Biddy Mulligan is a comic song about a Dublin street trader. A pub of the same name in Kilburn was bombed in 1975.
Biddy Mulligan’s at Olympia holds a 4.2 from six hundred people and is a straightforward, decent, unpretentious Irish pub of exactly the kind that London has a great many of and is quietly losing.
The name comes from a music hall song – the Pride of the Coombe – about a Dublin street trader, a widow, selling apples and hard-boiled eggs from a stall, defiantly cheerful about a hard life.
It is a comic song. It is also, in the way of these things, not entirely a joke.
The other Biddy Mulligan’s
There was a pub of the same name on Kilburn High Road, in the heart of one of the largest Irish communities in Britain.
On 20 December 1975 a bomb was thrown into it. Five people were injured. It was claimed by loyalist paramilitaries – one of a series of attacks on Irish pubs in London during that period.
It is barely remembered. It is not in the standard accounts. It happened in the same month and the same city as a great many other things, and the people in that bar were not the people the newspapers were writing about.
The Prat is a satirical magazine and we are not going to lecture anybody about the Troubles. We are simply recording that a pub with this name was bombed, in London, within living memory, and that almost nobody knows.
The Irish pub in London
It is a real institution and it is distinct from the themed article we reviewed in Covent Garden, where an entire industry supplies the same seventeen enamel signs and the same photograph of a man with a donkey to every unit from Aberdeen to Plymouth.
The real thing is different and you know it within about four seconds of walking in. It is a room built around a community that came here to work – on the sites, on the railways, in the hospitals – and which was, for a long stretch of the twentieth century, treated with open suspicion by the country it was building.
There is Guinness, and it is poured properly, and it takes as long as it takes, and if you complain about the wait you have told everybody in the room exactly who you are.
The pub
Ten to twenty pounds, sport on the screens, live music some nights, and a crowd that is genuinely mixed. It is cheap for this part of London and it is not going out of its way to impress anybody.
Verdict
Honest pub, proper pint, and a name from a comic song about a widow selling apples in a Dublin street, which has been attached to a great deal more history than a comic song deserves.
Go. Order the Guinness. Wait for it.
The song
Worth hearing, if you have not.
Biddy Mulligan is a widow with a stall in the Coombe, one of the poorest districts of Dublin, and the song is her, in the first person, listing what she sells and refusing to be pitied.
It is comic and it is defiant and it is very slightly furious, and it was written for a music hall audience who would have recognised her instantly.
Naming a pub after her is a considerably better idea than naming one after a duke, and the Prat would like to note that in two hundred and fifty articles this is one of the very few venues named after a working woman who is not either being blamed for something or having her house borrowed.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
