seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Category Archives: Arts & Music


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Birth of Anew McMaster, Anglo-Irish Stage Actor

Anew McMaster, Anglo-Irish stage actor, is born in Birkenhead, England, on December 24, 1891. During his nearly 45 year acting career he tours Ireland, Britain, Australia and the United States. For almost 35 years he tours as actor-manager of his own theatrical company performing the works of Shakespeare and other playwrights.

McMaster is born as Andrew McMaster, the son of Liverpool-born Andrew McMaster (1855–1940), a master stevedore, and Alice Maude née Thompson (1865–1895). A number of sources make the erroneous claims, based on details supplied by McMaster himself, that he is born in 1893 or 1894 or even 1895 in County Monaghan in Ireland but, according to the Birth Register and the 1901 United Kingdom Census, he is actually born in 1891 in Birkenhead, England. Like his future brother-in-law Micheál Mac Liammóir, who is born in London as Alfred Willmore but claims to have been born in Cork to Gaelic-speaking parents, McMaster reinvents himself as Irish and claims for himself the town of Monaghan as his birthplace, and Warrenpoint, County Down, as the scene of his earliest memories.

At the age of nineteen McMaster gives up a career in banking to pursue one on the stage. He moves to Ireland and tours the country with the O’Brien-Ireland theatrical company from 1910 to 1914. Success quickly follows with his appearance as Jack O’Hara in Paddy the Next Best Thing at the Savoy Theatre (1920). From 1921 he tours Australia in this and other plays, and in 1925 forms his own company, the McMaster Intimate Theatre Company, a ‘fit-up‘ company to tour in the works of Shakespeare, mainly in Ireland but also in Britain and Australia, touring with his theatrical company until 1959. One of the last actor-managers “of the old school – and an epitome of the type,” on occasions he persuades a ‘big name’ to act with his company as a draw for audiences. Frank Benson (1928), Sara Allgood (1929) and Mrs. Patrick Campbell appear with him.

In 1933 at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon McMaster appears as Hamlet opposite Esme Church as Gertrude, Coriolanus, Macduff in Macbeth, Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing, Prince Escalus in Romeo and Juliet, and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. His greatest roles are as Othello and as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, to which he adds King Lear in 1952. Just before World War II he and his company appear at the Chiswick Empire in a Shakespeare season. He tours the United States as James Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill‘s Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1956. Having ‘a great organ voice,’ Harold Pinter, who acts in his company in Ireland from 1951 to 1953 and calls him ‘perhaps the greatest actor-manager of his time,’ later describes McMaster as ‘evasive, proud, affectionate, shrewd, merry.’ In his brief biography Mac (1968), Pinter recalls, “Mac gave about a half dozen magnificent performances of Othello while I was with him… At his best he was the finest Othello I have seen. [He] stood dead in the centre of the role, and the great sweeping symphonic playing would begin, the rare tension and release within him, the arrest, the swoop, the savagery, the majesty and repose.”

McMaster’s only film role is an uncredited appearance as the Judge in Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960).

In 1924 McMaster marries the actress and designer Marjorie Willmore (1894–1970), the sister of Micheál Mac Liammóir. They have two children, the actors John Christopher McMaster (1925–1995) and Mary-Rose McMaster (1926–2018).

Anew McMaster dies at the age of 70 at his home in Dublin on August 24, 1962. He is buried with his wife in Deans Grange Cemetery in County Dublin.

McMaster trains a generation of actors who tour with his company and go on to achieve success as actors. These include Pauline Flanagan, Milo O’Shea, T. P. McKenna, Kenneth Haigh, Henry Woolf, Harold Pinter, Donal Donnelly and Patrick Magee. It is while they are touring with McMaster’s company that the actor and dramatist Micheál Mac Liammóir and the actor and producer Hilton Edwards first meet and begin their lifelong partnership.

McMaster’s biography, A Life Remembered: A Memoir of Anew McMaster by his daughter Mary-Rose McMaster, is published in 2017. Harold Pinter also publishes a short biography, Mac, in 1968.


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Opening of the Volta Electric Theatre in Dublin

Under the managership of the writer James Joyce, Ireland’s first cinematographic theatre, the Volta Electric Theatre (later renamed the Lyceum Picture Theatre), opens at 45 Mary Street in Dublin on December 20, 1909. The site has since been demolished and is occupied today by a department store.

In the early 1900s, demand for moving pictures is fierce and cinemas are springing up all over the world. After visiting Trieste, Joyce is determined to bring a cinema to Ireland. After receiving the backing of his Italian friends, he sets up the Cinematograph Volta on Mary Street. It opens its doors on December 20, 1909. The opening night features an eclectic program, with the comedy Deviled Crab, the mystery Bewitched Castle, La Pourponièrre, The First Paris Orphanage, and The Tragedy of Beatrice Cency. A popular actor is Charlie Chaplin.

Joyce soon becomes disillusioned with the venture, as the cinema mainly shows films from Europe and Italy, which are largely shunned by Dubliners at the time. After seven months, Joyce withdraws his involvement and the cinema is sold to the British Provincial Cinema Company. The cinema remains open until 1919.

In 1921, it is reopened as the Lyceum Picture Theatre following alterations which increase seating from 420 to 600. In the 1940s, Capitol and Allied Theatres Ltd. acquires the cinema. However, it closes its doors for the last time in 1948. Although it survives almost 40 years, the cinema is rarely successful.

Penneys, a fast fashion retailer and subsidiary of the British food processing and retail company Associated British Foods, purchases the building along with adjacent shops and builds a department store on the demolished site. For many years the site of Ireland’s first cinema is unknown to many as there is no plaque to commemorate it. However, on June 12, 2007, a plaque is unveiled on the original site marking the significance of 45 Mary Street.

A connection between the name and cinema in Ireland still remains. Volta is a streaming service for mainly Irish content.


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Birth of Nancy Wynne-Jones, Welsh & Irish Landscape Artist

Nancy Wynne-Jones HRHA, Welsh and Irish artist, is born Mary Esperance Wynne-Jones on December 10, 1922, in Penmaenucha, Dolgellau, Wales.

Wynne-Jones is born to landowner Charles Llewellyn Wynne-Jones and Sybil Mary Gella Scott. The family spends half the year in Wales and half the year in Thornhill, Stalbridge, Dorset, England. She has two brothers, Andrew and Ronald (“Polly”), both of whom die in Africa during World War II.

Wynne-Jones is educated at home. Her skill in art leads to her getting lessons in Sherborne from a children’s book illustrator. Her music is encouraged by the family doctor, and she begins to compose and study the violin, receiving lessons in Bournemouth with the first violinist of the symphony orchestra and continues in Aberystwyth after the start of World War II. She goes on to study the violin and composition at the Royal Academy of Music, London (1940–43). While in London she also serves as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse until 1943 and later as a draughtswoman at the Ordnance Survey.

After the war Wynne-Jones purchases and manages a bookshop on the King’s Road in Chelsea, but it is not a financial success. She returns to painting, studying at the Heatherley School of Fine Art, London (1951-52) and the Chelsea School of Art (1952–55). She travels extensively through Portugal and Italy painting landscapes. An interest in completing landscapes in an abstract manner leads her to study with Peter Lanyon in St. Ives, Cornwall.

Wynne-Jones begins study in Cornwall in 1957 and remains there for fifteen years. Her first public exhibition is in a group show (1957) at the Pasmore Edwards Gallery, Newlyn. Other group shows are Jefferson Place Gallery, Washington, D.C., (1959), and in Falmouth, Cornwall (1960). Her solo exhibitions are at the New Vision Centre, London (1962 and 1965), Florence (1963) and Dolgellau (1964). From the 1960s through the 1990s she exhibits in Great Britain, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Holland, South Africa, and the United States.

In 1962 Wynne-Jones purchases Trevaylor House near Penzance and provides accommodation for other artists including renowned Irish painter Tony O’Malley, sculptor Conor Fallon, and English poet and writer W. S. ‘Sydney’ Graham. In the 1970s she exhibits in Ireland at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin (1970) and at the Emmet Gallery, Dublin (1975 and 1977). During the 1980s she exhibits at the Lincoln and Hendricks galleries in Dublin before joining the Taylor Galleries, run by John and Patrick Taylor. She is elected honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 1994 and becomes a member of Aosdána in 1996. Originally an abstract artist, her contact with the Irish countryside slowly transforms her work to that of a landscape artist, albeit with an influence of abstraction attached to it. She becomes well known in Irish art circles as an eminent Irish landscape artist.

Wynne-Jones is involved with artist Derek Middleton before moving to Cornwall. There she becomes romantically involved with Graham who is in an open marriage, however it is the death of her mentor Peter Lanyon that devastates her. She meets the sculptor Conor Fallon through their mutual friend Tony O’Malley. Fallon had arrived in Cornwall ostensibly to meet Lanyon. They marry in 1966. Their honeymoon in Provence is immortalised in expressionist paintings done by Wynne-Jones. The couple adopts a boy and a girl, siblings, John and Bridget. In 1972 she moves with her family to Kinsale, County Cork. It is in this area that a number of her paintings are created. She moves to Ballard House, near Rathdrum, County Wicklow in 1987. There she paints the mountain visible from her home.

Wynne-Jones dies at the age of 83 on November 9, 2006. She is buried in Ballinatone (Church of Ireland), Rathdrum.

(Pictured: “Klein Constantia with Table Mountain” by Nancy Wynne-Jones, acrylic on paper, 16 1/2″ x 23″)


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Birth of William Grattan Tyrone Power, Stage Actor, Comedian & Author

William Grattan Tyrone Power, Irish stage actor, comedian, author and theatrical manager known professionally as Tyrone Power, is born in Kilmacthomas, County Waterford, on November 20, 1797. He is an ancestor of actor Tyrone Power and is also referred to as Tyrone Power I.

Power is the son of Tyrone Power, reported to be “a minstrel of sorts,” by his marriage to Maria Maxwell, whose father had been killed while serving in the British Army during the American Revolutionary War. His father is related to the Powers who are of the Anglo-Irish landed gentry and to George de la Poer Beresford, 1st Marquess of Waterford.

The young Power takes to the stage, achieving prominence throughout the world as an actor and manager. He is well known for acting in such Irish-themed plays as Catherine Gore‘s King O’Neil (1835), his own St. Patrick’s Eve (1837), Samuel Lover‘s Rory O’More (1837) and The White Horse of the Peppers (1838), Anna Maria Hall‘s The Groves of Blarney (1838), Eugene Macarthy’s Charles O’Malley (1838), and William Bayle Bernard‘s His Last Legs (1839) and The Irish Attorney (1840). In his discussion of these works, Richard Allen Cave argues that Power, both in his acting as well as his choice of plays, seeks to rehabilitate the Irishman from the derogatory associations with “stage Irishmen.”

Power has a number of notable descendants by his wife Anne, daughter of John Gilbert of the Isle of Wight:

  • Sir William James Tyrone Power (1819–1911), Commissary General in Chief of the British Army and briefly Agent-General for New Zealand
  • Norah Power, who married Dr. Thomas Guthrie
  • Sir Tyrone Guthrie, British theatrical director (1900–1971)
  • Maurice Henry Anthony O’Reilly Power (1821–1849), trained as a barrister but later took up acting
  • Frederick Augustus Dobbyn Nugent Power (1823–1896), civil engineer, left a large estate of £197,000, equivalent to £15.6 million or 28 million US dollars in 2006
  • Clara Elizabeth Murray Power (born 1825)
  • Mary Jane Power (born 1827)
  • Harold Littledale Power (1833–1901), actor, wine merchant, mine agent & engineer
  • Tyrone Power, Sr. (1869–1931), English theatre and silent movie star
  • Tyrone Power (1914–1958), American Hollywood star of the 1930s to 1950s
  • Romina Power (born 1951), American singer and film actress
  • Taryn Power (1953–2020), film actress
  • Tyrone Power, Jr. (born 1959), American film actor

Power is said to have purchased the land that is later occupied by Madison Square Garden, New York, shortly before his death. The lawyer who holds the papers cannot be found so the Power family is unable to claim right to the property.

Power is lost at sea on March 17, 1841, when the SS President disappears without trace in the North Atlantic shortly after departing for England. Anne Power is buried in the churchyard of St. Mary The Virgin Church in High Halden, Kent, England.


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Birth of William James “Willie” Pearse

William James “Willie” Pearse, Irish republican executed for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising, is born in Dublin on November 15, 1881. He is a younger brother of Patrick Pearse, a leader of the rising.

Throughout Pearse’s life he lives in the shadow of his brother to whom he is devoted and with whom he forms a particularly close relationship.

Pearse inherits his father’s artistic abilities and becomes a sculptor. He is educated at the Christian Brothers School, Westland Row. He studies at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art under Oliver Sheppard. He also studies art in Paris. While attending the Royal College of Art in London he gains notice for several of his artworks. Some of his sculptures are to be found in St. John’s Cathedral in Limerick, the Cathedral of St. Eunan and St. Columba in Letterkenny and several Dublin churches. He is trained to take over his father’s stonemason business but gives it up to help Patrick run St. Enda’s School which he founds in 1908. He is involved in the arts and theatre at St. Enda’s and aids the overall running of the school.

Pearse follows his brother into the Irish Volunteers and the republican movement. He takes part in the Easter Rising in 1916, always staying at his brother’s side at the General Post Office. Following the surrender, he is court-martialed and sentenced to death. It has been said that as he is only a minor player in the struggle it is his surname that condemns him. However, at his court martial he emphasizes his involvement.

On May 3, 1916, Pearse is granted permission to visit his brother in Kilmainham Gaol, to see him for the final time. However, while he is en route, Patrick is executed. He is executed on May 4. He and his brother are the only two brothers to be executed after the Easter Rising.

There are many more public commemorations of Patrick Pearse than of William. In 1966, Dublin’s Westland Row railway station is renamed Dublin Pearse railway station to honour both brothers. Pearse Square and Pearse Street in Dublin are renamed in honour of both, Pearse Street (then Great Brunswick Street) having been their birthplace. Many streets and roads in Ireland bear the name Pearse. Few name William, but there is a Pearse Brothers Park in Rathfarnham. The bridge over the River Dodder on the Rathfarnham Road, between Terenure and Rathfarnham is named after them and carries a plaque depicting the brothers in profile.

Brothers Pearse Athletic Club, founded in Rathfarnham, is named after the two brothers. A number of Gaelic Athletic Association clubs and playing fields are named after both Pearses, and at least one after William.


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Death of Tom Clancy of the Irish Folk Group The Clancy Brothers

Thomas Joseph Clancy, a member of the Irish folk group the Clancy Brothers, dies in Cork, County Cork, on November 7, 1990. He has the most powerful voice of the brothers and has previously been an actor in numerous stage productions, appearing with Orson Welles in King Lear. He also performs often on television and occasionally in the movies.

Clancy is born on October 29, 1924, one of eleven children born to Johanna McGrath and Bob Clancy in Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary. After being apprenticed as a baker, he follows his older brother Patrick “Paddy” Clancy into the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1943 during World War II, despite both having been members of the Irish Republican Army. In the RAF, he works as a radio operator on bombing runs over Germany.

Discharged from the RAF at the end of the war, Clancy tours with a British repertory company. In 1947 he and his brother Paddy emigrate to Canada. They then move to New York where he meets his first wife and his oldest daughter is born in 1950. They then soon move to Cleveland, Ohio, to live with relatives. He works for a while as a repertory actor at the Cleveland Play House, before returning temporarily to Ireland. While in Ireland, Clancy works for the Shakespeareana Internationale company run by English actor and manager Geoffrey Kendal. After Paddy sends him extra money, he returns to the United States. The brothers plan to move to California, but their car breaks down. They decide to try New York City instead and find work as actors, both on and off Broadway.

In 1956 their brother Liam Clancy joins them, accompanied by his friend Tommy Makem. Liam and Tommy begin singing together, and in 1959 are joined by the older Clancy brothers as The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. The group performs together until Liam leaves in 1976. Makem had left in 1969 to be replaced for a brief time by Bobby Clancy and later Louis Killen.

Clancy continues singing with The Clancy Brothers until 1976, when the group is disbanded. The group reforms in 1977 with a new line-up. Clancy performs with his brothers Paddy and Bobby and their nephew Robbie O’Connell until his death. He also performs with Paddy, Liam, and Tommy Makem during their reunion tour from 1984 to 1985.

Clancy takes the lead vocals on many of the group’s songs, such as “The Rising of the Moon,” “The Moonshiner,” “Haul Away Joe,” “Red Haired Mary,” “The Barnyards of Delgaty,” “Carrickfergus,” “I Once Loved a Lass,” “The Bold Fenian Men,” among others.

Clancy continues to act during his singing career, appearing in the movies The Killer Elite (1975) and Swashbuckler (1976). He also appears on episodes of Little House on the Prairie, Starsky and Hutch, and The Incredible Hulk, among others. He acts in several TV movies as well.

After an absence of fifteen years, Clancy returns to Broadway in May 1974 in Eugene O’Neill‘s A Moon for the Misbegotten. The Irish Times reviews his performance of Phil Hogan: “In ‘Moon’ he deftly measures up to the formidable company in which he finds himself – a wily, sly rogue with a whimsical humour and a genuine concern for his daughter.” The play is a hit and wins three Tony Awards.

Clancy dies from stomach cancer at the age of 66 on November 7, 1990 at Mercy University Hospital in Cork, County Cork. He is survived by his wife Joan and their three daughters, Rayleen, Blawneen and Rosie. Prior to his marriage to Joan, he has children, Eileen and Thomas, with Yvonne Marcus, in Cleveland, Ohio. He also has a daughter, Cait, with his second wife Laine, in the mid-1950s.

Clancy’s last recording is made in 1988 with Robbie O’Connell, Bobby Clancy, and Paddy Clancy at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, New Hampshire. Unfortunately, the recording is marred by unevenly mixed instruments and voices. After his death, Liam returns to the Clancy Brothers to fill in his place.


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Birth of Sir William Basil Goulding, Art Collector, Businessman & Cricketer

Sir William Basil Goulding, Irish cricketer, squash player, art collector and prominent businessman, is born in Dublin on November 4, 1909. He is an important art collector of contemporary art in Ireland and is renowned for his extensive collection which is dispersed posthumously. He is an adept businessman and sits on the boards of many companies.

Goulding is educated at Winchester College and Christ Church, Oxford. He inherits the family business W & HM Goulding Ltd. and succeeds his father as Chairperson in 1935. Goulding Ltd. is a well-established fertiliser manufacturer based in Dublin and Cork. The factory closes and is demolished in the mid-20th century and very little of it remains today. The land is donated to the people of Cork by Goulding in the late 1960s and is subsequently developed as an amenity park.

In 1939 Goulding marries Valerie Hamilton Monckton, daughter of Sir Walter Monckton, a lawyer, the UK Attorney General during the Edward VIII abdication crisis, and later a Member of Parliament (MP) for Bristol West. She is an Irish campaigner for disabled people, founder of the Central Remedial Clinic and senator. Together, they have three sons, Hamilton, Timothy and Lingard. The family lives in Enniskerry, County Wicklow, where he has the significant ‘Goulding Summer House’ built by Scott Tallon Walker architects.

During World War II, Goulding is commissioned as a pilot officer in the Royal Air Force. By the end of 1942 he has reached the rank of wing commander.

The Arts Act of 1951 establishes the Arts Council in response to the Bodkin Report which outlines the sad condition of the arts in Ireland. Goulding is a co-opted member of the Council from its formative years and is instrumental in acting on many of its policies.

Goulding is the founding Chairperson of the Contemporary Irish Art Society in 1962, along with Gordon Lambert, Cecil King, Stanley Mosse, James White and Michael Scott. The enthusiasm and vision of these founding members of the society is the catalyst which leads to the development of many important art collections in Ireland. The purpose of the society is to encourage a greater level of patronage of living Irish artists which, at the time, is extremely low. This is mainly achieved by raising funds to purchase artworks by living artists, which are then donated to public collections. The first purchase in 1962 is an important painting by Patrick Scott, donated to the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art (now the Hugh Lane Gallery). Over the following 12 years the society purchases 37 works for the gallery, until in 1974, Dublin Corporation starts to provide an annual purchasing fund for the gallery.

Following completion of the report ‘Design in Ireland,’ the Kilkenny Design Workshops (KDW) is set up in 1963. It endeavours to nurture native Irish crafts particularly textiles, metalwork, ceramics, glass and furniture to have a modern yet distinctly Irish sensibility. The KDW is the first State sponsored design agency in the world and is held as a model of governmental intervention in design. Goulding sits on the board of the KDW from its origination and occupies the role of Chairperson from 1977 until 1981.

A right-handed batsman and wicket-keeper, Goulding plays twice for the Ireland cricket team against the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) in 1934, the year in which his father is president of the Irish Cricket Union. He makes his debut in July in a two-day match, scoring seven runs in the Ireland second innings and taking one catch in the MCC first innings. The following month, he plays his only first-class match, not scoring in either inning. In addition to playing cricket, he also represents Ireland at squash, and captains Oxford University at football.

(Photo: Basil Goulding from Tim Goulding’s website, http://www.timgoulding.com)


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Birth of English Playwright John Arden

John Arden, English playwright, is born in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, England, on October 26, 1930. At the time of his death he is lauded as “one of the most significant British playwrights of the late 1950s and early 60s.”

Arden is the son of the manager of a glass factory. He is educated at Sedbergh School in Cumbria, King’s College, Cambridge and the Edinburgh College of Art, where he studies architecture. He first gains critical attention for the radio play The Life of Man in 1956 shortly after finishing his studies.

Arden is initially associated with the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre in London. His 1959 play, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, in which four army deserters arrive in a northern mining town to exact retribution for an act of colonial violence, is considered to be his best. His work is influenced by Bertolt Brecht and epic theatre as in Left-Handed Liberty (1965, on the anniversary of Magna Carta). Other plays include Live Like Pigs, The Workhouse Donkey, and Armstrong’s Last Goodnight, the last of which is performed at the 1963 Chichester Festival by the Royal National Theatre after it was rejected by the Royal Court.

Arden’s 1978 radio play Pearl is considered in a Guardian survey to be one of the best plays in that medium. He also writes several novels, including Silence Among the Weapons, which is shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1982, and Books of Bale, about the Protestant apologist John Bale. He is a member of the Royal Society of Literature.

With his wife and co-writer Margaretta D’Arcy, Arden pickets the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) premiere of his Arthurian play The Island of the Mighty, because they believe the production to be pro-imperialist. They write several plays together which are highly critical of British presence in Ireland, where he and D’Arcy live from 1971 onward.

In 1961, Arden is a founder member of the anti-nuclear Committee of 100, and he also chairs the pacifist weekly Peace News. In Ireland, he is for a while a member of Official Sinn Féin. He is an advocate of civil liberties, and opposes anti-terror legislation, as demonstrated in his 2007 radio play The Scam.

Arden is elected to Aosdána in 2011 before dying in Galway, County Galway on March 28, 2012. He is waked in a wicker casket.

(Pictured: Photograph of John Arden in 1966, credit to Sam Falk/The New York Times)


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Death of Sculptor Alexandra Wejchert

Alexandra Wejchert, Polish-Irish sculptor known for her use of perspex (plexiglass), stainless steel, bronze and neon colours, dies in Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin, on October 24, 1995.

Wejchert was born in Kraków, Poland on October 16, 1921. Her father is Tedeusz Wejchert, who ran a shipping business out of Gdańsk. She enters University of Warsaw to study architecture in 1939, and while there witnesses the German invasion of Poland during World War II. Having graduated in 1949, she works as a town planner and architect in Warsaw, where she graduates from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1956 with a degree before moving to Italy.

Wejchert holds her first solo show in 1959 in the Galeria dell’ Obelisco, Rome. She then returns to Warsaw where she is featured in the National Museum “Fifteen years of Polish art” exhibition in 1961. At this time she is still working as an architect, but does not support the social realism of Soviet architecture, which leads her to decide to concentrate solely on art from 1963. She leaves communist Poland in 1964, when she accompanies her younger brother, the architect Andrej Wejchert, when he and his wife Danuta moved to Dublin.

She holds her first solo show in Dublin in November 1966 with an exhibition of 30 paintings at The Molesworth Gallery. In 1967 she shows Blue relief at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, which is a wall relief of “sculpted paintings” which are precursors to her later free-standing sculpture. She wins the Carroll Open award of £300 at the 1968 Irish Exhibition of Living Art for Frequency No. 5. Also in 1968 she holds a solo exhibition in the Galerie Lamert, Paris, becoming a regular exhibitor there. During this period her work is used as a setting for an electronic music concert with the critic Dorothy Walker noting her designs have a rhythmic quality.

From the 1970s, Wejchert wins commissions for public art, starting with the 1971 wood and acrylic wall relief in the arts building at University College Dublin. In the same year, the Bank of Ireland purchases Blue form 1971 and then Flowing relief in 1972. Her 1971 triptych, Life, is commissioned for the Irish Life headquarters in Abbey Street. The Lombard and Ulster Bank in Dublin commissions untitled in 1980, and Allied Irish Banks (AIB) purchases Freedom in 1985 for their branch in Ballsbridge. Her entry wins a competition in 1975 for a stamp marking International Women’s Year, and features an image of hands reaching for a dove with an olive branch.

Wejchert becomes an Irish citizen in 1979, a member of Aosdána in 1981, and a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 1995. She is recognised internationally when she is the only Irish sculptor included in Louis Redstone’s new directions (1981). She is shown at the Solomon gallery from 1989 numerous times, including a solo show in 1992. A number of her most important pieces are for Irish universities, such as Geometric form at the University of Limerick and Flame at the University College Cork in 1995, her last work.

Wejchert dies suddenly at her home on Tivoli Road, Dún Laoghaire on October 24, 1995. She has one son, Jacob. The RHA holds a posthumous exhibition of her work in 1995. She is said to have influenced the younger generation of Irish sculptors, including Vivienne Roche, Eilis O’Connell, and Michael Warren. Flame is selected to be a part of the Irish Artists’ Century exhibition at the RHA in 2000.

(Pictured: “Flame,” 1995, brass and granite, University College Cork. This sculpture commemorates the people who bequested their bodies to the UCC Anatomical Gift Programme for the purpose of science and learning. It represents the flame of knowledge which leads to the light of understanding.)


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Birth of Paddy Reilly, Irish Folk Singer

Patrick ‘Paddy’ Reilly, Irish folk singer and guitarist, is born in Rathcoole, County Dublin, on October 18, 1939. He is one of Ireland’s most famous balladeers and is best known for his renditions of “The Fields of Athenry,” “Rose of Allendale,” and “The Town I Loved So Well.”

Reilly has two sisters, Jean and Linda. Linda sadly dies at the young age of 26, when he is still a teenager. His father works in the Swiftbrook Papermills, the main employer for the area, and whose claim to fame is to have produced the paper on which the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic was printed. His mother is a homemaker and both are fond of a singsong, especially at house parties.

Reilly releases his version of “The Fields of Athenry” as a single in 1983. It is the most successful rendition of this song, remaining in the Irish charts for 72 weeks.

For years a solo performer, Reilly joins The Dubliners in 1996 as a replacement for long-time member Ronnie Drew who had left the group to embark on a solo career. He leaves the group in 2005 and is replaced by Patsy Watchorn. He then moves to New York City where he owns a number of pubs, including Paddy Reilly’s on 29th Street and 2nd Avenue. After living in New York for several years, he returns to Ireland.