Robert Collis (1900-75)

WorksCriticismCommentaryQuotations

Life

[Dr. William Robert Fitzgerald Collis]; the twin of John Collis; he served as a doctor in Africa and looked after refugees after World War II; wrote a play, Marrowbone Lane (1942), dealing with Dublin slum life which was initially rejected by the Abbey but was played by the Gate in 1939, and revived in 1941; established the Communist Party of Ireland; The Silver Fleece (1939) is an autobiography; winner of the Carmichael Essay Prize with The State of Medicine in Ireland (1943);

 
issued Straight On (1947), with Han[s] Hogerzeil, recounting the liberation of Belsen; Collis married Hogerzeil and adopted five Belsen children; also The Ultimate Value (1951), about refugee children; issued A Doctor’s Nigeria (1960) and To Be a Pilgrim (Secker & Warburg 1975), and autobiography, ill & introd. by Christy Brown - whom he famously identified as a talented child in spite of serious disability; there is a photo port. by Lafayette in The Bell (Feb. 1946). DIW

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Works
Drama
  • Marrowbone Lane: A play in three acts (Dublin: Runa Press 1943), 95pp., ill. [port.], 19 cm [COPAC].
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Autobiography & travel
  • A Doctor’s Nigeria (London: Secker & Warburg 1960), 264pp., ill. [map, ports.];
  • Nigeria in Conflict (London: Secker & Warburg 1970), xiii, 215pp., ill. [8 pls., maps, ports.].
  • The Silver Fleece: An Autobiography (London: T. Nelson & Sons 1936), 290pp., ill.
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Miscellaneous
  • The State of Medicine in Ireland [Carmichael Prize Essay] (Dublin: Parkside Press 1943), vi, 70pp.
  • [W.R.F. Collis & P.C. MacClancy,] Some Paediatric Problems Presented at Belsen Camp, in British Medical Journal, Vol. 1 (1946), pp.273-75, ill.
  • W. R. F. Collis, Ninian Falkiner, P. C. D. MacClancy, M. Moran, Modern Methods of Infant Management - Before, During, and After Birth (London: William Heinemann Medical Books 1948), vii, 285pp.
  • ed., Neo-natal Paediatrics (London: William Heinemann Medical 1958) xiii, 301pp.
 
Contribs. to The Bell
  • A Description of Tuberculosis, in The Bell, VIII, 3 (June, 1944), pp.209-18;
  • ‘Work in Progress, No. 3: Journey to Czecho-Slovakia, being an excerpt from a forthcoming book on the establishment of a children's hospital at Belsen Concentration Camp’, in The Bell, XI, 5 (Feb. 1946), pp.947-59.
  • ‘“The Delicacy”, being a discourse on the T. B. problem’ [with ‘Two Years in a Sanatorium’, an essay by Charles Woodlock], in The Bell, I, 5 (Feb. 1941), pp.33-42.

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Criticism
“T” [pseud.], review of The Silver Fleece, in The Irish Book Lover, XXIV (May-June 1936), pp.71-72; Denis Johnston, ‘Plays of the Month: The Works of J. M. Barrie, Robert Collis [Marrowbone Lane] and David Sears’, in The Bell, II, 2 (May 1941), pp.86-91; Margaret Barrington, review of The Ultimate Value by Robert Collis, in The Bell, XVII, 6 (Sept. 1951), pp.70-72.

See also Anthony Jordan, Christy Brown’s Women (Westport Books 1998), which gives an account of Collis's founding of the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) [see Books Ireland, Dec. 1998, p.262].

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Commentary
Note that Frank O’Connor remarks on ‘Collis’s play Marrowbone Lane, which dealt with the Dublin slums [and which] was rejected by the Abbey Theatre; not, I imagine, on its merits.’ (‘The Future of Irish Literature’, in Horizon, Jan. 1942; rep. in David Pierce, ed., Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader, Cork UP 2000, p.503.)

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Quotations
Letter to Irish Press (3 Oct. 1936): ‘Dubliners are wont to describe their City affectionately as “An old lady”. When visitors admire her outer garment – the broad streets, the old 18th century houses, Fitzwilliam Square and St Stephen’s Green – they smile complacently and feel proud. Lift the hem of her outer silken garment, however, and you will find suppurating ulcers covered by stinking rags, for Dublin has the foulest slums of any town in Europe. In these “quaint old eighteenth century houses” the people are herded and live in conditions of horror.’ (Quoted in Kevin C. Kearns, Dublin Tenement Life, An Oral History, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1994).

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References
Cathach Books (1996-97) lists Marrowbone Lane (Dublin: Runa Press 1943), 65pp. [de luxe edn.].

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