George Johnstone StoneyFRS, Irish physicist, dies on July 5, 1911, at Notting Hill, London, England. He is most famous for introducing the term “electron” as the “fundamental unit quantity of electricity.” He introduces the concept, though not the word, as early as 1874, initially naming it “electrine,” and the word itself comes in 1891. He publishes around 75 scientific papers during his lifetime.
Stoney is born on February 15, 1826, at Oakley Park, near Birr, County Offaly, in the Irish Midlands, the son of George Stoney and Anne (née Bindon Blood). His only brother is Bindon Blood Stoney, who becomes chief engineer of the Dublin Port and Docks Board. The Stoney family is an old-established Anglo-Irish family. During the time of the famine (1845–52), when land prices plummet, the family property is sold to support his widowed mother and family. He attends Trinity College Dublin (TCD), graduating with a BA degree in 1848. From 1848 to 1852 he works as an astronomy assistant to William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, at Birr Castle, County Offaly, where Parsons had built the world’s largest telescope, the 72-inch Leviathan of Parsonstown. Simultaneously he continues to study physics and mathematics and is awarded an MA by TCD in 1852.
From 1852 to 1857, Stoney is professor of physics at Queen’s College Galway. From 1857 to 1882, he is employed as Secretary of the Queen’s University of Ireland, an administrative job based in Dublin. In the early 1880s, he moves to the post of superintendent of Civil Service Examinations in Ireland, a post he holds until his retirement in 1893. He continues his independent scientific research throughout his decades of non-scientific employment duties in Dublin. He also serves for decades as honorary secretary and then vice-president of the Royal Dublin Society (RDS), a scientific society modeled after the Royal Society of London and, after his move to London in 1893, he serves on the council of that society as well. Additionally, he intermittently serves on scientific review committees of the British Association for the Advancement of Science from the early 1860s.
Stoney publishes seventy-five scientific papers in a variety of journals, but chiefly in the journals of the Royal Dublin Society. He makes significant contributions to cosmic physics and to the theory of gases. He estimates the number of molecules in a cubic millimeter of gas, at room temperature and pressure, from data obtained from the kinetic theory of gases. His most important scientific work is the conception and calculation of the magnitude of the “atom of electricity.” In 1891, he proposes the term “electron” to describe the fundamental unit of electrical charge, and his contributions to research in this area lays the foundations for the eventual discovery of the particle by J. J. Thomson in 1897.
Stoney proposes the first system of natural units in 1881. He realizes that a fixed amount of charge is transferred per chemical bond affected during electrolysis, the elementary chargee, which can serve as a unit of charge, and that combined with other known universal constants, namely the speed of lightc and the Newtonian constant of gravitationG, a complete system of units can be derived. He shows how to derive units of mass, length, time and electric charge as base units. Due to the form in which Coulomb’s law is expressed, the constant 4πε0 is implicitly included, ε0 being the vacuum permittivity.
Like Stoney, Max Planck independently derives a system of natural units (of similar scale) some decades after him, using different constants of nature.
Hermann Weyl makes a notable attempt to construct a unified theory by associating a gravitational unit of charge with the Stoney length. Weyl’s theory leads to significant mathematical innovations, but his theory is generally thought to lack physical significance.
Stoney marries his cousin, Margaret Sophia Stoney, by whom he has had two sons and three daughters. One of his sons, George Gerald Stoney FRS, is a scientist. His daughter Florence StoneyOBE is a radiologist while his daughter Edith is considered to be the first woman medical physicist. His most scientifically notable relative is his nephew, the Dublin-based physicist George Francis FitzGerald. He is second cousin of the grandfather of Ethel Sara Turing, mother of Alan Turing.
After moving to London, Stoney lives first at Hornsey Rise, north London, before moving to 30 Chepstow Crescent, Notting Hill, west London. In his later years illness confines him to a single floor of the house, which is filled with books, papers, and scientific instruments, often self-made. He dies at his home on July 5, 1911. His cremated ashes are buried in St. Nahi’s Church, Dundrum, Dublin.
Following Fine Gael’s defeat at the 1977 Irish general election, the new leader, Garret FitzGerald, appoints Bruton to the front bench as Spokesperson on Agriculture. He is later promoted as Spokesperson for Finance. He plays a prominent role in Fine Gael’s campaign in the 1981 Irish general election, which results in another coalition with the Labour Party, with FitzGerald as Taoiseach. He receives a personal vote in Meath of nearly 23%, and at the age of only 34 is appointed Minister for Finance, the most senior position in the cabinet. In light of overwhelming economic realities, the government abandons its election promises to cut taxes. The government collapses unexpectedly on the night of January 27, 1982, when Bruton’s budget, that was to impose an unpopular value-added tax (VAT) on children’s shoes, is defeated in the Dáil.
The minority Fianna Fáil government which follows only lasts until November 1982, when Fine Gael once again returns to power in a coalition government with the Labour Party. However, when the new government is formed, Bruton is moved from Finance to become Minister for Industry and Energy. After a reconfiguration of government departments in 1983, he becomes Minister for Industry, Trade, Commerce and Tourism. In a cabinet reshuffle in February 1986, he is appointed again as Minister for Finance. Although he is Minister for Finance, he never presents his budget. The Labour Party withdraws from the government due to a disagreement over his budget proposals leading to the collapse of the government and another election.
Following the 1987 Irish general election, Fine Gael suffers a heavy defeat. Garret FitzGerald resigns as leader immediately, and a leadership contest ensues between Alan Dukes, Peter Barry and Bruton himself, with Dukes being the ultimate victor. Dukes’s term as leader is lackluster and unpopular. The party’s disastrous performance in the 1990 Irish presidential election, in which the party finishes in a humiliating and then unprecedented third in a national election, proves to be the final straw for the party and Dukes is forced to resign as leader shortly thereafter. Bruton, who is the deputy leader of Fine Gael at the time, is unopposed in the ensuing leadership election.
Bruton’s election is seen as offering Fine Gael a chance to rebuild under a far more politically experienced leader. However, his perceived right-wing persona and his rural background are used against him by critics and particularly by the media. However, to the surprise of critics and of conservatives, in his first policy initiative he calls for a referendum on a Constitutional amendment permitting the enactment of legislation allowing for divorce in Ireland.
By the 1992 Irish general election, the anti-Fianna Fáil mood in the country produces a major swing to the opposition, but that support goes to the Labour Party, not Bruton’s Fine Gael, which actually loses a further 10 seats. Even then, it initially appears that Fine Gael is in a position to form a government. However, negotiations stall in part from Labour’s refusal to be part of a coalition which would include the libertarian Progressive Democrats, as well as Bruton’s unwillingness to take Democratic Left into a prospective coalition. The Labour Party breaks off talks with Fine Gael and opts to enter a new coalition with Fianna Fáil.
In late 1994, the government of Fianna Fáil’s Albert Reynolds collapses. Bruton is able to persuade Labour to end its coalition with Fianna Fáil and enter a new coalition government with Fine Gael and Democratic Left. He faces charges of hypocrisy for agreeing to enter government with Democratic Left, as Fine Gael campaigned in the 1992 Irish general election on a promise not to enter government with the party. Nevertheless, on December 15, 1994, aged 47, he becomes the then youngest ever Taoiseach. This is the first time in the history of the state that a new government is installed without a general election being held.
Bruton’s politics are markedly different from most Irish leaders. Whereas most leaders had come from or identified with the independence movement Sinn Féin (in its 1917–22 phase), Bruton identifies more with the more moderate Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) tradition that Sinn Féin had eclipsed at the 1918 Irish general election.
Continued developments in the Northern Ireland peace process and Bruton’s attitude to Anglo-Irish relations come to define his tenure as Taoiseach. In February 1995, he launches the Anglo-Irish “Framework Document” with the British prime ministerJohn Major. It foreshadows the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which, among other things, establishes an elected, power-sharing executive authority to be run by these onetime adversaries, ending 30 years of bloodletting that had claimed more than 3,000 lives. However, he takes a strongly critical position on the British Government‘s reluctance to engage with Sinn Féin during the Irish Republican Army‘s 1994–1997 ceasefire. He also establishes a working relationship with Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin; however, both are mutually distrustful of each other.
The coalition remains in force to contest the 1997 Irish general elections, which are indecisive, and Bruton serves as acting taoiseach until the Dáil convenes in late June and elects a Fianna Fáil–Progressive Democrats government. He retires from Irish politics in 2004 and serves as the European Union Ambassador to the United States (2004–09).
Bruton dies at the age of 76 on February 6, 2024, at the Mater Private Hospital in Dublin, following a long bout with cancer. A state funeral is held on February 10 at St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s Church in Dunboyne.
Josephine McNeill, Irish diplomat, is born on March 31, 1895, in Fermoy, County Cork. She is the first Irish female diplomat appointed to represent Ireland abroad in a ministerial capacity.
McNeill is born Josephine Ahearne, the daughter of shopkeeper and hotelier, James Ahearne, and his wife Ellen Ahearne (née O’Brien). She attends the Loretto Convent, Fermoy, and goes on to graduate from University College Dublin (UCD) with a BA, H.Dip.Ed. in French and German. With this she begins a teaching career, at St. Louis’ Convent, Kiltimagh, at the Ursuline Convent, Thurles, and at Scoil Íde. Scoil Íde, the female counterpart to St. Enda’s School, had been established by her friend, Louise Gavan Duffy. She is fluent in the Irish language and takes an active part in the cultural elements of the Irish independence movement, such as literature and music. She is a member of Cumann na mBan, serving as a member of the executive committee in 1921.
After the death of her husband in 1938, McNeill becomes the honorary secretary of the council of the Friends of the National Collections, as well as serving as chair of the executive committee of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association until 1950. As a member of the Department of External Affairs advisory committee on cultural relations, she writes on economic, social and cultural issues. She represents Ireland at the UNESCO general assembly in Paris in 1949.
McNeill is an active member of Clann na Poblachta from its foundation in 1946. She is appointed the minister to the Netherlands in 1950 by Seán MacBride, making her the first Irish female diplomat to represent the Republic of Ireland abroad in a ministerial capacity. This appointment is not well received by diplomats in the Department of External Affairs. Her reports from The Hague focus on the issues the Netherlands faces with decolonisation. In 1955, she becomes the minister to Sweden, going on to hold the joint appointment to Austria and Switzerland from 1956 to 1960, after which she retires. While serving in Switzerland she puts aside the resentment she feels towards Éamon de Valera based on how he had treated her husband, to sit with him during a convalescence while de Valera recovers from an eye operation.
McNeill is an amateur pianist and collects paintings and porcelains. In 1933, she publishes the Irish language book, Finnsgéalta ó India.
Boland is born on September 16, 1870, at 135 Capel Street, Dublin, to Patrick Boland, businessman, and Mary Donnelly. Following the death of his mother in 1882, he is placed with his six siblings under the guardianship of his uncle, Nicholas Donnelly, auxiliary bishop of Dublin.
Boland is educated at two private Catholic schools, the Catholic University School, Dublin, and Birmingham Oratory in Birmingham, England, where he becomes head boy. His secondary education at the two schools help give him the foundation and understanding to play an influential role in the politics of Great Britain and Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century, when he is a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party, which pursues constitutional Home Rule.
In 1892, Boland graduates with a BA from London University. He studies for a semester in Bonn, Germany, where he is a member of Bavaria Bonn, a student fraternity that is member of the Cartellverband. He studies law at Christ Church, Oxford, graduating with a BA in 1896 and MA in 1901. Although called to the Bar in 1897, he never practises.
Boland is the first Olympic champion in tennis for Great Britain and Ireland at the first modern Olympics, which take place in Athens in 1896. He visits his friend Thrasyvoulos Manos in Athens during the Olympics, and Manos, a member of the organising committee, enters Boland in the tennis tournament. He promptly wins the singles tournament, defeating Friedrich Traun of Germany in the first round, Evangelos Rallis of Greece in the second, Konstantinos Paspatis of Greece in the semifinals, and Dionysios Kasdaglis of Greece in the final.
Boland then enters the doubles event with Traun, the German runner whom he had defeated in the first round of the singles. Together, they win the doubles event. They defeat Aristidis and Konstantinos Akratopoulos of Greece in the first round, have a bye in the semifinals, and defeat Demetrios Petrokokkinos of Greece and Dimitrios Kasdaglis in the final. When the Union Jack and the German flag are run up the flagpole to honour Boland and Traun’s victory, Boland points out to the man hoisting the flags that he is Irish, adding “It [the Irish flag]’s a gold harp on a green ground, we hope.” The officials agreed to have an Irish flag prepared.
Following a visit to County Kerry, Boland becomes concerned about the lack of literacy among the native population. He also has a keen interest in the Irish Language.
Boland’s patriotic stand is well received in nationalist circles in Ireland. This and a lifelong friendship with John Redmond gain for him an invitation to stand as a candidate for the Irish Parliamentary Party in the safe seat of South Kerry, which he holds from 1900 to 1918. He is unopposed in the general elections of 1900 and 1906, and the first of 1910. In the second election of 1910 he is challenged by a local man, T. B. Cronin, who stands as an independent nationalist in the interest of William O’Brien. Boland stands down at the 1918 United Kingdom general election.
In 1908, Boland is appointed a member of the commission for the foundation of the National University of Ireland (NUI). From 1926 to 1947, he is General Secretary of the Catholic Truth Society. He receives a papal knighthood, becoming a Knight of St. Gregory in recognition for his work in education. In 1950, he is awarded an honorary Doctor of Law by the NUI.
Boland marries Eileen Moloney at SS Peter and Edward, Palace Street, Westminster, on October 22, 1902, the daughter of an Australian Dr. Patrick Moloney. They have one son and five daughters. His daughter Honor Crowley succeeds her husband Frederick Crowley upon his death sitting as Fianna FáilTD for South Kerry from 1945 until her death in 1966. His daughter Bridget Boland is a playwright who notably writes The Prisoner and co-writes the script for Gaslight, and, among other books, co-authors Old Wives’ Lore for Gardeners with her sister, Maureen Boland.
Gleeson is the son of Frank and Pat Gleeson. He has described himself as having been an avid reader as a child. He receives his second-level education at St. Joseph’s CBS in Fairview, Dublin, where he is a member of the school drama group. He receives his Bachelor of Arts at University College Dublin (UCD), majoring in English and Irish. After training as an actor, he works for several years as a secondary school teacher of Irish and English at the now defunct CatholicBelcamp College in north County Dublin. He works simultaneously as an actor while teaching, doing semi-professional and professional productions in Dublin and surrounding areas. He leaves the teaching profession to commit full-time to acting in 1991. In an NPR interview to promote Calvary in 2014, he states he was molested as a child by a Christian Brother in primary school but was in “no way traumatised by the incident.”
As a member of the Dublin-based Passion Machine Theatre company, Gleeson appears in several of the theatre company’s early and highly successful plays such as Brownbread (1987), written by Roddy Doyle and directed by Paul Mercier, Wasters (1985) and Home (1988), written and directed by Paul Mercier. He also writes three plays for Passion Machine: The Birdtable (1987) and Breaking Up (1988), both of which he directs, and Babies and Bathwater (1994) in which he acts. Among his other Dublin theatre work are Patrick Süskind‘s one-man play The Double Bass and John B. Keane‘s The Year of the Hiker.
In 2003, Gleeson is the voice of Hugh the Miller in an episode of the Channel 4 animated series Wilde Stories. While he portrays Irish statesman Michael Collins in The Treaty, he later portrays Collins’ close collaborator Liam Tobin in the film Michael Collins with Liam Neeson taking the role of Collins. He later goes on to portray Winston Churchill in Into the Storm, winning a Primetime Emmy Award for his performance. He plays Barty Crouch, Jr. impersonating Hogwarts professor Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody in the fourth, and Alastor Moody himself in fifth and seventhHarry Potter films. His son Domhnall plays Bill Weasley in the seventh and eighth films.
Gleeson provides the voice of Abbot Cellach in The Secret of Kells, an animated film co-directed by Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey of Cartoon Saloon, which premieres in February 2009 at the JamesonDublin International Film Festival. He stars in the short film Six Shooter in 2006, written and directed by Martin McDonagh, which wins an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. In 2008, he stars in the comedy crime film In Bruges, also written and directed by McDonagh. The film, and his performance, enjoy huge critical acclaim, earning him several award nominations, including his first Golden Globe nomination. In the movie, he plays a mentor-like figure for Colin Farrell‘s hitman. In his review of In Bruges, Roger Ebert describes the elder Gleeson as having a “noble shambles of a face and the heft of a boxer gone to seed.”
Gleeson has been married to Mary Weldon since 1982. They have four sons: Domhnall, Fergus, Brían, and Rory. Domhnall and Brían are also actors. He speaks fluent Irish and is an advocate of the promotion of the Irish language. He is a fan of the English football club Aston Villa, as is his son Domhnall.
On February 21, 1910, Carson accepts the parliamentary leadership of the anti-Home Rule Irish Unionists and, forfeiting his chance to lead the British Conservative Party, devotes himself entirely to the Ulster cause. His dislike of southern Irish separatism is reinforced by his belief that the heavy industry of Belfast is necessary to the economic survival of Ireland. The Liberal government (1908–16) under H. H. Asquith, which in 1912 decides to prepare a Home Rule bill, cannot overcome the effect of his extra-parliamentary opposition. The Solemn League and Covenant of resistance to Home Rule, signed by Carson and other leaders in Belfast on September 28, 1912, and afterward by thousands of Ulstermen, is followed by his establishment of a provisional government in Belfast in September 1913. Early in that year he recruits a private Ulster army, the Ulster Volunteer Force, that openly drills for fighting in the event that the Home Rule Bill is enacted. In preparation for a full-scale civil war, he successfully organizes the landing of a large supply of weapons from Germany at Larne, County Antrim, on April 24, 1914. The British government, however, begins to make concessions to Ulster unionists, and on the outbreak of World War I he agrees to a compromise whereby the Home Rule Bill is enacted but its operation suspended until the end of the war on the understanding that Ulster’s exclusion will then be reconsidered.
Appointed Attorney General for England in Asquith’s wartime coalition ministry on May 25, 1915, Carson resigns on October 19 because of his dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war. In David Lloyd George’s coalition ministry (1916–22) he is First Lord of the Admiralty from December 10, 1916, to July 17, 1917, and then a member of the war cabinet as minister without portfolio until January 21, 1918.
Carson retires in October 1929. In July 1932, during his last visit to Northern Ireland, he witnesses the unveiling of a large statue of himself in front of Parliament Buildings at Stormont. The statue is sculpted by Leonard Stanford Merrifield, cast in bronze and placed upon a plinth. The inscription on the base reads “By the loyalists of Ulster as an expression of their love and admiration for its subject.” It is unveiled by James Craig, 1st Viscount Craigavon, in the presence of more than 40,000 people.
Carson lives at Cleve Court, a Queen Anne house near Minster-in-Thanet in the Isle of Thanet, Kent, bought in 1921. It is here that he dies peacefully on October 22, 1935. A warship brings his body to Belfast for the funeral. Thousands of shipworkers stop work and bow their heads as HMS Broke steams slowly up Belfast Lough, with his flag-draped coffin sitting on the quarterdeck. Britain gives him a state funeral on Saturday, October 26, 1935, which takes place in Belfast’s St. Anne’s Cathedral. He remains the only person to have been buried there. From a silver bowl, soil from each of the six counties of Northern Ireland is scattered onto his coffin, which had earlier been covered by the Union Jack. At his funeral service the choir sings his own favourite hymn, “I Vow to Thee, My Country.”
Joyce is a native Irish speaker who starts his education at a hedge school. He then attends school in Mitchelstown, County Cork.
Joyce starts work in 1845 with the Commission of National Education. He becomes a teacher and principal of the Model School, Clonmel. In 1856 he is one of fifteen teachers selected to re-organize the national school system in Ireland. Meanwhile he earns his B.A. in 1861 and M.A. in 1863 from Trinity College Dublin.
Joyce is a key cultural figure of his time. His wide interests include the Irish language, Hiberno-English, music, education, Irish literature and folklore, Irish history and antiquities, place names and much else. He produces many works on the history and culture of Ireland. His most enduring work is the pioneering The Origin and History of Irish Names of Places (first edition published in 1869). He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
In 1856 Joyce marries Caroline Waters of Baltinglass, County Wicklow, with whom he has two daughters and three sons, one of whom is the author Weston St. John Joyce. He dies on January 7, 1914, at his home, Barnalee, Rathmines, Dublin, and is buried two days later in Glasnevin Cemetery.
The P.W. Joyce collection at the Cregan Library in St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, Dublin, reflects many of Joyce’s interests and includes several rarities. These include autographed presentation copies by Joyce and his brother Robert, as well as books from Joyce’s own library. The collection also contains nine manuscripts associated with Joyce and his family members, including a manuscript in P.W. Joyce’s own hand of Echtra Cormaic itir Tairngiri agus Ceart Claíd Cormaic (Adventures of Cormac in the Land of Promise), a passage from the Book of Ballymote, which Joyce translated into English.
Joyce is born on April 24, 1906, in Brooklyn, New York, the eldest of three sons of Michael Joyce, an Irish Catholic from a family of tenant farmers in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, and his wife, Gertrude (née Brooke), who although born in Shaw and Crompton, Lancashire, is from a well-off AnglicanAnglo-Irish family of physicians associated with County Roscommon. The Joyces return to Ireland in 1909. William, a precocious child, attends Coláiste Iognáid SJ, a Jesuit school in County Galway, from 1915 to 1921. At the age of fourteen, he abandons Catholicism for Anglicanism, apparently after being told that all non-Catholics, including his mother, would be damned. In adult life he is nominally anglican, though his adherence to Christianity is tenuous.
The Joyces are unionists and teach their children fervent imperialism. During the Irish War of Independence, Joyce openly associates with the Black and Tans and acts as a scout for them. An acquaintance claims that his views are so extreme even loyalists dislike him. On December 9, 1921, he flees to England to join the Worcestershire Regiment and is followed to England in 1923 by the rest of the family. When he enlists, he claims to be eighteen, but after he contracts rheumatic fever, his age is discovered, and he is discharged in March 1922. For a time, he studies mathematics and chemistry at Battersea Polytechnic Institute as a pre-medical student (1922–23), but he leaves of his own accord, with a reputation for laziness and violent political views. His studies in English and history at Birkbeck College are more successful. He is a brilliant linguist and mathematician and graduates BA with first-class honours in 1927. He publishes an academic article on philology and considers progressing to an MA. He later falsely claims that his research had been plagiarised by a Jewish academic. In 1932, he enrolls at King’s College, London, for a Ph.D. in educational psychology.
Joyce is disturbed by the difference between depressed post-war Britain and the imperial ideal that he had imbibed in Galway and is mocked for his outspoken patriotism and obvious Irishness. He identifies strongly with Thomas Carlyle, an earlier angry anti-liberal from the provinces. His life is marked by repeated episodes of hero worship, followed by disillusion and bitter denunciation. In 1923, he joins the British Fascists, an organisation that has a significant Irish loyalist membership, and in 1924 he allies himself with a militant splinter group, the National Fascists. Most British fascists see themselves as Tory auxiliaries, and they often provide a security presence at conservative meetings. On October 22, 1924, while stewarding a meeting addressed by a Jewish conservative candidate, he has his face slashed and is left with a prominent scar across his right cheek. He joins the Conservative Party in 1928 and is active in the Chelsea constituency until 1930, when he is forced out because of his eccentricities and sexual misbehaviour. On April 30, 1927, he marries Hazel Kathleen Barr. They have two daughters but separate in 1935, largely because of his infidelities, heavy drinking, and temper. The marriage is dissolved in 1937.
In November 1933, Joyce abandons his Ph.D. studies to work for Sir Oswald Mosley‘s British Union of Fascists (BUF). By early 1934 he has become its paid publicity director, traveling throughout Britain to organise meetings. He is a powerful, rabble-rousing speaker, driven by an instinctive awareness that vitriolic verbal abuse gives speaker and audience a sense of power and solidarity. MI5 sees him as a compelling, though deranged, personality. On February 8, 1937, he marries Margaret Cairns White, a BUF activist from Lancashire, with whom he had cohabited since 1936.
Joyce leads a BUF faction that favours a recruitment strategy based on uncompromising ideological assertion. This is challenged by populists who prioritise marches and displays and hold that indoctrination should follow membership. In February 1937, he is BUF candidate for the London County Council in Shoreditch. The party wins 14 per cent of the vote. In March 1937, he, along with many full-time BUF staff, are sacked when the BUF cuts expenses. But his dismissal also reflects Mosley’s awareness that his obsessive rhetoric repels “respectable” recruits and that he is no longer a biddable, slavish admirer of “the Leader.” He later falsely claims near-exclusive credit for the BUF’s escalating antisemitism, a view that Mosley eventually finds it convenient to adopt in order to evade his own responsibility.
In April 1937, Joyce founds the National Socialist League, helped by a wealthy patron. He supports himself as a private tutor, refusing to take Jewish pupils. He is active in various antisemitic and pro-Nazi groups such as the Right Club and engages in “peace” campaigns based on the view that British interests lay with Germany against Russia. Political marginalisation intensifies his admiration for Nazi Germany and hero worship of Adolf Hitler. By the time of the Munich crisis in 1938, he has decided that if war comes, he will go to Germany, though he also considers moving to Ireland. He renews his British passport for one-year terms in August 1938 and August 1939.
On August 26, 1939, Joyce and his wife leave London for Berlin. He is allegedly tipped off about his impending arrest and internment by an MI5 officer, to whom he had supplied information on communists. His siblings, whom he recruited into his fascist organisations, are variously penalised for his activities. At a loose end in Berlin, he is persuaded by a British associate to become a radio announcer with the English-language service of the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (RRG). He makes his first broadcast on September 6, 1939, and receives a contract in October. He finds in radio an outlet for his forceful style and delight in saying the unsayable, and in the early years of the war takes an exultant pride in recounting Nazi victories. His performances are admired by Joseph Goebbels, whom Joyce, to his regret, never meets. On September 26, 1940, he acquires German citizenship.
The novel experience of hearing the enemy in one’s own living room attracts wide audiences in Britain. Joyce’s practice of naming newly captured prisoners of war in his broadcasts is also a compelling motive for listening. In fact, he tries to recruit British prisoners of war as collaborators. The name “Lord Haw-Haw,” invented by the Daily Express radio critic in September 1939, initially applies to several English-language broadcasters but in time becomes associated with Joyce. He is initially a figure of fun, imitated by comedians, but there are sinister undercurrents of terrifying omnipotence, intensified by his sneering, gloating delivery and his delighted deployment of the “big lie” technique. It is widely believed that British-based fifth columnists supply him with information, that he predicts air raids, and shows minute local knowledge. In time, fear and his growing notoriety feed popular hatred of him in Britain, though his anti-British taunts allegedly win appreciative Irish audiences. He exults that he is daily committing treason and rendering himself liable to the death penalty.
In 1940, Joyce publishes a commissioned self-justifying propaganda work, Twilight over England. His representation of himself echoes that of Hitler in Mein Kampf – the provincial patriot, whose martial sacrifices are betrayed by corrupt elites, learning through poverty the hollowness of bourgeois patriotism and the need to synthesise socialism with nationalism. He shares with his hero a paranoid belief in his own ability to create an alternative reality through language and obstinacy. He dreams of becoming the English Führer.
In Berlin, the Joyces’ marriage comes under increasing strain, marked by drunken rows, domestic violence, and infidelity on both sides, though they retain a fierce mutual fascination. They divorce on August 12, 1941, but remarry on February 11, 1942, while continuing their previous behaviour. As the Axis powers begin to fail, his broadcasts become more defensive, focusing on the Soviet threat. On October 14, 1944, he is awarded the German War Merit Cross, first class. On October 22, he is sworn into the Volkssturm (territorial army) and begins drilling. The Joyces are evacuated from Berlin in March 1945, initially to Apen near the Dutch border and then to Hamburg, where he makes a last, drunken, defiant broadcast on April 30, 1945, the day of Hitler’s death. After an unsuccessful attempt to escape to Sweden, the Joyces hide at Flensburg near the Danish border. On May 28, 1945, he is shot and captured while gathering firewood.
Joyce is brought back to Britain on June 16 after Parliament passed legislation simplifying treason trial procedures. At his September 17-20 trial, he proves his American citizenship, but the court holds that his illegally acquired British passport incurred duties of allegiance. His appeals are rejected by the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords. His fate is influenced by British public opinion, and possibly by a desire to avoid antagonising the Soviet Union. In his death cell he blames the defeat of national socialism on German limitations. He also fantasises that he could have saved Hitler from his incompetent subordinates.
Joyce is hanged at Wandsworth Prison on January 3, 1946. Unlike most of his fellow Nazis, he proclaims to the end his allegiance to national socialism and hatred of Jews. He corresponds cheerfully with Margaret, joking evasively about the death camps and expressing a belief that his spirit will survive, watch over her, and continue his work. To neo-Nazis he becomes a martyr. Even among those to whom his activities had been repellent, a significant body of opinion holds he should not have been condemned on a questionable and innovative technicality. The historian A. J. P. Taylor maintains that Joyce was executed for making a false declaration to obtain a passport, a misdemeanour that normally incurs a £2 fine.
In 1976, Joyce is reinterred in Galway as it is feared that a grave in England might become a fascist shrine. Thomas Kilroy‘s play Double Cross (1986) juxtaposes Joyce and Brendan Bracken as Irishmen who reinvented themselves through fantasies of Britishness. The BBC Sound Archive has recordings of some of Joyce’s broadcasts and transcripts of others, collected during the war as evidence for a future treason trial.
(From: “Joyce, William Brooke (‘Lord Haw-Haw’)” by Patrick Maume, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Cronin is known as an arts activist as well as a writer. He is Cultural Adviser to TaoiseachCharles Haughey and briefly to Garret FitzGerald. He involves himself in initiatives such as Aosdána, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Heritage Council. He is a founding member of Aosdána, and is a member of its governing body, the Toscaireacht, for many years. He is elected Saoi, a distinction for exceptional artistic achievement, in 2003. He is also a member of the governing bodies of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Ireland, of which he is for a time Acting Chairman.
His first collection of poems, called simply Poems (Cresset Press, London), is published in 1958. Several collections follow and his Collected Poems (New Island Books, Dublin) is published in 2004. The End of the Modern World (New Island Books, 2016), written over several decades, is his final publication.
Cronin’s novel, The Life of Riley, is a satire on Bohemian life in Ireland in the mid-20th century, while his memoir Dead as Doornails addresses the same subject.
Cronin knows Samuel Beckett from when they do some work for the BBC during the 1950s and 1960s. He gives a prefatory talk to Patrick Magee‘s reading of The Unnamable on the BBC Third Programme. Beckett is not impressed, saying, “Cronin delivered his discourse… It was all right, not very exciting.” Cronin later publishes a biography of him, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (1996), followed on from No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien (1989).
In his later years, Cronin suffers from failing health, which prevents him from traveling abroad, thus limiting his dealings to local matters. He dies in Dublin on December 27, 2016, one day short of his 93rd birthday.
Cronin firstly marries Thérèse Campbell, from whom he separates in the mid-1980s. She dies in 1999. They have two daughters, Iseult and Sarah. Iseult is killed in a road accident in Spain. He secondly marries the writer Anne Haverty who, along with daughter Sarah, survives him.
Purser is born in Dublin on August 24, 1835, the son of John Tertius Purser (1809–1893), the general manager of the well-known A Guinness, Son & Co. brewery, and Anna Benigna Fridlezius (1803-1881). He is educated in a wealthy family, which includes artists, as his cousin Sarah Purser, or engineers, as his brother-in-law John Purser Griffith. He is the brother of mathematician Frederick Purser. He receives his early education at the private boarding school run by his uncle, Dr. Richard W. Biggs, at Devizes, Wiltshire. He completes his schooling at Devizes and begins his university studies at Trinity College, Dublin, graduating BA in mathematics in 1856. He is the best mathematician of his year at the University and in 1855 he gains the Lloyd Exhibition.
Purser becomes a tutor to the four sons of William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse (1800-1867) in 1857. Lord Rosse’s 72-inch reflecting telescope, built in 1845 and colloquially known of as the “Leviathan of Parsonstown,” is the world’s largest telescope when it is built and continues to hold this distinction until the early 20th century. As well as acting as tutor to the children, Purser does become involved in Lord Rosse’s interest in astronomy but never does any observing.
In 1863, Purser is appointed professor of mathematics at Queen’s College, Belfast, a position he maintains until his retirement in 1901.
Purser never marries. When his father dies on April 5, 1893, Rathmines Castle passes to him. He dies at Rathmines Castle on October 18, 1903, a very wealthy man. In his will he leaves £100,000 to his brother Frederick Purser, £40,000 to his sister Anna Griffith and £5,000 to each of her children. In addition to the money, he owns property in Blessington Street, Essex Street and Eustace Street which he leaves to his brother-in-law John Purser Griffith. Other properties and interests that he owns he divides between his brother Frederick and his sister Anna. After his death, his sister Anna and her husband John Purser Griffith move into Rathmines Castle although, at this time, its ownership has gone to Frederick Purser. After Frederick dies in August 1910, the Castle and his considerable wealth passes to Anna.
(Pictured: Portrait of John Purser painted by the artist Sarah Purser, daughter of Tertius Purser’s brother Benjamin Purser. The portrait hangs in Queen’s College, Belfast.)
seamus dubhghaill 