PREVIEW: Robert Briscoe

Hello and welcome to No Gods, No Mayors, the podcast about mayors.

I'm November.

I'm the mayor of this episode and my co-mayors, as always, are Massey Lubchansky and Riley Quinn.

Hello.

Hello.

I've been doing this episode or the research of this episode for like three, four weeks at this point.

Yeah.

And the reason for that is I probably have attention deficit disorder, and also I'm trying to do too many things at once.

And so the task here was to read one guy's autobiography.

I have now completed that task.

I'm sorry.

It took me a calendar month to do that.

Is there another way to refer to a month?

No, no, I like the calendar kind of because it gives me the mental image of like tearing the calendar month off the calendar.

Home of the month in many ways.

Also, it scans so well.

Calendar month.

You really hit hit the month.

Calendar month.

Yeah.

Calendar month.

So they call me calendar month.

I'm about to introduce us to some new territory here because, following my thing of finding historical guys, and I think this is a very interesting historical guy, I think this is our first lord mayor.

If we're not familiar, a lord mayor is a somewhat higher falutin title than mayor that exists in some like kind of former British colonies and you know general Anglosphere for

like a ceremonial mayor, a mayor who doesn't really do anything but the like ribbon cutting stuff.

I've I've got some Lord Lord Mayor insights, which is the town I grew up in has the only Lord Mayoralty in Canada.

Really?

Yes.

Because it was briefly capital of Upper Canada before it was burned down by the Americans in 1812.

And then the capital, they were like, well, it's crazy to have the capital right here.

We should move it further away.

Riley, I just want to make it clear.

We will fucking do it again.

So watch it.

A Lord Mayor is like a ceremonial mayor.

Like Glasgow has a Lord Mayor, for instance.

The City of London has a Lord Mayor, but not the city or the small city of London.

It's also our first Irish mayor.

So I'm going to have to apologize in advance for butchering the history, the language,

the politics, almost certainly.

When you say Irish, you mean Irish like from Ireland.

Yes.

Never forget Jim Mongo Curly and his army of shalely-wielding maniacs.

No, of course.

I was going to say, for this episode, I have a challenge, which is for me, for me, someone who cannot do accents, the draw to do an Irish accent on mic for the next hour and hour and a half is going to rend my mind in twain.

And I need you to hold me accountable to not do it.

Because I'm not going to do it.

Basically, what's happened is you've entered into the, because both Nova and I are British, you've essentially entered into kind of a territory where doing an Irish accent is illegal.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Like if that feels insensitive in this instance.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If this podcast was all Americans, it'd be fine.

But it's like you've it's like you've moved to Saudi Arabia and you're like, but it's legal for me to start a brewery

in America.

Yeah, yeah.

So we will be, we will be applying

sort of the Brits rule of doing Irish accents, which is we love

including the Americans.

Yes, yeah.

So the guy that I have brought us, the mayor that I have brought us, is Robert Briscoe, who was Lord Mayor of Dublin.

And he's an interesting man in the sense that being Lord Mayor is by far his least impressive or interesting gig, and he kind of knows it, but it's also the one that he's most famous for.

And so all of his autobiography is about pre-mayor stuff.

And the mayonnaise rates a couple of sentences.

And so that's broadly the tack that we're going to take here.

And it's going to be a bit of a like 20th century

like Irish history syllabus here because Robert Briscoe lived through and acted in basically all of it.

He's Irish Forest Gump, essentially.

You're so right.

You're completely right.

Except, you know, you know how some of the comedy in Gump comes from Forrest Gump being in pretty sinister situations, like, you know, the war in Vietnam?

Very, very similar.

Anything sinister happened in Ireland in the 20th century?

Well, quite.

The other thing I would say is that

from my understanding, like as sort of a bit of table setting for the episode, but I, by the way, reading the notes, my jaw just kept going closer to the floor.

So we're going to enjoy that as it gets on.

But the real

sense that I get is that, like, his two times as Lord Mayor of Dublin was a bit like getting an honorary degree.

Yes.

Yeah, very much so.

He was mayor, which means he's in the mayor taculus.

That's right.

He's, he's next to P.T.

Barnum in the mayor taculus of mayors that were like in there.

Like, I also

listened to most of P.T.

Barnum's autobiography, and he talks about being mayor for four seconds.

And then he's like, and now back to the baboon, I stapled to a fish.

In the autumn of his life, he wandered into

like a dark forest and he stepped into our bear trap of being mayor for like one year only.

Our debris, our debris

bearwall grafton's death.

Yeah.

So this book, by the way, is

last thing, last thing.

The bear trap, instead of dropping a net on you, it just drops the chain of medals that Lord Mayors get to wear.

Well, he says that

the ceremonial one of the Lord Mayor of Dublin weighs 17 pounds.

Wow.

What's that in dollars?

I think that may that like that being dropped around your neck from a height could do you an injury but so uh the book is uh it's it's very like famous person's kind of unlettered autobiography this is even really before ghost writing and so it's very glad-handing it's very schmoozing the back third of it i would say is like very like it's like an acknowledgement section here's some people i met here's some people i met here's some people i met um and so he opens with the line On September 25th, 1894, I was born.

Not that it mattered to anyone but my parents.

Good line.

He's born in a suburb of Dublin, and his dad, Abraham, who everyone in Dublin apparently calls Papa, runs a furniture factory.

But his real passion, Abraham's is, is Irish nationalism because

Abraham Briscoe, Lithuanian Jew, who at the age of like 14,

his like uncle had like got together some money to send him out of Lithuania for a better life.

Yeah, I was going to say, I don't think there's a large Jewish population in Ireland, right?

Like, I've no, this is the first Irish Jew I've heard of.

I'm looking now, literally, less than 3,000 people, yeah,

there are a few, but not so many.

But while we're on that topic, by the way, the phrase, I was born, not that it mattered to anybody but my parents, suggests that he was born in the Catskills region of Dublin.

It's the most like Irish literature Jewish thing he could have said.

Like, sort of like just slammed into each other at the highest speed.

To steal a bit from, um, oh, God, I think it's Chloe, but like, very funny trans woman I follow on twitter doing the like uh three-syllable chant but it's irish jews irish jews um yeah so so papa briscoe right he had he had been born in in lithuania in what um uh robert says is like a town too small to have a ghetto

and he had just been like shipped to ireland And because he was 14 and because Lithuania fucking sucked to be a Jew in and because Irish anti-Semitism of the, you know, like early to mid-19th century took the form of what?

He kind of came to consider Ireland like a paradise on earth.

Yeah.

It's, it's a real, like,

like first generation immigrant thing where he's like, this is like the best country in the world, hands down.

Yeah.

I mean, I imagine like being like running through a blizzard while a Cossack is trying to do the second act of Fiddler on the Roof to you and then like ending up in like beautiful green Ireland where like sometimes sometimes the sun is out, uh, sounds like

getting dumped on my head is slightly warmer,

like for real.

Yeah, I this is like almost exactly the time my family also left uh Lithuania, and uh, it seems like uh the right choice to have been made for you by a guy in a fur hat, Jason.

Yeah, no, absolutely, just be like, this one, this one's gonna be Irish,

just some like mill owner in in like uh in like uh like eastern Lithuania just deciding his like grandchildren's future accents in the most incongruous way possible.

This one, Greece.

They've got all the Jews at Anatevka lined up and the Cossacks are like sending them all off, just be like putting them on a boat somewhere.

And then he hands one of them a shamrock.

Like, what the fuck is this?

And he's like, you'll find out.

Diaspora,

it's a weird time.

But so, yeah, he becomes this really, really fervent like hibernophile, hibernophile, right?

An enthusiast for Ireland.

And so he raises his children in that tradition.

He teaches them early on about the kind of like, about like, as

Robert puts it, like, Pete Boggs and like kings of legend and shit like that, right?

Cool.

He married up as well.

He married this

woman from a very prominent Russian Jewish family.

And they are all like, why is the one Irish Jew in the world who, by the the way, has no money trying to marry our daughter?

And they have to like elope.

And when they elope, he gets her onto the pier in Ireland and it's like, you know, this is this is Ireland, the best country in the world.

This is this is my home.

By the way, I have one shilling left.

Half of it is yours.

Yeah, it's it's it's like kind of human trafficking at this point.

But yeah, it's like it might kind of like a sort of Irish kafala system.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But so he becomes a brush salesman.