seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

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Death of Newspaper Editor Douglas Gageby

(Robert John) Douglas Gageby, one of the pre-eminent Irish newspaper editors of his generation, dies on June 24, 2004, following a lengthy illness. His life is well documented and a book of essays about him, Bright Brilliant Days: Douglas Gageby and the Irish Times, written by many of his colleagues, some of whom had attained fame for their literary achievements, is published in 2006.

Gageby is born at 54 Upper Beechwood Avenue, Ranelagh, Dublin, to Thomas Gageby, a Belfast-born civil servant. His mother, Ethel Elizabeth (née Smith), is a schoolteacher from County Cavan. The Gageby family moves to Belfast when he is about three years old as his father goes to work for the Northern Ireland Civil Service following partition. His paternal grandfather, Robert Gageby, stands as a Labour Party parliamentary candidate in Belfast North in 1910, and is a Belfast City Councillor for 20 years, first elected in 1898 as a trade union candidate supported by the Independent Labour Party.

Gageby is educated at Belfast Royal Academy and Trinity College Dublin, where he is elected a scholar in Modern Languages (French and German) in 1940. He is also actively involved with the student newspaper, Trinity News. He enlists in the Irish Army as a private soldier at the outbreak of World War II. He is commissioned later, and he serves as an intelligence officer. He reports from post-war Germany for The Irish Press and goes on to work under Conor Cruise O’Brien in the Irish News Agency. In 1954 he is the first editor of the Evening Press. In 1963 he becomes editor of The Irish Times, a post he holds until 1986, having been brought back from a short retirement in 1974. He is credited with moving The Irish Times from a Unionist organ into a successful Irish journal of record.

In 2003 it is revealed that a director, and later Chairman, of The Irish Times, Major Thomas Bleakley McDowell, had referred to Gageby as a “white nigger” for his views and role in the paper during the Northern Ireland civil rights movement‘s campaign in the 1960s. The comment appears in a letter from the British Ambassador to Dublin, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, to Kelvin White, head of the Irish Section of the British Foreign Office and is dated October 2, 1969. Gilchrist is referring to conversations which he had with McDowell where the latter professes himself to be fully behind the British government in the North and hostile to Gageby’s coverage of the civil rights movement. However, historian Mark O’Brien notes, “Despite his contacts with London, McDowell’s actions did not interfere with Gageby’s editorials on Northern Ireland”, due to the fact McDowell believes in editorial independence (even though McDowell strongly disagrees with Gageby’s nationalist views), and because Gageby is making the newspaper commercially successful. Under the 30 year rule, this letter is made available to newspapers on December 22 and 23, 1999, but no newspaper publishes it at that time.

The communiqué is later discovered by the historian Jack Lane and published in the Irish Political Review, a small magazine strongly antagonistic to The Irish Times, in January 2003. He brings it to the attention of The Irish Times editor, Geraldine Kennedy, on January 10, 2003, and she replies on January 15, 2003 saying she is “unable to confirm the veracity of it” and does not publish it. When, on January 26, 2003, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) publishes the story, The Irish Times finally follows the next day, January 27. Nonetheless, on April 24, 2004, Kennedy defends her position by saying, “The contents of the letter in question were published on January 27, 2003, as soon as its existence was drawn to my attention.”

Gageby dies on June 24, 2004, following a two year illness. His private funeral is conducted by Rev. Terence McCaughey, a family friend. The Irish Times endows an annual Douglas Gageby Fellowship for young journalists and a stand of trees is planted in his memory at Moynalty. His papers are presented to Dublin City University (DCU).

Gageby is married to Dorothy, daughter of Seán Lester, last Secretary General of the League of Nations. His daughter, Susan Denham, is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ireland from 2011 to 2017.


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Birth of Fra McCann, IRA Volunteer & Sinn Féin Politician

Fra McCann, Irish politician, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on June 19, 1953. He becomes active in the Irish republican movement and is imprisoned in the 1970s for membership of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. He also takes part in the blanket protest while in prison. In 1987, he is elected to Belfast City Council in a by-election, representing Sinn Féin.

McCann grows up in the Falls Road area of West Belfast. He is educated at St. Comgalls Primary School on Divis Street and later at St. Peters Secondary School off the Whiterock Road.

McCann is interned on the prison ship HMS Maidstone from February 14 until March 14, 1972, when he is moved to Long Kesh Detention Centre.

McCann is released from Long Kesh on May 9, 1972, then rearrested in November 1972 and re-interned until December 1975. During this period of internment, he is sentenced to nine months for escaping from Long Kesh through a tunnel. During this escape, IRA volunteer Hugh Coney is murdered by British soldiers.

McCann is arrested again in November 1976 and imprisoned in Crumlin Road Gaol where he spends six months on remand before being sentenced to three years. He joins the blanket protest in Crumlin Road Gaol where he and his comrades are held in solitary confinement until August 1978 when they are moved to the H-Blocks in Long Kesh, joining hundreds more on the blanket protest. He is released on November 22, 1979.

Upon his release, McCann travels throughout Ireland with other ex-prisoner’s highlighting the inhumanity in the H-Blocks. He travels throughout the United States in 1980 during which time he is arrested and spends 17 days in prison in New York. In 1981, he travels to Canada where he helps form H-Block committees and raises awareness about the hunger strike.

On his return to Ireland McCann is elected to sit on the National H-Block Committee and speaks at many events in support of the hunger strike. In the aftermath of the hunger strike he helps reorganise Sinn Féin in the Falls area.

McCann is elected to Belfast City Council in 1987 and sits on the Strategic Policy and Resources Committee and the Parks and Leisure committee. He is elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly representing Belfast West in 2003 and again in 2007, 2012 and 2018. While there he sits on the Finance and Personnel Committee and the Committee for Social Development.

In June 2006, McCann is charged with assault and disorderly behaviour following an incident in west Belfast. The incident occurs as the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) are attempting to arrest a teenager for attempted robbery. However, he claims heavy-handedness by the police and states, “I tried to put myself between one of the officers and the girl when the police officer radioed for assistance.” He is released on bail.

In October 2021, McCann announces that he would be stepping down as Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) for Belfast West and would not be contesting the next election.


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Death of Gerard Dillon, Painter and Artist

Gerard Dillon, Irish painter and artist, dies following a second stroke on June 14, 1971.

Dillon is born in Belfast in 1915 or 1916. He leaves school at the age of fourteen and for seven years works as a painter and decorator, mostly in London. From an early age he is interested in art, cinema, and theatre. About 1936 he starts out as an artist.

Dillon’s Connemara landscapes provide the viewer with context, portraits of the characters who work the land, atmosphere and idiosyncratic colour interpretations. At the age of 18, Dillon goes to London, initially working as a decorator. With the outbreak of World War II, he returns to Belfast. Over the next five years he develops as a painter in Dublin and Belfast. His works during this period are more than simple depictions of the life and people around him, they are reactions and interactions in paint.

In 1942, Dillon’s first solo exhibition is opened by his friend and fellow artist, Mainie Jellett, at The Country Shop, St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin. “Father, Forgive Them Their Sins” features depicting his concerns about the new war that had broken out. Despite a growing reputation, he has to return to London in 1944 to work on demolition gangs to restore his finances. In the late 1940s and during the 1950s, he finds himself favouring the town of Roundstone, County Galway. In 1951 he is introduced to Noreen Rice by her piano teacher. She has no formal training and she takes Dillon and George Campbell as her mentors for decades and her work is of a similar surrealistic and primitive style.

In 1958, Dillon has the double honour of representing Ireland at the Guggenheim International, and Great Britain at the Pittsburg International Exhibition. He and his sister, Mollie, have a property on Abbey Road in 1958. They let out part of the house to Arthur Armstrong and they let a flat to Noreen Rice and her brother. He and Noreen tour junk yards to find objects like leather and string that they include in their artwork.

Dillon travels widely in Europe and teaches for brief periods in the London art schools.

In 1967, Dillon suffers a stroke and spends six weeks in hospital. From this time his work changes direction. A notion of imminent death sends his work almost into another world, a realm of dreams and paintings intimating his death. In 1968 he is back in Dublin, where he helps to design sets and costumes for Seán O’Casey‘s play Juno and the Paycock. He continues to paint and also to make tapestries, sitting at his Singer sewing machine.

In 1969, Dillon pulls his artworks from the Belfast leg of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in purported protest during the Troubles against the “arrogance of the Unionist mob.” However, he does send work to Ulster when he donates work to Sheelagh Flanagan who had organised an exhibition for the relief of victims of the Belfast riots, in October 1969. His picture is hanged alongside the donated works of T. P. Flanagan, William Scott, F. E. McWilliam, Deborah Brown and Carolyn Mulholland as well as more than twenty others. Michael Longley retorts in a further letter, “Belfast needed creativity, it needed people like Gerard Dillon.” During his last years, he is invited to be involved in a children’s art workshop in the National Gallery of Ireland.

Dillon dies of a second stroke at the age of 55 on June 14, 1971. His grave, as requested, is unmarked in Belfast’s Milltown Cemetery. Danlann Gerard Dillon/The Gerard Dillon Gallery in Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich is named in his honour.

In his biography of the artist, James White briefly touches on the artists homosexuality: “such was his religious feeling that although he was drawn to people of that type, if he once had an encounter I believe that it never occurred again.” The artist’s nephew, Martin Dillon, recalls that after his uncle’s death he found a diary entry describing a homosexual encounter with a sense of guilt, but the author Gerard Keenan insists he was “a very well-adjusted homosexual.” Reihill expands on this, pointing to a probably unrequited love for the painter Daniel O’Neill and also highlighted Dillon’s association with Basil Rákóczi and The White Stag Group‘s Kenneth Hall both strong gay connections. Pictures with both overt and covert references are known.

(Pictured: “Washing Day” by Gerard Dillon)


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Birth of Colin Bateman, Novelist, Screenwriter & Journalist

Colin Bateman, novelist, screenwriter and former journalist known mononymously as Bateman, is born on June 13, 1962, in Newtownards, County Down, Northern Ireland.

Bateman attends Bangor Grammar School leaving at the age of 16 when he is hired by Annie Roycroft to join the County Down Spectator as a “cub” reporter, then columnist and deputy editor. A collection of his columns is published as Bar Stool Boy in 1989.

Bateman has been writing novels since his debut, Divorcing Jack, in 1994. Divorcing Jack wins a Betty Trask Award in the same year and is adapted into a 1998 film starring David Thewlis. Several of his novels feature the semi-autobiographical Belfast journalist, Dan Starkey.

Bateman’s book Murphy’s Law is adapted from the BBC television series Murphy’s Law (2001–2007), featuring James Nesbitt. He explains on his website that “Murphy’s Law was written specifically for James Nesbitt, a local actor who became a big TV star through Cold Feet. The ninety-minute pilot for Murphy’s Law on BBC One was seen by more than seven million people, and led to three TV series, on which I was the chief writer.”

Bateman’s eight-part series Scúp is written in English and translated into Irish. It is produced by Stirling Productions and BBC Northern Ireland. A second series has since been commissioned.

Bateman’s children’s book Titanic 2020 is shortlisted for the 2008 Bisto Book of the Year Award and the Bolton Children’s Book Award

Much of Bateman’s work is produced under the name “Bateman” rather than his full name. His 2007 novel I Predict a Riot bears (among others) the dedication: “For my Christian name, gone but not forgotten.” Since 2016, he has moved increasingly into film, writing the screenplays for The Journey, starring Timothy Spall and Colm Meaney, and Driven starring Jason Sudeikis and Lee Pace. Both films are premiered at the Venice Film Festival and selected for the Toronto International Film Festival. He is currently writing films about Fidel Castro in New York, ‘The Hotel Theresa’ and the British double agent George Blake.


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The Battle of Antrim

The Battle of Antrim is fought on June 7, 1798, in County Antrim during the Irish Rebellion of 1798 between British troops and Irish insurgents led by Henry Joy McCracken. The British win the battle, beating off a rebel attack on Antrim town following the arrival of reinforcements but the county governor, John O’Neill, 1st Viscount O’Neill, is fatally wounded.

The outbreak of the United Irish rebellion in Leinster on May 23 had prompted calls from Ulster United Irishmen to take to the field in support of their southern comrades. However, the organisation in Ulster had been severely damaged in a brutal disarmament campaign the previous year, and the new leadership are less radical and are not willing take to the field without French assistance, which is expected daily.

After waiting for two weeks while the rebellion rages in the south, the grassroots United Irish membership in Antrim decides to hold a number of meetings independent of their leaders. The outcome is the election of Henry Joy McCracken as their adjutant general and the decision to rise immediately. McCracken, together with James Hope, quickly formulate a plan to attack and seize all government outposts in County Antrim and then for the main attack to fall on Antrim town. Then using artillery seized at Antrim, the rebels are to march on Belfast in conjunction with the United Irish rebels in County Down.

McCracken has high hopes that many members of the militia will desert and join him, as disaffection is believed to be widespread, evidenced by the execution of four of the Monaghan militia for treason in Belfast in May.

On 6 June, McCracken and James Hope issue a proclamation calling for the United army of Ulster to rise. The initial plan meets with success, as the towns of Larne, Ballymena, Portaferry and Randalstown are taken and the bridge at Toome damaged to prevent the government from rushing reinforcements into Antrim from west of the River Bann. The rebels then assemble at Donegore Hill in preparation for the march and attack on Antrim town, where an emergency meeting of the county’s magistrates called by the county governor, Lord O’Neill, is due to take place.

Although almost 10,000 rebels assemble at Donegore, many display reluctance for the coming fight and stay on the hill in reserve or desert later so that probably fewer than 4,000 actually take part in the attack. The United Irishmen in Ulster are mostly Presbyterian, but are joined with Catholic Defenders and the tension between the two groups on the march likely causes some desertions. These difficulties lead to a loss of momentum, and the attack is delayed. McCracken is forced to make adjustments to his plan of attack, which had envisaged a simultaneous overwhelming assault on the town from four separate points.

The town is garrisoned by a small force of about 200 yeomen, cavalry under Lt. Col. William Lumley and armed volunteers but they also have four artillery pieces and the delay in the rebel attack allows them to send requests for assistance to Belfast and Lisburn from where reinforcements are already on the way. The garrison forms themselves at the base of the demesne wall of Antrim Castle, with artillery to the front and cavalry to the rear with their flanks anchored by the Market House and Presbyterian Meeting House. A part of the Scottish Quarter in the town is also burned by the garrison as it is perceived to be a stronghold of rebel sympathisers.

The attack finally begins shortly before 3:00 p.m. when the rebels begin a cautious march through the town. As rebel front ranks arrive to face the garrison’s defensive line, artillery opens fire on the rebels, causing them to pull back out of range. Large clouds of dust and smoke are thrown up which, together with the fires from the Scottish Quarter, obscure the garrison’s view of events.

The rebel withdrawal is mistaken for a full retreat and the cavalry moves out to pursue and rout the supposed fleeing rebels. The cavalry effectively runs into a gauntlet of rebels who are protected by a long churchyard wall and stationed in houses along the main street, suffering heavy losses to the gunfire and pikes of the rebels.

After routing the cavalry, the rebels attack the remainder of the garrison, which then begins to pull back to the safety of the castle wall. This is mistaken by a newly arrived rebel column as an attack on them, causing them to flee in panic. In the confusion, the county commander, Lord O’Neill, trapped with his magistrates, is fatally wounded by James Clements who avoids trial by joining the army. A rebel attempt to seize the artillery is only narrowly beaten off by troops stationed behind the demesne wall.

At this critical juncture, British reinforcements from Belfast arrive outside the town and, assuming it to be held by the rebels, begin to shell it with their artillery. This prompts more desertions and the rebel army begins to disintegrate, but their withdrawal is protected by a small band under James Hope which fights a successful rearguard action from the church grounds along the main street. This allows the bulk of the rebels to withdraw safely.

When the military enters the town, they begin a spree of looting, burning and murder, of which the most enthusiastic perpetrators are reported to be the Monaghan militiamen, who are anxious to prove their loyalty and expunge the shame of the recent executions of their comrades for sedition. The town of Templepatrick is burned to the ground and Old Stone Castle is razed to the ground. McCracken, Hope and their remaining supporters withdraw northward, establishing camps of ever dwindling size along the route of their retreat until news of the defeat at Ballynahinch causes their final dispersion. McCracken is arrested by yeomen on July 7 and is hanged in Belfast on July 17, having refused an offer of clemency in return for informing on his comrades.

Commemoration of the centenary of the battle, marked by a nationalist parade in Belfast on June 6, 1898, provokes loyalist riots.


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Protestant March Ends in Bloody Battle on the Craigavon Bridge

A Protestant march against the creation of “no-go” areas in Londonderry on June 3, 1972, ends in a bloody battle on the Craigavon Bridge. Soldiers use rubber bullets and water cannon to control the crowd when the so-called “Tartan gangs” at the tail end of the march begin to throw bottles and stones at the British Army.

The “no-go” areas, known as Free Derry, are areas where both the Irish Republican Army and Provisional Irish Republican Army can openly patrol, train and open offices with widespread support and without involvement of security services. Bogside, Creggan and Brandywell make up the area Free Derry, and it is still known by that name despite the barricades no longer being present.

The 10,000 strong march sets off from Irish Street at 1500 GMT to call for an end to the “no-go” areas on the east bank side of the River Foyle.

The biggest security operation since the start of the Troubles is set up for the march with soldiers on every corner. The bridge is the centre of the trouble as it joins the Protestant side of the town to the “no-go” Roman Catholic areas of Bogside and Creggan.

Despite pleas from march organisers for the violence to stop it does not end until the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) steps in. They form a human barrier between the protesters and the Army. The confrontation lasts an hour and results in one man being injured but no arrests.

A spokesman for the Army says, “Naturally it is regretted that we have to fire rubber bullets but there we are. The only alternative is the Bogside would be invaded by the Protestant marchers.”

Despite the violence, William Craig, the leader of the Ulster Vanguard movement, who organised the march, says the marches will go on. “We are no longer protesting – we are demanding action,” he says.

On July 31, 1972, the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland William Whitelaw orders 20,000 soldiers to dismantle IRA barricades in the “no-go” areas of Derry and Belfast.

1972 becomes the bloodiest year of the Troubles. Some 470 people are killed that year, the overwhelming majority of them civilians.

(From: “1972: Protestant march ends in battle,” BBC On This Day, http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday)


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Birth of Betty Williams, Peace Activist and Nobel Peace Prize Recipient

Elizabeth “Betty” Williams (née Smyth), peace activist and co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on May 22, 1943.

Williams’s father works as a butcher and her mother is a housewife. She receives her primary education from St. Teresa Primary School in Belfast and attends St. Dominic’s Grammar School for Girls for her secondary school studies. Upon completing her formal education, she takes up a job of office receptionist.

Rare for the time in Northern Ireland, Williams’s father is Protestant and her mother is Catholic, a family background from which she later says she derived religious tolerance and a breadth of vision that motivated her to work for peace. Early in the 1970s she joins an anti-violence campaign headed by a Protestant priest. She credits this experience for preparing her to eventually found her own peace movement, which focuses on creating peace groups composed of former opponents, practicing confidence-building measures, and the development of a grassroots peace process.

Williams is drawn into the public arena after witnessing the death of three children on August 10, 1976, when they are hit by a car whose driver, an Irish Republican Army (IRA) paramilitary named Danny Lennon, had been fatally shot in return fire by a soldier of the King’s Own Royal Border Regiment. As she turns the corner to her home, she sees the three Maguire children crushed by the swerving car and rushes to help. Their mother, Anne Maguire, who is with the children, dies by suicide in January 1980.

Williams is so moved by the incident that within two days of the tragic event, she obtains 6,000 signatures on a petition for peace and gains wide media attention. With Mairead Corrigan, she co-founds the Women for Peace which, with Ciaran McKeown, later becomes the Community of Peace People.

Williams soon organises a peace march to the graves of the slain children, which is attended by 10,000 Protestant and Catholic women. However, the peaceful march is violently disrupted by members of the IRA, who accuse them of being “dupes of the British.” The following week, she leads another march in Ormeau Park that concludes successfully without incident – this time with 20,000 participants.

In recognition of her efforts for peace, Williams, together with Corrigan, become joint recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1976.

The Peace Prize money is divided equally between Williams and Corrigan. Williams keeeps her share of the money, stating that her intention is to use it to promote peace beyond Ireland, but faces criticism for her decision. She and Corrigan have no contact after 1976. In 1978, Williams breaks off links with the Peace People movement and becomes instead an activist for peace in other areas around the world.

Williams receives the People’s Peace Prize of Norway in 1976, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1977, the Schweitzer Medallion for Courage, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award, the Eleanor Roosevelt Award in 1984, and the Frank Foundation Child Care International Oliver Award. In 1995, she is awarded the Rotary International “Paul Harris Fellowship” and the Together for Peace Building Award.

At the 2006 Earth Dialogues forum in Brisbane, Williams tells an audience of schoolchildren during a speech on Iraq War casualties that “Right now, I would like to kill George W. Bush.” From September 17 to 20, 2007, she gives a series of lectures in Southern California. On September 18, she presents a lecture to the academic community of Orange County entitled “Peace in the World Is Everybody’s Business” and on September 20 she gives a lecture to 2,232 members of the general public, including 1,100 high school sophomores, at Soka University of America. In 2010, she gives a lecture at WE Day Toronto, a WE Charity event that empowers students to be active within their communities, and worldwide.

Speaking at the University of Bradford before an audience of 200 in March 2011, Williams warns that young Muslim women on campus are vulnerable to attacks from angry family members, while the university does little to help protect them. “If you had someone on this campus these young women could go to say, ‘I am frightened’ – if you are not doing that here, you are dehumanising them by not helping these young women, don’t you think?”

At the time she receives the Nobel Prize, Williams works as a receptionist and is raising her two children with her first husband Ralph Williams. This marriage is dissolved in 1981. She marries businessman James Perkins in December 1982 and they live in Florida in the United States.

In 2004, Williams returns to live in Northern Ireland. She dies on March 17, 2020, at the age of 76 in Belfast.


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Birth of Thomas Johnson, Politician & Trade Unionist

Thomas Ryder Johnson, Irish Labour Party politician and trade unionist who serves as Leader of the Opposition from 1922 to 1927 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1917 to 1927, is born on May 17, 1872, in Liverpool, England. He serves as a Teachta Dála (TD) for Dublin County from 1922 to 1927. He is a Senator for the Labour Panel from 1928 to 1934.

Johnson works on the docks for an Irish fish merchant, spending much of his time in Dunmore East and Kinsale. It is this way that he picks up ideas about socialism and Irish nationalism, joining a Liverpool branch of the Independent Labour Party in 1893. In 1900 he starts work as a commercial traveller, then moves in 1903 with his family to Belfast where he becomes involved in trade union and labour politics.

In 1907 Johnson helps James Larkin organise a strike in the port, but has to watch in dismay as the strike, which begins with remarkable solidarity between labour, Orange, and nationalist supporters, collapses in sectarian rioting. At various times he is the president, treasurer and secretary of the Irish Trades Union Congress (ITUC) which is, at the time, also the Labour Party in Ireland, until officially founded in 1912 by James Connolly and James Larkin. Johnson becomes Vice-president of the ITUC in 1913, and President in 1915.

Johnson sympathizes with the Irish Volunteers, many of whom are sacked from their jobs, for illegal activities. During the Easter Rising, he notes in his diary that people in Ireland paid little heed to the fate of the defeated revolutionaries. He succeeds as leader of the Labour Party from 1917, when the party does not contest the 1918 Irish general election. When the British government tries to enforce conscription in Ireland in 1918, he leads a successful strike in conjunction with other members of the Irish anti-conscription movement.

Johnson is later elected a TD for Dublin County to the Third Dáil at the 1922 Irish general election and remains leader of the Labour Party until 1927. As such, he is Leader of the Opposition in the Dáil of the Irish Free State, as the anti-treaty faction of Sinn Féin refuses to recognise the Dáil as constituted. He issues a statement of support for the Government of the 4th Dáil when the Irish Army Mutiny threatens civilian control in March 1924.

Johnson is the only Leader of the Labour Party who serves as Leader of the Opposition in the Dáil. He loses his Dáil seat at the September 1927 Irish general election, and the following year he is elected to Seanad Éireann, where he serves until the Seanad’s abolition in 1936.

In 1896 he meets Marie Tregay, then a teacher in St. Multose’s National school, outside Kinsale. A native of Cornwall, she has advanced political views. They marry in 1898 in Liverpool. Their only son, Frederick Johnson, is born in 1899, and becomes a well-known actor. Johnson dies on January 17, 1963, at 49 Mount Prospect Avenue, Clontarf, Dublin.

Each summer, Labour Youth holds the “Tom Johnson Summer School” to host panel discussions, debates and workshops.


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Birth of Herbert Hughes, Composer, Music Critic, Collector & Arranger

Herbert Hughes, Irish composer, music critic and a collector and arranger of Irish folksongs, is born in Belfast on May 16, 1882. He was the father of Spike Hughes.

Hughes is raised in Belfast but completes his formal music education at the Royal College of Music, London, where he studies with Charles Villiers Stanford and Charles Wood, graduating in 1901. Subsequently, he works as a music critic, notably for The Daily Telegraph from 1911 to 1932.

Described as having an “ardent and self-confident manner,” Hughes is first heard of in an Irish musical capacity (beyond being honorary organist at St. Peter’s Church on Antrim Road at the age of fourteen) collecting traditional airs and transcribing folksongs in North Donegal in August 1903 with his brother Fred, Francis Joseph Bigger, and John Patrick Campbell. Dedicated to seeking out and recording such ancient melodies as are yet to be found in the more remote glens and valleys of Ulster, he produces Songs of Uladh (1904) with Joseph Campbell, illustrated by his brother John and paid for by Bigger. Throughout his career, he collects and arranges hundreds of traditional melodies and publishes many of them in his own unique arrangements. Three of his best-known works are the celebrated songs, My Lagan Love, She Moved Through the Fair, and Down by the Salley Gardens, which are published as part of his four collections of Irish Country Songs, his key achievement. These are written in collaborations with the poets Joseph Campbell and Padraic Colum, and W. B. Yeats himself. A dispute with Hamilton Harty over copyright on My Lagan Love is pursued on Bigger’s advice, but fails.

Hughes has a unique approach to arranging Irish traditional music. He calls upon the influence of the French impressionist Claude Debussy in his approach to harmony: “Musical art is gradually releasing itself from the tyranny of the tempered scale. […] and if we examine the work of the modern French school, notably that of M. Claude Debussy, it will be seen that the tendency is to break the bonds of this old slave-driver and return to the freedom of primitive scales.” He regards arrangements as an independent art form on an equal level with original composition: “[…] under his [i.e. the arranger’s] hands it is definitively transmuted into an art-song, an art-song of its own generation.” His folksong arrangements have been sung all across the English-speaking world. John McCormack and Kathleen Ferrier are the first to record them on gramophone records.

An admirer of James Joyce‘s poetry, Hughes in 1933 edits The Joyce-Book, a volume of settings of Joyce’s poetry, with 13 pieces by 13 composers including, besides Hughes himself, Arnold Bax, Arthur Bliss, Herbert Howells, John Ireland, and non-British composers such as George Antheil, Edgardo Carducci-Agustini, and Albert Roussel. The large-format, blue-cloth covered volume has since become a collector’s item.

Hughes also composes a limited amount of original chamber music (a violin sonata is mentioned in a letter to Hughes from Bernard van Dieren dated April 4, 1932), and some scores for the stage (like And So to Bed by James Bernard Fagan) and film. Hughes and John Robert Monsell also create songs for a musical version of Richard Brinsley Sheridan‘s The Rivals called Rivals!, which is staged at the Kingsway Theatre in London in October 1935 by Vladimir Rosing and runs for 86 performances.

Married to Lillian Florence (known as Meena) Meacham and Suzanne McKernan, Hughes has three children: Patrick, known professionally as Spike Hughes, Angela and Helena. He dies in Brighton, England, at the relatively early age of fifty-four on May 1, 1937.


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Birth of James Sheridan Knowles, Dramatist & Actor

James Sheridan Knowles, Irish dramatist and actor, is born in Cork, County Cork, on May 12, 1784. A relative of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, he enjoys success writing plays for the leading West End theatres. Later in his career he also produces several novels.

Knowles’s father is the lexicographer James Knowles, cousin of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The family moves to London in 1793, and at the age of fourteen he publishes a ballad entitled The Welsh Harper, which, set to music, is very popular. His talents secure him the friendship of William Hazlitt, who introduces him to Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He serves for some time in the Wiltshire and afterwards in the Tower Hamlets militia, leaving the service to become a pupil of Dr. Robert Willan. He obtains the degree of M.D. and is appointed vaccinator to the Jennerian Society.

Although Dr. Willan offers him a share in his practice, Knowles decides to give up medicine for the stage, making his first appearance as an actor probably at Bath, and plays Hamlet at the Crow Street Theatre, Dublin. At Wexford he marries, in October 1809, Maria Charteris, an actress from the Edinburgh Theatre. In 1810, he writes Leo, a successful play in which Edmund Kean appears. Another play, Brian Boroihme, written for the Belfast Theatre in the next year, attracts crowds. Nevertheless, his earnings are so small that he is obliged to become assistant to his father at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. In 1817 he moves from Belfast to Glasgow, where, besides keeping a flourishing school, he continues to write for the stage.

Knowles first important success is Caius Gracchus, produced at the Belfast Theatre in 1815. His Virginius, written for William Charles Macready, is first performed in 1820 at Covent Garden. In William Tell (1825), he writes for Macready one of his favourite parts. His best-known play, The Hunchback, is produced at Covent Garden in 1832, and he wins praise acting in the work as Master Walter. The Wife is brought out at the same theatre in 1833. The Daughter, better known as The Wrecker’s Daughter, in 1836, and The Love Chase in 1837. His 1839 play Love is praised by Mary Shelley for its “inspiring situations founded on sentiment and passion.” His second wife is the actress, Emma Knowles.

In his later years Knowles forsakes the stage for the pulpit and, as a Baptist preacher, attracts large audiences at Exeter Hall and elsewhere. He publishes two polemical works: the Rock of Rome and the Idol Demolished by Its Own Priests in both of which he combats the special doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. He is for some years in the receipt of an annual pension of £200, bestowed by Sir Robert Peel in 1849. In old age he befriends the young Edmund Gosse, whom he introduces to Shakespeare. He makes a happy appearance in Gosse’s Father and Son.

Knowles dies at Torquay on November 30, 1862. He is buried under a huge tomb at the summit of the Glasgow Necropolis.

A full list of the works of Knowles and of the various notices of him can be found in The Life of James Sheridan Knowles (1872), privately printed by his son, Richard Brinsley Knowles (1820–1882), who is well known as a journalist. It is translated into German.