If you were a Dublin resident any time between the 1930s and the early 1960s, the chances are high that you would have gone to the theatre or the cinema for your shot of entertainment.
But whatever form you picked, highbrow or lowbrow, you almost certainly went to premises owned and run by the extraordinary Elliman family, the showbiz kings of Ireland. In three or four decades, the Ellimans ran the gamut of rags to riches. Every Hollywood star you can think of, and then some, from Bing Crosby to Ginger Rogers to Danny Kaye, came to Ireland at the behest of the Ellimans. There were sports promotions, pantomimes, literary dramas, the cream of the Irish theatre, and hundreds of the top films.
And then, with the advent of television and the death of the driving force of the family, Louis Elliman, it all stopped, almost as though a tap had been turned off. Today there is only one former Elliman theatre left in Dublin – the Gaiety – still functioning, although no longer under the family’s control; and the city council is considering re-naming a street for the Theatre Royal, scene of some of the family’s greatest dramatic triumphs.
Every aspect of this extraordinary story has been lovingly put together by the Jerusalem-based writer Wendy Elliman, who first began assembling her family history around 15 years ago. “At the stone-setting for the last sibling, we agreed that we should really do something to preserve the anecdotes and the family stories for the next generation. And ‘we’ turned out to be me.”
When Elliman speaks of “the last sibling” she is talking about the 12 sons and daughters of the family patriarch, Maurice Elliman.
And indeed, there were so many of them – nine sons, three daughters – that Elliman frequently refers to their place in the family by numbers. She herself is the daughter of Hymie Elliman, the seventh son – but he did not go into the family business, instead attending Trinity College Dublin, qualifying as a doctor and moving to England. Elliman and her sister were brought up in Finchley, north-west London, but made frequent visits to see their aunts and uncles and cousins. She recalls attending services at a Dublin synagogue and realising that almost the entire congregation consisted of relatives.
Elliman had originally intended her manuscript to be for the younger generation – including her own triplet daughters, who didn’t know much about the family history – but after the outbreak of war following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, she was at home and began to write the book in earnest.
The story starts, as so many Ashkenazi stories do, in an eastern European shtetl, this one in Lithuania, where Elliman’s grandfather, then known as Moshe Helman, was born. He became a travelling cantor – perhaps the origin of his love of audiences and entertainment.
But one pogrom too many drove out the man who became Maurice Elliman. He left the shtetl aged just 20 in 1892, arriving in Dublin as a penniless immigrant, with no discernible skills. His first hosts in the city told him that the last thing anyone needed in rural Ireland was a travelling cantor, so he tried various means of making a living, including becoming a pedlar and, briefly, a greengrocer.
He had married the daughter of his landlords and the couple kept having children – so it was imperative to find a sustainable way of making a living for the ever-growing family. By chance – he and his wife Leah loved going to see “magic lantern” shows – the owner of a magic lantern franchise decided there was no future in the technology, and gave all the equipment to Maurice Elliman.
In 1910, Elliman tells us – 18 years after his arrival in Ireland – her grandfather began screening “bioscope” shows, using this earliest of cinema equipment. At this stage he was still running his greengrocery business, but increasingly took the bioscope shows around Ireland, using members of his family to help – “12-year-old Abe travelled with him as projectionist and electrician, and his eldest daughter, ten-year-old Rosie, provided the musical accompaniment.”
Though Maurice still described himself in a 1911 census as a greengrocer, the travelling shows were popular enough for him to jettison the fruit and veg business and turn his attention to entertainment. Elliman writes: “His travelling bioscope shows had convinced him of the potential of cinema. He had read the situation clearly. In the coming decades, Ireland would register the highest rate of cinema admissions in Europe.”
So he rented a disused garage in central Dublin and converted it into what he named the Cinema Theatre, a state-of-the-art film house that became the first of 34 picture houses that the Elliman Group would ultimately own.
By 1922 Maurice had opened the most luxurious cinema Dublin had ever seen – the Metropole, seating 1,000 people and offering unheard of facilities to the paying public, complete with orchestra and restaurant.
Much of the trajectory of her family’s success was familiar to Wendy Elliman, though there were some surprises in store when she began working on the book properly. One story related to one of the 12 siblings who had supposedly gone to England and died in the Second World War. “This wasn’t true, in fact. I was contacted by a researcher, Kieran Devenish, from the University of Galway,” she says.
Devenish established that Bennie Elliman, number five in the order of siblings, had actually not only married out, but had converted to Catholicism, an act which shocked the entire family. Maurice was horrified and “sat shivah for his living child” – but his children, says Elliman, refused to sit with him. Just 14 months after his 1938 marriage, Bennie died in Dublin’s Mater Nursing Home of an unknown condition, leaving a pregnant widow.
The family story that was put about regarding Bennie was symptomatic of the complex relationship between Irish Jews, the older generation of whom were immigrants to the country, and the host Catholic community. Elliman frequently notes throughout the book that first Maurice, and then his son Louis, were at pains to maintain good relations with Catholic clergy. One of Maurice’s first ventures in 1911 gave proceeds to a local church; cinema offerings in which there were scenes which might offend Catholic Ireland led to such scenes being cut. “The family gave to Jewish causes – they gave the Gaiety to Wizo [for an event] once – but they were very aware of outside pressure.”
At the same time, Elliman says, none of her family has spoken of engrained Irish antisemitism, though she notes sharply that Ireland, nominally neutral during the Second World War, failed to take in a single Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Europe.
Maurice’s death in 1952, aged 79, quite literally stopped traffic in central Dublin as his funeral cortège made its way to the cemetery, as did that of his son Louis in 1965, who by then was known internationally as the face of the Irish entertainment industry.
“Louis died when I was 14 and he was a lovely man,” says Elliman. “He was very quiet, apparently unassuming and modest – but when I read his journal [included in the book] it was a revelation to me. People [in Hollywood] really wanted him.”
The journal, held in the keeping of Elliman’s cousin Edward, details an incredible months-long trip that Louis and his wife Ettie took in 1950, from America to Australia to Hawaii, meeting everyone from Walt Disney to film stars such as Gregory Peck and Judy Garland, and the more anonymous behind-the-scenes impresarios in cinema and theatre.
Inevitably, I have to ask Elliman about present-day Irish attitudes to Jews and Israel. She says her initial response is that she is “very saddened”, and said when she has asked her Irish family about antisemitism they say they have not experienced it themselves, “though they are of course aware of it. They assume it will pass, and unfortunately Ireland is not out of step with the rest of Europe.”
Despite events in Ireland which Elliman deplores, she is having two rather poignant launches for her book – one in Israel at the official residence of the Irish ambassador, Sonya McGuinness, and one in Dublin at the Irish Jewish Museum.
For the Israeli launch, Elliman says, she contacted Irish expats in Israel “but two people said that because of the way Ireland is behaving now, they wouldn’t set foot in the residence.” On the other hand, the Dublin launch – on February 22 – is set to welcome the descendants of some of the actors and artists whom Maurice and Louis Elliman brought to the public eye. They, she says, have enthusiastically accepted the invitation.
Elliman says that one of her motives in writing the book was “to remind people of the contribution that Irish Jews have made on a national level, not just to Judaism but to the wider society”. Clearly the Ellimans were a major part of that contribution.
The Outsiders Who Built Irish Entertainment by Wendy Elliman is published by Valentine Mitchell
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