Earning his Spurs – Frank McNally on an unlikely Wexford hero ‘Tottenham in his Boots’

Pleasant as it may be for most visitors, the town of New Ross is an Arsenal fan’s nightmare.

I know this because among the people who took part in a walking tour of it last weekend was the affable, recently retired Sky News correspondent Dermot Murnaghan, a fervent Gunners supporter whose wife Maria has many relatives in Wexford.

He was looking forward with some trepidation to the first North London derby of the new Premiership season in two weeks’ time. And it was visibly distressing for him that, everywhere we turned in New Ross, it seemed, the name “Tottenham” was written in stone.

That this is (or was once) a Tottenham stronghold is due to a family of the surname who, in former centuries, owned the town. So doing, they produced six successive generations of MPs. Judging by their many mentions on stone plaques, they also had a strong grip on the municipal chisel.

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The founder of the dynasty went even further, if unwittingly, by writing his name into the Hiberno-English language. Like all the later MPs, he was a Charles Tottenham (1694–1758), and served as an obscure backbencher in the old Irish House of Commons until an event of 1731 earned political immortality.

The parliament – all Protestant then, of course – was unsure what to do with a budget surplus of £60,000, so split into two almost equal factions on the issue.

The “time-servers” (as one critic called them) wanted to present the money as a gift to the British exchequer. The “patriots” (as they called themselves) wanted to keep it in Ireland.

When the MP for New Ross – one of the latter group – heard the vote was imminent, he was at home in Tottenhamgreen, near Taghmon. So he leapt on his horse and, it is said, rode through the night to reach Dublin in time.

Arriving at College Green, mud-spattered and still in riding boots, he was at first refused entry for breaching sartorial guidelines. But he shouldered his way in and the speaker allowed him cast his vote, which swung the decision.

The incident was not immediately famous, and according to the Dictionary of Irish Biography, historians have been unable to identify the precise house division. Tottenham’s intervention may have happened, less dramatically, at committee stage.

But a phrase somehow entered the language. An engraving of 1749 portrayed “Tottenham in his Boots” on the steps of parliament. Thereafter this became a political slogan.

As Jonah Barrington put it in his memoirs: “The anecdote could not die while the Irish Parliament lived; and I recollect Tottenham in his Boots remaining down to a very late period a standing toast at certain patriotic Irish tables.”

A later painting of the same title, now in the National Gallery, does indeed show Tottenham on a set of footsteps in a pair of large boots.

But the background is not College Green, the subject is not covered in mud, and if he has just ridden 60 or 90 miles* to Dublin, his miniature dog appears to have beaten him there to welcome him. (*Discrepancies in the reported distance he travelled are in part explained by the old Irish mile, which was a third longer that the English.)

The NGI picture may instead have been painted on his own footsteps, referencing rather than depicting his moment of fame.

The phrase makes a cameo appearance in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, then under construction, where a footnote refers to ‘tottingham in his boots’

Definitions of Irish patriotism and nationalism changed in subsequent centuries. Democracy was an evolving concept too. A later Charles Tottenham (1738–1806) adopted the surname Loftus after an inheritance from an uncle that included the rotten borough of Bannow.

Infamous even by the standards of the time, this was founded on an abandoned coastal village in Wexford that had gradually disappeared under sand.

The 18th century MP for it was said to represent “a chimney”, which protruded from the dunes sufficiently to have formal election notices pinned on it. The constituency was abolished, with the Irish parliament itself, in 1800.

Still, Tottenhams continued to be elected to the British House of Commons until the 1880s, when a new political nationalism was on the rise. As a Scottish relative of the family wrote ruefully in a letter to the Spectator in 1913, the last of the six Tottenham MPs was a member for New Ross “until Mr Redmond appeared upon the scene and turned people’s heads”.

The expression “Tottenham in his Boots” enjoyed a brief revival in the early years of the Free State, thanks to the equally pivotal John Jinks, who in 1927 saved the government, this time by not turning up for a vote.

That might explain the phrase’s cameo appearance in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, then under construction, where a footnote refers to “tottingham in his boots”.

The boots did not make it into any of the inscriptions in New Ross, as far as I could see. But they were never football boots, in any case. Ironically for Arsenal and Spurs fans alike, they have gone down in history as a symbol of resistance to interference in Irish affairs by London.