The Personals

by Brian O'Connell

  And of course, once he had the All-Ireland final programmes he needed to go back and look for the Munster final programmes for both years. You can see where this is going, can’t you?

  Will he ever be able to say his collection is complete? ‘It’s never really complete. I am back to 1944 in Limerick senior hurling championship programmes, but I am missing a lot of programmes from the 1930s,’ he says. ‘Limerick played in five All-Ireland finals in the 1930s. In the 21 years I have been collecting I have only ever been able to purchase one of them. It was in an auction down in Kilkenny. A lot of collectors like myself have very few All-Ireland programmes from before the war. The programmes of the 1930s and 1940s tended just to be one sheet. In those times, very few people kept anything. We have about 12 to 15 big collectors in the country. I am one of them but the other collectors tend to collect all competitions and I only collect Limerick so I’m not seen as a risk to any of these other guys.’

  Browsing through his collection of 1,000 or so programmes, I find that it ranges from All-Ireland finals to League finals, Railway Cups to regional championships as well as county, club, minor, under-21 and senior games. I wonder what has been his best find through the Evening Echo ads?

  ‘The best find I had was the proceeds of an old collector about six or seven years ago outside Cork. His nephew called me and said he collected a lot. That can mean anything of course, but really the litmus test is anyone who has programmes before 1975, because that’s when programmes start having a value really. This man had a few thousand programmes, and some excellent GAA newspapers from the 1950s and 1960s. He had protected the stuff really really well. He actually had a little tomb, like a back room, which when you opened it up was like Tutankhamun’s vault. On all sides were shelves and I bought the whole collection. It took me three trips up and down to Cork before I had it all taken away.’

  I can’t help but think of my interviewee’s family, as he arrives home from Cork with the car stuffed with GAA annuals, programmes and old newspapers. Does his wife share his glee when he arrives in the front door with another box full of dusty programmes? ‘She is absolutely appalled,’ he tells me. ‘She really detests it. We have two kids who have asthma, so it’s not good. I’m allowed to decontaminate them in that room out there and then I have to move them within two months. So either upstairs, out in the shed or moved on.’

  Does he regard collecting as an addiction? ‘It’s an obsession,’ he says. ‘Plus, I love meeting people. I have met some of the best people through collecting. And when we go up to the All-Ireland finals we will meet up. I consider myself a GAA man first, and a collector second.’

  The most he had spent on one programme was €1,400 for the 1933 All-Ireland final programme. He says it shouldn’t have cost him that much, but another collector bid against him. Often they do side deals between themselves to prevent that happening, but that didn’t work on this occasion. He rarely gets hits online, but has noticed in the past year or so that he’s getting fewer calls through the newspaper classifieds.

  Having built up this amazing collection over the years, I’m curious to know how often he takes it out and looks at it. ‘Very rarely,’ he says. ‘I’ve no interest in looking at it. The joy is in having it and knowing that if someone comes to me looking for a programme from, say, 1947, I can pull it out and say, yep, I have that programme. So I tend not to look at the collection at all, I only ever focus on what I am missing. The joy for me is having rare items no one else will have. For example, Gaelic Sport was a very seminal old GAA magazine that ran from 1958 right through to 2002 and I know that there were 417 editions of it. I have two full runs of it, which is five boxes of it, in the house here. I built one run and then a collector gave me a second run which was in better condition and I couldn’t part with either of them.’

  It’s this kind of attention to detail that separates the casual collector from the serious one. Long after I turn off the tape recorder we’re still sitting at his kitchen table leafing through his collection. His passion is infectious, as is his general sports knowledge, and I jokingly say he’d be some man to have on a table quiz team. I wonder was it in some way a therapy for him over the years to channel his compulsions into collecting?

  ‘I don’t really see it as that. I see myself as a very focused collector. I would look on it as being a collector gene,’ he says, ‘rather than something that was a mutation or sickness. We are collectors. We were collectors from a young age, and we will die as collectors.’

  Signing the Past Away

  Nelson Mandela hand-signed autograph. Genuine hand-signed piece, doing a clear-out, reason for quick sale, €3,000. DoneDeal, October 2018

  Under his bed in his parents’ house in rural Cork, John has a box that once contained items that meant the world to him. Now in his early thirties, he’s leaving Cork and making the move to Dublin. The psychological break with his home county has meant that it’s finally time to get rid of his treasured autograph collection. The itch has been scratched. He’s not in his twenties any more and the obsession has abated. Plus, the few bob he expects to get will come in handy when he finds himself shelling out up to €2,000 a month for a glorified cupboard in Dublin 15.

  For now though, John wants to take me back to when he first began an autograph collection, and much to my surprise, he credits one Charles J. Haughey with kick-starting his passion. ‘Ex-Taoiseach Charles Haughey and I wrote to each other a lot when I was in Leaving Cert,’ John tells me. ‘I was doing honours history and we had to do a project on a subject or a person in time. So I decided to write to Charlie Haughey. This was back in 1997 and he was a former Taoiseach at the time.’

  Don’t you just love Ireland? That adage that you’re only ever two phone calls away from a minister, or a Taoiseach in this case, is true. John had developed an interest in current affairs, and he wanted to have a discussion with the former Taoiseach and get his views on the events of the day. He also had one eye on the 30 per cent of the marks given for his final-year history project, and he probably figured that not too many in his class would have a former head of state contributing. ‘I was just chancing my arm writing to him really,’ says John. ‘But in fairness to him, he wrote back swiftly and said he was very happy to oblige. Over the course of a year we wrote back and forth. He would write on headed notepaper and gave me his views on lots of things, including a documentary that was broadcast on RTÉ at the time about him and other things of interest.’

  At one stage Haughey sent a signed portrait of himself to John, and at various other times over the years he sent cards with pictures of Kinsealy and of course, his autograph. Unsurprisingly, John got full marks for the project and an ‘A’ in the Leaving Cert exam. The experience accelerated his interest in historical figures and events and his autograph collecting obsession began in earnest, thanks to Charlie.

  Sometimes what draws me into an ad like this is not so much the item for sale, but the words used to sell it. In this case, of course the Mandela name is interesting, but possibly more interesting was the fact that the seller was doing a clear-out and that there was a reason for a quick sale.

  Quick sale often means either a fresh start or an attempt to break free from past associations or debt. It can signify a break-up, a rebirth, economic difficulty or someone wanting to move on from grief or loss. In this case, as I was to find out, it meant a new beginning, a move away from home and the start of a new life.

  Over the years John would go to fairs and auctions and keep an eye out online for any interesting autographs that came up. He bought a copy of Margaret Thatcher’s biography signed by her before she became ill. Like many of the collectors gathered together in this book, he became obsessive about his pursuit, and began taking courses in how to identify fake or real autographs. Generally, autographs are collected by enthusiasts who attend book signings by famous people, or go to personal appearances. At these you pay a fee for the privilege of having their
scribble. There are several companies that will authenticate autographs and sometimes even provide a photo of the person signing the autograph as further proof.

  Through this process John acquired the Nelson Mandela autograph which he has now put up for sale. It had been in a book originally and he has the photo of Mandela signing to prove its authenticity. He later acquired Richard Nixon’s signature by buying it directly from a person who lived next door to Nixon in California, and with that autograph he also got a picture of the seller with Nixon.

  In total, he’s had seven US presidents’ autographs which he can authenticate. This is important, he says, because a lot of these being sold online are made with an auto pen machine. The number of these kinds of automated autographs doing the rounds prompted John to take an online course in autographs just so he could tell the difference between those written by hand and those written by machine.

  Following on from this, he became fascinated with the way autographs had been written, and he became interested in the kind of pens people used to sign their names. This led him to buying the pen Lyndon B. Johnson used to sign several deals. The other presidential autographs he has include those of Jimmy Carter, the two Bushes and Bill Clinton, as well as many Irish political leaders, from Jack Lynch to Garret FitzGerald.

  Now John has taken a job in Dublin, he’s clearing out his old room, and selling what he doesn’t want any more. He was previously offered a lot of money for some of the collection, including the Mandela autograph. This was at a time when many of the figures, such as Thatcher, were alive. He expects his collection may make more now that several have passed away. He needs to make as much as he can, given the way rents in Dublin are escalating. He talks about this several times during the course of our interview. It says something when a mid-career civil servant can’t readily afford to rent in Dublin. We talk about the possibility that people like him will increasingly remain in Cork in years to come and commute daily to Dublin instead of paying upwards of €500 a week for a room. He reminds me that rents in Cork are not far behind those in Dublin.

  The high rents mean getting rid of a collection which is personal to him, but which he rarely shares with others, so it’s a sacrifice he is willing to make. Anyway, the thrill in building the collection wasn’t in having a huge archive of material in his room. It was in combining his interest in history with something personal to a figure of great historical interest, something that came from their very fingertips – that was the buzz for him.

  Not unusually for a collector, his was a relatively narrow focus. Present-day Hollywood stars don’t interest him. He’s had the autographs of Bob Hope, Jimmy Stewart and a few others during his time collecting and is more interested in old-school film idols. In other words, don’t expect him to be pursuing the scribblings of the Kardashians online any time soon.

  When he had his full collection, he had the autographs mounted and displayed in his bedroom, and later, when he had a home office, they were hung there. The most he’d paid for an autograph was for Nelson Mandela’s, which was around €1,000. He was offered €2,500 for it, but decided instead to put it under his bed for a few years in the hope of achieving a higher price when the great man passed on. So far, that hasn’t quite worked out, and the move to Dublin fund is looking a lot leaner because of it.

  The one autograph he wanted and could never get his hands on was that of US President John F. Kennedy. ‘I had a few bids all right for one but never got near it,’ he said. ‘I would have had Ted Kennedy. I had JFK’s Mass card and stuff but never got JFK’s signature. I would have needed about $10,000 for it and that’s way out of my league,’ he tells me. ‘If I ever have the money though I will buy it. I would love to have it. He was a big hero of mine. Because he died young, some people think there’s not many of his autographs out there. He signed a lot of letters as a senator though and a lot of those letters are out there somewhere.’

  Moving on to Irish historical autographs, he’s always had his eye on the big two of Collins and de Valera. He tells me that a German autograph house has bought a lot of Irish autographs in recent years, including those of Douglas Hyde and others and many are now in private collections. ‘You can expect to pay up to €5,000 for de Valera’s autograph,’ he says, adding that he knows people who have one through their parents but would never sell.

  We discuss how much Charlie Haughey’s autograph is likely to be worth in the decades ahead and I mention that the only time I saw Haughey publicly was at former Taoiseach Jack Lynch’s funeral in Cork. I was standing on Patrick Street with thousands of others, and Haughey was in a car in the funeral procession, and the abuse hurled at him was quite something.

  ‘I was so embarrassed and sorry that happened,’ John says. ‘There is no place for that. I was there and I introduced myself to him after and he said it’s so nice to meet and thanks for saying hello. I was so embarrassed. It was not the time and place for it. We are better than that. Cork people are better than that. I was told shortly after the funeral he told the driver just to go straight home. It is a pity.’

  That reaction has to be seen in the context of Haughey and Lynch’s complex relationship, as well as the fall from grace and controversy surrounding the former Taoiseach. He was obviously one of the most capable politicians we’ve ever produced on this island, and also one of the most flawed.

  ‘My parents are in their seventies and they will tell you he was a good Taoiseach,’ John says. ‘He did a lot of good things, such as what he did for the arts and the elderly and a lot of it gets overshadowed. You take my mother’s generation, for example, very few will have a bad word to say about him. OK, there’s his personal life and everything, but sure everyone has something. He was a divisive figure, but as far as I’m concerned, in terms of my interactions with him, he couldn’t have been more helpful. He wrote to me about a dozen times and he really didn’t have to; there was nothing in it for him.’

  During that correspondence, they discussed a recent programme made about the ex-Taoiseach on television which had been complimentary about him, and Haughey also discussed going into coalition with the PDs, as well as ranking formidable political opponents. John looks back on the exchanges with Haughey as having had a big influence on his passions and interests in life that have sustained him to this day. He doubts, though, that the Haughey autograph will hold its value.

  Having said that, sometimes you can’t tell which autographs will end up increasing in value. For example, he has had the Mandela autograph for sale a while and is surprised there hasn’t been more interest. It’s likely to be sold to someone in business who wants to put it on the wall of their office. ‘Maybe the price is putting people off, but to be totally honest, there was more interest in his autograph when he was alive than now when he is dead,’ he tells me.

  He reflects back on some of the other valuable autographs he’s owned over the years, such as Jimmy Stewart’s. Darwin’s is one he would like to get his hands on, and he says it’s always worth looking inside old books in charity shops for signatures. He advises caution when buying autographs online though as there are a lot of forgeries around. The best way to authenticate an autograph is to get it direct from the person themselves at a book signing, or to write to them as he did. Haughey wasn’t the only head of state he wrote to. When he was in office, he chanced his arm and wrote to Prime Minister Tony Blair. ‘I just thought I’d try it and ask him for his autograph,’ John says. ‘I used a bit of the Irish plámás about how I was building up a collection and told him he would be a fantastic addition. He had no problem writing back on official paper with his autograph enclosed. It sometimes pays to have a bit of neck!’

  John has also had a few Reagan autographs over the years, and would love to get his hands on Churchill’s. His is hard to get though, unlike Thatcher’s, which is fairly ubiquitous in the autograph world.

  Much of the collection is gone now and he’s left with about 20 autographs. Ha
ughey, Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton are the stand-out ones. The collecting bug which sustained him for so many years has left him. Life has taken over. In a way, I tell him, he’s one of the lucky ones, in that some collectors find it very difficult to ever manage an amicable divorce from their passion, and it ends up becoming a burden.

  For John, the rents in Dublin mean that the only signature he’s likely to be seeing for a while is his own at the bottom of inflated lease agreements. Despite that, he’s relishing the move.

  Part Seven

  LOST CAUSES?

  Being Frank

  Help wanted for pensioner to formulate a difficult letter. Evening Echo

  The last page of the classifieds is often where the nuggets are, where requests that don’t fit into other categories find a home. You can find everything from people hoping to meet long-lost friends to a whole series of anonymous devotions to Catholic saints, the offer of miracle cures or the contact details for addiction counselling services. Some time ago, my eye was drawn to the above advertisement.

  From experience, anyone who feels they need to post an ad like this in the small ads possibly lives something of an isolated life, whether by design or accident. It also struck me as unusual that the number provided was a landline number in an era when mobile phones are ubiquitous. I was curious to find out why the letter the person needed help with was so difficult – was it a legal issue perhaps? Or something emotional that had to be penned to a long-lost relative? Or the ending of an affair maybe? As you can probably tell, I wasn’t doing a great job in reining in my imagination in advance of making contact.