John Dudley Digges, Irish stage actor, director, and producer as well as a film actor, is born in Ranelagh, Dublin, on June 9, 1879. Although he gains his initial theatre training and acting experience in Ireland, the vast majority of his career is spent in the United States, where over the span of 43 years he works in hundreds of stage productions and performs in over 50 films.
Digges is the child of James Digges and Catherine Forsythe. He becomes acquainted with theatre directors William and Frank Fay and takes an interest in acting. He joins W. G. Fay’s Irish National Dramatic Company, along with others including Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh, James H. Cousins, Frederick Ryan and Maire Quinn (who becomes his wife). Their first production, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, with Maud Gonne in the lead role, and Déirdre, is on April 2, 1902. The company, which has no funds to speak of, acquires a couple of bare rooms at 34 Lower Camden Street, which with the help of friends from Irish-revival societies they turn into a small theatre. However, this proves too small for the plays they are planning to stage. They rehearse at the Coffee Palace in Westmoreland Street and also use the Molesworth Hall for productions.
In 1903, the playwrights and most of the actors and staff from these productions go on to form the Irish National Theatre Society, which has its registered offices in Camden Street. The society founds the Abbey Theatre.
Digges goes to the United States with a group of fellow-actors in 1904, and becomes successful as both actor and producer. He is stage manager for a time to both Charles Frohman and George Arliss, and by the 1920s he has become a notable performer on Broadway. One of his best-known roles there is as Ficsur in the original 1921 production of Ferenc Molnár‘s Liliom (later adapted into the musical Carousel by Rodgers and Hammerstein). In 1924, in Woodstock, New York, he founds the Maverick Theater with the assistance of Hervey White, who had established the Maverick Arts Colony. He is also artistic director of a company that includes Helen Hayes and Edward G. Robinson.
Digges expands his career into films by 1929, and over nearly two decades he performs in more than 50 films, including the original pre-Hays Code adaptation of The Maltese Falcon (1931). He Is cast in that feature as Casper Gutman, the character later portrayed by Sydney Greenstreet in the 1941 version. In The Invisible Man (1933) he plays the Chief Detective who plots to capture the title character, opposite the unseen Claude Rains. He plays the role of the Heavenly Examiner in both the original Broadway production and the 1930 screen version of Sutton Vane‘s Outward Bound. He also works as a director on Broadway.
Digges marries only once, to Irish actress Maire Quinn. The couple wed on August 27, 1907, in New York City and remain together until Maire’s death in August 1947. On October 24, 1947, just two months after his wife’s death, he dies of a stroke in his Manhattan apartment at 1 West 64th Street. He is survived by three siblings, all living in Ireland: a sister, Mrs. Mai Gannen, and two brothers, James and Ernst. Following a requiem mass at Blessed Sacrament Roman Catholic Church on October 28, he is buried next to his wife at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.
(Pictured: Digges as Boss Mangan in the 1920 Broadway production Heartbreak House, which he also directs)
O’Connor’s father, Andrew O’Connor (1846–1924), of Lanarkshire, Scotland, is a stonecutter who becones a professional sculptor. As a teenager, he apprentices to his father, helping him to design monuments for cemeteries.
O’Connor is involved in a minor controversy in 1909 when he is commissioned to design a statue for Commodore John Barry, of the American Revolutionary-era navy. His first design is heatedly attacked by Irish American groups. He submits a second version, but it too is ultimately rejected, and the sculptor John J. Boyle received the commission.
McKelvey is second among six children and second of three sons of William McKelvey, painter and decorator, originally from Roseville, Craigavad, County Down, and his wife Mary, daughter of Frank Baird, farmer, from Ballywee, County Antrim. He is baptised at Saint Matthew’s Parish Church.
McKelvey attends Mayo Street national school in Belfast. When he is sixteen he became a lithographer apprentice to the firm David Allen & Sons. They produce postcards, posters and notices. He enrolls in the Belfast School of Art part-time by attending evening classes until he leaves his employment in 1911 to study full-time. Alfred Rawlings Baker, his art master, has great influence on him during his time at art college. He receives numerous awards for his artwork including the Sir Charles Brett Prize, the Fitzpatrick Prize, and the Taylor Art Competition.
McKelvey returns to David Allen & Sons in 1917 for a short period of time before he begins to focus on painting and opens his own studio in 1920. The studio is located in Rea’s Building, Royal Avenue, Belfast.
By 1918 McKelvey’s work is exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) and in 1921 he is elected a member of the Belfast Art Society. He is appointed an associate of the RHA in 1923, being granted full membership in 1930. During his career he is considered on a par with Paul Henry and James Humbert Craig, two of the most successful Irish landscape painters of the time. He is elected as one of the first academicians of the Ulster Academy of Arts when it is founded in 1930. He dies in Belfast on June 30, 1974.
F. J. McCormick (real name Peter Christopher Judge), an Irish actor who becomes known for his work at Dublin‘s Abbey Theatre, is born in Skerries, County Dublin, on June 1, 1890. He acquires the stage name “F.J. McCormick” to disguise his identity from his current and future employers, and to avoid parental disapproval. He joins the Abbey at age 19, and acts in some 500 productions there. He is especially remembered for his work in the plays of Seán O’Casey.
After living in Skerries in his early years, at age ten McCormick moves to Dublin and proceeds to live there for the majority of the duration of his life. He is educated locally in Skerries. His father, Michael Judge, is a maltser and later becomes a brewery manager. He is of medium height, with “expressive eyes” and thick brown hair. As a young man, he begins writing by contributing articles to the press. He works briefly as a post office clerk in London but returns to Dublin to work as a junior clerk in the Civil Service. He resigns from his public service career in 1918 and decides to embrace acting as a full-time career as a member of the Abbey Theatre at age 19.
McCormick’s mother dies when he is 2 years old. He and his family move to Dublin when he is 10 or 12 years old. He is raised in Skerries and attends the Holy Faith Convent for primary education. He describes his childhood in Skerries “as a very happy one.” He marries Eileen Crowe on December 2, 1925, in Rathdown. They meet at the Abbey where Crowe is also an actor. In describing their performances together, Seamus De Burca writes, “F. J. McCormick and Eileen Crowe lived a life together of perfect bliss.” The couple has two children, a son, David, and a daughter, Marie.
After moving briefly to London, McCormick returns to Dublin, where he works in the Civil Service. He also takes acting roles in the Workmen’s Club on York Street, and for the first time under the pseudonym by which he becomes known for roles with the Queen’s Theatre, Dublin. By May 1919, he has a leading role in an independent production of The Curate of St. Chad’s by Constance Powell Anderson at the Abbey Theatre. An attack on Irish acting by Edward Martyn is answered by McCormick in the pages of the journal Banba in June 1921.
McCormick acts in over 500 plays at the Abbey Theatre, becoming particularly associated with the plays of Sean O’Casey staged there. From 1923 to 1925, he is also stage manager at the Abbey. Of his performance as Seumus Sheilds in The Shadow of a Gunman, O’Casey says that the actor created a character greater than that which he had written. He plays Capt. Brennan in the filmed version of O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars but it is his return to film in Carol Reed‘s Odd Man Out (1947) that sees him singled out for praise in contemporaneous reviews. The Irish Times writes that “the acting of the Irish players was unremittingly professional, and, in the case of F. J. McCormick, as Shell, a weak-minded and elderly corner-boy, quite outstanding.” The Times of London finds “it is Mr. F. J. McCormick as a sly, bird-like creature, who stops just the right side of informing, who catches most surely at the imagination.”
In their review of the film Hungry Hill (1947), The New York Times writes, “As the butler who served John Brodrick, his sons, and their sons in turn, the late F. J. McCormick is truly magnificent, giving an even more subtle portrayal of Irish character than he did as the wily tramp in Odd Man Out.”
In the last five years of McCormick’s life he continues to work in the Abbey where he acts in over 70 plays before his death. He only stars in one play in the theatre in the final year of his life, the play They Got What They Wanted playing the role of Bartley Murnaghan. He secures more leading roles in the film industry. He dies in Dublin at the age of 56 from a brain tumour on April 24, 1947. He is buried in Dean’s Grange Cemetery, Deansgrange, County Dublin. He continues to work right up until his death.
It is said that people regarded McCormick as one of the greatest actors in his era. This comes from his work in 500 plays and 4 films over his career. A year after his death, Barry Fitzgerald says he only knew of two actors with the gift that McCormick had and they were Charles Laughton and Charlie Chaplin.
There are many popular plays and films that McCormick is part of which are still remembered to this day by many, some of them include the original The Plough and the Stars in 1926 where he originates the role of Commandant Jack Clitheroe. He also plays the role of Captain Brennan in the John Ford film version of the play in 1936. In his appreciation for McCormick, Gabriel Fallon remembers him as both a great actor and a great man.
It is said that McCormick was one of the most versatile actors of his generation, his early death was a huge loss to the Irish arts and more specifically the Abbey Theatre where he carried most of his work.
Gannon is born on August 1, 1910, in Harold’s Cross, Dublin, into a craftsmen family of carpenters, many of whom worked in the famous Guinness Brewery. His education, in two local schools, is rudimentary and at the age of fifteen he starts working as an apprentice carpenter in the Guinness Brewery. His apprenticeship involves learning to make office furniture and attending evening classes in nearby colleges, where he is able to improve his education in a more congenial atmosphere. A love of music and the arts had been encouraged by two maiden aunts. His parents subsequently purchase an upright piano and he learns to play it at the Read Pianoforte School. When his apprenticeship is completed and he is on the dole for some years, he spends much of his spare time buying pictures, books, antiques and old clocks and watches in the various auction rooms and antique shops in Dublin.
While reading a series of articles about Tibet in a magazine, Gannon stumbles across an article, which, he believes, is by Violet Gordon-Woodhouse, a British harpsichordist and clavichord player of the period. The article is about the revival of the harpsichord, which interests him. He asks permission to examine the harpsichords on display in the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin, but is given no encouragement by the staff. He is finally allowed to see the instruments when he is in his early twenties. Dismayed, he concludes that they are too expensive to buy and too complicated to make.
In London with Margaret, who is visiting her parents, Gannon goes to the Benton Fletcher collection of keyboard instruments, which is then in Chelsea, and measures a harpsichord by Jacob and Abraham Kirckman. Back home, he makes a copy of the instrument in a tiny conservatory at the back of his house in the Dublin suburb of Rialto. The harpsichord is played by John S. Beckett for the first time in public in 1959 as the continuo for Johann Sebastian Bach‘s St. Matthew Passion and is praised in the national press. Beckett subsequently persuades the authorities in the Guinness Brewery to provide Gannon with a special workshop, in which he makes five harpsichords and restores several antique pianos. The first harpsichord made in the Brewery is donated to the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin. The second is sold to Harrods of London, and the third is sold to Ireland’s national radio and television station RTÉ. This third instrument is used regularly by the RTÉ Symphony and Concert orchestras and also by the well-known composer and performer of Irish traditional music, Seán Ó Riada.
Gannon continues to make many more harpsichords and restore more pianos during the years to come. In all, he completes twenty harpsichords during his lifetime – the final four are completed by a friend, Patrick Horsley, in England. One of the harpsichords made by Gannon-Horsley returns to Ireland and is presented to NUI Maynooth. A piano of note that he restores is a Broadwood square piano owned by the poet and composer, Thomas Moore, which belonged to Lord and Lady Elveden (later Iveagh).
Gannon is the subject of several RTÉ radio programmes, three RTÉ television programmes (including The Late Late Show) and a television programme, Gallery, made by BBC Northern Ireland. He befriends a great many people, including the artist, writer and conservationist Peter Pearson, and regular musical evenings are held at the family home in Bryan Guinness‘s grounds in the suburbs of Dublin. Because of his interest in antique clocks and watches, he becomes a member of the Irish branch of the Antiquarian Horological Society, founded by his friend William Stuart.
In 1978, Trinity College Dublin (TCD) gives Gannon an honorary MA degree for his contribution to the authentic performance of early music in Ireland. Two years later, he is invited to travel with the New Irish Chamber Orchestra to China, where he tunes and maintains one of his harpsichords and celebrates his seventieth birthday. In 1989, a second honorary MA is given to him, this time by NUI Maynooth.
Following Gannon’s 80th birthday, which is attended by fifty people, he finally settles down to retirement. A series of minor strokes follow, which eventually lead to dementia and ultimately to his death, aged 88, on May 23, 1999.
The Cathal Gannon Early Music Room is opened in the Royal Irish Academy of Music in May 2003. It contains a harpsichord and clavichord made by Gannon, a Broadwood grand piano restored by him, and a square piano.
Part of a transmitted RTÉ programme, Nationwide (January 17, 2007), features archive footage of Gannon and his instruments. Three RTÉ radio programmes, Bowman: Sunday Morning, broadcast in November 2006, feature a 1983 interview with Gannon.
In 1910, Elvery moves to South Africa to marry Hobart Kay, FRCS. By 1916 they have settled in Port Elizabeth.
Kay is a founder member of the Eastern Province Society of Arts and Crafts. In 1924 she is elected a member of the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists. She paints and makes etchings, and in 1926 her etching Romance is bought by Mary of Teck, Queen of the United Kingdom, at the Dominion Artists’ Exhibition in London. She travels widely in South Africa and sketches as she goes, and is also commissioned to make many portraits of mayors of Port Elizabeth, many of them lost when the City Hall burns down in 1977. During World War II she is commissioned by the government to record the war on the home front, and some of her work is held in the South African National Museum of Military History. From 1927 to 1945 she produces two to four illustrations each week for The Outspan.
Kay’s largest painting is the 1937 work Surgery, showing a patient undergoing abdominal surgery (a cholecystectomy). She portrays herself as the scrub nurse and her husband Hobart as the surgeon. In preparation for this painting she visits three hospitals and observes at least two operations, making 27 pages of preliminary sketches of people and equipment used in surgery. During World War II she paints further medical paintings: Operation in a Base Hospital and Blood to Save Lives.
Kay holds one-woman exhibitions from 1922 to 1955, and retrospective exhibitions of her work are held at the Iziko South African National Gallery in 1965 and 1982.
In her early days at Port Elizabeth, Kay is a keen sailor and is described as “for a time the fastest spinnaker-hand in South Africa.”
Kay has three daughters and one son. Her daughter Joan Wright (1911-91) teaches painting at the Port Elizabeth Technical College School of Art and Design, and her daughter Marjorie Reynolds writes and publishes a biography of her mother in 1989, and a further book about the Elvery family in 1991, and also donates her mother’s collection of works and archives to the Iziko South African National Gallery as “The Kay Bequest” in 1992.
Flynn publishes the novel Nothing To Say in 1983. It is subsequently translated into German, Italian, and Polish. He founds his arts company, Farcry Productions, in 2004, which produces visual art, performance and installation work around taboo issues such as child sexual abuse, violence, and addiction.
Flynn is first elected to Dublin City Council in the 2009 Irish local elections as an independent candidate representing the South-East Inner City electoral area. He is re-elected to the revised Pembroke-South Dock electoral area in the 2014 Irish local elections.
Flynn tables a motion to move the Temple Bar Cultural Trust, a State company set up in 1991 as a regeneration agency for Temple Bar, under the direct control of Dublin City Council. The trust is subsequently found to be in breach of corporate governance and accountability in a number of public reports. He also expresses critical views of the way public money is spent as part of a Grafton Street regeneration project in Dublin.
Flynn supports tougher regulation around the amplification of busking on public streets, which leads to his office being vandalised in February 2015. He is involved in a number of challenges to cycle lane provision, with a High Court challenge against the Strand Road cycle lane COVID-19 mobility trial and is a spokesperson for a group opposed to this cycle lane trial. Critics accuse him of consistently voting against policies that would provide more active travel infrastructure and in favour of policies which negatively impact pedestrians and cyclists. His legal challenges to cycling provision have the potential to revert a number of cycle lanes which have been created back to servicing predominantly cars.
In 2015, Flynn resigns from the Dublin City Council Arts SPC over what he perceives as a lack of cohesive overall policy, strategy, and vision.
In 2016, Flynn protests against the Artane Band, due to its association with the Artane Industrial School. The band responds saying it has had no association with the former industrial school. His peaceful protest, which includes him protesting on a window sill in his Dublin City Council office, is criticised by some as “attention seeking” and a “publicity stunt full stop.”
In 2019, Flynn is involved in a protest march against plans to open the state’s largest homeless shelter in his ward. Protesters march northbound on Aungier Street blocking traffic and shouting slogans against the Peter McVerry trust for providing the services in conjunction with Dublin City Council. In 2020, he takes further legal action against the council, who are working in conjunction with the Peter McVerry Trust, so that he can ensure the homeless facilities will not be built in the area.
Morrison grows up in a community steeped in traditional Irish culture especially music and at the age of seventeen he is employed by the Gaelic League to tutor the Connacht style of step dancing at the Gaelic League school in County Mayo.
In 1915, at the age of 21, Morrison immigrates to the United States and settles in New York City. In 1918, he wins the fiddle competition at the New York Feis. He becomes associated with other leading Irish musicians such as Michael Coleman and Paddy Killoran, who are also from County Sligo.
Morrison is one of the leading Irish music teachers in New York in the 1930s and 1940s. In addition to the fiddle, he can play the flute, tenor banjo and button accordion, and teaches hundreds of young Irish American students to play traditional music.
The Sligo style of fiddle music Morrison plays is typically highly ornamented and fast, with a fluid bowing style. Recordings of his playing are imported to Ireland in great numbers, and have an extraordinary impact. In many areas, local playing styles fall into disuse because of the popularity of the style and repertoire of Morrison and Michael Coleman. This repertoire includes predominantly reels, rather than jigs and hornpipes, and are often played by Irish musicians in the same order as on the original recordings. According to Séamus Mac Mathúna, “More than thirty years after Coleman’s death … one seldom hears ‘Bonny Kate’ without ‘Jenny’s Chickens.’ ‘Tarbolton’ is inevitably followed by ‘The Longford Collector’ and the ‘Sailor’s Bonnet.'” The great Canadian fiddler Jean Carignan was is influenced by Morrison. Morrison is well regarded by Frankie Gavin: “the approach he had to fiddle playing and the approach he had to any tune he touched just…can’t be beaten…nobody can play like that today.”
Morrison dies on November 11, 1947, and is interred, like many of his great musical contemporaries, in Saint Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx.
Elvery is the second among seven children of William Elvery , merchant, and Theresa Elvery (née Moss), singer and music teacher, whose parents are English Quakers. Her father’s ancestors were silk merchants from Spain, called Alvarez. Her early childhood is spent in Carrickmines, County Dublin. In 1896 the family moves to Foxrock and she attends the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. Her mother’s family is artistic – one aunt is the artist Phoebe Anna Traquair – and she and her sisters are talented artists and singers. Her younger sister, Dorothy Kay, becomes a noted portrait painter in South Africa. At the age of sixteen, she wins a three-week scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington, London. Back in Dublin, she models for William Orpen, then teaching in the school. They become friends, and she regrets never studying painting under him. She concentrates on sculpture under John Hughes and has great success, winning the Taylor scholarship three years in a row (1901–03). The first year she wins, the judges, seeking evidence that she had worked unaided, asks her to model a head from life in their presence.
Elvery’s first exhibit in the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) is a bronze statuette of a boy in 1902. Thereafter she is a lifelong exhibitor with the RHA, showing almost annually until her death. Friendship with the older Sarah Purser introduces her to Dublin’s artistic milieu and to the arts and crafts movement. In the movement’s 1904 exhibition she shows ten items, including terracotta statuettes, a holy water stoup, and a plaster cast of a lectern, which is cast in bronze in Paris that year and placed in her former parish church in Carrickmines. The movement’s historian, Paul Larmour, calls this lectern “a remarkable piece of organic Art Nouveau . . . There is nothing else like it in Ireland.”
In 1904, after a brief period studying in Paris with her sister and fellow students Estella Solomons and Frances “Cissie” Beckett, Elvery takes lessons in stained glass from Alfred E. Child, and is then persuaded by Purser to join her Tower of Glass (An Túr Gloine) studio. She remains six years, executing windows for St. Stephen’s Church, Mount Street, Dublin; St. Nicholas Church, Carrickfergus; and a war memorial at the Church of Ireland church, Carrickmines. Although her work is generally well received, she does not rate her skill in the medium highly – “I never got the right feeling for glass or the detached, austere quality necessary for ecclesiastical art” – and her window for a Gortconvent leads to a critical review of Purser’s studio by W. B. Yeats. She does not, however, confine herself to glass but also designs for silversmiths and illustrated books for children. For Iosagán agus Sgealta Eile (1907), by Patrick Pearse, she provides a black-and-white frontispiece and four colour illustrations. For the Cuala Press, run by Lily and Elizabeth Yeats, she designs calendars, Christmas cards, and fifteen hand-coloured prints, which continue to be issued until after World War II.
Elvery’s social life in Dublin is busy. An active member of the United Arts Club, she is called by Lady Gregory “the beautiful Miss Elvery,” and Orpen’s portrait, showing her long-necked, graceful, and vivacious, bears out this description. Tiring of glass, and wishing to become a painter, she leaves in 1910 for the Slade School of Fine Art in London. There Henry Tonks is less complimentary than her Dublin teachers. He finds her work facile: “The speed, the slickness, the skill. It is horrible!” Orpen also comes to this view: “her only fault was that the transmission of her thoughts from her brain to paper or canvas, clay or stained glass, became so easy to her that all was said in a few hours. Nothing on earth could make her go on and try to improve on her first translation of her thought.”
Back in Dublin, Elvery takes a studio in Kildare Street and teaches for a time in the Metropolitan School of Art, before her parents arrange a marriage with Charles Henry Gordon Campbell, eldest son of the future Lord Chancellor of Ireland, James Campbell. They marry on August 1, 1912, and move to London where he is called to the English bar. It is not initially a love match but they are well-suited – he likes artistic, Bohemian circles and they become friends with D. H. and Frieda Lawrence, the painter Mark Gertler, the publisher John Middleton Murry, and his wife, the writer Katherine Mansfield, who describes Campbell as “a queer mixture for she is loving and affectionate, and yet she is malicious.”
Campbell’s husband becomes secretary of the Department of Industry and Commerce in the Irish Free State and in 1922 the family moves to Clonard, Terenure, Dublin. His government position means that within six months the house is burned down by anti-Treatyites, who are, however, almost comically accommodating – local men, they express distress at the job and allow her to save the children’s Christmas presents. In 1931 she becomes Lady Glenavy after her husband succeeds to his father’s title, an important member of Dublin’s social and artistic scene. She helps establish the Dublin Drama League and assists Shelah Richards in the production of two plays in 1936. Her friendships are wide and varied and her conversation imaginative and engaged. Dressed in beige – what her son calls “variations on a theme of porridge” – she entertains constantly. Her house has what she terms a “caravanserai” character and is constantly full of people.
Appointed an associate of the RHA in 1932, Campbell becomes a full member in 1934 and takes her turn at teaching. She also joins the more radical Society of Dublin Painters and holds in February 1935 a one-person show at their premises, 7 Stephen’s Green, but she never shows with the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, though her work is more avant-garde than that of most academicians. At its best in still lifes and figure compositions, her work has “a sense of drama and an enigmatic or near-surrealist appearance.” Brian Kennedy notes that she is the first Irish painter to go surrealist (though she never thinks of herself in this way) and although she is serious about her work – taking lessons at an advanced age from Patrick Hennessy – she is also diffident. Her memoir does not trace her development as an artist and mentions only one work with approbation – The Intruder (exhibited at the RHA in 1932). Now in the National Gallery of Ireland, it depicts in bold, rich colours a female centaur beckoning a young man from a group of picnickers. It immediately attracts attention. Richard Orpen wants the academy to buy it, but they think it obscene.
About 1941 the Campbells move to a large Georgian house in Rathfarnham, and twenty years later they transfer to a smaller house in Sandycove. After her husband’s death in 1962, she publishes her memoirs, And Today We Will Only Gossip (1964). The title is well chosen as the book is not self-revelatory but full of characters she encountered. Monk Gibbon calls her a “unique mixture: of talent and diffidence; of gregariousness and contempt for the herd; of gentle consideration and a savage determination to wound. Only those who knew her well knew her at all; and even to them she remained something of a mystery” (The Irish Times, December 2, 1980).
Campbell dies in Dublin on May 21, 1970, and is survived by her two sons, the writer and humorist Patrick Campbell and the novelist Michael Campbell, and predeceased by her daughter, Bridget, an Irish international lacrosse player and talented scientist, who is killed by a bomb during the London blitz.
(From: “Campbell, Beatrice Moss” by Bridget Hourican and Pauric J. Dempsey, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: “Bridgit – a picture of Miss Elvery (Beatrice Elvery),” oil on canvas by William Orpen, 1909)
O’Riordan is the youngest child among two sons and three daughters of Daniel O’Connell O’Riordan, a barrister and justice of the peace (JP), and Katharine O’Riordan (née O’Neil), who is her husband’s first cousin. At age of four he witnesses his mother’s death in a carriage accident. His formal education, firstly as a day student at Belvedere College, Dublin (1881–85), and secondly as a boarder at Clongowes Wood College, County Kildare (1887–88), is interrupted by ill health and periods of self-education at home, marked by omnivorous reading in his father’s library.
While engaged in military studies in Bonn, Germany (March–September 1890), preparatory to entering Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in Great Britain, he falls from a horse during riding lessons, suffering a back injury that results in permanent spinal damage, thus precluding a military career.
Left with limited means after his father’s death, O’Riordan moves to London in 1891, where, after attempting suicide, he finds work as a stage actor with the Independent Theatre Society of J. T. Grein and other companies, both in London and touring the provinces, and is noted for his interpretations of Henrik Ibsen. Active in the Irish Literary Society, where he meets W. B. Yeats, he writes fiction under the pseudonym “F. Norreys Connell,” which he also adopts for his stage work.
O’Riordan’s early publications include In the Green Park (1894), a collection of connected short stories, The House of the Strange Woman (1895), a provocative novel of sexual promiscuity in upper-class London bohemia, boycotted by some booksellers as being “morally tainted,” and several books reflecting his deep interest in all things military, most notably The pity of war (1906), a collection of Kiplingesque short stories. Largely abandoning fiction for some years to concentrate on writing for the stage, he returns to Dublin for the first time in fourteen years to direct his controversial one-act play The Piper, which opens at the Abbey Theatre on February 13, 1908. It is jeered as a slander on Irish patriots in disturbances mildly reminiscent of the “Playboy” riots thirteen months previously. The audience on the third night is placated by Yeats, who in a speech from the stage interprets the play – in which a party of rebels in the 1798 rising disdain to set sentries as they argue interminably and discursively, only to be surprised and slaughtered by yeomanry – as a satirical allegory on the fruitless debate that followed the Parnellite split. The work can more usefully be read as a meditation on the propensity of democracy to disintegrate at moments of crisis into ineffectual and dillusory demagoguery. The Piper weathers the controversy to become a frequently performed staple of the Abbey Theatre repertoire during the 1910s.
After the death of John Millington Synge, O’Riordan serves briefly as managing director of the Abbey Theatre from March 25 to July 2, 1909, during which time he produces and directs two of his own one-act plays – Time on April 1, in which he also acts, and An Imaginary Conversation on May 13 – as well as the first revival of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World on May 27. Wearied by the repeated interferences in the theatre’s affairs by its financial backer, Annie Horniman, he resigns abruptly during her fit of pique when the actress Sara Allgood recites poetry at a private gathering of suffragettes.
O’Riordan scores a major triumph on the London stage with Captain Hannibal (1909), his adaptation of a novel by Stanley Weyman, on the proceeds of which he lives for many years. Settling permanently in London, in 1910 he purchases a house at 106 Meadvale Road, Ealing, his home for the rest of his life. Rejected by the British Army at the outset of World War I owing to his disability, after several failed attempts to secure war work he eventually goes to the front in 1918 in charge of YMCA rest huts at Étaples railway junction, where he befriends the doomed soldier poet Wilfred Owen.
O’Riordan achieves his most accomplished writing within a cycle of twelve novels, published under his own name, chronicling the experiences of several inter-connected Irish and English families from the Napoleonic Wars to the 1920s. First of the series to appear was Adam of Dublin (1920), a combined Bildungsroman and roman-à-clef of the literary revival, with vignettes of Dublin slum life, Belvedere College, and the early years of the Abbey Theatre. He follows his protagonist, Adam Quinn, through the sexual turmoil of adolescence, an itinerant acting career, and an unhappy marriage in three sequels: Adam and Caroline (1921), In London (1922), and Married life (1924). These four novels chronologically conclude the narrative of the completed cycle. The narrative commences with the “Soldier” tetralogy – Soldier Born (1927), Soldier of Waterloo (1928), Soldier’s Wife (1935), and Soldier’s End (1938) – a picaresque treatment of the multifarious and farflung experiences of David Quinn, a forebear of Adam, from an Irish childhood and English education, to the Battle of Waterloo, where he suffers horrible facial mutilation, through the Irish famine and the American Civil War, to his death at the hands of Versaillais troops during the suppression of the Paris commune. Judith Quinn (1939) and Judith’s Love (1940), about the disappointments in love and marriage of a late-Victorian Dublin woman, link the narratives of the “Adam” and “Soldier” tetralogies, while The Age of Miracles(1925) and Young Lady Dazincourt (1926) are chronologically contemporaneous with the latter “Adam” novels. Inconsistent in intention, and uneven in execution, the cycle is strongest in its evocative descriptions of Dublin, London, and other cities, with their varied social strata, in different historical periods, in the sharp-edged, witty dialogue, and in the juxtaposition of dazzling comedy and an ironic sense of tragedy.
O’Riordan continues to write successful, if lightweight, stage plays. His 1928 production of Napoleon’s Josephine features a stellar cast including Edith Evans. Among his published plays are Shakespeare’s End, and Other Irish Plays (1912), Rope Enough (1914), His Majesty’s Pleasure (1925), The King’s Wooing (1929), and Captain Falstaff and Other Plays (1935). The historical commentary Napoleon Passes (1933) reflects his abiding interest in the French emperor. President of the Irish Literary Society from 1937 to 1939, he resigns after failing to persuade his colleagues to repudiate Ireland’s wartime neutrality. Despite age, disability, and increasing reclusivity, throughout World War II he serves as an air raid warden from 1940 to 1945. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1945–48), he represents the society on the council of the newly formed National Book League, and is the society’s Tredegar lecturer in 1946. Charming and convivial, a witty and erudite conversationalist, he cultivates numerous literary friendships, and is an inveterate womaniser, enjoying countless intimate relationships, both sexual and platonic.
O’Riordan marries firstly Florence Derby in 1903, a nurse eight years his senior, with whom he has one son. They are estranged by the time of her death in 1923. In 1924, he marries secondly Olga Buckley, his lover since 1920, and secretary to the wife of G. K. Chesterton. They have two sons (both born before the marriage) and one daughter. Despite considerable contemporary celebrity and critical acclaim, his work compared to that of Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac, he has been ignored by posterity. The best of his writing, especially the “Adam” and “Soldier” novels, merit rediscovery.
O’Riordan dies at his London home on June 18, 1948, the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. A special O’Riordan number of the Journal of Irish Literature (September 1985), edited by his daughter Judith, includes a portrait photograph, the text of The Piper, and a detailed chronology.
(From: “O’Riordan, Conal Holmes O’Connell (‘Norreys Connell’)” by Lawrence William White and Aideen Foley, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
seamus dubhghaill 