Percy French

Biography

French wrote his first successful song as a student in 1877, for a smoking concert at Trinity College. It was called “Abdul Abulbul Amir”. It was printed in 200 copies for five pounds, and he sold each copy for two shillings and sixpence. He forgot to register the copyright, the song was later republished without his name, and all the income from it went to others.

William Percy French was born on 1 May 1854 at Clooneyquinn House, near Tulsk in County Roscommon. His father, Christopher French, was an Anglo-Irish landlord, and his mother was Susan Emma, née Percy. He was the third of nine children. He was educated in England, at Kirk Langley and Windermere College, then at Foyle College in Derry, and afterwards entered Trinity College Dublin. There he won five of the six watercolour prizes and in 1876 joined the Dublin Sketching Club. He was awarded his civil engineering qualification in 1880 and his BA in 1885 (sources give different dates). For a short time he worked as an apprentice engineer on the Midland Railway.

In 1883 French became an inspector of drains for the Board of Works in County Cavan. He came to regard those years as the time when he realised that painting was his real vocation. In Cavan he founded a sketching club and a comic troupe, the Kinnepottle Komics, painted a great many watercolours, and wrote songs that are generally thought to be his best of the period. In 1883 the eruption of Krakatoa turned sunsets red all over the world, and his landscapes with unusual skies are counted among his finest. He exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy and sometimes gave his pictures short verses in place of titles.

Around 1888 the Board cut its staff, and French lost his post.

He became editor of The Jarvey, a comic weekly started by the publisher Mecredy. It ran for two years and filled 1,664 pages. French himself travelled widely around the country by bicycle with his paints, stopping to sketch. He wrote for The Irish Cyclist for thirty-four years. When Mecredy went on holiday and left him in charge as editor, French answered readers’ letters so facetiously that the publisher came back to a storm of cancelled subscriptions. After The Jarvey failed, his long career as a songwriter and entertainer began. In 1890 he moved to London, and he wrote to his friends from his Dublin address on Mespil Road: “We have come to live by the canal, do drop in.”

French often wrote songs with his friend Houston Collisson: “The Mountains of Mourne” was made by the two of them together. For Collisson he also wrote the libretti of comic operas, from “The Knight of the Road” (1891) to “Noah’s Ark” (1906). He performed his own solo numbers, sketches and parodies, including parodies of Thomas Moore and of Gilbert and Sullivan; many of his poems and songs deal with emigration. For Queen Victoria’s visit to Dublin in 1900 he wrote the parody “The Queen’s After-Dinner Speech”. Among his best-known pieces are “Phil the Fluter’s Ball” and “Slattery’s Mounted Fut”.

“Are Ye Right There Michael”, a song about the state of the railway in rural County Clare, so embarrassed the railway company, according to a persistent local legend, that it led to a lawsuit. French, in this story, arrived late at court and told the judge he had come by the West Clare Railway, whereupon the case was dismissed. I have seen no documents, so I will not vouch for the legend.

French was married twice. His first wife, Ethel Armitage-Moore, wrote a society column for The Jarvey and drew; she died in 1891, and a few weeks later their newborn daughter died too. From 1894 his wife was Helen Sheldon, and they had three daughters. Until 1900 the family lived on Mespil Road, then in St John’s Wood in London.

In January 1920, at the age of sixty-five, French fell ill while performing in Glasgow. He died on 24 January in Formby, at the home of his cousin, Canon Richardson. He is buried in the churchyard of St Luke’s Church, Formby. His archive is kept at the North Down Museum in Bangor.