Tipperary: It's a long, long way to the truth

The Rock of Cashel is at the heart of County Tipperary. Photo / 123RF

The real story about the song of wartime longing turns out to have a more earthy meaning, Peter Calder discovers.

Whether it really is a long way to Tipperary depends on your starting point. To the British soldiers who cheered themselves up with the famous song in the trenches of World War I, it must have seemed a very long way indeed. But to get there from the battlefields, they would not have headed to the county of the same name in Ireland; the Tipperary in the song is in London.

I learned this while talking to Seamus King, a respected local historian of Co. Tipperary in Ireland, who was at the time inducting me into the mysteries of the Irish national game of hurling.

As we relaxed over a couple of pints of Guinness in the bar of my hotel in the county's main town of Cashel, I asked him where I should go in nearby Tipperary Town (as the locals call it) to get a taste for the town that had been immortalised in the song.

His voice dropped - if we had not been alone in the bar, I fancy he would have looked around to make sure he wasn't overheard - as he told me that the song wasn't about the town at all. Tipperary, he said, was soldiers' slang for the red-light district of Soho in London's West End.

"Now what would you be wanting to go writing that for?" the lovely lady in the Tipperary Town tourist office chided me the next day when I asked her to confirm the story. The most she would concede was that "it is alleged" the word referred to Soho.

But even a cursory internet search favours that explanation over the one that said the soldiers were longing for a lovely lass pining in the south of Ireland.

What is not disputed is that the song was first performed on January 31, 1912, in Stalybridge, near Manchester, by a music hall performer called Jack Judge, whose parents were Irish (though from Co. Mayo, a long, long way from Tipperary). There is debate about where it was penned, though the consensus is that it was in response to a five-shilling pub bet that Judge couldn't write a song in a day.

Certainly, it was not written by an Irishman in Ireland - or even about Ireland: the chorus' penultimate line "Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square" make the London reference more persuasive.

Tipperary itself happily trades on the song's fame, and it's worth a visit, if only to tease the woman in the tourist office.

But the heart of the county is Cashel, famous for the spectacular Rock of Cashel, which looms mightily on the edge of town. The traditional seat of the kings of Munster (the southwestern quarter of the island) before the Norman invasion, it is now the site of a remarkably well-preserved cathedral and monastery, most of which was built in the 12th century.

On a clear day, which the locals tell me is a rare occurrence, though it was brilliant the entire June week I was there, you can see five counties from the top of the Rock.

Cashel has a strong New Zealand connection too. A former Archbishop of the diocese, Thomas William Croke, was, for a scant three years, the Archbishop of Auckland.

The Te Ara Encyclopaedia of New Zealand notes that in his time here, he "restored firm leadership to a diocese left in disarray by his predecessor, Bishop Pompallier".

He rebuilt diocesan finances by getting his hands on the surplus income from the gold-rich parishes of the Coromandel, and instituting "a more rigorous system for the Sunday collection at St Patrick's Cathedral".

But if Croke is less remembered by non-Catholics in Auckland than the celebrated Pompallier, he is immortalised in Ireland.

He was one of three founding patrons of the Gaelic Athletic Association, which was established in Thurles, near Cashel, in 1884, to "foster a spirit of earnest nationality" by restoring the indigenous sporting codes - hurling and Gaelic football - that had been repressed by the English.

Croke Park in Dublin, the spiritual home of Gaelic games, is named for him.

CHECKLIST

Getting there: Emirates flies daily from Auckland to Dublin via its hub in Dubai.

Further information: See tipperarytown.ie.

The writer visited Ireland with the assistance of Emirates and Visit Ireland.