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Category Archives: Arts & Music


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Birth of Jake Burns, Frontman of Stiff Little Fingers

John “Jake” Burns, singer and guitarist best known as the frontman of Stiff Little Fingers, is born on February 21, 1958, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He also records with Jake Burns and the Big Wheel, 3 Men + Black, and as a solo artist.

Burns grows up in Joanmount in Ballysillan. His mother is a seamstress, and his father is a machinist in a textile machinery factory/steel foundry, where he is a shop steward, and his socialist views are an influence on his son. Prior to punk, Burns’s musical influences include Rory Gallagher, Dr. Feelgood, Graham Parker, and Bob Marley.

Burns starts off his career at Belfast Boys’ Model School with a rock covers band, Highway Star, which consists of Burns, Gordon Blair, Henry Cluney, and Brian Faloon. Blair subsequently leaves the group to join Rudi, and Ali McMordie joins at about the time the band discovers punk.

The band is briefly named the Fast, but as there is already a group of that name, they change it to Stiff Little Fingers, taken from the song of the same name that had appeared on Pure Mania, the 1977 album by the Vibrators. Apart from a five-year gap from 1983 to 1987, Stiff Little Fingers has been active since 1977 to the present day and have released ten studio albums.

In 1981, Burns makes his acting debut in an episode of the BBC‘s Play for Today series entitled Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain, written by Belfast-born poet and playwright Stewart Parker, which also features the rest of Stiff Little Fingers effectively playing themselves as “The Band.”

After the breakup of Stiff Little Fingers in 1983, Burns forms Jake Burns and the Big Wheel. The band consists of Burns on vocals and guitar, Steve Grantley on drums, Sean Martin on bass guitar, and Pete Saunders on keyboards. Big Wheel records a total of three singles, “On Fortune Street,” “She Grew Up” and “Breathless.” A compilation album, also called On Fortune Street, is released in 2002 after the band’s demise.

In 1987, Burns disbands Big Wheel, and Stiff Little Fingers reforms, because they are “skint and wanted to make a bit of cash to get back to Ireland for Christmas.”

From about 2001 to 2005, Burns is involved in a side project with Pauline Black of the Selecter, called 3 Men and Black. This involves Black touring with three male artists from the late 1970s and early 1980s doing acoustic versions of songs they are famous for and talking a little about how they came to write the songs. The lineup for the concerts is fairly fluid, and includes such people as Bruce Foxton, Jean-Jacques Burnel, Eric Faulkner and Nick Welsh.

On March 27, 2006, Burns releases a solo album titled Drinkin’ Again.

In 2009, Burns forms a Chicago punk rock supergroup called the Nefarious Fat Cats to raise money for local charities. Notable members include John Haggerty (Pegboy, Naked Raygun), Joe Haggerty (Pegboy), Joe Principe (Rise Against), Scott Lucas (Local H), Herb Rosen (Beer Nuts, Right of the Accused) and Mark DeRosa (Dummy). Burns also contributes guitar and vocals on a track of the Black Sheep Band charity record for Children’s Memorial Hospital, A Chicago Punk Rock Collaboration for the Kids, Vol 1.

In 2016, Burns joins an acoustic “supergroup” formed by Kirk Brandon of Spear of Destiny, called Dead Men Walking which also includes David Ruffy and John “Segs” Jennings, both of Ruts DC.

Burns lives in London for over ten years from 1978 after Stiff Little Fingers relocates there. His first wife lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, and after their marriage, he moves to Newcastle, where he lives for 16 years, becoming a supporter of Newcastle United F.C. He is also an avid supporter of the Northern Ireland national football team.

Burns’s second wife, Shirley, is American and they have lived in Chicago since 2004. Burns eventually becomes a U.S. citizen, partially so he can help vote out Donald Trump.

(Pictured: Jake Burns, performing with Stiff Little Fingers in 2019)


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Death of James Bernard Fagan, Actor, Producer & Playwright

James Bernard Fagan, Irish-born actor, theatre manager, producer and playwright in England, dies of a heart attack in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, on February 17, 1933, following a bout of influenza.

Fagan is born in Belfast on May 18, 1873, the eldest of the five children of Sir James Fagan, a surgeon at the Belfast Royal Hospital and an inspector of Irish reformatories, and Mary Catherine Fagan (née Hughes). He attends Clongowes Wood College near Clane, County Kildare and then moves to England. Initially interested in a career in the church, he begins studying law at Trinity College, Oxford in 1892 but leaves in 1893 without a degree. He works for a time in the Indian Civil Service but abandons this career for the stage.

Fagan begins his career as an actor with the company of Sir Frank Benson for two years, then joining, from 1895 to 1899, the company of Herbert Beerbohm Tree at Her Majesty’s Theatre. There he appears in Katherine and Petruchio, A Man’s Shadow, Julius Caesar, The Musketeers and Carnac Sahib. He starts writing plays in 1899, with The Rebels, for the time forsaking acting. In 1913, he returns to the stage touring as the Rt. Hon. Denzil Trevena in his own play, The Earth. He next writes The Fourth of August (1914) and Doctor O’Toole (1917). In 1917 he produces his first play, his own adaptation of the Eugène Brieux play Damaged Goods at St. Martin’s Theatre. He next produces The Wonder Tales and The Little Brother at the Ambassadors Theatre in London.

Fagan takes over the Court Theatre in London’s Sloane Square as a Shakespearean playhouse in 1920. The Times calls his revivals of Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, Henry the Fourth (Part Two) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream “memorable for their freshness, sanity and distinction, and [deserving of] a place in theatrical history.” At the Court, he revives Damaged Goods and, in 1921, with the assistance of the author, produces George Bernard Shaw‘s Heartbreak House, with Edith Evans as “Lady Utterwood.” In 1922 he produces his play The Wheel at the Apollo Theatre. Its success allows him to repay his creditors. Even more successful is his adaptation of Treasure Island at the Savoy Theatre with Arthur Bourchier as “Long John Silver,” which opens December 26, 1922. It is revived every Christmas until the outbreak of World War II.

Fagan is persuaded by Jane Ellis, the actress who with Alfred Ballard founds the Oxford Playhouse “Red Barn” in 1923, to be its first manager. His first production at the Oxford Playhouse is a restaging of Shaw’s Heartbreak House and numbered Shaw among the audience. He produces The Cherry Orchard, at various theatres, to favourable reviews, popularising Anton Chekhov in Britain. From November 16, 1925, with Dennis Eadie, he presents Juno and the Paycock at the Royalty Theatre, thus bringing Seán O’Casey to the attention of London’s theatre-going public. O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars follows the next year.

Fagan receives little support from the University of Oxford or the play-going public and resigns in 1929. His successor is Stanford Holme, who broadens its appeal and, despite the straitened times, makes it financially viable. In 1929, he is a director of the Festival Theatre, Cambridge, where his friend Terence Gray is director. He also produces many works for the Irish Players.

Beginning in the 1920s, several of Fagan’s plays are adapted for film. He moves to Hollywood in 1929 for the filming by Paramount Pictures of his play The Wheel as The Wheel of Life. Other film work includes his co-adaptation of the screenplay for the 1932 film Smilin’ Through, and he co-writes Paramount’s Forgotten Commandments the same year. His play Bella Donna is filmed four times, including posthumously in 1946, and a 1936 film, The Improper Duchess is based on his 1931 play of the same name.

James Bernard Fagan dies in Hollywood, California, on February 17, 1933, at the age of 59 of a heart attack following a bout of influenza.


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Death of Carl Hardebeck, Traditional Music Composer & Arranger

Carl Gilbert Hardebeck, or Carl G. Hardebec, British-born Irish composer and arranger of traditional music, dies in Dublin on February 10, 1945.

Hardebeck is born on December 10, 1869, in Clerkenwell, London, to a German father and Welsh mother. He loses his sight when he is a baby. He attends the Royal Normal School for the Blind in London (1880–92) where, under his teacher Frederick Corder, a professor from the Royal Academy of Music, he shows a marked aptitude for music.

In 1893, at the age of twenty-four, Hardebeck moves to Belfast, where he opens a music store, but the venture fails, and he becomes the organist of a small parish in the city, the Holy Family Church, Wellington Place. He enters an anthem, O God of My Salvation, for contralto and chorus, for the 1897 Dublin Feis Ceoil and wins. On this occasion he hears folk song arrangements of Charles Villiers Stanford and others for the first time. At the 1901 Feis Ceoil, he again wins a prize, this time for a large cantata, The Red Hand of Ulster. In 1914, his wife, Mary Reavy, dies.

In 1919, Hardebeck becomes the director of the music school in Cork and becomes the first professor of Irish music at University College Cork (UCC) in 1922. Ill-suited for administrative tasks, he relinquishes the post after one year and returns to Belfast, which after the Irish Civil War has become the capital of Northern Ireland. In 1932, he finally settles in Dublin, where he works for An Gúm, the Irish government publisher, as arranger of Irish traditional songs for piano and choirs, many of which become teaching material at schools in the nascent Republic of Ireland. He also teaches Irish and traditional music in the Dublin Municipal School of Music for two years. On many occasions he acts as adjudicator in singing and musical competitions across Ireland.

Despite Hardebeck’s mixed German/Welsh/English background, the events of the 1913 Dublin lock-out, the outbreak of World War I, and the 1916 Easter Rising radicalise him, turning him into an Irish nationalist. He is quoted as saying, “I believe in God, Beethoven and Patrick Pearse.” He studies the Irish language and collects folk songs from around the country, making some unique arrangements that bridge the gap between traditional and art song.

At home in Dublin, Hardebeck plays his excellent arrangements of Irish melodies on a Schiedmayer harmonium. The instrument has a “percussion” stop, which he uses to great effect. He also owns a Knauss piano but plays the harmonium by choice. He is quite an authority on plainchant. The noted Irish harpsichord maker Cathal Gannon is a close friend of his for many years. Hardebeck teaches him how to appreciate the structure of the classical symphony and concerto and passes on his enthusiasm and love of Irish melodies.

Following Hardebeck’s death at his home, 14 St. Vincent Street, Berkeley Road, Dublin, on February 10, 1945, a Radio Éireann-sponsored symphony concert, held in the Capitol Theatre in Dublin, begins with a sympathetic performance of his orchestral variations upon Seoithín Seó. A state funeral is held in Saint Joseph’s Church, Berkeley Road, Dublin. The church is packed; various government ministers, the Lord Mayor and representatives of President Douglas Hyde and of Éamon de Valera are there. Hardebeck’s own Kyrie and Agnus Dei are performed at the Requiem Mass. He is interred in Glasnevin Cemetery, where a Benedictus is chanted by the clergy present. A vote of sympathy is issued by the Irish National League of the Blind to Hardebeck’s widow and relatives, in which the hope is expressed “that the nation as a whole would not be unmindful of the important contribution which the late Dr. Hardebeck had made to Irish culture, music and art.”

Unfortunately, very little attention has been given to Hardebeck, who is one of the instigators in the revival of Irish music. Indeed, he is largely forgotten after his death. This is possibly due to his mixed origins and place of birth. His arrangement for orchestra of The Lark in the Clear Air is a fine piece of music, but he is content to sell it to the music publishers Boosey & Hawkes for just six guineas.

In June 2013, a plaque to Hardebeck’s memory is installed at Holy Family Church, Belfast.

(Pictured: “Carl Hardebeck (1869-1945),” oil on canvas, National Museums NI)


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Birth of Brigid Ganly, Painter & Sculptor

Brigid Ganly HRHA, Irish painter and sculptor, is born Rosaleen Brigid O’Brien on January 29, 1909, in Dublin.

Ganly is one of five children born to Dermod O’Brien and his wife Mabel Smiley. Her father is a painter. His grandfather is the Irish republican William Smith O’Brien. She grows up in Country Limerick at a farm in Cahirmoyle until the family moves to Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin. She goes on to attend the Metropolitan School of Art where she has the opportunity to study under Patrick Tuohy, Seán Keating and Oliver Sheppard. She is a talented sculptor and wins several awards, including the Taylor scholarship in 1929, for her allegorical male nude, Pity. She spends time in Paris in 1951 where she trains with André Lhote. She travels to Greece where Lhote continues to influence her work.

Ganly also studies painting in the Royal Hibernian Academy School where she has Margaret Clarke and Seán O’Sullivan as teachers. She is made an associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1928 and becomes a member in 1935, though in 1969 she resigns her membership in protest at the lack of young artists being given the opportunity to exhibit. In 1972 she is made an honorary member and returns.

Ganly is a representational artist and while known as a portrait artist, she also paints landscapes, interiors and may be best known for her still lifes. Some of her best works are portraits of her husband, her sister Ethel, her father, and her friend Sheila Pim. She illustrates the book-jackets of Pym’s works. She has many exhibitions, with the RHA and the Water Colour Society of Ireland. There is a retrospective of her life in 1998 in the Hugh Lane Gallery and her works are in the collections there. She is also in the collections of the Waterford Municipal Gallery, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork and in The National Self-Portrait Collection of Ireland. She is part of the 2014 exhibition “Irish Women Artists: 1870-1970.”

Ganly’s sister-in-law is Kitty Wilmer O’Brien with whom she often exhibits. She marries Andrew Ganly, a dental surgeon and writer, in 1936. He dies in 1982. They have two children, Eoghan and Phillida.

Ganly dies at the age of 93 on March 25, 2002.


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Death of Gordon Lambert, Businessman, Senator & Art Collector

Charles Gordon Lambert, Irish businessman, senator and art collector, dies in a Dublin hospital on January 27, 2005.

Lambert is born on April 9, 1919, in the family home at Highfield Road, Rathmines, Dublin, the youngest of four sons of Robert James Hamilton Lambert, a veterinarian and renowned cricketer, and his wife Nora (née Mitchell). His eldest brother, Noel Hamilton “Ham” Lambert, is a versatile sportsman and noted veterinary practitioner.

Lambert is educated at Sandford Park School, Dublin, and at Rossall School, Lancashire. He is steered by his mother toward a career in accountancy for which he prepares by studying commerce at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). Graduating in 1940, he joins the accounting firm Stokes Brothers and Pim, qualifying Associate Chartered Accountant in 1943. In 1944, after auditing biscuit manufacturers W. & R. Jacob and Co. Ltd, one of Ireland’s largest and most prestigious industrial companies, he is offered and accepts a £300 a year job at Jacob’s as assistant accountant.

In 1953, Lambert becomes Jacob’s chief accountant as the management grooms him for an executive career. During 1948–56, Jacob’s suffers from profit and price controls, lack of capital investment and complacency brought about by the absence of competition. The entry of Boland’s Bakery into the Irish biscuit market in 1957 is exploited by Lambert who urges the alarmed board, which has long regarded advertising as vulgar, to market its products more vigorously. This assertiveness yields his advancement to the position of commercial manager in 1958. A year later he becomes the first non-member of the Bewley and Jacob families to be appointed to the board.

Between 1959 and 1970, biscuit consumption in Ireland doubles for which Lambert can claim much credit. Recognising that the advent of self-service stores means that manufacturers can no longer rely on retailers to sell their products, he pioneers advanced promotional techniques in Ireland, particularly the use of marketing surveys and of mass advertising in newspapers, on radio and on the emerging medium of television. To further accord with retailers’ preferences, Jacob’s drives the widespread packaging of biscuits in airtight packets rather than tins and also introduces a striking red flash logo for its packets. His interest in contemporary art enables him to contribute directly to Jacob’s packaging designs.

Lambert is appointed to the board of the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) in 1964, a position he holds until 1977, and serves as president of the National Agricultural and Industrial Development Association (NAIDA) in 1964–65, spearheading a “Buy Irish” campaign. His involvement with NAIDA dates to the mid-1950s and leads to his friendship with Jack Lynch, Minister for Industry and Commerce. This relationship and his admiration for Seán Lemass incline him toward Fianna Fáil. He also believes the party is the one most likely to deliver economic growth.

In 1977, Lambert is appointed to Seanad Éireann by Taoiseach Jack Lynch. He sits as an independent but assures Lynch he will broadly support the government. Dismayed by Ireland’s economic uncompetitiveness, he uses this platform to bemoan the state’s financial profligacy and failure to control inflation, and the indifference of Irish politicians towards the business community, contending that Irish industrialists suffer and need to learn from the expert lobbying of the indigenous agricultural sector and of large multi-national companies based in Ireland. He also articulates his social liberalism, desire for peaceful reconciliation in Northern Ireland and support for cultural and environmental causes. But his commitment to the Seanad wanes as he grasps its irrelevance. When Lynch resigns in December 1979, Lambert joins the Fianna Fáil party in a futile bid to preserve his political influence.

Following Jacob’s takeover of Boland’s Bakery in 1966, Lambert becomes joint managing director of a new entity, Irish Biscuits Ltd, the manufacturing and trading company for the Boland’s and Jacob’s biscuits operations. W. & R. Jacob and Co. Ltd becomes a holding company. In 1968, he becomes the sole managing director. From 1977 he begins withdrawing from the active administration of the company, relinquishing his managing directorship in 1979 to become chairman.

Initially, Lambert views art as a hobby but he comes to see it as a calling, drawing inspiration from Sir William Basil Goulding, his predecessor as Ireland’s leading collector and advocate of modern art. From the late 1970s he serves as head of the Contemporary Irish Art Society (CIAS) and on the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the advisory committee of the Dublin Municipal Gallery, the board of the National Gallery of Ireland, the editorial board of the Irish Arts Review and the international council of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.

The Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) opens in 1991 and receives through the medium of the Gordon Lambert Trust some 212 works, which form the centerpiece of its collection. Thereafter Lambert gifts another 100 works to IMMA. He sits on IMMA’s board from 1991, and the west wing of the museum is named after him in 1999.

Despite being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1988, Lambert remains relatively active and plays golf into his 80s. In 1999 he receives an honorary LLD from TCD. From 1997, he relies increasingly on Anthony Lyons, an acquaintance of longstanding, to care for him. His last years are overshadowed by the collapse in autumn 2002 of his close but complex relationship with his family. Thereafter he shuns his relations and changes his will, granting Lyons a substantial portion of his estate while curtailing the amount to be received by his family. He dies in a Dublin hospital on January 27, 2005. Relatives challenge his final will in the High Court in 2009, but it is upheld.

(Pictured: Photograph of director of Jacob’s Biscuits, Gordon Lambert, speaking from a podium at the first Jacob’s Television Awards. The Lord Mayor of Dublin, James O’Keefe, is sitting behind Lambert. The awards ceremony takes place at the Bishop Street factory, Dublin.)


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Birth of Lilian Davidson, Artist, Teacher & Writer

Lilian Davidson ARHA, Irish landscape and portrait artist, teacher and writer, is born on January 26, 1879, at Castle Terrace, Bray, County Wicklow.

Davidson is the sixth of ten children of clerk of petty session, Edward Ellice Davidson, and Lucy Rising Davidson (née Doe). Her mother dies in 1888, and it is presumed that she receives a private education but as the family are not affluent, the details are unclear. She goes on to attend the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (DMSA) from 1895 to 1905. While at the DMSA, she wins prizes in 1895 and 1896 and is awarded a scholarship and free studentship at the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) in 1897, the same year her father dies. She completes her studies in 1905. In the early 1910s, she is living in Rathmines and spends some time in England and Wales.

Davidson is commissioned by Switzer’s department store on Grafton Street to draw costumes in 1899. In 1909, her painting After Rain is exhibited by the Dublin Sketching Club, with her continuing to show work there until 1920. She exhibits The Bonfire with the Water Colour Society of Ireland in 1912, becoming a committee member in 1934 and continuing to exhibit with them until 1954. In 1914, she is one of the artists included in a sale of paintings to aid Belgian refugees. She is first exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 1914, with The Student. Her painting exhibited by the RHA in 1916, The Harbour, St. Ives, demonstrates an influence from Stanhope Forbes and the Newlyn School, with a bright palette and contrasting illumination, which become characteristic of her work. She illustrates C. H. Bretherton’s collection of humorous poems and recollections about London Zoo, A Zoovenir (1919).

Davidson holds a joint exhibition with Mainie Jellett in 1920, at Mill’s Hall, Merrion Row, Dublin. Jellett produces a pencil portrait of Davison (pictured above), which shows her in a straw hat she frequently wears. The RHA exhibits Davidson’s oil painting, The Flax Pullers, in 1921. This work shows an influence from Paul Henry and French Impressionism in her use of colour-blocking. In the early 1920s, she travels to Switzerland, Belgium, and France, producing works such as Fish Market, Bruges. She lives in Paris in the late 1920s, exhibiting at the Salon de la Societé Nationale in 1924 and 1930. She places a self-portrait in her depiction of a peasant gathering, The Country Races. Reproductions of her drawing of Leinster House and Christ Church Cathedral by Bulmer Hobson are included in A Book of Dublin (1929). Her landscape, Low Tide, Wicklow, which is exhibited at the RHA in 1934, and Boats at Wicklow, Dusk show her ability to depict reflections in water. She continues to paint scenes of rural life, including Cottages – Keel, Achill, which shows an influence from Jack Butler Yeats in her use of space and colour. The fact that her family is not wealthy likely influences her choice of poorer people as her subjects, depicting them in a sympathetic manner. Her work is part of the painting event in the art competitions at the 1928 Summer Olympics.

Davidson’s paintings are exhibited at the Contemporary Picture Galleries, Dublin in 1930, alongside Yeats, Evie Hone, and Harry Kernoff. She is a member of the Picture Hire Club, 24 Molesworth Street, Dublin from 1941 to 1942, and is a frequent contributor to the Munster Fine Arts Club. Her work is exhibited at the Salon des Beaux Arts, Paris, the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and in Amsterdam. A large number of her works from the 1930s show the Irish-speaking area of Galway, Claddagh, such as Night in Claddagh, exhibited with the RHA in 1933. Her Irish landscapes, such as Claddagh Cottages, are included in the Oireachtas Art Exhibitions from 1932 to 1946. From around 1934, she is a member of the Society of Dublin Painters, exhibiting with them from 1939 to 1954. She influences the Society’s move toward the avant-garde in the 1940s. She is elected associate to the RHA in 1940 and continues to exhibit there until her death. Her 1946 work, Gorta, shows influence from Zola, Rilke, Dostoyevsky and Picasso.

Davidson teaches drawing at her studio at 1 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin. Her pupils include Bea Orpen, Anne Yeats, and Mo Irwin. She also is a teacher at a number of Dublin schools, such as Belgrave school, Rathmines, Wesley College, St. Stephen’s Green, and Castle Park School, Dalkey. She travels to Abbeyleix, County Laois, once a week to teach at Glenbawn boarding school.

As well as painting, Davidson writes a number of plays, short stories, and monologues under a pseudonym, “Ulick Burke.” In 1927, a collection of her poems and Donegal rhymes is published. In 1931, Hilton Edwards directs her stage play Bride, at the Gate Theatre. Her short story, Her Only Son, is published in The Bell under a pseudonym in 1942. In 1935, she is a founder-member of the Torch Theatre, Dublin. She designs scenery, and is the co-director with Hugh Hyland in 1936, under the stage name “Jennifer Maude.”

Davidson dies at her home at 4 Wilton Terrace, Dublin on March 29, 1954. She is buried in an unmarked grave in Mount Jerome Cemetery. The National Gallery of Ireland (NGI) holds her 1938 portrait of Yeats, as well as her crayon drawing of Sarah Purser. She is a regular attendee at Purser’s “Second Tuesdays” gatherings. The Abbey Theatre holds her portrait of Joseph Holloway. She bequeaths The Golden Shawl to the Hugh Lane Gallery, which is a large self-portrait. Two of her works are included in the NGI’s 1987 exhibition, Irish Women Artists from the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day.


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Birth of Máire Ní Chinnéide, Language Activist & Playwright

Máire Ní Chinnéide (English: Mary or Molly O’Kennedy) Irish language activist, playwright, first president of the Camogie Association and first female president of Oireachtas na Gaeilge, is born in Rathmines, an affluent inner suburb on the Southside of Dublin, on January 17, 1879.

Ní Chinnéide attends Muckross Park College and the Royal University of Ireland (later the National University of Ireland) where she is a classmate of Agnes O’Farrelly, Helena Concannon, and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. She learns the Irish language on holiday in Ballyvourney, County Cork, and earns the first scholarship in Irish language from the Royal University of Ireland, worth £100 a year, which is spent on visits to the Irish college in Ballingeary.

She studies in the school of Old Irish established by Professor Osborn Bergin and is strongly influenced by the Irish Australian professor O’Daly. She later teaches Latin through Irish at Ballingeary and becomes proficient in French, German, Italian and Spanish.

She spends the last £100 of her scholarship on a dowry for her marriage to Sean MacGearailt, later first Accountant General of Revenue in the Irish civil service, with whom she lives originally in Glasnevin and then in Dalkey.

She is a founder member of the radical Craobh an Chéitinnigh, the Keating branch of Conradh na Gaeilge, composed mainly of Dublin-based Kerry people and regarded, by themselves at least, as the intellectual focus of the League.

In August 1904, some six years after the establishment of the earliest women’s hurling teams, the rules of camogie (then called camoguidheacht), first appears in Banba, a journal produced by Craobh an Chéitinnigh. Camogie had come to public attention when it was showcased at the annual Oireachtas (Conradh na Gaeilge Festival) earlier that year, and it differed from men’s hurling in its use of a lighter ball and a smaller playing-field. Ní Chinnéide and Cáit Ní Dhonnchadha, like Ní Chinnéide, an Irish-language enthusiast and cultural nationalist, are credited with having created the game, with the assistance of Ní Dhonnchadha’s scholarly brother Tadhg Ó Donnchadha, who drew up its rules. She is on the first camogie team to play an exhibition match in Navan, County Meath, in July 1904, becomes an early propagandist for the game and, in 1905, is elected president of the infant Camogie Association.

Ní Chinnéide later serves as Vice-President of Craobh an Chéitinnigh, to Cathal Brugha. She is active in Cumann na mBan during the Irish War of Independence and takes the pro-treaty side during the Irish Civil War and attempts to set up a woman’s organisation “in support of the Free State” alongside Jennie Wyse Power.

She first visits the Blasket Islands in 1932 with her daughter Niamh, who dies tragically young. In the summer of 1934, she puts the idea into Peig Sayers‘s head to write a memoir. According to a later interview with Ní Chinnéide “she knew and admired her gift for easy conversation, her gracious charm as a hostess, her talent for illustrating a point she was making by a story out of her own experience that was as rich in philosophy and thought as it was limited geographically.” Peig answers that she has “nothing to write.” She had learned only to read and write in English at school and most of it has been forgotten.

Ní Chinnéide suggests Peig should dictate her memoir to her son Micheal, known to everyone on the island as An File (“The Poet”), but Peig “only shook her head doubtfully.” At Christmas, a packet arrives from the Blaskets with a manuscript, she transcribes it word for word and the following summer brings it back to the Blaskets to read it to Peig. She then edits the manuscript for the Talbot Press. Peig becomes well known as a prescribed text on the Leaving Certificate curriculum in Irish.

Ní Chinnéide has an acting part in the first modern play performed in Irish on the stage, Casadh an tSugáin by Douglas Hyde in 1901. She is later author of children’s plays staged by An Comhar Drámuidhachta at the Oireachtas and the Peacock Theatre, of which Gleann na Sidheóg and An Dúthchas (1908) are published. She is a broadcaster in Irish on 2RN, a wholly owned subsidiary of Raidió Teilifís Éireann, after its foundation in 1926 and author of a translation of Grimms’ Fairy Tales (1923). She is president of the Gaelic Players Dramatic group during the 1930s and a founder of the Gaelic Writers Association in 1939.

She soon becomes interested in writing children’s plays, including Gleann na Sidheóg (Fairy Glen, 1905) and Sidheoga na mBláth (Flower Fairies, 1909. Although there is little information available on the staging of her first play, by the time her second children’s play, Sidheóga na mBláth, is published in An Claidheamh Soluis in December 1907, “Éire Óg” (“Young Ireland”) branches of Conradh na Gaeilge have been established in conjunction with adults’ branches. Patrick Pearse in particular voices the expectation that this play will be staged by many “Éire Óg” branches “before the New Year is very old,” thus indicating the immediate take up of such plays. Indeed, a week after the play’s publication, it is staged in the Dominican College in Donnybrook, Dublin, where Ní Chinnéide had spent several years as an Irish teacher.

Ní Chinnéide dies on April 25, 1967, and is buried in Dean’s Grange Cemetery.

In 2007 the camogie trophy (Máire Ní Chinnéide Cup) for the annual inter-county All-Ireland Junior Camogie Championship is named in her honour.

(Pictured: Máire Ní Chinéide at her graduation, photograph from Banba, 1903)


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Birth of Mildred Anne Butler, Animal & Genre Painter

Mildred Anne Butler, Irish artist who works in watercolour and oil of landscape, genre and animal subjects, is born on January 11, 1858, in Kilmurry, a Georgian house near Thomastown, County Kilkenny.

The youngest daughter of Captain Henry Butler, a grandson of the Edmund Butler, 11th Viscount Mountgarret, and Clara Butler (née Taylor) of the Newarke, Leicester, England. Her father is himself an enthusiastic painter, known for his publication South African sketches: illustrative of the wildlife of a hunter on the frontier of Cape Colony (1841). Her early artistic efforts are mainly copies of romantic subjects, but the influence of the London artist Paul Jacob Naftel, with whom she begins corresponding in the early 1880s, proves to be crucial to her artistic development. Studies with William Frank Calderon, an expert in animal painting, are also significant. She subsequently spends the summers of 1894 and 1895 in Newlyn, Cornwall, England, with the Irish artist Norman Garstin, who introduces her to contemporary French painting.

In 1885, Butler makes her first visit to the continent, traveling through France, Switzerland, and Italy. From 1905 to 1914 she travels regularly to Europe, most particularly Aix-les-Bains and Wiesbaden, during which time she produces genre views of French and German villages. After 1914 her life at the family home is interrupted only by visits to London exhibitions. She is best known for her paintings of Kilmurry and its environs, many of which display an interest in botany. Much of her work is dominated by detailed representations of animals and birds, often drawn from photographs and stuffed specimens.

Butler’s career as an exhibitor begins in 1882 with the Irish Fine Arts Society, later known as the Water Colour Society of Ireland (WCSI), with which she has a long association. She exhibits regularly with the society from 1892 onward and is a member of its committee for many years. She is also closely associated with the Dudley Museum and Art Gallery in London. Her work is first shown there in 1888, and on this evidence, she is elected to their society. The purchase by the Chantrey bequest for the Tate Gallery of The Morning Bath for £50 in 1896 is a high point in her career. The first painting by a woman to be selected by the council, its purchase is followed by almost consistently good press reviews for her work. The Athenaeum of May 5, 1897, writes: “The young lady knows how to look at her subjects with the eyes of a well-trained artist.”

Butler also comes to the attention of the American artistic press. She contributes to the portfolio of drawings given by the Society of Lady Artists to Princess May on her marriage to the Duke of York in 1893, while in 1922 her work is included in the portfolio presented to Princess Mary on her marriage. Her patrons include Queen Alexandra, and the grand duke of Hesse, who purchases two of her paintings after she is invited to exhibit in Hesse Darmstadt in 1911. In 1914 she is made a member of the Union Internationale des Beaux Arts, and in 1921 her paintings are shown in Japan. She regularly exhibits with the Belfast Ramblers, the Royal Ulster Academy, the Royal Academy of Arts (RA), the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), the Society of Lady Artists, and the Royal Watercolour Society, of which she is made an associate member in 1896, and a full member in 1937.

In her later years, severe rheumatism prevents Butler from painting. She has a keen interest in music. She survives all five of her siblings, and inherits Kilmurry, where she dies on October 11, 1941. She is buried at Thomastown, County Kilkenny. Her paintings are represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane, the Ulster Museum, and the Tate, London.

(From: “Butler, Mildred Anne” by Frances Clarke, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Death of Frank Fay, Actor & Co-founder of the Abbey Theatre

Frank J. (Francis John) Fay, actor, theatrical producer and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, dies on January 2, 1931.

Fay is born on August 30, 1870, at 10 Lower Dorset Street, Dublin, the eldest son of four children of William Patrick Fay, a government clerk, and his wife, Martha Fay (née Dowling). He is educated at Belvedere College, Dublin, where he learns shorthand and typing, before leaving to become a secretary for an accountancy firm in Dublin. From an early age he has a passion for the theatre and immerses himself in books on the subject, becoming a drama expert. His brother, William George Fay, shares his enthusiasm and they take part in many amateur productions, setting up the Ormonde Dramatic Company in 1891.

Fay is an ardent nationalist, and Arthur Griffith appoints him drama critic for his newspaper, the United Irishman (1899–1902), where he develops his ideas on how the theatre should be run. Initially in favour of plays in the Irish language, he soon abandons this as unworkable. In May 1901 he attacks W. B. Yeats for his faulty notions about theatre and even his work as a dramatist, ending with the fiercely nationalistic assertion that “there is a herd of Saxon and other swine fattening on us. They must be swept into the sea with the pestilent breed of West Britons with which we are troubled, or they will sweep us there.” Yeats’s and Lady Gregory‘s next play is Cathleen ni Houlihan.

In 1902, Fay writes a famous article advocating a national theatre company that will “be the nursery of an Irish dramatic literature which, while making a world-wide appeal, would see life through Irish eyes.” He is a member of his brother’s National Dramatic Society, which merges with the Irish Literary Theatre in 1902 to form the Irish National Theatre Society, the originating body of the Abbey Theatre. The following year Yeats declares that the national theatre owes its existence to the two Fay brothers. Fay soon abandons Griffith and begins to champion the cause of Yeats.

An excellent tragic actor, Fay can make audiences forget his less than five feet six-inch stature through the power of his voice. When the Abbey Theatre opens on December 27, 1904, he stars in Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand as Cú Chulainn, a role he makes his own. He spends much time training the other actors. As an elocution teacher he has no equal. One play has Yeats leaving with his “head on fire” because of the quality of the voices on stage. Yeats dedicates his play The King’s Threshold (1904) with the words: “In memory of Frank Fay and his beautiful speaking in the character of Seanchan.”

Fay has a close but turbulent relationship with his brother William, whom he defers to in all theatrical matters except acting. Their heated arguments sometimes lead to blows. His temper is always volatile, and he is prone to histrionics and fits of depression. After 1905, the Abbey Theatre becomes a limited company owing to the patronage of Annie Horniman, and the Fays lose most of their control, which results in much tension and bitterness. In 1907, Fay plays Shawn Keogh in the first production of The Playboy of the Western World by John Millington Synge.

Disagreements with Yeats over the approach to choosing and staging of plays comes to a head late in late 1907 and the Fays resign on January 13, 1908. On March 13 they are suspended from the Irish National Theatre Society. They tour the United States with Charles Frohman before separating. Fay then tours England in minor Shakespearean roles and melodrama. Between 1912 and 1914, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Mary Plunkett attempt to persuade him to become actor-manager of an Irish theatre. In 1918 he returns to the Abbey Theatre in two short-lived revivals of Yeats’s The Hour Glass and The King’s Threshold. He retires to Dublin permanently in 1921, teaching elocution and directing plays in local colleges.

Fay marries, in 1912, Freda, known as “Bird.” They live at Upper Mount Street, Dublin, and have one son, Gerard, who becomes a popular writer and memoirist. Fay dies on January 2, 1931, having never really recovered from the death of his wife, and is buried at Glasnevin Cemetery. He is credited with creating the Abbey Theatre style of acting, which becomes internationally known, and influences many other schools of acting. He wanted actors to behave as naturally as possible and to speak the lines as people would in real life, rather than with an exaggerated stage delivery. His training is a major influence on subsequent generations, as actors learned to “speak words with quiet force, like feathers borne on puffs of wind.”

(From: “Fay, Frank J. (Francis John)” by Patrick M. Geoghegan, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009) | Pictured: Portrait of Frank Fay by John Butler Yeats, commissioned by Annie Horniman for the opening of the Abbey Theatre, December 27, 1904)


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Birth of Richard Orpen, Architect, Painter & Illustrator

Richard Francis Caulfield Orpen, Irish architect, painter, illustrator and designer, is born on December 24, 1863.

Orpen is born to Anne (née Caulfield) and Arthur Herbert Orpen, a solicitor of Oriel, Blackrock, Dublin. His maternal grandfather is the Bishop of Nassau, Charles Caulfield. He is the eldest of four brothers and two sisters. His youngest brother is William, the painter. He attends St. Columba’s College in Whitechurch, Dublin, and graduates from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) with a BA in 1885. While attending St. Columba’s, he publishes an Irish comic alphabet for the present times in 1881, which is a mix of cartoons and verse mocking Charles Stewart Parnell and the home rule movement.

Orpen wants to pursue painting, but “for family reasons” he becomes an architect. He spends eleven years with Thomas Drew, initially as a pupil, and later as a managing assistant from 1885 to 1892. From around 1884, he attends the annual excursions of the English Architectural Association. Around 1890, he establishes his own architectural practice in Drew’s offices at 22 Clare Street, Dublin. In 1896, he moves his office to 7 Leinster Street. In 1888 he is elected as a member of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI), serving as a council member from 1902 to 1910, as honorary secretary from 1903 to 1905, and as president from 1914 to 1917. He designs the institute’s official seal in 1909. In 1904, the Irish Builder describes him as the “originator of the bungalow in Ireland.”

From 1888, Orpen exhibits with the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), with watercolours and architectural drawings. He continues to exhibit with them until 1936. He collaborates with Percy French on a number of projects, including illustrating Racquetry Rhymes (1888) and The First Lord Liftinant and Other Tales (1890). He provides cartoons for French’s periodical, The Jarvey. His architectural illustrations are included in H. Goldsmith Whitton’s Handbook of the Irish Parliament Houses… (1891). He is one of the original members of the Architectural Association of Ireland, serving as its first president in 1896, and as vice-president in 1910.

Orpen is appointed the architect to St. Columba’s from 1897 to 1938, following a fire at the college in 1896. He becomes a fellow of the college, and the sanatorium becomes known as the Orpen building. He is an active member of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland, serving as secretary in 1895, on the committee in 1904, and in 1917 sits on the organising committee for the fifth exhibition. In 1906, he is a founding member of the Arts Club. In 1906 he moves his architectural practice to 13 South Frederick Street, and moves into a house he designed, Coologe, Carrickmines, County Dublin.

At the 1907 Irish International Exhibition, Dublin, Orpen exhibits a number of chalk drawings. The same year he designs the cover of a satirical pamphlet, The Abbey row, not edited by W. B. Yeats, which mocks The Arrow and the riots at the first production of The Playboy of the Western World. He unveils a bust of Hugh Lane at the opening of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art on Harcourt Street in 1908. He is appointed secretary to the municipal gallery committee by Lane. In 1910, he is appointed architect to Christ Church Cathedral, as well as architect to St. Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. In 1911 he is elected an associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy, a full member in 1912, and was the academy’s secretary from 1925 to 1937.

From 1910 to 1914, Orpen is in an architectural partnership with Page Dickinson, with the two collaborating on plans for the new Dublin municipal gallery and conversion of the Turkish Baths, Lincoln Place. Lane rejects his and Dickinson’s gallery plans, leading to him refusing to work with Lane’s choice of architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens. In 1914, he is appointed a guardian of the National Gallery of Ireland, and lectures at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art on architectural history in 1914 and 1915. He is involved in the design of a number of memorials including the setting for a bronze relief by Beatrice Campbell for the members of the Royal Irish Regiment killed in the Second Boer War and the war memorial at the Rathgar Methodist church. He serves as president of the arts and crafts section of the Royal Dublin Society (RDS). He is also a governor of the Royal National Hospital for Consumption for Ireland in Newcastle, County Wicklow.

Orpen marries Violet Caulfield in 1900. They are both descended from William Caulfeild, 1st Viscount Charlemont. He dies on March 27, 1938, at his home, Coologe, and is buried in Dean’s Grange Cemetery.

Orpen features as one of the many portraits in Seán Keating‘s Homage to Sir Hugh Lane. St. Columba’s College holds a portrait of Orpen by his brother, William, as well as a memorial stained-glass window to him by Catherine O’Brien.