Warden is born in the townland of Ballycastle, near Newtownards in County Down, the eldest among three sons of Robert Warden, tenant farmer, and Elizabeth Warden (née Bailie). Educated locally, he studies for the Presbyterian ministry, despite being told by a clergyman that he is a “blockhead.” Entering the University of Glasgow, he wins a silver medal for his work on barometers, receives a certificate in midwifery, and graduates MA in April 1797. Returning to Ireland, he accepts a provisional license to preach from the Presbytery of Bangor, County Down, and becomes a popular preacher in the region. A patriot in politics, he joins the United Irishmen. Because of this a warrant was issued for his arrest in 1798 and he surrenders himself to the government. Banished from Ireland, he decides to emigrate to the United States and writes a pamphlet explaining his decision, A farewell address to the junto of the presbytery of Bangor, in which he accuses the church leaders of “meanness, injustice and cruelty.”
On his arrival in New York City in 1799, Warden decides to abandon his career as a clergyman and become a teacher. Interested in mathematics, science and literature, he becomes principal of the Columbia Academy in Kinderhook, New York, and is appointed in 1801 the head tutor at Kingston Academy in Ulster County, New York. Employed by General John Armstrong, Jr. to teach his children, he makes useful connections in American society. He becomes a citizen in 1804 and is asked to accompany Armstrong to France when he is appointed ambassador. Arriving in Paris in 1806, he gives strong support to Armstrong and defends him from criticism in the American press. He is appointed acting consul in 1808, and serves as head of the legation on two occasions when Armstrong is absent. Surprisingly, despite their ties of friendship, Armstrong does not recommend Warden to succeed him permanently, and advises President Thomas Jefferson that although “honest and amiable” he is “not well qualified for business.” Stung by these comments, Warden reacts angrily and his friendship with Armstrong ends acrimoniously. As a result he is swiftly recalled from Paris.
Once back in America, Warden lobbies vigorously to be appointed French consul. Supported by Jefferson, now out of office, he returns to Paris in August 1811 having convinced the government of his credentials. Befriending the new ambassador, Joel Barlow, he soon allows pride to get the better of him. Arrogantly styling himself “consul general” after Barlow dies in December 1812, he provokes much anger and is dismissed from office on June 10, 1814. He never holds a diplomatic appointment again.
Deciding to remain in France, he resumes his scholarly activities and publishes his first book, On the Origin, Nature, Progress and Influence of Consular Establishments in 1813. A friend of many of the leading French writers and intellectuals, he also offers assistance to visiting scholars from America, providing a bridge between the European and American intellectual communities. His reputation increases with the publication of Chorographical and Statistical Description of the District of Columbia (1816) and A Statistical, Political and Historical Account of the United States of North America (3 vols., 1819). The publishers of a series, L’art de vérifier les dates, commissions him to research the volumes on North and South America in 1821. These run to ten volumes and are written over thirteen years.
Beset by financial difficulties, Warden is twice forced to sell part of his vast library to raise money. He dies on October 9, 1845, in Paris, after a long illness. He never marries.
(From: “Warden, David Bailie” by Patrick M. Geoghegan, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Solomons is born to Maurice Solomons and poet Rosa Jane Jacobs. Her father is an optician whose practice in 19 Nassau Street, Dublin, is mentioned in Ulysses. Her father is also the Vice-Consul of Austria-Hungary. The Solomons family, who came to Dublin from England in 1824, are one of the oldest continuous lines of Jews in Ireland.
Solomons grandmother, Rosa Jacobs Solomons, who is born in Hull in England, is the author of a book called Facts and Fancies (Dublin 1883). Her brother, Bethel Solomons, a renowned physician, a master of the Rotunda Hospital and Irish international rugby player, is mentioned in Finnegans Wake. Her brother Edwin is a stockbroker and prominent member of the Dublin Jewish community. Her younger sister Sophie is a trained opera singer. A portrait of Sophie, by her cousin the printmaker Louise Jacobs, survives in the Estella Solomons archives in the Library of Trinity College Dublin (TCD).
In 1898, at the age of 16, Solomons enters the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art where she wins a significant prize. Her classmates include future Irish artists including Mary Swanzy, Eva Hamilton and William J. Leech. She also attends the Chelsea School of Art from 1903 to 1906. A visit to the tercentenary exhibition of the work of Rembrandt in Amsterdam in 1903 impacts her creative practice and possibly influences her adoption of printmaking as her principal vehicle of expression. She studies under two of Ireland’s leading artists, Walter Osborne, who is another major influence, and William Orpen. With her friends Cissie Beckett (aunt of Samuel Beckett) and Beatrice Elvery, she goes to study in Paris at Académie Colarossi. On her return she exhibits in Leinster Hall, Molesworth Street, with contemporaries such as Beatrice Elvery, Eva Hamilton and Grace Gifford. Her work is also included in joint exhibitions with other artists at Mills Hall and the Arlington Gallery, London. She also exhibits at her Great Brunswick Street studio in December 1926.
Solomons illustrates Padraic Colum‘s The Road Round Ireland (1926) and DL Kelleher’s The Glamour of Dublin in 1928. Originally published after the devastation of the 1916 Easter Rising, the later edition features eight views of familiar locations in the city centre including Merchant’s Arch and King’s Inns. Her etching “A Georgian Doorway” is included in Katherine MacCormack’s Leabhar Ultuin in 1920. This publication features illustrations by several prominent Irish artists and is sold in aid of the new Saint Ultan’s Children’s Hospital in Charlemont Street, Dublin, that had been founded by two prominent members of Cumann na mBan, Dr. Kathleen Lynn and Madeleine ffrench-Mullen.
Solomons is elected an associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in July 1925, but it is not until 1966 that she is elected an honorary member. Her work is included in the Academy’s annual members’ exhibition every year for sixty years.
Solomons is married to poet and publisher Seumas O’Sullivan, whose birth name is James Sullivan Starkey. Her parents oppose the relationship as O’Sullivan is not of the Jewish faith. They marry in 1925, when she is 43 and he 46, after her parents have died. She collaborates with her husband on The Dublin Magazine (1923–58), the renowned literary and art journal, of which O’Sullivan is editor for 35 years. She provides vital financial support to the magazine, particularly in sourcing advertising, which is difficult in the tough economic climate of the new Free State. She is helped in this endeavour by poet and writer, Kathleen Goodfellow, a lifelong friend. When Solomons and O’Sullivan are looking to move from their house in Rathfarnham because of a damp problem, Goodfellow offers them the house beside her own on Morehampton Road for a nominal rent. Two of Solomons’ portraits of Goodfellow are in the Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo.
Solomons joins the Ranelagh branch of Cumann na mBan at the same time as Goodfellow. They are taught first aid, drilling and signaling by Phyllis Ryan. She is active before and during the Irish War of Independence. She conceals ammunition in the family vegetable garden before delivering it to a Sinn Féin agent. Her studio at Great Brunswick Street is used as a safe house by republicanvolunteers. During this time, she paints the portraits of a number of revolutionaries, some of which she has to later destroy to avoid incriminating them. Her work includes a portrait of Frank Aiken when we was chief of staff of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
Solomons takes up a teaching position at Bolton Street College, Dublin. In 1939, she organises an exhibition in Dublin to help refugee artists from Europe.
Solomons dies on November 2, 1968, and is buried in Woodtown Cemetery, Rathfarnham. Her friend Kathleen Goodfellow gifts the Morehampton Road Wildlife Sanctuary, where Solomons liked to paint, to An Taisce. Two plaques have subsequently been erected there, one in memory of Solomons and one for Goodfellow.
Some of Solomons works are held in the Niland Collection, at The Model gallery in Sligo and in the National Gallery of Ireland. Her archives, which include artwork and photographs (and prints by Louise Jacobs), and the archives of The Dublin Magazine are in the Library of Trinity College Dublin.
Thomas Reynolds, United Irishman, informant, consul and heir to a fortune, is born at his father’s house, 9 West Park Street, Dublin, on March 12, 1771.
Reynolds’s family history is well documented. His great-great-grandfather was Connor Reynolds of Rhynn Castle, County Leitrim, who married the daughter of Sir Robert Nugent, by whom he leaves three sons, Conor, George Nugent and Thomas. The second of these renounces his family’s Catholicism and becomes a Protestant in order to obtain possession of the greater part of the family estates and was grandfather of the George Nugent Reynolds who was killed in a duel in 1786. The third son, Thomas, a successful wool-stapler in Dublin, married Margaret Lacy, the sister of the famous Austrian general, Franz Moritz von Lacy, and by her had three sons and one daughter. Thomas’s eldest son, James, inherited his business and was one of the seven Catholics who in 1757 met at the Globe coffee-house, Essex Street, to form a committee to request the removal of legal disabilities imposed on Catholics. Thomas’s second son, also Thomas, a manufacturer of woolen poplins, had three daughters, whose marriages connected him with several distinguished Catholic families, and an only son, Andrew, father of the main subject of this article. Andrew Reynolds, admitted into partnership with his father, later developed a new poplin “by having the warp of silk and the weft, or shoot, of worsted.” These poplins came to be “prized in foreign countries as Irish tabinets.” He had an annual turnover of £100,000 to £150,000 and eventually made profits of £15,000 to £20,000 a year. On April 20, 1767, Andrew Reynolds married as his second wife, a second-cousin, Rose Fitzgerald, eldest daughter of Thomas Fitzgerald of Kilmead, County Kildare, a distant kinsman and substantial creditor of the Duke of Leinster, and his wife Rose, daughter of Francis Lacy of Inns Quay, Dublin. By Rose he had two sons and twelve daughters.
Until the age of eight, Reynolds, the future United Irishman and the only son to survive to adulthood, lives at the seat of his maternal grandfather in the care of a Catholic priest, William Plunkett. He is then moved to the school of a Protestant clergyman named Crawford at Chiswick near London and by the age of twelve he spends all vacations in the house of Sir Joshua Reynolds, who appears to take pleasure in teaching him the first principles of drawing. From Chiswick, he moves to Liège in 1783 to be educated by Catholics priests, former Jesuits, returning to Ireland shortly before his father’s death, at the age of 44, on May 8, 1788.
After 1784, the introduction of cottons to Ireland spoiled Andrew Reynolds’s trade. Loans to his nephews, the O’Reilly brothers (Thomas, Patrick and Andrew), iron-smelters at Arigna, County Roscommon, worsen his losses, which reach £200,000 at the time of his death. Lodging with his mother in Dublin, 17-year-old Reynolds mixes with “dissipated idlers” such as Simon Butler and Valentine Lawless. He revisits the Continent and is in Paris in July 1789 when the Bastille is stormed. At the behest of his mother, he becomes a member of the Catholic Committee in succession to his father on February 9, 1791, and attends the Catholic Convention as a delegate of the Dublin parish of St. Nicholas Without in December 1792. He chooses not to enter his late father’s business, preferring, despite his small income, the carefree life of a gentleman, doing the rounds of his well-to-do country relations. On March 25, 1794, he marries Harriet Witherington, fourth daughter of William Witherington, a Dublin woolen merchant, and a younger sister of Matilda Tone. His mother thereupon assigns to him half of the capital in the family business – now carried on by a relation, Thomas Warren, formerly clerk to Andrew Reynolds – and one third of the profits. He has other property as well and expectations of more, including a life-interest in an estate in Jamaica and the promise from the Duke of Leinster of the reversion of Kilkea Castle in County Kildare. A poor manager, Warren is forced out and later testifies against him in a judicial process. He still has £18,500 in assets and in 1797 obtains possession of Kilkea Castle and winds up his business affairs.
On the eve of the rebellion of 1798, Reynolds is a gentleman “of ample fortune and of the first connexions in the country.” In January or February 1797, he is drawn into the United Irish organisation by Peter Sullivan, a confidential clerk in the Reynolds family business, who refers him to Richard Dillon, a Catholic linen-draper, and to Oliver Bond, in whose house in Bridge Street he is sworn in, believing, according to his son, that the sole objects of the organisation are Catholic emancipation and the reform of parliament. Soon he is attending meetings of a baronial committee, but only after meeting Lord Edward FitzGerald in November 1797 achieves a position of importance, that of County Kildare treasurer and membership of the Leinster provincial committee. After being informed of a plan for an insurrection and for the assassination of approximately eighty individuals, some of them his own relations, and knowing the provincial committee is to meet on March 12 at the house of Oliver Bond to decide finally on a general rising, he communicates the United Irishmen’s plan to Dublin Castle through William Cope, a merchant. Those present at Bond’s house are arrested and so the plan is spoiled. He resigns as county treasurer on March 18, to be replaced by John Esmonde. Known to the United Irish leadership as an informant and in danger of his life – at least two unsuccessful attempts on his life are made – but known to Dublin Castle only as an influential United Irishman, he suffers the ransacking of his house at Kilkea on April 20 by dragoons and militia, who believe FitzGerald is concealed there. Finally, he is arrested and is to face a court-martial at Athy but, his true identity being disclosed to Dublin Castle by Cope, he is delivered to a grateful Irish privy council on May 5.
During the rebellion, Kilkea Castle, which had been renovated by Reynolds in 1797 at an expense of over £2,500 and contains priceless paintings, is garrisoned by troops and attacked by insurgents, rendering it uninhabitable for many years. It is refitted in the late 1830s. He is the principal prosecution witness in the trials of John McCann, William Michael Byrne and Bond. There being few other grounds of defence, the defence counsel, John Philpot Curran, seeks to impeach his character and motives, which, with adverse remarks by Thomas Moore in his Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1831) and a hostile obituary in The Morning Chronicle, gives rise after his death to a two-volume apologia by his son, Thomas, based on family papers and a remarkably detailed source for the history of the Reynolds family. For his action in coming forward at a critical period to save Ireland from the wicked plans of the conspirators, he is honoured by Dublin Corporation with the Freedom of the City on October 19, 1798.
His life threatened, Reynolds resides for some months in Leinster Street, Dublin, then moves with his family to Britain, spending some time in Monmouthshire before settling in London in 1803. In 1810, he is appointed British postmaster-general in Lisbon, an onerous but lucrative appointment owing to the Peninsular War. In September 1814 he returns to England. In July 1817, favoured by Lord Castlereagh, he goes to Copenhagen as consul to Iceland. He has to visit that remote island part of the kingdom of Denmark only once (June–August 1818) and in January 1820 finally leaves Copenhagen leaving his younger son, Thomas, in charge of consular affairs. With his wife and daughters, he settles in Paris. There in 1825, his elder son, Andrew Fitzgerald, fights a duel with Thomas Warren, a French army officer and son of Thomas Warren who had been Reynolds’s clerk, and is later a United Irishman. In 1831, he undergoes a religious experience and embraces evangelical Protestantism.
Casement is born into an Anglo-Irish family, and lives his very early childhood at Doyle’s Cottage, Lawson Terrace, Sandycove. His father, Captain Roger Casement of the (King’s Own) Regiment of Dragoons, is the son of Hugh Casement, a Belfast shipping merchant who goes bankrupt and later moves to Australia. After the family moves to England, Casement’s mother, Anne Jephson (or Jepson), of a DublinAnglican family, purportedly has him secretly baptised at the age of three as a Roman Catholic in Rhyl, Wales.
The family lives in England in genteel poverty. Casement’s mother dies when he is nine years old. His father takes the family back to County Antrim in Ireland to live near paternal relatives. His father dies when he is thirteen years old. He is educated at the Diocesan School, Ballymena (later the Ballymena Academy). He leaves school at 16 and goes to England to work as a clerk with Elder Dempster Lines, a Liverpool shipping company headed by Alfred Lewis Jones.
Casement is a British consul in Portuguese East Africa (1895–98), Angola (1898–1900), Congo Free State (1901–04), and Brazil (1906–11). He gains international fame for revealing atrocious cruelty in the exploitation of native labour by white traders in the Congo and the Putumayo River region of Peru. His Congo report, published in 1904, leads to a major reorganization of Belgian rule in the Congo in 1908, and his Putumayo report of 1912 earns him a knighthood, which is ultimately forfeited on June 29, 1916.
Ill health forces Casement to retire to Ireland in 1912. Although he comes from an Ulster Protestant family, he has always sympathized with the predominantly Roman Catholic Irish nationalists. Late in 1913 he helps form the National Volunteers, and in July 1914 he travels to New York City to seek American aid for that anti-British force. After World War I breaks out in August, he hopes that Germany might assist the Irish independence movement as a blow against Great Britain. On arriving in Berlin in November 1914, he finds that the German government is unwilling to risk an expedition to Ireland and that most Irish prisoners of war would refuse to join a brigade that he intends to recruit for service against England.
Later, Casement fails to obtain a loan of German army officers to lead the Irish rising planned for Easter 1916. In a vain effort to prevent the revolt, he sails for Ireland on April 12 in a German submarine. Put ashore near Tralee, County Kerry, he is arrested on April 24 and taken to London, where, on June 29, he is convicted of treason and sentenced to death. An appeal is dismissed, and he is hanged at London’s Pentonville Prison on August 3, 1916, despite attempts by influential Englishmen to secure a reprieve in view of his past services to the British government. During this time, diaries reputedly written by Casement and containing detailed descriptions of homosexual practices are circulated privately among British officials. After years of dispute over their authenticity, the diaries are made available to scholars by the British home secretary in July 1959. It is generally considered that the passages in question are in Casement’s handwriting.
In 1965 Casement’s remains are repatriated to Ireland. Despite the annulment, or withdrawal, of his knighthood in 1916, the 1965 UK Cabinet record of the repatriation decision refers to him as “Sir Roger Casement.”
Casement’s last wish is to be buried at Murlough Bay on the north coast of County Antrim, in present-day Northern Ireland, but Prime MinisterHarold Wilson‘s government had released the remains only on condition that they could not be brought into Northern Ireland, as “the government feared that a reburial there could provoke Catholic celebrations and Protestant reactions.”
Casement’s remains lay in state at the Garrison Church, Arbour Hill (now Arbour Hill Prison) in Dublin for five days, close to the graves of other leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising. After a state funeral, his remains are buried with full military honours in the Republican plot in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, alongside other Irish republicans and nationalists. The President of Ireland, Éamon de Valera, then the last surviving leader of the Easter Rising, attends the ceremony, along with an estimated 30,000 others.
Jaffe is born into a Jewish family, one of four boys and five girls born to Daniel Joseph and Frederiké Jaffe. In 1852, his parents bring their family to Belfast. His father, along with his older brothers, Martin, John and Alfred, set up a business exporting linen. He is educated at Mr. Tate’s school in Holywood, County Down, and later in Hamburg and Switzerland.
Jaffe marries Paula Hertz, daughter of Moritz Hertz from Braunschweig, on March 8, 1879. They have two sons, Arthur Daniel and William Edward Berthold Jaffe. Daniel Joseph Jaffé is his nephew, son of his brother Martin.
From 1867 to 1877 Jaffe lives and works in New York. In 1877, his brothers retire so he returns to Belfast to head the family business, The Jaffe Brothers, at Bedford Street. He builds it up to become the largest linen exporter in Ireland. He is a member of the Belfast Harbour Commission and becomes a naturalised citizen in 1888. In 1894, he successfully agitates for the reporting and destruction of shipwrecks in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Jaffe is a Justice of the Peace, a governor of the Royal Hospital, a member of the Irish Technical Education Board and a member of the Senate of Queen’s College, which later becomes Queen’s University Belfast. He is the German consul in Belfast. He is an active member of the committee which gets the Public Libraries Act extended to Belfast, leading to the first free library being established there. In 1910 he erects the Jaffe Spinning Mill on the Newtownards Road, also known as Strand Spinning. This provides work for 350 people, rising to 650 in 1914 when the company expands to make munitions. He is lavishly charitable and contributes to Queen’s College.
Jaffe takes a keen interest in the Jewish community of Belfast. He is life-president of the Belfast Hebrew Congregation, which worships at the Great Victoria Street, Belfast synagogue. His father established it on July 7, 1871. Between 1871 and 1903 the congregation increases from fifty-five to over a thousand. He pays most of the £4,000 cost of building the synagogue in Annesley Street. He opens it in 1904 wearing his mayoral regalia. Three years later with his wife, they set up the Jaffe Public Elementary School on the Cliftonville Road.
The outbreak of war sees anti-German sentiment and when the RMS Lusitania passenger liner is torpedoed by a German U-boat of the coast of County Cork on May 7, 1915, resulting in the death of 1,000 people, anti-German feeling in Britain and Ireland rise to breaking point. Even though he is loyal to the Crown, and his eldest son Arthur and his nephew are serving in the British Army, Jaffe is accused of being a German spy. Society women refuse support for the Children’s Hospital so long as Jaffe and his wife remain on the board. He is “overwhelmed with pain and sorrow.”
After twenty-five years of service, Jaffe resigns his post as Alderman of Windsor Ward for Belfast City Council in June 1916 when he is almost 70 years of age and takes up residence in London, where he dies on April 29, 1929. Lady Jaffe is too ill to attend his funeral, and she dies a few months later, in August 1929.
seamus dubhghaill 