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Birth of Louie Bennett, Suffragette, Trade Unionist, Journalist & Writer

Louisa (Louie) Bennett, suffragette, trade unionist, and peace activist, is born on January 7, 1870, in Garville Avenue, Rathgar, Dublin, the eldest daughter of James Cavendish Bennett, a prosperous auctioneer, and his wife Susan (née Bolger). She is brought up at Temple Hill, Blackrock, and educated at Alexandra College, and at an academy for young ladies in London, where she and her sisters form an Irish League. She goes on to study singing in Bonn, Germany. Already as a teenager she shows an interest in writing, her first literary effort being Memoirs of the Temple Road in the 80s. Afterward she publishes two unsuccessful romantic novels, The Proving of Priscilla (1902) and A Prisoner of His Word (1908), the latter set in County Down in the aftermath of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

Bennett turns her attention to women’s issues and by 1910 has become involved in the suffrage movement, initially through her reading of the suffrage monthly The Irish Citizen. In 1911, she co-founds, with her life-long friend and colleague Helen Chenevix, the Irish Women’s Suffrage Federation, an umbrella organisation, which by 1913 has connected fifteen Irish suffrage societies and has established links with Europe and the United States. She and Chenevix are the organisation’s first honorary secretaries. She is also associated with the Irish Women’s Franchise League, for which she runs public speaking classes. However, as the divide between militants and opponents of the use of violence become more pronounced, Bennett, as a confirmed pacifist, who endorses what she calls “constructive, rather than destructive action,” distances herself from the league, and through her involvement in the production of The Irish Citizen seeks to sideline the militants.

Bennett’s concerns are not limited to the question of women’s franchise. As founder of the Irish Women’s Reform League, she not only addressea the suffrage question, but examines many social issues concerning women. The league focuses on working conditions, monitors court cases involving women, and demands school meals and better education. She is among those who assist in the relief effort at Liberty Hall during the 1913 strike and lockout in Dublin, and she appeals for funds for strikers’ families through The Irish Citizen. In the period that follows she maintains her links with the labour movement. She often opposes the direct, uncompromising approach of both James Connolly and Helena Molony, and argues that labour and women’s issues can only be hampered by any affiliation with nationalist politics. The aftermath of the Easter Rising, and in particular, the murder of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, causes her to revise some of her views on nationalism. In late 1916 she accepts an invitation to reorganise the Irish Women Workers’ Union (IWWU), on the understanding that she would have complete independence from Liberty Hall. Assisted by Chenevix and Father John Flanagan, she re-creates the union along professional lines, and by 1918 its membership has risen dramatically from a few hundred to 5,300. She consistently defends its separatist stance, arguing that women’s concerns in a male-dominated union will always be of secondary importance.

Throughout World War I Bennett campaigns for peace, and she is selected as the Irish representative to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She leads the IWWU in its opposition to the attempted introduction of conscription in 1918, and in 1920 she travels to the United States to highlight Black and Tan atrocities (she later meets David Lloyd George and demands the removal of the Black and Tans from Ireland). As a member of the Women’s Peace Committee, she acts as a mediator during the Irish Civil War.

In 1925, Bennett is appointed to an Irish Trades Union Congress (ITUC) committee to promote a scheme of working class education with the assistance of the labour movement. Her interest in adult education later leads to her involvement with The People’s College. A member of the national executive of the ITUC (1927–32, 1944–50), she becomes the first female president of the congress in 1932. She serves a second presidential term in 1947. Her knowledge of labour issues is officially acknowledged by the Irish government in 1932, when she is sent as a representative to Geneva to put forward the case of Irish women workers. In 1938 she delivers a paper entitled Industrialism in an Agrarian Country to the International Relations Institute in the Netherlands.

Despite the depth of Bennett’s involvement with the union movement, she has ambitions outside trade unionism, and in 1938 she lets her name be put forward by the IWWU as a congress candidate for election to the senate, but this comes to nothing. In that year she is appointed to the government commission on vocational organisation (1938–43). In 1943, she is elected as a Labour Party member of the Dún Laoghaire borough council. As a councillor she consistently lobbies for improved housing and is instrumental in the establishment of Dún Laoghaire’s housing council in 1949. She had refused a labour nomination in the 1918 general election, but she stands for Dublin County Council and Dáil Éireann in 1944, in both cases unsuccessfully. She is the only Labour Party member to criticise the party’s support for the Fianna Fáil minority government of 1932, arguing that it is “never right or wise to co-operate with another party with fundamentally different principles.” As an elected member of the Labour Party executive, she represents Ireland at the International Labour Organization in Europe. She is also a representative at the League of Nations.

Throughout her public career Bennett consistently condemns colonialism, fascism, and armaments expenditure. She is possibly best remembered for her leadership in the laundry workers’ strike of 1945, during which IWWU members successfully fight for a fortnight‘s paid holiday. Her management of the IWWU, which lasts until 1955, is marked by determination and diplomacy, though she often uses threatened resignations as a means of controlling her colleagues. She died, unmarried, on November 25, 1956, in Killiney, County Dublin.

(From: “Bennett, Louisa (‘Louie’)” by Frances Clarke, Dictionary of Irish Biography, October 2009)


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Death of Thomas Campbell, Presbyterian Minister

Thomas Campbell, a Presbyterian minister who becomes prominent during the Second Great Awakening of the United States, dies on January 4, 1854. Born in County Down, he begins a religious reform movement on the American frontier. He is joined in the work by his son, Alexander. Their movement, known as the “Disciples of Christ,” merges in 1832 with the similar movement led by Barton W. Stone to form what is now described as the American Restoration Movement (also known as the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement).

Campbell is born on February 1, 1763, in County Down, Ireland (now Northern Ireland), and is raised as an Anglican. He is ordained a minister in the Scottish Seceder Presbyterian Church sometime after graduating from the University of Glasgow in 1786. He leaves Ireland for the United States in April 1807. This move is prompted by the advice of his physician. Once in America, disagreement arises between him and other Presbyterians over certain points related to Calvinist doctrine and the administration of the Eucharist.

The Campbell wing of the movement is launched when Campbell publishes the Declaration and Address of the Christian Association of Washington in 1809. The Presbyterian Synod had suspended his ministerial credentials. In the Declaration and Address he sets forth some of his convictions about the church of Jesus Christ, as he organises the Christian Association of Washington, in Washington County, Pennsylvania, not as a church but as an association of persons seeking to grow in faith. On May 4, 1811, the Christian Association reconstitutes itself as a congregationally governed church. With the building it constructs at Brush Run, Pennsylvania, it becomes known as Brush Run Church.

When their study of the New Testament leads the reformers to begin to practice baptism by immersion, the nearby Redstone Baptist Association invites Brush Run Church to join with them for the purpose of fellowship. The reformers agree, provided that they will be “allowed to preach and to teach whatever they learned from the Scriptures.”

Thomas and his son, Alexander, work within the Redstone Baptist Association during the period 1815 through 1824. While both the Campbells and the Baptists share practices of baptism by immersion and congregational polity, it is soon clear that the Campbells and their associates are not traditional Baptists. Within the Redstone Baptist Association, some of the Baptist leaders consider the differences intolerable when Alexander Campbell begins publishing a journal, Christian Baptist, which promotes reform. The Campbells anticipated the conflict and move their membership to a congregation of the Mahoning Baptist Association in 1824.

Campbell is a student of the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke. While he does not explicitly use the term “essentials,” in the Declaration and Address, Campbell proposes the same solution to religious division as had been advanced earlier by Herbert and Locke: “[R]educe religion to a set of essentials upon which all reasonable persons might agree.” The essentials he identifies are those practices for which the Bible provides “a ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ either in express terms or by approved precedent.” Unlike Locke, who sees the earlier efforts by Puritans as inherently divisive, he argues for “a complete restoration of apostolic Christianity.” He believes that creeds serve to divide Christians. He also believes that the Bible is clear enough that anyone can understand it and, thus, creeds are unnecessary.

Campbell combines the Enlightenment approach to unity with the Reformed and Puritan traditions of restoration. The Enlightenment affects the Campbell movement in two ways. First, it provides the idea that Christian unity can be achieved by finding a set of essentials that all reasonable people can agree on. The second is the concept of a rational faith that is formulated and defended on the basis of a set of facts derived from the Bible.

Thomas dies on January 4, 1854, in Bethany, West Virginia, and is buried next to his wife in the Campbell family cemetery.


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Death of Jane Mitchel, Irish Nationalist Wife of John Mitchel

Jane “Jenny” Mitchel, an Irish nationalist and wife of John Mitchel, dies at her home in Bedford Park, New York, on December 31, 1899.

Mitchel is born Jane Verner around 1820 near Newry, County Down. At the time she, her brother and her mother, Mary Ward, are living with Captain James Verner (1777–1847), who is from a prominent Armagh family, and is involved in the Orange Order, going on to become Orange deputy grandmaster of Ireland in 1824. Although James Verner raises Mitchel, she is not believed to be his child. She attends Miss Bryden’s School for Young Ladies in Newry. 

Mitchel meets her husband, John Mitchel, when she is fifteen. The couple elopes in November 1836, but do not marry as James Verner pursues them to Chester and brings her home to Ireland. They elope again in 1837, and are married at Drumcree Church, County Armagh, on February 3. At this point, Mitchel is disowned by James Verner, and goes to live with her in-laws at Dromalane, County Down. They then move to Banbridge in 1839 where her husband practises law. The couple goes on to have six children, three daughters and three sons.

The couple moves to Dublin in October 1845 when John Mitchel becomes the assistant editor of The Nation. They live at 8 Ontario Terrace, Rathmines, where they meet Young Irelanders. She is a full supporter of her husband’s nationalism. She aids in his work with The Nation, reading other newspapers, keeping and filing reference clippings, going on to become an editor and anonymous contributor to the United Irishman from February 1848. John Mitchel is convicted of treason for inciting insurrection in May 1848, and is sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation. Mitchel urges his fellow Young Irelanders to fight his removal, and denounces them when they fail to come out in support of him.

Due to her standing in the nationalist community, £1,450 is raised to support her and her family. For three years, Mitchel lives in Newry and Dublin, before she joins her husband in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in June 1851, where they settle in the village of Bothwell. Their youngest child, Isabel, is born there in 1853.

The Mitchels travel around the island with her husband, visiting fellow Irish exiles, becoming fond of William Smith O’Brien in particular. 

When John Mitchel escapes in July 1853, Mitchel travels with her children to join him in Sydney, from where they sail to the United States. They live for a time in Brooklyn, New York, from 1853 to 1855, rekindling friendships with old friends who are fellow Young Ireland exiles. 

In May 1855, the family moves to a remote farm at Tucaleechee Cove in Tennessee. She fears that the isolation and life in a primitive log cabin will be detrimental to their children’s education, and at her behest the family moves to Knoxville, Tennessee, in September 1856. From here, John Mitchel runs a pro-slavery newspaper, the Southern Citizen. 

The family moves again in December 1858 to Washington, D.C. Mitchel supports her husband in the Southern cause, albeit with some reservation. Nothing, she says, will induce her “to become the mistress of a slave household.” Her objection to slavery is “the injury it does to the white masters.”

Mitchel accompanies her husband to Paris in September 1860, and in opposition to some of the family, she supports her daughter Henrietta’s conversion to Catholicism and entrance into a convent. She remains in Paris and Ireland with her daughters, while her husband and sons assist the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Without letting her husband know, she resolves to return to America when she hears of her youngest son, William’s, death at Gettysburg in July 1863. She sails with her daughters, Mary and Isabel, as Henrietta had died earlier the same year. While their ship runs a blockade by the Union, the ship is shelled, runs aground, and catches fire near the coast of North Carolina. She and her daughters are unhurt, but lose all of their possessions. By December 1863, she has joined her husband in Richmond, Virginia, remaining their for the rest of the Civil War. Their eldest son, John, is killed in action in July 1864.

The family returns to New York after the war, and John Mitchel sets up another paper, The Irish Citizen (1867–72). Due to lack of funding for the Irish American press and her husband’s ill health results in the family falling into poverty. This is alleviated by a testimonial raised by William and John Dillon in 1873. Mitchel is widowed in March 1875, going on to receive $30,000 from nationalist sympathisers. She invests this money in a photolithographic firm she and her son, James, run. She dies at home in Bedford Park, New York, on December 31, 1899. She is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York, with her plot marked with a large Celtic cross. She is survived by two of her children, James (1840–1908) and Mary (1846–1910).


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Birth of Charles Agar, 1st Earl of Normanton

Charles Agar, 1st Earl of Normanton, an Anglo-Irish clergyman of the Church of Ireland, is born in Gowran Castle in Gowran, County Kilkenny, on December 22, 1736. He serves as Dean of Kilmore, as Bishop of Cloyne, as Archbishop of Cashel, and finally as Archbishop of Dublin from 1801 until his death.

Agar is the third son of Henry Agar of Gowran and his wife Anne Ellis, daughter of the Most Reverend Welbore Ellis, Bishop of Meath. His brothers include James Agar, 1st Viscount Clifden, and Welbore Ellis Agar, a notable art collector. Welbore Ellis, 1st Baron Mendip, is his maternal uncle.

Agar is educated at Westminster School in Westminster, London, and Christ Church, Oxford, where he matriculates on May 31, 1755, aged 18. He graduates BA in 1759, promoted by seniority to MA in 1762. On December 31, 1765, he is created a Doctor of Civil Law.

Agar is known to have held particularly marked Calvinistic positions. He serves as Dean of Kilmore from 1765 to 1768, and then as Bishop of Cloyne until 1779.

In 1776, Agar marries Jane Benson, a daughter of William Benson, of Downpatrick, County Down. In 1779 he is appointed as Archbishop of Cashel and also joins the Privy Council of Ireland. In 1784, while he is in office, the new St. John’s Cathedral, Cashel, is completed, and two years later its important Samuel Green organ is built.

In 1794, Agar is raised to the Peerage of Ireland as Baron Somerton. In 1801, he is translated to become Archbishop of Dublin and is created Viscount Somerton. In 1806, he is further honoured when he is made Earl of Normanton. These titles are all in the Peerage of Ireland. He remains as Archbishop of Dublin until his death in 1809, and from the beginning of 1801 onward, sits in the House of Lords as one of the twenty-eight original Irish representative peer, following the Acts of Union 1800 which unites Ireland and Great Britain.

Agar dies on July 14, 1809, aged 72, and is succeeded in his secular titles by his son Welbore Ellis Agar. He is buried in the north transept of Westminster Abbey. His widow Jane, Countess of Normanton, is buried alongside him following her death in 1826. His tomb dates from 1815 and is created by John Bacon.


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The Dungannon Land Mine Attack

The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) ambushes two British Army Land Rovers with an improvised land mine outside Dungannon, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, on December 16, 1979. Four British soldiers are killed in the attack.

Since the beginning of its campaign in 1970, the Provisional IRA has carried out many improvised land mine and roadside bomb attacks on British forces in the region. In September 1972, three British soldiers are killed when their armoured vehicle is blown up by an IRA land mine at Sanaghanroe, near Dungannon. In March 1974, two IRA members are killed on the Aughnacloy Road near Dungannon when a land mine they are planting explodes prematurely.

The Dungannon attack occurs just months after the Warrenpoint ambush on August 27, 1979, where the IRA kills eighteen British soldiers with roadside bombs in south County Down — the deadliest single attack on British forces during The Troubles.

On December 16, 1979, two armoured British Army Land Rovers are driving along Ballygawley Road, about two miles outside Dungannon. A unit of the IRA had planted a 600–1,000-pound (270–450 kg) improvised land mine in a culvert under the road at Glenadush. When the second vehicle reaches the culvert, the land mine is detonated by remote control from a concealed location, showcasing their evolving tactics in guerrilla warfare and ambush strategy. The blast is powerful enough to launch the armoured Land Rover into the air and killing four soldiers from the Royal Regiment of Artillery outright: William Beck (23), Keith Richards (22), Simon Evans (19), and Allan Ayrton (23).


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Birth of John McAlery, Association Football Pioneer

John McCredy McAlery, an Irish association football pioneer, is born in Rathfriland, County Down, on November 29, 1848. His accomplishments include organizing the first ever properly organized football match in the history of Irish football in 1878, founding the first Irish football club in 1879, helping found the Irish Football Association in 1880, and wearing the captain‘s armband in Ireland‘s first ever international match in 1882. He is known as the “father of Irish association football.”

McAlery moves to Belfast to learn the drapery business and soon becomes very successful, opening the Irish Tweed House gentleman’s outfitters on Royal Avenue. A talented cricketer in his youth, his first involvement in the Belfast sport scene is helping in the formation of the Cliftonville Cricket Club in 1870, later serving as club treasurer. In 1878, during his honeymoon in Scotland, he witnesses his first ever association football match, and enjoys it so much he decides to introduce the sport back home.

The first match of organized association football on Irish soil is played on October 24, 1878, between Caledonian and Queen’s Park. McAlery invites the Scottish sides to play in the exhibition match at the Ulster Cricket Ground in an attempt to showcase the game to the Belfast crowd. Queen’s Park achieves a 3–2 victory, and more importantly, the demonstration is well received by the locals.

On September 20, 1879, less than a year later, McAlery places an advertisement in both the News Letter and the Northern Whig soliciting for individuals interested in becoming members of the Cliftonville Association Football Club.

The newly formed Cliftonville F.C. side plays their first match just nine days later, losing 2–1 to a team of rugby players called Quidnunces. They achieve their first victory on November 1 with a 2–0 defeat of Knock F.C., a team of former lacrosse players.

On November 18, 1880, McAlery organizes a meeting at the Queen’s Hotel in Belfast between the seven Irish football clubs that have been established at the time: Alexander, Avoniel, Cliftonville, Lisburn Distillery, Knock, Moyola Park and Oldpark. These teams become the founding members of the Irish Football Association (IFA), with Lord Spencer Chichester serving as its president and McAlery as secretary. In an appendix to the minutes of the meeting, McAlery writes: “If the spirit which pervaded from those present be acted upon the result will be a strong Association for promoting the game which we have espoused.”

The meeting also provides for Ireland’s first official football competition, the Irish FA Cup. In the first Cup final of the inaugural competition, played on April 9, 1881, Cliftonville is defeated by Moyola Park. They suffer the same fate the following year, losing to Queen’s Island in the final of the 1881–82 edition. McAlery, who captains Cliftonville while playing at fullback, wins his first trophy on his third try, as his club defeats Ulster to win the 1882–83 Irish Cup.

McAlery does not play much after this, deciding to focus on his administrative role in Irish football. He referees international matches until 1887, and remains the Irish FA secretary until 1888.

McAlery captains Ireland’s first ever international match on February 18, 1882, playing at right back. On a “bittery cold” Belfast night with occasional rain and hail, Ireland loses to the far more experienced England team by a score of 13–0. A week later, he makes his second and final international appearance, captaining his team again as they lose 7–1 to Wales in Wrexham.

McAlery retires to Whitehead, County Antrim, where he dies on December 3, 1925.

In 2013, a blue plaque erected by the Ulster History Circle is unveiled at Solitude, Cliftonville’s home ground, to commemorate McAlery’s efforts.


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Birth of James Craig, Loyalist Paramilitary

James Pratt Craig, Northern Irish loyalist paramilitary during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, is born in Belfast on November 17, 1941.

Craig, known as Jim, grows up in an Ulster Protestant family on the Shankill Road. In the early 1970s, he, a former boxer, is sent to the HM Prison Maze for a criminal offence unrelated to paramilitary activities. While serving his sentence at the Maze he joins the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), and is asked by the organisation’s commander at the time, Charles Harding Smith, to take control of the UDA prisoners inside, on account of his reputation as a “hard man.”

After his release in 1976, Craig sets up a large protection racket and becomes the UDA’s chief fundraiser. By 1985, he has managed to blackmail and extort money from a number of construction firms, building sites, as well as pubs, clubs, and shops in Belfast and elsewhere in Northern Ireland, whose intimidated owners pay protection money out of fear of Craig and his associates. It is alleged that the UDA receives hundreds of thousands of pounds, some of which also find their way inside Craig’s pockets as part of his “commission.” He is acquitted on a firearm charge and Ulster Freedom Fighters (a cover name for the UDA) membership on March 18, 1982. In 1985, he is brought to court after a number of businessmen decide to testify against him, with the condition that their identities remained hidden. The case falls apart when Craig’s defence argues that his client’s rights were violated by the concealment of the witnesses’ identities.

Craig allegedly is involved in the double killing of a Catholic man and a Protestant man on the Shankill Road in 1977. The men, both colleagues, had entered a loyalist club and were later stabbed, shot and put into a car which was set on fire. By this time the UDA West Belfast Brigade no longer wants him in their ranks, as they claim they can no longer “afford him.” Craig, who is ordered to leave the Shankill Road, goes on to join forces with John McMichael’s South Belfast Brigade. In addition to being the principal fundraiser, he also sits on the UDA’s Inner Council. He usually travels in the company of his bodyguard, Artie Fee, a UDA member from the Shankill Road.

The rival Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) carries out an investigation after it is rumoured Craig has been involved in the death of UVF major William Marchant, who is gunned down by Provisional Irish Republican Army gunmen from a passing car on the Shankill Road on April 28, 1987. Marchant is the third high-ranking UVF man to be killed by the IRA during the 1980s. Although their inquiries reveal that Craig had quarrelled with Marchant as well as Lenny Murphy and John Bingham prior to their killings, the UVF feel that there is not enough evidence to warrant an attack on such a powerful UDA figure as Craig.

In December 1987, when UDA South Belfast brigadier John McMichael is blown up by an IRA booby-trap car bomb outside his home in Lisburn‘s Hilden estate, it is believed that Craig had organised his death with the IRA. Allegedly Craig fears McMichael is about to expose his racketeering business, thus putting an end to his lucrative operation. McMichael reportedly sets up an inquiry and discovers that Craig is spending money on a lavish scale, going on holidays at least twice a year and indulging in a “champagne lifestyle.” At the same time, it is suggested that Craig has made certain deals with Irish republican paramilitary groups, dividing up the rackets in west Belfast, and he would be doing the IRA a favour by helping them to eliminate a high-profile loyalist such as McMichael. Craig has established links with republicans during his time in prison, and the profitable deals and exchanges of information between them ensures he will most likely not be a target for IRA assassination.

Craig is named as an extortionist in Central Television’s 1987 programme The Cook Report. He plans to sue the programme’s producers for libel. In January 1988, Jack Kielty (father of future television presenter Patrick Kielty), a building contractor from County Down who had promised to testify as a key witness against Craig, is murdered by the UDA. This killing is attributed to Craig, although it is never proven.

Craig is shot dead by two gunmen from the UDA in “The Castle Inn” (later called “The Bunch of Grapes”), a pub in Beersbridge Road, east Belfast on October 15, 1988, where he has been lured in the belief that there is to be a UDA meeting. He is playing pool in the pub at the time of his fatal shooting by the two men, both of whom are wearing boilersuits and ski masks and carrying automatic weapons. Upon spotting Craig they open fire, spraying the room with gunfire. Craig dies instantly. A bystander pensioner is also murdered in the attack, and four other bystanders are wounded by stray bullets. The UDA claims the killing is carried out due to Craig’s “treason” and involvement in John McMichael’s murder as they know he had provided the IRA with information to successfully carry out the assassination. They apologise for the unintentional death of the pensioner. Craig is not given a paramilitary funeral, and none of the UDA’s command attend it.


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Death of Olive Henry, Northern Irish Artist

Olive Henry, Northern Irish artist known for her painting, photography and stained glass design, dies on November 8, 1989, in Crawfordsburn, County Down, Northern Ireland. She is a founding member of the Ulster Society of Women Artists and is believed to be the only female stained glass artist working in Northern Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century.

Henry is born in Belfast on January 15, 1902, the daughter of the tea merchant George Adams Henry. She attends Mount Pottinger National School, and Victoria College, before expanding her studies at night classes at the Belfast School of Art.

Henry completes an apprenticeship at Clokey Stained Glass Studios founded by Walter Francis Clokey where she is to work for over fifty years designing stained glass windows. Her appointment in the autumn of 1919 comes by a chance visit to Victoria College by the firm’s owner who is seeking a suitable apprentice. She retires from the firm at Easter 1972.

In addition to her stained glass work, Henry exhibits her paintings widely in the Oireachtas, Belfast Art Society, Royal Ulster Academy, Royal Hibernian Academy, the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, Water Colour Society of Ireland, Belfast Museum and Art Gallery (now the Ulster Museum) and the National Society in London. She is a founding member, with Gladys Maccabe, of the Ulster Society of Women Artists and is president of the society from 1979 to 1981.

Henry exhibits at the Belfast Art Society for the first time in 1928. She exhibits four works, all landscapes in oil, and then a further two works in the following year. In 1931, she shows a further two works with the successor to the Belfast Art Society, the Ulster Academy of Arts. In 1932, she shows A Derbyshire Village, described by one critic as “a delightful English rural scene.” Between 1931 and 1942 she shows with more than twenty paintings at the Ulster Academy of Arts, exhibiting at each annual show in that time.

Henry has a keen interest in photography from an early age and wins various awards for her photographs. In 1934, she wins the August prize from the Photographic Dealers’ Association for a shot of a child playing with toys in the bath, having received a consolation prize of five shillings in September of the previous year for a shot of a traditional market scene in Boulogne. She goes on to write a regular column for Amateur Photographer throughout the 1930s.

In January 1935, Henry is appointed leader of a local sketching group by the Youth Hostel Association. In December 1935, she is commended for a sketch called River Pool, submitted to a competition judged by James Humbert Craig on behalf of the Youth Hostel Association, presented alongside Port Muckin a show with the sketching group. Maurice Canning Wilks contributes Skernaghan Point, Brown’s Bay to the same show.

The Robinson and Cleaver Art Gallery stages a display of works from Four Ulster Artists in 1936 consisting of paintings from Henry, her sister Marjorie, Theo Gracey and F. H. Hummel. She contributes Green Boat, which she had presented earlier in the year to the Ulster Academy of Arts, and includes Off the Scilly Isles among pictures from Brittany and Bavaria. The reviewer in Belfast’s News Letter refers to her style as “Post-Impressionism.”

In 1937, Henry is elected an Associate of the Ulster Academy of Arts and presents three watercolours to the institution the following year. The exhibition is opened by Oliver St. John Gogarty with participants such as John Luke, Maurice Wilks, James Humbert Craig, Rosamund Praeger and Colin Middleton, who shows three Surrealist works including Angelus.

The Royal Hibernian Academy displays two small works, Flight, 1941 and Lakeside, among an unusually large contingent of Ulster artists in the annual exhibition in the spring of 1942. The Ulster Academy of Arts is united in their commitment to raise funds for the bomb damaged Ulster Hospital for Children and Women in their Spring Exhibition of 1942. Henry displays a sense of humour in her use of black-out paint, roadblocks and air raid shelters in one of the watercolours on show.

Henry is a regular exhibitor with the Water Colour Society of Ireland, and contributes more than one hundred works to their exhibitions between 1943 and 1986.

Henry joins Violet McAdoo in a joint exhibition at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery in 1944. McAdoo presents with watercolours, however, Henry also presents oils. The paintings are primarily of landscapes but included a number urban scenes.

In 1945, Henry and her sister Margaret join Arthur and George Campbell, Colin Middleton, Gladys and Max Maccabe, Thomas Carr, Maurice Wilks, James McIntyre and others, in the only official exhibition from the Ulster branch of the Artists’ International Association sponsored by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (NI) at the Belfast Museum.

The MacGaffin Gallery at Pottinger’s Entry is the venue for a group exhibition of experimental and modernist works with Nevill Johnson, Aaron McAfee and the MacCabes in 1946, where Henry exhibits seven paintings. Quayside is one of three pictures that she presents at the Ulster Academy in 1946. She also shows it with the Water Colour Society of Ireland in the following year and at CEMA’s Some Ulster Paintings exhibition in that same year.

In 1946, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and Art (CEMA) purchases a painting by Henry, in addition to works by other contemporary Ulster artists. Twenty-four of the works from the CEMA collection, including her painting, are later presented at their Donegall Place gallery in 1954.

Henry debuts at the 1948 Irish Exhibition of Living Art with one painting and returns in each of the subsequent ten years with a total of 20 paintings. She is also elected as an Honorary Academician of the Ulster Academy of Arts in 1948.

Henry displays one work, Harbour, Northern Ireland, with Violet McAdoo at the 88th exhibition of the Society of Women Artists at the Royal Institute Galleries in London during the summer of 1949. Just a few months later her work is back in London for the United Society of Artists annual exhibition where she shows Gossip and Shell and Sail.

Henry is awarded a travel scholarship from the Soroptomists of Belgium in 1957, which enables her to study stained glass in the country. She is the President of Soroptomist Club of Belfast from 1960 to 1961, where she had been a member since its foundation in 1932.

Upon her return from Belgium, CEMA stages a solo exhibition with thirty-five of Henry’s oils and watercolours at their Belfast gallery. The exhibition is arranged at short notice when another is unexpectedly cancelled. Writer Nesca Robb opens the exhibition where it is claimed a new painting technique, “monopainting,” is revealed, described as paint drawn through a gauze over glass. The exhibition includes a ‘Breton’ series, Kerry Tangle, Ship Pattern, Barrack Shapes, Lough Shapes, and Backs. In addition, she displays In the Park, an oil previously seen at the Royal Ulster Academy in 1955 and at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1956, and a second oil, City Lunch Hour, exhibited at the Royal Ulster Academy in 1956.

The Ulster Society of Women Artists is founded in 1957 by Gladys Maccabe with the support of Henry and a number of others at a time when no arts societies are accepting female artists into their ranks. The main objective is to ensure the development of quality art and women artists in Ulster. The organisation begins with ten invited artists. Henry exhibits with the society throughout her life.

Henry receives a mention in the local press referring to her exhibits in the Royal Ulster Academy show of 1959 with Kenneth Jamison comparing her work with that of Deborah Brown, “Olive Henry is more decadent by instinct, a fine formaliser. Her pictures Man and Ropes and Riviera Port, well defined and carefully abstracted, contrast in form with Deborah Brown’s freer Oil Over Tempra,[sic] 1959.”

A group exhibition in 1964 at the New Gallery in Belfast includes work from Henry alongside Neil Shawcross, Max Maccabe, Kathleen Bell, Richard Croft and Helen Ross. Among other works she shows Easter and Long Garden.

In 1965, Henry joins twelve Ulster artists including Alice Berger-Hammerschlag, Basil Blackshaw, Colin Middleton, Romeo Toogood, and Mercy Hunter in a diverse exhibition of landscape paintings at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland gallery. In the same year, she completes a commission from the Sullivan Association of Former Pupils to design a window for Sullivan Upper School in Holywood, County Down.

In 1981, the Ulster Society of Womens Artists elects Henry as President. A retrospective of her studio works is hosted by the Shambles Gallery in Hillsborough, County Down in 1986, some thirty years since her last solo exhibition. Henry shows at the Royal Ulster Academy Annual Exhibition in 1987 for the last time.

Henry dies on November 8, 1989, at Crawfordsburn, County Down. Her paintings are held in the collections of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, Ulster Museum, Irish Linen Centre & Lisburn Museum, and the Royal Ulster Academy of Arts Diploma Collection.

(Pictured: “The Gardener,” watercolour by Olive Henry)


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Death of Patrick Dorrian, Lord Bishop of Down and Connor

Patrick Dorrian, Roman Catholic prelate and 23rd Lord Bishop of Down and Connor, dies in Belfast on November 3, 1885.

Dorrian is born in Downpatrick, County Down, on March 29, 1814, one of four sons of Patrick Dorrian and his wife Rose (née Murphy). He is educated first by a Unitarian minister in the classical school in the town, where he excels, and then in St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, where he is ordained in 1833.

Dorrian’s first appointment is as a curate in the then developing town of Belfast, attached to St Patrick’s Church, Belfast, where he ministers for ten years. At a relatively young age he is appointed parish priest in Loughinisland, County Down, (1847-60) at which time he becomes Bishop of Gabala (Qabala) and Coadjutor Bishop of the Diocese of Down and Connor to assist the ailing, frail and irenic Bishop Cornelius Denvir.

Dorrian is consecrated bishop on August 19, 1860, in St. Malachy’s Church, Belfast, and eventually succeeds as bishop five years later on May 4, 1865. He is known for his authoritarian style of leadership, referred to as “Cullenite“. As the post-famine population of Belfast grows, so too does sectarian attitudes, especially among those moving into the city from rural districts all over Ulster looking for work. He seeks to defend Catholic interests, insisting on the necessity of separate Catholic education and seeking, where possible, to influence the social and political interests of his church.

In this respect, historians Sean Connolly and Gillian McIntosh refer to Dorrian’s “pugnacious” presiding over the rapid expansion in priests, churches and religious houses in contrast to the “scholarly but ineffective” Bishop Denvir.

It is estimated Dorrian is responsible for doubling the number of Catholic churches in the city of Belfast, and in 1866, early in his episcopate, St. Peter’s Cathedral, Belfast in Derby Street in the Lower Falls area is first used as a pro-cathedral. His episcopal chair, placed in that church for the occasion, is still in use by the bishops of the Diocese of Down and Connor. He attends the First Vatican Council and is one of the leading Irish delegation to the event.

Dorrian dies at the Episcopal Palace, Chichester Park, Belfast, at 7:00 a.m., on November 3, 1885. His remains are interred within the chancel of St. Patrick’s Church, Belfast, on Friday, November 6.

At a meeting of the parish priests held in the chapel of St. Malachy’s College, on November 6, 1885, immediately after Dorrian’s funeral, Patrick MacAlister is elected Vicar Capitular of Down and Connor. McAllister is then named by Pope Leo XIII as Dorrian’s successor as the 24th Lord Bishop of Down and Connor.

In November 2017, the historic chapel of Belfast’s Mater Infirmorum Hospital is re-opened after extensive refurbishment. It has, as a result of its connection with Dorrian, become known as the Dorrian Chapel.


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Death of Albert Morrow, Illustrator, Poster Designer & Cartoonist

Albert George Morrow, Irish illustrator, poster designer and cartoonist, dies at his home in West Sussex, England, on October 26, 1927.

Morrow is born on April 26, 1863, in Comber, County Down, the second son of George Morrow, a painter and decorator from Clifton Street in west Belfast. Of his seven brothers, four, George, Jack, Edwin, and Norman, are also illustrators and all but one are artists. He is a keen ornithologist in his youth. In later life he is a keen walker and paints landscapes for leisure.

Morrow is educated at the Belfast Model School and latterly at the Belfast Government School of Art between 1878 and 1881.

While studying under T. M. Lindsay at the Government School of Art in 1880, Morrow is awarded a £10 prize for drawing from the eminent publishers Cassell, Petter and Galpin. In 1881, while still learning his trade, he paints a mural of Belfast for the Working Men’s Institute in Rosemary Street, where his father is chairman. Later in that same year he exhibits a watercolour sketch of a standing figure entitled Meditative at the gallery of Rodman & Company, Belfast.

Morrow then wins a three-year scholarship worth £52 per year which he takes to the National Art Training School at South Kensington in 1882, where he begins a lifelong friendship with the British sculptor Albert Toft. In 1883, while still attending South Kensington, he joins the staff of The English Illustrated Magazine in preparation for the launch of the first edition. Two of his works are published in the Sunday at Home magazine in September of the same year.

J. Comyns Carr, first editor of The English Illustrated Magazine, commissions Morrow to complete a series on English industry when he has yet to complete his studies at South Kensington.

In 1890, Morrow begins illustrating for Bits and Good Words. He exhibits nine works at the Royal Academy of Arts between 1890 and 1904, all of which are watercolours, and another in 1917, and an offering in chalk at the 159th Exhibition, in the year of his death.

Morrow becomes a member of the Belfast Art Society in 1895, exhibiting with them in the same year. In 1896, a Morrow print is published in Volume 2 of the limited-edition print-collection Les Maîtres de l’Affiche selected by “Father of the Poster” Jules Chéret. In the same year he shows a watercolour of a Gurkha at the Earls Court in the Empire of India and Ceylon exhibition. In 1900, he exhibits with two Ulster artists, Hugh Thomson and Arthur David McCormick, at the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, who along with Morrow had contributed to the early success of The English Illustrated Magazine.

Morrow is one of the founders of the Ulster Arts Club in November 1902 along with five of his brothers, an organisation that has a nonsectarian interest in Celtic ideas, language and aesthetics. In November 1903, he exhibits at the first annual exhibition of the Club when he shows alongside John Lavery, Hans Iten, James Stoupe and F. W. Hull. He exhibits The Itinerant Musician, a watercolour that he had previously shown at the Royal Academy in 1902. Honorary membership is conferred upon him the following year. Three years later he is honoured with a solo exhibition of sketches and posters in conjunction with the Ulster Arts Club, at the Belfast Municipal Gallery.

In 1908, Morrow joins his brothers in an exhibition at 15 D’Olier Street, Dublin, an address which is later registered to the family business in 1913. Among his contributions to the family exhibition is his painting of Brandon Thomas, The Clarionette Player, which had previously been exhibited at the Royal Academy, and a poster entitled Irving in Dante.

In 1917, Morrow joins his brother George and 150 artists and writers, in petitioning the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George to find a way of enacting the unsigned codicil to Hugh Lane’s will and establish a gallery to house Lane’s art collection in Dublin. Among the 32 notable artists who sign this petition are Jack B. Yeats, Sir William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, and Augustus John.

Morrow illustrates books for children and adults, but he is best known for the hundreds of posters he designs for the theatre, with the bulk of his commissions coming from just one lithographical printer, David Allen and Sons. As a cartoonist he draws for children’s annuals, and contributes three cartoons to Punch in 1923, 1925 and posthumously in 1931.

Morrow dies at his home in West Hoathly, West Sussex, on October 26, 1927, at the age of 64. He is survived by his wife and two children. His headstone in the local churchyard at All Saints Church, Highbrook is designed by his friend, the sculptor and architect, Albert Toft.

Morrow’s works can be found in many public and private collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the British Museum.

(Pictured: Colour lithograph poster by Albert Morrow advertising a cinematic showing at the Curzon Hall, Birmingham, c. 1902)