Thompson is the youngest child of the social historians and peace activists E. P. Thompson and Dorothy Towers. She has lived in Ireland since 1981 and many of her books are set there. She trains racehorses in the UK and United States and travels extensively in India before settling in 1984 in Inagh, County Clare, in the west of Ireland with her partner Conor Minogue. They have two daughters, Cliodhna and Dearbhla. She is an accomplished fiddler with an interest in Irish traditional music, which is reflected in The New Policeman (2005).
In September 1914 Cregan goes to Dublin to study music in the Leinster School of Music, under Madame Coslett Heller. It is while she is in Dublin that she becomes friends with the Ryan family, who are strong nationalists as well as interested in the Gaelic League and Sinn Féin. She begins to sing for concerts which are fundraisers for the Irish Volunteers. The last concert is just two weeks before the Easter Rising.
During Easter week Cregan is sent to Tralee with “automatics and ammunition” by Seán Mac Diarmada. While she is carrying a violin case of munitions, she is also carrying details for the wireless technology needed for communicating with the SS Aud, the boat which is carrying more weapons for the rebellion. The communications with the SS Aud go wrong when the car carrying the Volunteers goes off a pier and the occupants are drowned. She is still in the area to assist with the surviving Volunteer, who unfortunately knows nothing of the details for the SS Aud. She is not easily able to get back to Dublin, because owing to the Rising the city is cut off. By the time she gets back, her friends have been arrested.
When Cregan is going to school in Dublin she is also working in a school in Rathmines. Like many of the teachers, she loses her job after the rising because of her connection to the rebels. However, she is able to get new positions over the next few years in both Ballyshannon and Portstewart until she marries. In Ballyshannon she experiences the early expressions of support and sympathy, but Portstewart is a Unionist enclave with many houses flying union flags on polling day in 1918.
Cregan is a member of Cumann na mBan and with them is active during the Irish War of Independence. She is given a medal for her participation. On July 23, 1919, she marries Dr. James Ryan in Athenry, County Galway. His entire family had been deeply involved in the Easter Rising, as well as the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. They have three children, Eoin, who becomes a Senator, Nuala (Colgan) and Seamus.
The family is initially based in Wexford during the War. The house is often raided when the British soldiers are looking for her husband and Cregan herself is arrested in February 1921 for refusing to put up martial law posters. Later the family sells the house and remains mobile while she works for the Sinn Féin government, and her husband is in prison. It is during this time that she works as a courier to the continent and to London. After the war, they purchase Kindlestown House in Delgany, County Wicklow, where they remain for the rest of their lives.
Cregan’s first book for children is Old John and gains her considerable international success and attention. Sean Eoin is also published in Irish and is illustrated by Jack Butler Yeats. Her work is also aired on the BBC and RTÉ. Rathina wins the Downey Award in the United States in 1943. She also writes two plays: Hunger strike (1933), based on experience of her husband’s involvement in such a strike, which is broadcast on Radio Éireann on May 5, 1936, and Curlew’s call (1940).
Cregan dies on November 9, 1975, in St. Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, and is buried in Redford cemetery near her home in County Wicklow.
(Pictured: Máirín Cregan and her husband, Dr. James Ryan)
On November 6, 1929, Conradh na Gaeilge (English: Gaelic League) announces expulsion for anyone who attends “foreign jazz dances.”
Conradh na Gaeilge, a cultural organisation which promotes the Irish language, implements a ban against all forms of jazz music. Taken by the executive of the Conradh na Gaeilge, it is an issue, which has festered for many months prior to the ban and will for some time afterward.
It is claimed that jazz music has taken hold in Ireland in the wake of World War I and has spread from Dublin to the music halls which have sprung up in towns and villages across the country. Detractors claim that jazz music and dancing is just a “passing phase” and that it is the “natural reaction” to the post-war phase that Ireland finds itself in.
All branches of Conradh na Gaeilge are sent a warning as to their conduct going forward with particular regard to attending or promoting jazz. The idea is to follow the Gaelic Athletic Association’s bans on the playing of foreign games, something which has proved popular across the country. While the debate had begun earlier in 1929 in Wexford and other centres, it is in Leitrim that the most vocal opponents of jazz are to be found. Here the parish priest of Cloone, Fr. Conferey, openly criticises jazz from the pulpit and tells the people that they should sing Irish songs only. In nearby Mohill it is reported that 3,000 people demand that jazz be banned and they carry banners with slogans such as “Down with Jazz” and “Out with paganism.”
Ultimately, the ban sparks outrage across the country but it speaks volumes about post-independent Ireland and attitudes towards culture and pastimes, which are not Irish.
(From: Gaelic League Bans ‘Jazz’ – 6 November 1929, Sunday Independent, Irish Newspaper Archives, http://www.irishnewsarchives.com, November 10, 1929)
Charles Jervas, Irish portrait painter, translator, and art collector of the early 18th century, dies at his home at Cleveland Court, London, on November 2, 1739.
Born in Shinrone, County Offaly, around 1675, Jervas is one of seven children (five sons and two daughters) of John Jervas of Clonlisk, Shinrone, and his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Captain John Baldwin, High Sheriff of County Offaly, of Shinrone. He studies in London as an assistant under Sir Godfrey Kneller between 1694 and 1695.
After selling a series of small copies of the Raphael Cartoons around 1698 to Dr. George Clarke of All Souls College, Oxford, the following year, he travels to Paris and Rome (while financially supported by Clarke and others) remaining there for most of the decade before returning to London in 1709 where he finds success as a portrait painter.
Painting portraits of the city’s intellectuals, among them such personal friends as Jonathan Swift and the poet Alexander Pope, both of which are now in the National Portrait Gallery, London, Jervas becomes a popular artist often referred to in the works of literary figures of the period.
Jervas gives painting lessons to Pope at his house in Cleveland Court, St. James’s, which Pope mentions in his poem, To Belinda on the Rape of the Lock, written in 1713 and published in 1717 in Poems on Several Occasions.
Pope’s verse Epistle to Mr. Jervas, written around 1715, is published in the 1716 edition of John Dryden‘s 1695 translation of Fresnoy’s Art of Painting (Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy‘s De arte graphica, 1668). In it, Pope refers to Jervas’s skill as an artist:
O, lasting as those colours may they shine, Free as they stroke, yet faultless as thy line; New graces yearly like thy works display, Soft without weakness, without glaring gay!
With his growing reputation, Jervas succeeds Kneller as Principal Painter in Ordinary to King George I in 1723, and subsequently King George II. In 1727 he marries Penelope Hume, a wealthy widow with a supposed fortune of £20,000, and moves to Hampton, London. He continues to live in London until his death on November 2, 1739.
Jervas’s translation of Miguel de Cervantes‘s novel Don Quixote, published posthumously in 1742 as being made by Charles “Jarvis” due to a printer’s error, has since come to be known as “the Jarvis translation.” He is first to provide an introduction to the novel including a critical analysis of previous translations of Don Quixote. It has been highly praised as the most accurate translation of the novel up to that time, but also strongly criticised for being stiff and humourless, although it goes through many printings during the 19th century.
As principal portraitist to the King of England, Jervas is known for his vanity and luck, as mentioned in the Imperial Biographical Dictionary, “He married a widow with $20,000; and his natural self-conceit was greatly encouraged by his intimate friend [Alexander] Pope, who has written an epistle full of silly flattery.”
According to one account, after comparing a painting he had copied from Titian, Jervas is said to have stated, “Poor little Tit, how he would starve!”
Upon being told that Jervas had set up a carriage with four horses, Godfrey Kneller replies, “Ach, mein Gott, if his horses do not draw better than he does, he will never get to his journey’s end.”
Liam Redmond, Irish character actor known for his stage, film and television roles, dies in Dublin on October 28, 1989, following a lengthy illness.
Redmond is born in Limerick, County Limerick, on July 27, 1913, one of four children born to cabinet-maker Thomas and Eileen Redmond. Educated at the Christian Brothers schools in Dublin, he later attends University College Dublin (UCD) and initially reads medicine before moving into drama.
While Director of the Dramatic Society, Redmond meets and marries the society’s secretary, Barbara MacDonagh, sister of Donagh MacDonagh and daughter of 1916 Easter Rising leader Thomas MacDonagh and Muriel Gifford. They have four children.
Redmond is invited to join the Abbey Theatre in 1935 as a producer by William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet. Yeats writes his play Death of Cú Chulainn for Redmond to star as Cú Chulainn, hero of one of Ireland’s foundational myths.
Redmond makes his acting debut at the Abbey Theatre in 1935 in Seán O’Casey‘s The Silver Tassie. His first stage appearance is in 1939 in New York City in The White Steed. After returning to Britain at the outbreak of World War II he is a regular on the London stage. He is one of the founders of the Writers’, Artists’, Actors’ and Musicians’ Association (WAAMA), a precursor of the Irish Actors’ Equity Association. His insistence that “part-time professionals” – usually civil servants who act on the side – should be paid a higher rate than professional actors for both rehearsal time and performance, effectively wiping out this class, raising the wages and fees of working actors.
Hone is born in Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin on October 26, 1831. He is the son of Brindley Hone, a merchant and director of the Midland Great Western Railway.
Though a member of a very artistic family, Hone’s initial training is as an engineer at Trinity College Dublin followed by a brief period of work for the Irish Railway before going to Paris in 1853 to study painting. He first studies under Adolphe Yvon, the French military painter, and later Thomas Couture, who is one of the earliest exponents of realism and from whom he learns principles which influence his work throughout his career.
Most of Hone’s later paintings are landscapes, very often enlivened with animals and occasionally with figures. In France he is influenced by the painter Gustav Courbet who is taking a new and quite revolutionary realistic approach. His closest painting tips are, however, from another French impressionist, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He becomes a close friend of one of Corot’s followers at the Barbizon school of landscape painting. At Barbizon he learns to appreciate colour, texture and tone in the landscape and applies it in strong and confident brushworks to the painting of Irish subjects on his return. In Paris he also works closely with artist Édouard Brandon, also a follower of Corot.
Hone’s paintings which are completed in France have many similarities to those that he completes at his country farm in County Dublin, but the finish is perhaps more polished and professional in the later Irish works.
From 1876, except for four years, Hone exhibits at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA). He is elected a full member in 1880 and in 1894 becomes Professor of Painting. His exhibition with John Butler Yeats in 1901 is one of the turning points for the history of Irish art as it is their paintings which convince Sir Hugh Lane that Dublin should have a gallery of modern art.
Nathaniel Hone dies in Dublin on October 14, 1917. After his death his widow bequeaths the contents of his studio to the National Gallery of Ireland. He rarely dates his work, so it is difficult to establish chronology. The similarity of many of his motifs and subjects often make it difficult to tell whether a view is Irish or French. Equally it is difficult to chart his developments on stylistic grounds alone.
(Pictured: Nathaniel Hone, the younger, self-portrait as an old man)
Lady Harriet Kavanagh, Irish artist, traveler, and antiquarian, described as a “woman of high culture and of unusual artistic power,” is born Lady Harriet Margaret Le Poer Trench on October 13, 1799. She is believed to be the first Irish female traveler to Egypt.
Kavanagh is the second daughter of Richard Le Poer Trench and Henrietta Margaret Le Poer Trench (née Staples), with three brothers and three sisters. She marries Thomas Kavanagh of Borris House, County Carlow, on February 28, 1825, as his second wife. The couple has four children, three sons Charles, Thomas, Arthur, and one daughter, Harriet or “Hoddy.”
Kavanagh’s third son, Arthur MacMorrough Kavanagh, is born without fully formed limbs. Some attribute the disability to a peasant’s curse, while others speculate it is due to Lady Kavanagh taking laudanum during her pregnancy. She refuses to treat her son differently to his siblings, and with the help of local doctor Francis Boxwell, raises him as a normal child. During his initial education, she teaches Arthur herself, teaching him to paint and then write by holding brushes and pens in his mouth. With the help of the surgeon Sir Philip Crampton, she has a mechanical wheelchair constructed for Arthur, and also encourages him to ride horses and engage in other outdoor activities. Her husband dies after twelve years of marriage, in 1837.
In 1846, Kavanagh takes her children to learn French in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, later traveling to Rome. As an antiquarian, she also wants to visit Egypt and the Holy Land, setting off on the long journey from Marseille in October 1846. Accompanying her are her daughter, Harriet, her two sons, Thomas and Arthur, their tutor, the Rev. David Wood, and a maid, Miss Hudson. In Cairo, she hires two feluccas with Arab crews, and visits archaeological sites along the Nile, such as Thebes, Karnak, and the Nubia region. From there, she visits sites of biblical interest, including Tyre, Sidon, and Roda Island. She negotiates with Bedouin chiefs in Aqaba, hiring camels and Bedouin guides to travel to Hebron. She visits harems and a slave market and records the journey’s incidents in her diary, including her son Arthur’s accidental near drowning when he falls off their boat while fishing.
While visiting Jerusalem in Easter 1847, Kavanagh bears witness to a confrontation over the control of holy places between Roman and Orthodox Catholics priests. She goes on to visit Petra, the Sinai Peninsula, Beirut, Smyrna, and Constantinople. The group spends a second winter in Egypt before traveling to the Black Sea before returning to Marseilles in April 1848. Much of these journeys are conducted on horse or camel-back, with one desert crossing taking 36 days. She later comments on her travels as a woman, stating “quite enough danger to make it a very exciting business.”
In 1850 and 1852, Kavanagh travels to Corfu, returning to Borris with samples of Greek lace. She teaches a number of her tenants to copy these designs, which lead to the establishment of a local lace-making industry. She is elected to the Kilkenny Archaeological Society in 1851.
Kavanagh moves to Ballyragget Lodge, County Kilkenny, in 1860, dying there on July 14, 1885. She is buried in St. Mullin’s Abbey, Borris in County Carlow. She documented her travels in journals, with drawings and paintings of the sites she visited. These are held by the Kavanagh family, along with an oil portrait and a self-portrait. Her collection of roughly 300 Egyptian antiquities were donated to the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland after her death. These collections were later moved to the National Museum of Ireland and form a core element of the Museum’s Egyptian collection. Copies of two of her watercolours, a self-portrait, and a landscape are on display in the Museum.
Barton is born in Dublin on April 21, 1856. Her father is a lawyer from Rochestown, County Tipperary, and her mother’s family is from County Galway. Educated privately, she is a liberal in social affairs. Her interests include horse racing. She is cousins with sisters Eva Henrietta and Letitia Marion Hamilton. She begins exhibiting her broad-wash watercolour paintings with the Water Colour Society of Ireland (WCSI) in 1872. She and her sister Emily visit Brussels in 1875, where they receive drawing tuition in drawing and fine art painting under the French artist Henri Gervex. There, along with her close friend Mildred Anne Butler, she begins to study figure painting and figure drawing.
In 1879, Barton joins the local committee of the Irish Fine Art Society. Afterward she trains at Paul Jacob Naftel‘s art studio in London. She, like Butler, studies under Naftel. In 1882, she exhibits her painting Dead Game, at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA). In 1884, she exhibits at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA). Later, she shows at the Japanese Gallery, the Dudley Museum and Art Gallery and the Grosvenor Gallery in London. In 1893, she becomes an associate member of the Society of Painters in Water Colours, attaining full membership in 1911.
Barton’s watercolours and townscapes become well known in both Dublin and London. This is helped by her illustrations in books of both cities including Picturesque Dublin, Old and New by Francis Farmer and her own book Familiar London.
(Pictured: “A rest in rotten row” – 1892 watercolour by Rose Maynard Barton. The painting shows a nurse and child resting on Rotten Row, Hyde Park, London.)
Patrick J. Killoran, Irish traditional fiddle player, bandleader and recording artist is born on September 21, 1903, in Emlaghgissan (also spelled “Emlagation”), a townland in the civil parish of Emlaghfad near the town of Ballymote, County Sligo. He is regarded, along with James Morrison and Michael Coleman, as one of the finest exponents of the south Sligo fiddle style in the “golden age” of the ethnic recording industry of the 1920s and 1930s.
Killoran’s father Patrick plays the flute and his mother Mary the concertina, but he is also influenced by local fiddle master Philip O’Beirne, who had earlier tutored Michael Coleman. As a teenager, he is a volunteer with the Ballymote-based 3rd Battalion of the south Sligo Brigade of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish War of Independence.
In 1925, Killoran emigrates to New York City, arriving on May 19 on the Cunard liner Scythia. Within a few months, he officially declares his intention to become a citizen of the United States, listing his address as 227 East 126th Street in east Harlem and his occupation as “laborer.” He later lodges with fellow Sligo fiddler James Morrison in a Columbus Avenue apartment on Manhattan‘s Upper West Side. A 1927 newspaper ad for “Morrison’s Orchestra” offers “Irish music by P. Killoran and J. Morrison, celebrated violinists,” giving 507 West 133d Street in west Harlem as the contact address. He soon launches his own career as a soloist and bandleader. A publicity photo of his quartet c. 1928 includes button accordionist D. Casey, tenor banjo player Richard Curran and second fiddler Denis Murphy. By the next year, he is performing on a weekly radio program sponsored by the Pride of Erin Ballrooms, located at the corner of Bedford and Atlantic Avenues in Brooklyn. He also tries another side occupation as his 1931 naturalization petition lists his occupation as “Music store owner.”
At the Pride of Erin, and later at the Sligo Ballroom at 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, Killoran’s “Irish Orchestra” provides music for Irish dancing, while Jack Healy, another Ballymote native, leads a group for “American” dancing. Healy, as a singer and tenor saxophone player, also performs and records with Killoran’s group, the membership of which over the course of the 1930s includes fiddler Paddy Sweeney, another Sligo native, fiddle and clarinet player Paul Ryan, Ryan’s brother Jim on the C Melody saxophone, pianists Eileen O’Shea, Edmund Tucker and Jim McGinn, drummer Mickey Murphy, button accordionists Tommy Flanagan and William McElligott and tenor banjo/tenor guitar player Michael “Whitey” Andrews.
Killoran’s band is variously billed as his “Pride of Erin Orchestra,” “Radio Dance Orchestra,” “Sligo Ballroom Orchestra,” “Lakes of Sligo Orchestra” and “Irish Barn Dance Boys.” The group is a popular choice for county association functions, particularly those of Sligo and Roscommon. In 1932, he leads a band that accompanies CardinalWilliam Henry O’Connell of Boston to the Eucharistic Congress in Ireland and briefly bills his group as the “Pride of Erin Eucharistic Congress Orchestra.” He regularly performs at Irish beach resorts on the Rockaway peninsula and in East Durham in the Catskill Mountains.
Uniquely among the major New York Irish musicians of the pre-World War II era, Killoran continues his musical career through the 1950s. He issues new recordings, including duets with flute player Mike Flynn and some fiddle-and-viola sides with Paul Ryan, and leads an active dance band. Age and illness eventually force him to retire, and in 1962 he turns over leadership of the band, a fixture at the City Center Ballroom, to button accordionist Joe Madden, father of Cherish the Ladies flute player Joanie Madden.
In 1956, Killoran is a co-founder of the Dublin Recording Company, later better known simply as Dublin Records, which is organized to record new Irish discs in New York.
Killoran is a founding member of the Emerald Irish Musicians Benevolent Society, a group that stages “Night of Shamrocks” concerts to raise money for the benefit of sick and deceased Irish musicians in New York. He is also a member of the Irish Musicians Association of America, and a New York branch of that organization, which later merges with Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Eireann, is named for him.
In addition to the 1932 trip to the Eucharistic Congress, Killoran returns to Ireland at least twice. In 1949, he plays on a Radio Éireann program hosted by piper and folklorist Séamus Ennis. Some selections from that broadcast are recorded on a private disc and are later released on CD. On a 1960 visit, he visits Sligo and Clare and performs at a concert in County Longford.
Killoran is married twice. His first wife, Anna Gorman, a native of County Roscommon, dies in 1935. His second wife is Betty (Bridget) Hayes, an immigrant from Shanaway West, County Clare, who survives him. He dies in New York City on April 24, 1965.
A “Paddy Killoran Traditional Festival” is celebrated in the third week of June in Ballymote, where a monument in Killoran’s honor is erected in 2012.
O’Flynn is acknowledged as Ireland’s foremost exponent of the uilleann pipes and brings the music of the instrument to a worldwide audience. In 2007, he is named TG4 Musician of the Year at the Gradam Ceoil TG4, considered to be the foremost recognition given to traditional Irish musicians.
O’Flynn is born to musical parents. His father, Liam, is a teacher and fiddle player. His mother, Maisie (née Scanlan), who comes from a family of musicians from County Clare, plays and teaches piano. From an early age, he shows musical talent, and is encouraged to pursue his interest in the uilleann pipes by the piper Tom Armstrong. At the age of 11, he begins taking classes with Leo Rowsome. He is also influenced by Willie Clancy and Séamus Ennis. In the 1960s, he begins to receive recognition of his talent, winning prizes at the Oireachtas na Gaeilge and the Fleadh Cheoil. During his early years, he is sometimes billed as Liam Óg Ó Flynn.
In 1972, O’Flynn co-founds the Irish traditional music group Planxty, alongside Christy Moore, Andy Irvine and Dónal Lunny and remains a member throughout the band’s various incarnations. While Seán Ó Riada and The Chieftains had reinvigorated Irish traditional instrumental music in an ensemble format during the 1960s, Planxty builds on that foundation and takes it one step further. They bring a punch and vitality to acoustic music that draws heavily on O’Flynn’s piping virtuosity.
As O’Flynn grows in his skill as a musician and as he begins to meet pipers like Willie Clancy and Séamus Ennis, he becomes acutely aware of his position in the tradition of piping. His subsequent close friendship with Ennis, which starts as a master/pupil relationship, teaches him that there is much more to being a piper than playing tunes. He notes, “Seamus Ennis gave me much more than a bag of notes.”
“When I’m playing, I’m certainly lost within it. The only way to describe it, is that it’s like looking inwards. I think when a performer engages with the audience, and vice versa, it’s like a spell is cast and a terrific passage of feelings moves from the musician to the audience and back again.”
Following the break-up of Planxty in 1983, O’Flynn finds work as a session musician with such prominent artists as The Everly Brothers, Enya, Kate Bush, Nigel Kennedy, Rita Connolly, and Mark Knopfler. He also works on film scores, including Kidnapped (1979) and A River Runs Through It (1992). He is adventurous enough to work with avant-garde composer John Cage, but his most natural alliance is with neo-romantic composer Shaun Davey.
The Bothy Band are natural successors to the original Planxty, and one of its members, Matt Molloy, who subsequently joins The Chieftains, plays with The Chieftains’ fiddler Seán Keane on O’Flynn’s album, The Piper’s Call, which is performed in the 1999 BBC Proms season at the Royal Albert Hall. He also works on projects with Seamus Heaney, mixing poetry with music.
O’Flynn’s name is mentioned in Christy Moore’s song “Lisdoonvarna.”
O’Flynn dies in a Dublin hospital on March 14, 2018, following a long illness. His cremated remains rest at Newlands Cross Cemetery and Crematorium in Dublin.
The Liam O’Flynn Award is awarded each year by the Arts Council and the National Concert Hall to recognise individual creativity in Traditional Irish music. Awardees include Úna Monaghan, Barry Kerr, Jack Talty, Louise Mulcahy and Strange Boy (aka Jordan Kelly).
seamus dubhghaill 