National pride, national vanity and WB Yeats in Bedford Park

WB Yeats and Fintan O’Toole

Ahead of Fintan O’Toole’s lecture on October 6, Cahal Dallat explores WB Yeats’s links to Bedford Park and the enduring debate over national pride and national identity

By Cahal Dallat

WB Yeats spent his formative years in Bedford Park, where he wrote some of his best loved poems and, through his connections with the local artistic community, helped lay the foundations for what would become Ireland’s world famous Abbey Theatre.

On Tuesday 6 October, leading Irish writer, journalist and literary critic Fintan O’Toole will come to St Michael & All Angels Church in Bedford Park to deliver the 2026 WB Yeats Bedford Park Lecture, National Pride & National Vanity: Yeats, Art & Patriotism.

Here, Cahal Dallat, who will introduce the lecture and is founder of the WB Yeats Bedford Park Project, explains why the subject remains relevant and explores Bedford Park’s role in the artistic and political debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Book tickets for the lecture here.

National Pride & National Vanity: Yeats, Art & Patriotism

Guest blog by Cahal Dallat

What can Fintan O’Toole, as a leading Irish and international author, journalist, lecturer, theatre critic and expert on the intersections of politics and the arts, have to say (on Tuesday 6 October) about a poet who grew up here in Bedford Park 150 years ago that’s so absolutely relevant to today’s world?

Clearly the lecture title, and Fintan’s career as drama critic for The Irish Times, and his connection as a passionate advocate for (and former literary adviser to) the world famous Abbey Theatre, Europe’s first state subsidised theatre (which grew out of Yeats’s dream of an Irish National Theatre, a dream that became reality thanks to the support and encouragement of Bedford Park theatrical friends), has captured the public imagination in no uncertain terms.

Over two thirds of our tickets (St Michael and All Angels has a 250 seat capacity!) have gone already with two weeks to go, plus RSVPs from invited patrons, actors, writers, MPs, councillors, local, community leaders and representatives from the Yeats Society in Sligo and the Yeats Sisters symposium in Dublin attending the talk.

The title of the 2026 WB Yeats Bedford Park Lecture which Fintan will deliver gives a clue to his thinking: National Pride and National Vanity: Yeats, Arts and Patriotism, with that loaded word “Patriotism” right at the end.

We simply can’t hear the word “patriot” applied now (usually self applied) to those protesting against a more tolerant, inclusive society, here in Britain, in the US, and even in Ireland, where “national pride” is now the excuse of the xenophobe, without remembering Samuel Johnson’s wise pronouncement that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”.

Johnson was a patriot and a staunch English Tory but held, in the eighteenth century, strong views in favour of human rights and against the excesses of empire. Those views might surprise many of today’s so called patriots. Though they wouldn’t surprise the cosmopolitan, radical, egalitarian, feminist and anti imperial denizens of nineteenth century Bedford Park who gathered (in the same spaces in which we gather today) to hear lectures on art and politics and to discuss the society of the future.

Bedford Park’s discussers and debaters were, themselves, of course, as the world’s first garden suburb, living in a “housing estate” created not for profit but for communal happiness, an unlikely Utopian experiment in how a new society could be created!

The Abbey Theatre in Dublin, founded by Yeats and his friends with support from Bedford Park connections

Bedford Park and the end of Empire

The Bedford Park Society’s 150th anniversary exhibition in 2025 gave proof to the rhetorical banner headline Ahead of the World in Everything? and it’s clear that many of the liberal and progressive views taken for granted in this artists’ colony and first garden suburb were ahead of their time, many of them – with the added eclectic Bedford Park interests in vegetarianism, fine press printing, craft work and Eastern spirituality – all becoming suddenly fashionable eighty years later in the 1960s!

The 1960s also saw the end of the British Empire as one after another ex colony achieved nationhood as a result of the anti colonial trend that was central to much of Bedford Park’s activism and agitation.

Jamaican Henry Fox-Bourne who edited the suburb’s own “local paper”, The Bedford Park Gazette, campaigned to protect “native races” in the colonies, and corresponded with and supported Sir Roger Casement, the world’s first “humanitarian rapporteur” who was knighted for his reports on atrocities by the Belgian king’s company in the Congo and by the British owned Peruvian Amazon Company in Putumayo. Casement’s sister lived just behind the Yeatses and his initial contacts with the Yeats family were more focused on the Arts and Crafts aspects of Bedford Park life: more “William Morris” anti-industrial than anti-imperial.

3 Blenheim Road where Yeats wrote his first-staged-play

Irish Cultural Revival

But one aspect of that progressive thought (alongside campaigning for Indian independence, which would come 60 years later) was the argument for Irish Home Rule.

Yeats and his Bedford Park and London-Irish friends, mostly Protestants from the pro Union Anglo Irish landed gentry – though occasional visitors included Fenian activist John O’Leary, Casement, revolutionary Maud Gonne, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, former premier of Victoria in Australia, and Gaelic scholar and poet Douglas Hyde, later first President of Ireland – decided (after an 1890 split in the Irish Parliamentary Party) that the route to self determination was through cultural, rather than political, action.

London’s theatres, galleries, concert halls and publishing houses had already long been dominated by Irish talent – Field, Moore, Sullivan, Wallace, Balfe, Stanford and Wood, musically (as we explored in last year’s Yeats/Bedford Park event with Irish Heritage singers and musicians), Farquhar, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Shaw and Wilde as dramatists and Swift, Maria Edgeworth, Laurence Sterne, the Brontës and Bram Stoker in literature.

So Yeats aimed to create a sense of Irish “national pride” by focusing on Irish writing, including translations of ancient Irish myths and sagas as rich as the Arthurian or Viking legends, by creating, in London, an Irish Literary Society which remains an important part of London’s cultural scene today, and which quickly gave rise to a Dublin based National Literary Society.

Yeats loved Shakespeare, and spent summers in Stratford studying and attending the plays: so with support from Bedford Park’s Florence Farr and her wealthy Golden Dawn associates he envisaged an Irish National Theatre that would be a “people’s theatre”, as he explained in his Nobel acceptance speech, as explored by his biographer, Professor Roy Foster in our 2023 Yeats/Bedford Park lecture.

That idea, with the support of Lady Augusta Gregory and brothers Frank and Willy Fay (Matthew Fay, a grandson of Frank Fay, has been a key committee member in the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project over the past ten years) became the Abbey Theatre, a key element in the cultural revival that encouraged national pride and provided the soft diplomacy behind Ireland’s asserting its sovereignty in the second decade of the twentieth century.

Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, staged at the Abbey Theatre in 1926

Reality after the Revolution

But “national pride” proved a two edged sword, after the creation of the new Irish Free State when Yeats’s Abbey Theatre protégé, Sean O’Casey staged his “Easter Rising” play ten years after the revolution.

Complete with, as appropriate for a true “people’s theatre”, dramatic portrayals of ordinary flawed human beings, rather than heroic martyrs, and of Dublin’s poor, tenement dwellers, looters, drinkers, and loose women. And public opinion in the new Free State, especially the views of those associated with the Rising, had its “national vanity” seemingly insulted.

That 1926 play was revived at the Abbey Theatre, 100 years later, ie this year, and Fintan O’Toole saw in both the audiences’ reactions and the distinction between the pride Yeats had sought to inspire through his own writing and the vanity with which one country believes its people to be better than all others, lessons for our present world.

Hence his suggestion of the lecture theme and the decision that Bedford Park, as the source of that cultural revival, was the place to deliver such a lecture.

Conrad Shawcross’s #EnwroughtLight

Lessons for Today

I’ll be giving a short introduction on the evening, and then sitting back to hear what Fintan, as one of our leading thinkers, and a winner of numerous prizes for his journalism, not least on the subject of Brexit, has to say about not just about Yeats, art and patriotism, but on when encouraging national identity as a matter of pride is a positive and commendable aim, and how it can create a vainglorious sense of supremacy, exceptionalism and xenophobia that blinds us to realities in society.

Sure to be another exceptional evening in this series that has explored not just the centripetal intake of literary and artistic talent (much, but not all of it Irish or London Irish in origin) into late nineteenth century Bedford Park, but how the enlightened ideas forged there spilled out, or in fact flew out centrifugally, rather as Conrad Shawcross’s #EnwroughtLight artwork outside St Michael and All Angels Church (the Yeats family’s parish church during their time here and an ongoing centre of the community) spirals and gyres its way up and out from the ordinary space between – as Yeats puts it – the roadway and the pavements gray, to shape the twentieth century and beyond.

READ ALSO: Interview with Conrad Shawcross, designer of Chiswick’s new sculpture Enwrought Light

Cahal Dallat is a London based poet, musician and critic, and founder and organiser of the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project. He is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Review and has won the Keats Shelley and Strokestown International poetry prizes.