This is an ad for Riordans wine shop in Washington street in Cork which
I think they wrote themselves and which they used to use to advertise the joys of drinking in programmes for cultural events in Cork in the 1950’s.
It stuck in my mind and just today I managed to find it in a Cork Ballet Company Programme for 1959 in the Cork City Library Archives.
Read it carefully, there is quite a lot of modern medical science hidden in there.
Poor Smith, Poor Brown.
They say with whispers or with winks,
“Poor Smith, the trouble is he drinks”
The doctors worry more for Brown
Whose appetite has got him down.
They know as some of us do not
The plate’s as deadly as the pot.
The sober diner may depart
From fatty something of the heart
While he whose wickedness is wine
May totter on to Ninety Nine
Yet no one whispers in the streets
“Poor Brown, the trouble is- he eats”
Yes I know it is not at all suitable to my November resolutions but, whatever.
Searching my blog I was convinced I had written about this piece of verse before- I had ! I came upon this plea from 2007, nearly seven years ago which I have finally answered myself! (I must say I remembered the second verse with great accuracy)
December 10, 2007
01:53 PM
The Wickedness of Wine
I have such a strong memory of an entirely politically incorrect poem which used to be printed in Theatre Programmes in the Cork of my youth.
To the best of my memory this was was part of an advertisment for Riordens Wines and Spirits which stood next door to Dwyers Wholesale Warehouse on Washington Street in Cork.
It extolled the benefits of drinking above those of eating, neither of which would be permitted today.
I can only remember a couple of snatches of the verse which I had always imagined, it was so wittily phrased, was by someone of the calibre of Coward or Nash.
I have searched the internet in vain for the original poem so can only assume it was written by a copywriter with a particularly fluent pen in Cork in the fifties.
The central theme was to contrast, Mr. Brown who overindulged in food to, someone who (in the phrase of the day ); “ drank.”
It finished with something like;
The sober diner may depart
With fatty something of the heart
Yet he whose wickedness is wine
May totter on to ninety nine
Yet no-one whispers in the streets
“Poor Brown the trouble is, he eats”
Is there anyone out there old enough to remember the rest of it?
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