrote some of his Irish dispatches for Arthur Griffith's newspaper Sinn Féin. Which reminds me, too late to mention it the taxi driver, of what must be the most extraordinary fact in the history of Irish-Bangladeshi relations.
Namely that in 1930, inspired by events in Dublin 14 years earlier, Bengali rebels staged an uprising against British rule in Chittagong, now Bangladesh's second city. They called themselves the Indian Republican Army (IRA), took over buildings until overwhelmed by superior force, and timed it for Easter, symbolically, even though none of them were Christians.
But maybe the taxi driver knew all this already and, by refusing to charge me, was doing his own bit to make Ireland free.