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Category Archives: Union with Great Britain (1801-1912)


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Death of Sir James Charles Mathew, Barrister & Judge

Sir James Charles Mathew, barrister and judge, dies in London on November 9, 1908.

Mathew is born on July 10, 1830, at Lehenagh House, County Cork, eldest son of Charles Mathew, gentleman, of Lehenagh House and Castlelake, County Tipperary, and his wife Mary, daughter of James Hackett of Cork. He is of a Roman Catholic family and his uncle is Fr. Theobald Mathew, the temperance movement campaigner. His initial education is at a private school in Cork. He enters Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in July 1845, graduating BA (1850) as a gold medalist and senior moderator. In Hilary term 1850 he is admitted to the King’s Inns in Dublin. He moves to London, entering Lincoln’s Inn on June 1, 1851, and is called to the English bar in Hilary term 1854.

Mathew is a founding member of the Hardwicke Society, a legal debating society, and builds up a substantial practice as a junior barrister, being much in demand as counsel for jury cases in the Guildhall sittings. Despite being highly regarded by his peers, a certain lack of confidence holds him back and even when vacancies arise, he does not apply to be made a Queen’s Counsel (QC). In 1873, however, he represents the treasury as a junior counsel in the prosecution of the Tichborne claimant, Arthur Orton, in one of the most celebrated legal cases of the day. He is the only counsel for the treasury who does not get into heated arguments in court with Orton’s leading council, Dr. Edward Vaughan Hyde Kenealy.

Mathew possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of legal procedure and in 1881 is made a bencher at Lincoln’s Inn and awarded an honorary doctorate by TCD. Although still only a junior counsel he is appointed a judge in the Queen’s Bench Division in March 1881 and knighted. After the return to office of the Liberal Party in August 1892 he becomes chairman of the commission established to investigate the state of evicted tenants in Ireland. His appointment is perhaps unfortunate, as he is a home ruler in politics and the home rule MP John Dillon is his son-in-law. When the commission begins its hearings on November 7, 1892, he announces that he will not allow witnesses to be cross-examined. This provokes protests from Edward Carson, who had recently been replaced as solicitor general for Ireland. Counsel is ordered to withdraw and eventually two members of the commission resign, while the landlords refuse to cooperate with the proceedings. Despite severe criticism, many of the commission’s recommendations are incorporated in the Wyndham Land Purchase Act of 1903.

Throughout his legal career, Mathew argues for the establishment of a separate commercial court and eventually succeeds in convincing the other members of the bench and also Lord Russell of Killowen, who is appointed Lord Chief Justice in 1894, that such a court be established. As a result of this, he is appointed as the first judge of the Commercial Court when it is set up in 1895. In 1901 he is made a privy councilor and appointed judge in the Court of Appeal.

On December 6, 1905, Mathew is seized with a paralytic stroke at the Athenaeum Club in London, and his resignation is announced on the following day. On November 9, 1908, he dies at his London home, 46 Queen’s Gate Gardens. His remains are returned to Ireland, where they are interred in St. Joseph’s Cemetery, Cork.

Mathew marries Elizabeth Blackmore, eldest daughter of the Rev. Edwin Biron, JP and vicar of Lympne near Hythe, Kent, in December 1861. They have two sons and three daughters. His eldest daughter, Elizabeth Mathew, marries John Dillon. A portrait of Sir James Charles Mathew, by Frank Holl, is in the possession of the family. In 1896 a cartoon portrait of him by ‘Spy’ appears in Vanity Fair.

(From: “Mathew, Sir James Charles” by David Murphy, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie | Pictured: Sir James Charles Mathew by Alexander Bassano, half-plate glass negative, 1883, National Portrait Gallery, London)


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Birth of Alice Curtayne, Writer & Lecturer

Alice Curtayne, Irish writer and lecturer, is born on November 6, 1898, in Upper Castle Street, Tralee, County Kerry.

Curtayne is the youngest child of John Curtayne, founder and proprietor of the Tralee Carriage Works, and his wife Bridget Curtayne (née O’Dwyer). She receives her initial education at local convents before attending La Sainte Union College in Southampton, England. Having taken a typing course, she is engaged as a secretary in Milan, where she remains for four and a half years. This proves to be a formative period in her life. She comes to regard Italy as a second home and is greatly influenced by the work of the Italian Catholic philosopher, Giovanni Papini.

On leaving Italy Curtayne works for a time in Liverpool. She joins the Liverpool Catholic Evidence Guild, from where she receives her diploma as a diocesan catechist. While in England she also develops an interest in public speaking. Her first book, Catherine of Siena (1929), is followed by numerous publications on religious and historical subjects, including Lough Derg (1933), Patrick Sarsfield (1934), The Trial of Oliver Plunkett (1953), Twenty Tales of Irish Saints for children (1955), and The Irish Story (1962).

Curtayne’s enthusiasm for Italy is reflected in her many publications of Italian interest, including a scholarly work on Dante, and a novel House of Cards (1940), which centres on the experiences of a young Irish woman living in Italy. In 1972 she produces Francis Ledwidge: A Life of the Poet, her well regarded biography of the poet Francis Ledwidge, and in 1974 it is followed by an edition of his complete poems, The Complete Works of Francis Ledwidge. Throughout her journalistic career she is a contributor to various magazines and papers, among them The Irish Times, Irish Independent, The Irish Press, Books on Trial, The Spectator, and The Standard.

During the 1950s and early 1960s Curtayne makes five lecture tours in the United States, speaking on Irish life, history, and literature. In 1959 she receives an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from Anna Maria College in Paxton, Massachusetts, where she briefly teaches. She is presented with the Key to Worcester City by Mayor James D. O’Brien. She also gives a course of lectures on Dante at Craiglockhart College, Edinburgh, in 1956, and in 1965 she again speaks on Dante in a Radio Éireann Thomas Davis lecture.

In December 1954 The Irish Press sends Curtayne to Rome to write daily reports on the close of the Marian year. She goes to Rome again for the final session of the Second Vatican Council. She is commissioned to send weekly reports to local newspapers, The Nationalist (Carlow) and The Kerryman. She also sends a series of profiles of outstanding personages of this Vatican Council to The Universe and an article for Hibernia journal.

In 1935, Curtayne marries the English-born writer and broadcaster Stephen Rynne, with whom she has two sons and two daughters. They run a farm at Prosperous, County Kildare, and are well known advocates of the values of rural living. One son, Andrew Rynne, becomes a medical practitioner and well known for his liberal views on birth control. Daughter Brigid Rynne later illustrates some of her mother’s books.

Curtayne dies on August 9, 1981, in the Hazel Hall Nursing Home in Clane, County Kildare, and is buried at Killybegs Cemetery.


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Birth of Charlotte O’Conor Eccles, Writer, Translator & Journalist

Charlotte O’Conor Eccles, Irish writer, translator and journalist, is born in County Roscommon on November 1, 1863. She spends her working life in London. Aliens of the West (1904) is said to be among “the best modern books of short stories on Ireland yet written.”

Eccles is the fourth daughter of Alexander O’Conor Eccles of Ballingard House, the founder of a home-rule newspaper, The Roscommon Messenger. She attends a Catholic grammar school, Upton Hall School FCJ, near Birkenhead and convents in Paris and Germany.

Eccles later lives in London with her mother and sister where, after a number of setbacks, she becomes a journalist in the London office of the New York Herald. She goes on to become a staff member of the Daily Chronicle and the Star. She comments in an article in the June 1893 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine on “the immense difficulty a woman finds in getting into an office in any recognised capacity,”

Eccles joins the agricultural reformer Sir Horace Plunkett in writing and lecturing around Ireland for the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction. Another of her Blackwood’s Magazine articles, in December 1888, covers “Irish Housekeeping and Irish Customs in the Last Century.”

Her first novel, The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore (Jarrold & Sons, 1897), is published in 1897 under the male pseudonym Hal Godfrey: “This hilarious novel tells of a middle-aged woman who drinks too much of an elixir of youth, causing pandemonium in the…boarding-house where she lives with her sister.” She also contributes to a number of periodicals, including the Irish Monthly, The Pall Mall Magazine, the American Ecclesiastical Review and The Windsor Magazine.

Eccles’s other books include Aliens of the West (Cassell, 1904) and The Matrimonial Lottery (Eveleigh Nash, 1906). An obituary in The Times describes Aliens of the West as “one of the best modern books of short stories on Ireland yet written.”

Eccles dies unmarried on June 14, 1911, at her home in St. John’s Wood, London, of cerebral thrombosis after a reported nervous breakdown.


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Birth of Thomas MacGreevy, Poet & Former Director of the National Gallery of Ireland

Thomas MacGreevy, a pivotal figure in the history of Irish literary modernism, is born on October 26, 1893, in Tarbert, County Kerry. A poet, he is also director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963 and serves on the first Irish Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon).

MacGreevy is the son of a policeman and a primary school teacher. At age 16, he joins the British Civil Service as a boy clerk.

At the outbreak of World War I, MacGreevy is promoted to an intelligence post with the Admiralty. He enlists in 1916 and sees active service at the Ypres Salient and the Somme, being wounded twice. After the war, he studies at Trinity College, Dublin, in whose library his papers are now held. He then becomes involved in various library organisations, begins publishing articles in Irish periodicals, and writes his first poems.

In 1924, MacGreevy is first introduced to James Joyce in Paris. The following year he moves to London, where he meets T. S. Eliot and begins writing for The Criterion and other magazines. He also begins publishing his poetry.

In 1927, MacGreevy moves to Paris to teach English at the École normale supérieure. Here he meets Samuel Beckett and resumes his friendship with Joyce. His essay The Catholic Element in Work In Progress is published in 1929 in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work In Progress, a book intended to help promote Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Along with Beckett, he is one of those who signs the Poetry is Vertical manifesto which appears in issue 21 of transition. In 1931, he produces critical studies of both Eliot and Richard Aldington.

In 1934, Poems is published in London and New York City. The work shows that MacGreevy has absorbed the lessons of Imagism and of The Waste Land, but also demonstrates that he has brought something of his own to these influences. The book is admired by Wallace Stevens and the two poets become regular correspondents.

Unfortunately, although MacGreevy continues to write poetry, this is the only collection published in his lifetime. Since his death there have been two Collected Poems issued, one in 1971 and an edited edition collecting his published and unpublished poetry published twenty years later.

In 1929 MacGreevy begins working at Formes, a journal of the fine arts. He also publishes a translation of Paul Valéry‘s Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci as Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci. In the mid-1930s, he moves back to London and earns his living lecturing at the National Gallery there.

From 1938 to 1940 MacGreevy is the chief art critic for The Studio. He publishes several books on art and artists, including Jack B. Yeats: An Appreciation and an Interpretation and Pictures in the Irish National Gallery (both 1945), and Nicolas Poussin (1960).

MacGreevy is a lifelong Roman Catholic. His faith informs both his poetry and his professional life. On returning to Dublin during World War II, he writes for both the Father Mathew Record and the Capuchin Annual and joins the editorial board of the latter.

MacGreevy is director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950–63. Although to many he seems a surprising choice, his latent talents as an administrator are brought to the fore. He is instrumental in bringing to the gallery such ideas as a lecture series and in-house restoration, which are commonplace abroad. It is through his persistent requests to the government that an extension to the gallery is approved. Unfortunately, the demands of the position take its toll. He has two heart attacks in 1956 and 1957 and ill health forces him to retire in 1963.

During his last years MacGreevy begins writing poetry again. He also begins his memoirs, which he never completes. He is admitted to the Portobello Nursing Home in Dublin for what is to be a minor operation in March 1967. He dies from heart failure on Saint Patrick’s Day eve, March 16, 1967.


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Birth of William Smith O’Brien, Young Ireland Leader

William Smith O’Brien, Irish nationalist Member of Parliament (MP) and leader of the Young Ireland movement, is born in Dromoland, Newmarket-on-Fergus, County Clare, on October 17, 1803.

O’Brien is the second son of Sir Edward O’Brien, 4th Baronet, of Dromoland Castle. His mother is Charlotte Smith, whose father owns a property called Cahirmoyle in County Limerick. He takes the additional surname Smith, his mother’s maiden name, upon inheriting the property. He lives at Cahermoyle House, a mile from Ardagh, County Limerick. He is a descendant of the eleventh century Ard Rí (High King of Ireland), Brian Boru. He receives an upper-class English education at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge. Subsequently, he studies law at King’s Inns in Dublin and Lincoln’s Inn in London.

From April 1828 to 1831 O’Brien is Conservative MP for Ennis. He becomes MP for Limerick County in 1835, holding his seat in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom until 1849.

Although a Protestant country-gentleman, O’Brien supports Catholic emancipation while remaining a supporter of British-Irish union. In 1843, in protest against the imprisonment of Daniel O’Connell, he joins O’Connell’s anti-union Repeal Association.

Three years later, O’Brien withdraws the Young Irelanders from the association. In January 1847, with Thomas Francis Meagher, he founds the Irish Confederation, although he continues to preach reconciliation until O’Connell’s death in May 1847. He is active in seeking relief from the hardships of the famine. In March 1848, he speaks out in favour of a National Guard and tries to incite a national rebellion. He is tried for sedition on May 15, 1848 but is not convicted.

On July 29, 1848, O’Brien and other Young Irelanders lead landlords and tenants in a rising in three counties, with an almost bloodless battle against police at Ballingarry, County Tipperary. In O’Brien’s subsequent trial, the jury finds him guilty of high treason. He is sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Petitions for clemency are signed by 70,000 people in Ireland and 10,000 people in England. In Dublin on June 5, 1849, the sentences of O’Brien and other members of the Irish Confederation are commuted to transportation for life to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania in present-day Australia).

O’Brien attempts to escape from Maria Island off Tasmania, but is betrayed by the captain of the schooner hired for the escape. He is sent to Port Arthur where he meets up with John Mitchel.

O’Brien is a founding member of the Ossianic Society, which is founded in Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day 1853, whose aim is to further the interests of the Irish language and to publish and translate literature relating to the Fianna. He writes to his son Edward from Van Diemen’s Land, urging him to learn the Irish language. He himself studies the language and uses an Irish-language Bible, and presents to the Royal Irish Academy Irish-language manuscripts he has collected.

In 1854, after five years in Tasmania, O’Brien is released on the condition he never returns to Ireland. He settles in Brussels. In May 1856, he is granted an unconditional pardon and returns to Ireland that July. He contributes to The Nation newspaper, but plays no further part in politics.

In 1864 he visits England and Wales, with the view of rallying his failing health, but no improvement takes place and he dies in Bangor, Gwynedd, Wales on June 18, 1864.

A statue of William Smith O’Brien stands in O’Connell Street, Dublin. Sculpted in Portland limestone, it is designed by Thomas Farrell and erected in D’Olier Street, Dublin, in 1870. It is moved to its present position in 1929.

(Pictured: Portrait of William Smith O’Brien by George Francis Mulvany, National Gallery of Ireland)


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Birth of Archie Doyle, Anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army Member

Archie Doyle, one of three anti-Treaty members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) who assassinated the Irish Minister for Justice Kevin O’Higgins, is born on September 29, 1903. He has a long subsequent career in the organisation’s ranks.

Doyle fights in the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) and takes the anti-Treaty side in the Irish Civil War (1922-23) and is subsequently interned among numerous others. Together with two fellow-detainees, Timothy Coughlin and Bill Gannon, he takes part in forming a secret “vengeance grouping.” The three vow that once free of imprisonment they will take revenge on their opponents, whom they consider traitors to the Irish cause.

Most such private revenge pacts are broken up by the IRA leadership when it reorganises following 1924, but Doyle and his two fellow conspirators persist and carry through their deadly aim. On July 10, 1927, the three surprised O’Higgins on his way to Mass at the Booterstown Avenue side of Cross Avenue in Blackrock, Dublin, and shoot him down.

O’Higgins is especially hated by IRA members for having ordered the executions of seventy-seven of their fellows during the Civil War, an act for which he outspokenly takes responsibility and refuses to express any remorse. Moreover, he is a dominant member of the Irish Free State government, and the conspirators have good reasons to believe that his death would weaken it.

The three make their escape and are not apprehended. However, Timothy Coughlin is shot to death by police informer Sean Harling on the night of January 28, 1928, on Dublin’s Dartry Road, under circumstances which remain controversial up to the present. A second IRA man is known to have been with Coughlin that night, in surveillance of Harling’s home, and escapes unharmed. It is believed that Doyle is that second man, though this point, as many other details of this still rather mysterious affair, remains not quite certain.

Doyle is among the beneficiaries of the amnesty issued by Éamon de Valera when he comes to power in 1932, under which numerous IRA men are released from prison and the charges against others dropped. In later times Doyle openly admits his part in the killing of O’Higgins, and indeed takes pride in it, without fear of prosecution.

With the end of the IRA’s alliance with de Valera and the increasing confrontation between them, Doyle, now a veteran highly respected in the IRA circles, becomes deeply involved in the organisation’s 1940s campaigns. Harry, the memoirs of IRA man Harry White, make repeated admiring references to “Archie Doyle of Dublin, the Tan War veteran who had fought through it all.”

During the IRA’s Northern campaign, Doyle is said to have participated in the abortive raid on the British barracks at Crossmaglen, County Armagh, on September 2, 1942, in retaliation for the execution of Tom Williams earlier that morning. The IRA unit, some twenty men in a commandeered lorry and accompanying car, is discovered by a passing Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) patrol near the village of Cullaville. Doyle is mentioned in White’s memoirs as having “jumped out of the car, Thompson in hand, and started shooting at the RUC.” Since the element of surprise is lost, the attack on the barracks has to be cancelled.

A week later, on September 9, White mentions Doyle as having commanded the assassination of Sergeant Denis O’Brien, Irish Special Branch detective and himself a former IRA man, near Dublin. It is a highly controversial affair, opposed by the IRA GHQ in Belfast as damaging to the Northern campaign, and precipitates a massive manhunt by the Irish police. It is IRA Chief of Staff Charlie Kerins who is caught two years later, charged with the O’Brien assassination and eventually executed for it. White, however, claims that it is Doyle who actually commands that action, on Kerins’s orders. Doyle, who openly spoke of his part in killing O’Higgins, seems far more reticent about this part of his career.

In 1943 Doyle is assigned as the IRA’s Quartermaster General in Belfast.

On July 1, 1943, Doyle is mentioned as having participated, together with Kerins and with Jackie Griffith, in an operation of “fund-raising” for the hard-pressed IRA (i.e., robbery). The three men arrive on bikes at the gates of Player Wills factory on the South Circular Road, Dublin, and with scarves around their faces stop at gunpoint a van loaded with some £5,000 for wages and drive away with the van and the money.

Griffith is shot down by the police in Dublin less than a week later, in what is charged to be an extrajudicial assassination, and Kerins is caught in 1944 and executed, becoming a major IRA martyr. Doyle, however, continually survives decades of a very dangerous way of life and manages to die of old age. He dies in St. James’s Hospital in Dublin in 1980.


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Death of Charles Bianconi, Italo-Irish Entrepreneur

Charles Bianconi, Italo-Irish passenger car entrepreneur, dies on September 22, 1875, at Longfield House, Boherlahan, County Tipperary. Sometimes described as the “man who put Ireland on wheels,” he develops a network of horse-drawn coaches that become Ireland’s “first regular public transport” system.

Bianconi is born Carlo Bianconi in Tregolo, Costa Masnaga, Italy on September 24, 1786. He moves from an area poised to fall to Napoleon and travels to Ireland in 1802, by way of England, just four years after the Irish Rebellion of 1798. At the time, British fear of continental invasion results in an acute sense of insecurity and additional restrictions on the admission of foreigners. He is christened Carlo but anglicises his name to Charles when he arrives in Ireland.

Bianconi works as an engraver and printseller in Dublin, near Essex Street, under his sponsor, Andrea Faroni, when he is sixteen. In 1806 he sets up an engraving and print shop in Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, moving to Clonmel in 1815.

Bianconi eventually becomes famous for his innovations in transport and is twice elected mayor of Clonmel.

Bianconi is the founder of public transportation in Ireland, at a time preceding railways. He establishes regular horse-drawn carriage services on various routes from about 1815 onward. These are known as “Bianconi coaches” and the first service, Clonmel to Cahir, takes five to eight hours by boat but only two hours by Bianconi’s carriage. Travel on one of his carriages cost one penny farthing a mile.

Bianconi also establishes a series of inns, the Bianconi Inns, some of which still exist in Piltown, County Kilkenny and Killorglin, County Kerry.

In 1832 Bianconi marries Eliza Hayes, the daughter of a wealthy Dublin stockbroker. They have three children – Charles Thomas Bianconi, Catherine Henrietta Bianconi and Mary Anne Bianconi, who marries Morgan John O’Connell and is the mother of his grandson John O’Connell Bianconi.

Bianconi’s transport services continue into the 1850s and later, by which time there are a number of railway services in the country. The Bianconi coaches continue to be well-patronised, by offering connections from various termini, one of the first and few examples of an integrated transport system in Ireland. By 1865 Bianconi’s annual income was about £35,000.

Charles Bianconi dies on September 22, 1875, at Longfield House, Boherlahan, County Tipperary. Having donated land to the parish of Boherlahan for the construction of a parish church, he wishes to be buried on the Church grounds. He, and his family, are buried in a side chapel, separate from the parish church in Boherlahan, approximately five miles from Cashel, County Tipperary.


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Birth of Mike Quill, Irish-American Trade Unionist

Michael Joseph “Red Mike” Quill, one of the founders of the Transport Workers Union of America (TWU), a union founded by subway workers in New York City that expands to represent employees in other forms of transit, is born on September 18, 1905, in Gortloughera, near Kilgarvan, County Kerry.

Quill is the seventh among five sons and three daughters of John Daniel Quill, farmer, of Gortloughera, and Margaret Quill (née Lynch), of Ballyvourney, County Cork. He attends Kilgarvan national school until early adolescence. The family has strong republican sympathies, and he serves with an Irish Republican Army (IRA) flying column during the Irish Civil War.

In 1926, Quill emigrates to New York City. After a series of brief jobs, in 1929 he secures employment with the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) as a subway station change-maker. Attracted to socialism and militant industrial unionism by his reading of James Connolly, in 1933 he is one of a small group of workers seeking to initiate a trade union independent of the IRT’s complacent company union. Comprised largely of ex-IRA men linked by membership of Clan na Gael and the leftist Irish Workers’ Clubs, his group soon joins forces with a New York transit-industry organising effort by the Communist Party, resulting in the launch in April 1934 of the Transport Workers Union (TWU).

With a convivial personality and a flair for oratory, Quill quickly emerges as one of the union’s most effective organisers. During 1935 he leaves his IRT job to work full-time as union organiser. In December 1935 he is elected TWU president, a position he holds until his death. By autumn 1936 the TWU has established a solid base on the IRT and intensifies organisation on New York’s other transit lines: subways, buses, elevated trains, and trolleys. In May 1937 the TWU affiliates with the incipient Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). After winning, mostly by large majorities, a series of union representation elections in May–June 1937, the TWU negotiates closed-shop contracts with various New York transit companies, obtaining for its 30,000 members substantial wage increases and benefits and a work-week reduction to forty-eight hours. The ethnic profile of the TWU, which is colloquially nicknamed “the Irish union,” reflects that of New York’s transit workforce, about half of which is Irish born.

First elected to the New York City Council in November 1937 as candidate of the American Labor Party, Quill serves on the body intermittently until 1949. After 1940 he leads the TWU into expansion outside New York, organising in mass transit in other cities, in airlines, and in railroads. Despite modest membership numbers (135,000 by the mid-1960s), the TWU is the United States‘ largest transit union, and Quill maintains a high public profile, owing to his union’s situation in a key economic sector, its base in the country’s largest city, and the colourful and the controversial features of his personality and politics. The 1940 municipal buy-out of New York’s private subway companies and subsequent evolution of a unified civically operated transport system precipitates a lengthy TWU struggle to establish collective bargaining rights and procedures for the transport workforce as public employees. This campaign, by setting precedents for public-sector union organisation nation-wide, marks Quill’s most enduring legacy to the American labour movement.

Quill denies repeated charges that he is a Communist, while retorting that he would “rather be called a Red by the rats than a rat by the Reds.” Communists hold influential positions at all levels in the TWU until the union’s December 1948 convention, when, after months of rancorous conflict over policy, he secures the expulsion from union office of all Communist Party members. His own politics, nevertheless, remain conspicuously leftist in the America of the 1950s and 1960s, as he condemns both the McCarthyite anti-Red witch-hunt and the Vietnam War. Elected a CIO vice-president in 1950, he eschews redefinition as “a labour statesman,” and advocates a national labour party and nationalisation of major industries. A strenuous opponent of racial discrimination by employers and within trade-union structures, he actively supports the black civil rights movement. He is the only top CIO official to oppose its 1955 merger with the conservative, craft-dominated American Federation of Labor (AFL), which he accuses of “the three Rs” of raiding, racketeering, and racism.

Quill’s final battle is his most dramatic. On January 1, 1966, he defies public-sector anti-strike legislation and a court injunction and leads TWU Local 100 into the first total subway-and-bus strike in New York City history, paralysing traffic for twelve days. Arrested on January 4, Quill, who has a history of serious heart disease, collapses during admission to prison and is transferred to hospital under police custody. On January 13 the strike is settled with a 15 percent wage increase, the highest of Quill’s TWU presidency. On January 28, several days after discharge from hospital, he dies of heart failure in his home. He is interred at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York, after a funeral Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, his casket draped by the Irish tricolor.

Speaking after his death, Martin Luther King Jr. eulogises Quill with the following: “Mike Quill was a fighter for decent things all his life—Irish independence, labor organization, and racial equality. He spent his life ripping the chains of bondage off his fellowman. When the totality of a man’s life is consumed with enriching the lives of others, this is a man the ages will remember—this is a man who has passed on but who has not died. Negroes had desperately needed men like Mike Quill who fearlessly said what was true even when it offended. That is why Negroes shall miss Mike Quill.”

Quill marries Maria Theresa O’Neill of Cahersiveen, County Kerry, in 1937. They have one son. Maria dies in 1959. He then marries Shirley Garry (née Uzin) of Brooklyn, New York, his long-serving administrative assistant, in 1961. They have no children. The Michael J. Quill Centre at Ardtully, Kilgarvan, County Kerry, houses a commemorative museum.

(From: “Quill, Michael Joseph” by Lawrence William White, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie | Pictured: Irish-American Trade Unionist Mike Quill during a visit to the White House in 1938)


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Birth of Frank Ryan, Politician, Journalist & Paramilitary Activist

Frank Ryan, politician, journalist, intelligence agent and paramilitary activist, is born in the townland of Bottomstown, Elton, County Limerick, on September 11, 1902. A fascinating, somewhat mythical figure, he lives during turbulent times when Ireland finally disposes of tyrannical British rule in Ireland and becomes an icon for socialist republicans in Europe during the 1930s and 40s.

Ryan’s parents, Vere Foster Ryan and Annie Slattery, are National School teachers at Bottomstown with a taste for Irish traditional music, and they live in a house full of books. He attends St. Colman’s College, Fermoy. From then on, he is devoted to the restoration of the Irish language. He studies Celtic Studies at University College Dublin (UCD), where he is a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) training corps. He serves as a flying column member during the murderous Irish War of Independence (1919-21), thereby interrupting his studies. He leaves UCD before graduating to join the IRA’s East Limerick Brigade in 1922.

Ryan fights on the Anti-Treaty side in the Irish Civil War (1922-23) and is wounded and interned. In November 1923 he is released and returns to UCD. He secures his degree in Celtic Studies and further secures the editorship of An Phoblacht (The Republic), the newspaper of the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA).

The split in the Irish independence party, Sinn Féin, results in regular fist fights between pro and anti-Treaty forces. Cumann na nGaedhael, the pro-Treaty political party in government, recruits the Army Comrades Association (Blueshirts) under former Garda Commissioner Eoin O’Duffy to protect their members from anti-Treaty IRA protesters at annual Armistice Day and Wolfe Tone commemorations. Ryan is a forceful orator at these events and is frequently arrested and beaten up by the Gardai. The fractious politics results in Dáil members Sean Hales and Kevin O’Higgins being shot dead in public.

Ryan resigns from the IRA and founds the Republican Congress with Peadar O’Donnell and George Gilmore. Worker’s strikes unite Northern Protestant and Southern Catholic workers protesting against low wages and long hours.

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) inspires Ryan to lead the first contingent of Irish volunteers to support the Popular Front government of Republican Spain. A brave and inspiring leader, he serves with Italian and German Republican divisions. He is seriously wounded at the Battle of Jarama in February 1937. Following recuperation in Ireland, he is appointed adjutant to republican General José Miaja. During the Aragon Offensive he is captured with 150 of his men in April 1938 and sentenced to death. Irish President, Éamon de Valera, intervenes with General Francisco Franco and Ryan’s sentence is commuted to thirty years. His health suffers severely in Burgos Prison, Spain during his two-year incarceration.

Franco refuses to release Ryan because he is considered his most dangerous prisoner. In August 1940 he is transferred to Berlin, where he is re-united with IRA Chief of Staff Seán Russell. An attempt to return both men to Ireland by U-boat ends with Russell dying from a perforated ulcer. Ryan voluntarily returns to Germany where he serves as the unofficial IRA ambassador for German intelligence. Irishman Francis Stuart, son-in-law of Maud Gonne, who writes some of William Joyce’s propaganda, takes good care of Ryan until his untimely death at a hospital in Loschwitz in Dresden on June 10, 1944.

Ryan’s funeral in Dresden is attended by Elizabeth Clissmann, wife of Helmut Clissmann, and Francis Stuart. Clissmann eventually forwards details of Ryan’s fate to Leopold Kerney in Madrid. According to Stuart and Clissmann, the cause of death is pleurisy and pneumonia.

In 1963, historian Enno Stephan locates Ryan’s grave in Dresden. Three volunteers of the International Brigades, Frank Edwards, Peter O’Connor and Michael O’Riordan travel to East Germany as a guard of honour to repatriate Ryan’s remains in 1979. On June 21, 1979, his remains arrive in Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church, his local church when he lived in Dublin. The church is packed with all shades of Republican and left-wing opinion, as well as those from his past such as the Stuarts, the Clissmanns, Peadar O’Donnell, George Gilmore, and ex-comrades and sympathizers from all over the world. The cortège on its way to Glasnevin Cemetery halts at the GPO in memory of the dead of the 1916 Easter Rising. His coffin is borne to the grave in Glasnevin Cemetery by Irish veterans of the Spanish Civil War, Frank Edwards, Peter O’Connor, Michael O’Riordan and Terry Flanagan. Con Lehane delivers the funeral oration while a piper plays “Limerick’s Lamentation.” He is buried next to Éamonn Mac Thomáis.

Ryan leads a vicarious life in pursuit of human rights, socialism and republicanism. His life story remains more colourful than fiction.


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Birth of Richard Chenevix Trench, Anglican Archbishop & Poet

Richard Chenevix Trench, Anglican archbishop and poet, is born in Dublin on September 9, 1807.

Trench is the son of Richard Trench (1774–1860), barrister-at-law, and the Dublin writer Melesina Chenevix (1768–1827). His elder brother is Francis Chenevix Trench. He is educated at Harrow School, and graduates from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1829. In 1830 he visits Spain. While incumbent of Curdridge Chapel near Bishop’s Waltham in Hampshire, he publishes The Story of Justin Martyr and Other Poems (1835), which is favourably received, and is followed by Sabbation, Honor Neale, and other Poems (1838), and Poems from Eastern Sources (1842). These volumes reveal the author as the most gifted of the immediate disciples of William Wordsworth, with a warmer colouring and more pronounced ecclesiastical sympathies than the master, and strong affinities to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, John Keble and Richard Monckton Milnes.

In 1841 Trench resigns his living to become curate to Samuel Wilberforce, then rector of Alverstoke, and upon Wilberforce’s promotion to the deanery of Westminster Abbey in 1845 he is presented to the rectory of Itchen Stoke. In 1845 and 1846 he preaches the Hulsean Lectures, and in the former year is made examining chaplain to Wilberforce, now Bishop of Oxford. He is shortly afterwards appointed to a theological chair at King’s College London.

Trench joins the Canterbury Association on March 27, 1848, on the same day as Samuel Wilberforce and Wilberforce’s brother Robert.

In 1851 Trench establishes his fame as a philologist by The Study of Words, originally delivered as lectures to the pupils of the Diocesan Training School, Winchester. His stated purpose is to demonstrate that in words, even taken singly, “there are boundless stores of moral and historic truth, and no less of passion and imagination laid up” — an argument which he supports by a number of apposite illustrations. It is followed by two little volumes of similar character — English Past and Present (1855) and A Select Glossary of English Words (1859). All have gone through numerous editions and have contributed much to promote the historical study of the English tongue. Another great service to English philology is rendered by his paper, read before the Philological Society, On some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries (1857), which gives the first impulse to the great Oxford English Dictionary. He envisages a totally new dictionary that is a “lexicon totius Anglicitatis.” As one of the three founders of the dictionary, he expresses his vision that it will be “an entirely new Dictionary; no patch upon old garments, but a new garment throughout.”

Trench’s advocacy of a revised translation of the New Testament (1858) helps promote another great national project. In 1856 he publishes a valuable essay on Pedro Calderón de la Barca, with a translation of a portion of Life is a Dream in the original metre. In 1841 he had published his Notes on the Parables of our Lord, and in 1846 his Notes on the Miracles, popular works which are treasuries of erudite and acute illustration.

In 1856 Trench becomes Dean of Westminster Abbey, a position which suits him. Here he introduces evening nave services. In January 1864 he is advanced to the post of Archbishop of Dublin. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley had been first choice, but is rejected by the Church of Ireland, and, according to Bishop Wilberforce’s correspondence, Trench’s appointment is favoured neither by the Prime Minister nor the Lord Lieutenant. It is, moreover, unpopular in Ireland, and a blow to English literature, yet it turns out to be fortunate. He cannot prevent the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, though he resists with dignity. But, when the disestablished communion has to be reconstituted under the greatest difficulties, it is important that the occupant of his position should be a man of a liberal and genial spirit.

This is the work of the remainder of Trench’s life. It exposes him at times to considerable abuse, but he comes to be appreciated and, when he resigns his archbishopric because of poor health in November 1884, clergy and laity unanimously record their sense of his “wisdom, learning, diligence, and munificence.” He finds time for Lectures on Medieval Church History (1878), and his poetical works are rearranged and collected in two volumes (last edition, 1885). He dies at Eaton Square, London, on March 28, 1886, after a lingering illness. He is buried at Westminster Abbey.

George W. E. Russell describes Trench as “a man of singularly vague and dreamy habits” and recounts the following anecdote of his old age:

“He once went back to pay a visit to his successor, Lord Plunket. Finding himself back again in his old palace, sitting at his old dinner-table, and gazing across it at his wife, he lapsed in memory to the days when he was master of the house, and gently remarked to Mrs. Trench, ‘I am afraid, my love, that we must put this cook down among our failures.'”