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Tag Archives: 1922 United Kingdom General Election


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Birth of Pierce McCan

Pierce McCan, Sinn Féin politician, is born at Prospect Lodge, Ballyanne Desmesne, County Wexford, on August 2, 1882. 

McCan is the son of Francis McCan, a land agent, and Jane Power. He is the nephew of Patrick Joseph Power, MP for East Waterford from 1885 to 1913. He attends Clongowes Wood College and Downside School. He resides at Ballyowen House, Dualla, Cashel, County Tipperary, and is an “extensive farmer” and is a member of the Tipperary Hunt.

McCan is a founder member of Sinn Féin in 1905. He joins the Gaelic League in 1909 and is a member of the Irish Volunteers from 1914 onward.

After more than 2,000 German and Austrian prisoners are imprisoned at Richmond Barracks, Templemore, County Tipperary, following the first battles of World War I in 1914, he plots to engineer a mass escape but is thwarted when the prisoners are removed to Leigh, Lancashire in 1915. He is interned in 1916 after the Easter Rising for several months in Richmond Barracks, Dublin, and Knutsford, England. In May 1918, he is arrested under the German Plot and detained in Gloucester Gaol.

McCan is president of the East Tipperary executive of Sinn Féin. While incarcerated, he is elected as a Sinn Féin MP for the East Tipperary constituency at the 1918 United Kingdom general election in Ireland.

In January 1919, Sinn Féin MPs refuse to recognise the Parliament of the United Kingdom and instead assembles in the Mansion House, Dublin as a revolutionary parliament called Dáil Éireann. McCan never sits in Dáil Éireann, dying in prison on March 6, 1919, during the Spanish flu pandemic. On March 9, 1919, he is buried in Dualla, Cashel, County Tipperary.

No by-election is called to replace him in the UK constituency. After April 1, 1922, the Irish Free State (Agreement) Act 1922 prohibits any by-election, and the constituency is abolished when parliament is dissolved on October 26, 1922, for the general election on November 15.

The First Dáil also considers how to fill the vacancy. A select committee in April recommends that the local Sinn Féin organisation which nominated him should nominate his replacement. A June proposal to postpone action, either for six months or until a Westminster by-election is held, is referred to another committee, which recommends that “in view of the circumstances which occasioned the vacancy, it was due to the memory of the late Pierce McCann that his place should not be filled at present.”

On April 10, 1919, Cathal Brugha tells the First Dáil: “Before I formally move the motion, as I have mentioned the name of Pierce McCan, I would ask the Members of the Dáil to stand up as a mark of our respect to the first man of our body to die for Ireland, and of our sympathy with his relatives. We are sure that their sorrow is lightened by the fact that his death was for the cause for which he would have lived, and that his memory will ever be cherished in the hearts of the comrades who knew him, and will be honoured by succeeding generations of his countrymen with that of the other martyrs of our holy cause.” The McCan Barracks in Templemore, County Tipperary, is named after him.

In the 1933 Irish general election, McCan’s brother, Joseph, a member of the National Farmers’ and Ratepayers’ Association, stands unsuccessfully for the National Centre Party in the Tipperary constituency.


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Birth of T. P. O’Connor, Politician & Journalist

Thomas Power O’Connor, PC, Irish nationalist politician and journalist known as T. P. O’Connor and occasionally as Tay Pay (mimicking his own pronunciation of the initials T. P.), is born in Athlone, County Westmeath, on October 5, 1848. He serves as a Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland for nearly fifty years.

O’Connor is the eldest son of Thomas O’Connor, an Athlone shopkeeper, and his wife Teresa (née Power), the daughter of a non-commissioned officer in the Connaught Rangers. He is educated at The College of the Immaculate Conception in Athlone, and Queen’s College Galway, where he wins scholarships in history and modern languages and builds up a reputation as an orator, serving as auditor of the college’s Literary and Debating Society.

O’Connor enters journalism as a junior reporter on Saunders’ Newsletter, a Dublin journal, in 1867. In 1870, he moves to London and is appointed a sub-editor on The Daily Telegraph, principally on account of the utility of his mastery of French and German in reportage of the Franco-Prussian War. He later becomes London correspondent for the New York Herald. He compiles the society magazine Mainly About People (M.A.P.) from 1898 to 1911.

O’Connor is elected Member of Parliament for Galway Borough in the 1880 United Kingdom general election, as a representative of the Home Rule League, which is under the leadership of William Shaw, though virtually led by Charles Stewart Parnell, who wins the party’s leadership a short time later. At the next general election in 1885, he is returned both for Galway Borough and for the Liverpool Scotland constituencies, which has a large Irish population. He chooses to sit for Liverpool and represents that constituency in the House of Commons from 1885 until his death in 1929. He remains the only British MP from an Irish nationalist party ever to be elected to a constituency outside of the island of Ireland. He continues to be re-elected in Liverpool under this label unopposed in the 1918, 1922, 1923, 1924 and 1929 general elections, despite the declaration of a de facto Irish Republic in early 1919, and the establishment by the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty of a quasi-independent Irish Free State in late 1922.

From 1905, O’Connor belongs to the central leadership of the United Irish League. During much of his time in parliament, he writes a nightly sketch of proceedings there for The Pall Mall Gazette. He becomes “Father of the House,” with unbroken service of 49 years, 215 days. The Irish Nationalist Party ceases to exist effectively after the Sinn Féin landslide of 1918, and thereafter he effectively sits as an independent. On April 13, 1920, he warns the House of Commons that the death on hunger strike of Thomas Ashe will galvanise opinion in Ireland and unite all Irishmen in opposition to British rule.

O’Connor founds and is the first editor of several newspapers and journals: The Star, the Weekly Sun (1891), The Sun (1893), M.A.P. and T.P.’s Weekly (1902). In August 1906, he is instrumental in the passing by Parliament of the Musical Copyright Act 1906, also known as the T.P. O’Connor Bill, following many of the popular music writers at the time dying in poverty due to extensive piracy by gangs during the piracy crisis of sheet music in the early 20th century. The gangs often buy a copy of the music at full price, copy it, and resell it, often at half the price of the original. The film I’ll Be Your Sweetheart (1945), commissioned by the British Ministry of Information, is based on the events of the day.

O’Connor is appointed as the second president of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) in 1916 and appears in front of the Cinema Commission of Inquiry (1916), set up by the National Council of Public Morals where he outlines the BBFC’s position on protecting public morals by listing forty-three infractions, from the BBFC 1913–1915 reports, on why scenes in a film may be cut. He is appointed to the Privy Council by the first Labour government in 1924. He is also a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Journalists, the world’s oldest journalists’ organisation. It continues to honour him by having a T.P. O’Connor charity fund.

In 1885, O’Connor marries Elizabeth Paschal, the daughter of a judge of the Supreme Court of Texas.

O’Connor dies in London on November 18, 1929, and is buried at St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery, Kensal Green, in north-west London. He is the last Father of the House to die as a sitting MP until Sir Gerald Kaufman in 2017.


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Birth of Cahir Healy, Irish Nationalist Politician

Cahir Healy, Irish nationalist politician, is born in Mountcharles, County Donegal, on December 2, 1877. He is a leader of northern Nationalists and is a self educated man who makes major contributions to Ireland’s cultural and literary heritage.

Healy becomes a journalist working on various local papers. He joins Sinn Féin on its foundation in 1905. He later campaigns against the inclusion of County Fermanagh and County Tyrone in Northern Ireland, arguing that they have an Irish nationalist majority. He is imprisoned for his activities in 1922, before being elected in the 1922 United Kingdom general election to represent Fermanagh and Tyrone as a Nationalist Party MP, but with the support of Sinn Féin.

Healy is re-elected in 1923, but remains in custody until the following year, in which he does not defend his seat. Instead, he is elected to represent the seat in the House of Commons of Northern Ireland in the 1925 Northern Ireland general election, but does not take his seat until 1927 due to the Nationalist abstentionist policy. In 1928 he becomes a founder of the National League of the North. In 1929, with the break-up of the large Fermanagh and Tyrone constituency, he switches to sit for the new seat of South Fermanagh. In a 1931 Fermanagh and Tyrone by-election he is again elected for Fermanagh and Tyrone to the British Parliament, but stands down again in 1935.

Healy becomes an insurance official but continues to write, his output including journalism, poetry and short stories. He is interned by the United Kingdom government for a year during World War II under Defence Regulation 18B. In 1950 he is elected to the British House of Commons for a third time, on this occasion representing Fermanagh and South Tyrone. He finally sits in the British Parliament in 1952, and holds the seat until he stands down in 1955. He leaves the Northern Ireland House of Commons in 1965, by which point he is the Father of the House.

Healy dies on February 8, 1970, at the age of 92 at Enniskillen, County Fermanagh.

(Pictured: Portrait of Cahir Healy by Lafayette, half-plate nitrate negative, July 7, 1932, given by Pinewood Studios via Victoria and Albert Museum, 1989, National Portrait Gallery, London)


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Birth of Sir Joseph Larmor, Physicist & Mathematician

Sir Joseph Larmor FRS FRSE, Irish and British physicist and mathematician who makes breakthroughs in the understanding of electricity, dynamics, thermodynamics, and the electron theory of matter, is born in Magheragall, County Antrim, on July 11, 1857. His most influential work is Aether and Matter, a theoretical physics book published in 1900.

Larmor is the son of Hugh Larmor, a Belfast shopkeeper and his wife, Anna Wright. The family moves to Belfast around 1860, and he is educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, and then studies mathematics and experimental science at Queen’s College, Belfast, where one of his teachers is John Purser. He obtains his BA in 1874 and MA in 1875. He subsequently studies at St. John’s College, Cambridge where in 1880 he is Senior Wrangler and Smith’s Prizeman and obtains his MA in 1883. After teaching physics for a few years at Queen’s College, Galway, he accepts a lectureship in mathematics at Cambridge in 1885. In 1892 he is elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and he serves as one of the Secretaries of the society. He is made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1910.

In 1903 Larmor is appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a post he retains until his retirement in 1932. He never marries. He is knighted by King Edward VII in 1909.

Motivated by his strong opposition to Home Rule for Ireland, in February 1911 Larmor runs for and is elected as Member of Parliament for Cambridge University (UK Parliament constituency) with the Conservative Party. He remains in parliament until the 1922 general election, at which point the Irish question has been settled. Upon his retirement from Cambridge in 1932 he moves back to County Down in Northern Ireland.

Larmor receives the honorary Doctor of Laws (LLD) from the University of Glasgow in June 1901. He is awarded the Poncelet Prize for 1918 by the French Academy of Sciences. He is a Plenary Speaker in 1920 at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) at Strasbourg and an Invited Speaker at the ICM in 1924 in Toronto and at the ICM in 1928 in Bologna.

Larmor dies in Holywood, County Down, Northern Ireland, on May 19, 1942.