McGrady enters politics in 1961 as an Independent Nationalist councillor on Downpatrick Urban Council, serving as chairman from 1964 until the council is replaced by Down District Council in 1973.
In 1970, McGrady becomes a founder member of the SDLP, later serving as its first chairman (1971–73). He sits on Down District Council from 1973 to 1989, serving as chairman from 1974–1975 and is also elected to all three regional assemblies in 1973, 1975 and 1982 representing South Down. In the 1973 power-sharing executive he is appointed as Head of the Department of Executive Planning and Co-ordination, serving from January to May 1974.
In Westminster elections McGrady contests South Down unsuccessfully in 1979, 1983 and at the by-election of January 1986, losing on each occasion to Enoch Powell, the sitting MP. He succeeds at the fourth attempt in the 1987 United Kingdom general election and holds the seat until his retirement in 2010. His tenure is briefly threatened in the mid-1990s when the Boundary Commission suggests merging much of his constituency with the neighbouring Newry and Armagh constituency to form a new “Newry and Mourne” constituency. This is overturned during a local review, which preserves his seat and actually removes more Unionist sections such as Dromore. His support holds solid over the years despite talk of a slippage, and this is reinforced in the 2005 United Kingdom general election with his re-election to the House of Commons.
On February 25, 2010, McGrady announces that he will stand down at the 2010 General Election. He continued to be chairperson of the Lecale Branch of the SDLP.
McGrady dies at the age of 78 in Downpatrick on November 11, 2013.
Perceval-Maxwell is born in 1870, the only son of John Perceval-Maxwell, eldest son of Robert Perceval-Maxwell DL (1813–1905), of Finnebrogue House, Downpatrick, County Down.
Perceval-Maxwell is educated at Eton College. He plays a significant part in the raising of the 36th (Ulster) Division on the outbreak of World War I. He is commissioned Major in the 13th (County Down) Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles, which he had raised, in September 1914, and is appointed second-in-command in December 1914. He is promoted to the temporary rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and commands a battalion from November 1916 and commands a battalion of the Royal Munster Fusiliers from May 1918. He is seriously wounded during the war. He resigns his commission in January 1919.
He is appointed to the Privy Council of Ireland in the honours for the opening of the Parliament of Northern Ireland in July 1921, entitling him to the style “The Right Honourable.” He serves in the Northern Ireland Senate from 1921 to 1925.
In 1895, Perceval-Maxwell marries Edith Grace Head. They have five sons: John Robert Perceval-Maxwell (born 1896), Richard Henry (born 1897, killed in action in 1916), Patrick Edward (born 1900), Brian Stephen (born 1908), and David (born 1911).
Perceval-Maxwell dies at the age of 62 on May 24, 1932, in a Belfast nursing home. He is buried in Inch Parish Churchyard, Downpatrick.
In 1802 Corry is dismissed from the Exchequer and replaced by John Foster (later Lord Oriel), he is awarded, however, £2,000 p.a. in compensation. In 1806 the changes in ownership of the Newry estates alters his position. The lands pass to a senior line of the Needham family and they support General Francis Needham, 1st Earl of Kilmorey, at the general election. Corry does not have the funds needed, in excess of £5000, to purchase a seat elsewhere. However, Lady Downshire is inclined to support the Grenville ministry and comes to a formal agreement with Corry to give him £1000 towards his expenses should he be successful in Newry, and, if not, to bring him in for another borough. He fails against the Needham interest in Newry, but a seat at Newport, Isle of Wight, is purchased for him, with £4000 from Lady Downshire, and he is appointed to the Board of Trade. Six months later Grenville’s ministry has fallen and there is another general election. Corry stands, again unsuccessfully, for Newry.
Corry is unmarried but has a long-term relationship with Jane Symms. They have three sons and three daughters. His daughter Ann marries Lt. Col. Henry Westenra, the brother of Robert Cuninghame, 1st Baron Rossmore. His residence in Newry is the Abbey Yard, now a school, and Derrymore House, Bessbrook, County Armagh, which he had inherited from his father and sold in 1810. It is now the property of the National Trust. During his life, a road is constructed from near the main entrance of Derrymore House around Newry and links up with the Dublin Road on the southern side of the town primarily for his use. This road subsequently becomes known as “The Chancellor’s Road,” as a result of his term as the Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer. A local legend has it that the road is constructed after an incident in which Corry’s stagecoach is stoned while passing through Newry by people angry at an unpopular window tax he had introduced. The road has retained this name, but it is cut in half by the Newry by-pass in the mid-1990s, however, as a result of works associated with the new A1 dual carriageway, the two-halves of the road are now reconnected.
Corry dies at his house in Merrion Square, Dublin, on May 15, 1813, his 60th birthday. He is buried in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.
McParland holds a unique place in English football history as the first player in the game to score in and win both English major domestic knockout Finals. One of the finest headers and strikers of the ball of the past fifty years, he is regarded as one of the greatest players to represent both Aston Villa and Northern Ireland.
During his time with Aston Villa, McParland is influenced by Jimmy Hogan. He later wins the FA Cup in 1957, scoring twice in the final against Manchester United but also becoming involved in a controversial incident in which he shoulder-charges (at the time a legitimate form of challenge) the Manchester United keeper after only six minutes. This leaves United’s goalkeeper, Ray Wood, unconscious with a broken cheekbone. McParland’s two-goal haul is remembered fondly as an example of his all-round abilities as a player showcasing his diving header and volleying techniques.
McParland also wins the Second Division title in 1960 and the League Cup in 1961 while with Aston Villa. He is on the scoresheet for the second leg of the 1961 League Cup final, when Aston Villa overturns a 2–0 deficit against Rotherham United to win the second leg 3–0 at Villa Park, becoming the winners of the first Football League Cup.
Following Aston Villa, McParland joins local rivals Wolverhampton Wanderers for a brief period in 1962. Although he is only there for one season, he manages to score 10 goals in 21 games. The following season he moves on to Plymouth Argyle, his final English league club before hanging up his boots. In 1965, he is recruited to play for Toronto Inter-Roma FC of the Eastern Canada Professional Soccer League. He scores many memorable goals, especially one against the Hamilton Steelers to give his side the victory.
McParland represents Northern Ireland 34 times and scores twice in his debut against Wales in the 1953–54 season. He also stars for Northern Ireland in the 1958 FIFA World Cup in which he scores five goals and helps his team to the quarterfinals. France defeats Northern Ireland 4–0 in their quarterfinal match.
McParland holds the record for being the highest-scoring Northern Irish player in World Cup finals history.
In April 2015, the feature-length documentary Spirit of ’58 is screened as part of the Belfast Film Festival. It features McParland prominently alongside Billy Bingham, Billy Simpson, Jimmy McIlroy and Harry Gregg, the other surviving players at the time, as it tells the story of Northern Ireland’s journey throughout the 1950s under the managership of Peter Doherty, culminating in the 1958 World Cup.
McParland is the last surviving player from the 1957 FA Cup Final following the death of Bobby Charlton on October 21, 2023. Following the death of Billy Bingham on June 9, 2022, McParland is the last surviving member of the Northern Ireland squad from the 1958 World Cup campaign. He is one of the last surviving members of the 1958 FIFA World Cup.
McLaverty is born on July 5, 1904, at Magheross, near Carrickmacross, County Monaghan, the son of Michael McLaverty, a waiter, and Kathleen McLaverty (née Brady). His father works in a hotel in the town until they move to Rathlin Island, and later to Belfast, when he is five years old. He attends St. Malachy’s College in the city, where an inspiring teacher instills in him a love of William Shakespeare‘s writings. He entered Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) in October 1924 and studies physics. He obtains a B.Sc. in 1928 and immediately takes his H.Dip.Ed., completing his teaching practice in St. Mary’s University College, Strawberry Hill, London. The following year he begins teaching at St. John’s Primary School in Colinward Street, west Belfast. He is admitted to the degree of M.Sc. at QUB in 1933.
In 1933, McLaverty marries Mary Conroy (formerly Giles), a young widow and fellow teacher at St. John’s. They have two sons and two daughters.
During his time at St. John’s, McLaverty writes his first five novels and fifteen short stories. In the 1930s he has developed a distinctive style in precise, unsentimental, but compassionate short stories. By the late 1930s, however, he switches his energies from short stories to the novel. Call My Brother Back (1939) contrasts the traditional world of Rathlin Island with the northern troubles in a family context. Another novel, Lost Fields (1941), and his collection of short stories, The White Mare (1943), explore the Belfast of his childhood and deal with the underlying tensions in Irish rural life. In the period 1949–55 he publishes five other novels: Three Brothers (1948), Truth in the Night (1951), School for Love (1954), The Choice (1958), and Brightening Day (1965). These novels deal with ordinary people and the dilemmas they encounter in their families and communities. His writings are influenced by Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Katherine Mansfield, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the Irish short story writers Liam O’Flaherty and Daniel Corkery.
As headmaster of St. Thomas’s intermediate school, a large school for boys in Ballymurphy, off the Falls Road, McLaverty gives his first job to the young Seamus Heaney, in whom he cultivates an interest in the writings of Chekhov and Tolstoy and the Irish writers Mary Lavin and Patrick Kavanagh. He deems Heaney to be the only genius he has ever met, and his work and success are a great source of pride and joy to him. His encouragement of the young John McGahern is of as much benefit to McLaverty himself, as their short but intense correspondence give him the energy to resume his writings.
Between his resignation from St. Thomas’s in 1963 and the early 1970s he teaches part-time at St. Joseph’s training college and St. Dominic’s High School, one of Belfast’s best-known grammar schools. In 1981 his old alma mater recognises his contribution to literature by awarding him an honorary master’s degree. In the same year he wins the American Irish literary fellowship, a prestigious literary award of $10,000, in recognition of his “impressive body of work as a short story writer and novelist.”
McLaverty dies on March 22, 1992, in County Down, Northern Ireland.
(From: “McLaverty, Michael” by Éamonn Ó Ciardha, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
The Protestant forces are taken by surprise and there is little fighting, reflected in the term “Break,” a Scottish word for rout. Victory secures eastern Ulster for the Jacobites but they fail to fully exploit their success.
While much of the Protestant population of east Ulster supports the claim of William III to thrones of Ireland, England and Scotland, the rest of Ireland, including the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Richard Talbot, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell, and the army, support James II. As a result, war breaks out in Ireland after James is deposed in the Glorious Revolution. At the start of the conflict, the Jacobites are left in control of two fortified positions at Carrickfergus and Charlemont in territory which is predominantly Williamite in sympathy. The local Williamites raise a militia and meet in a council at Hillsborough. They make an ineffective assault on Carrickfergus. However, this is easily beaten off and a local Catholic cleric named O’Hegarty reports that the Williamite are badly armed and trained.
The Jacobite commander in the north is Richard Hamilton, an experienced soldier who serves with the French military from 1671 to 1685, when he is appointed a colonel in the Irish Army. In September 1688, he and his regiment are transferred to England. When James flees into exile, he is held in the Tower of London. Released on parole by William in February, he is sent to negotiate with Talbot but drops this mission once back in Ireland. Alexander Osbourne, a Presbyterian clergyman, is sent to offer the Hillsborough council a pardon in return for surrender but they refuse, reportedly encouraged by Osbourne. On March 8, Hamilton marches north from Drogheda with 2,500 men to subdue the Williamites by force.
On March 14 Hamilton crosses the River Lagan and attacks a 3,000 strong Williamite force under Lord Mount Alexander at Dromore. Alexander’s cavalry falls back in disorder following a charge by the Jacobite dragoons. Seeing this, Hamilton orders a general advance of his infantry and the Williamite foot flee toward Dromore itself. They are overtaken in the village by the Jacobite cavalry and slaughtered, roughly 400 being killed and the rest fleeing for their lives.
Lord Mount Alexander rides to Donaghadee and takes a ship to England, while many other Protestants leave for Northern England or Scotland. Hamilton’s men capture Hillsborough, along with £1,000 and large stocks of food but fail to pursue their opponents. This allows the bulk of the militia under Rawdon and Henry Baker to reach Coleraine, then make their way to Derry, where they take part in the successful defence of the city.
Dickson is born on December 25, 1744, the eldest son of John Dickson, a tenant farmer of Ballycraigy, in the parish of Carnmoney, County Antrim. His mother is Jane Steel and, on the death of his uncle, William Steel, on May 13, 1747, the family adds his mother’s maiden name to their own.
In his boyhood, Dickson is educated by Robert White, a Presbyterian minister from Templepatrick and enters University of Glasgow in November 1761. Following graduation, he is apparently employed for a time in teaching, and in 1771 he is ordained as a Presbyterian minister. Until the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, he occupies himself mainly with parochial and domestic duties. His political career begins in 1776, when he speaks and preaches against the “unnatural, impolitic and unprincipled” war with the American colonies, denouncing it as a “mad crusade.” On two government fast-days his sermons on “the advantages of national repentance” (December 13, 1776), and on “the ruinous effects of civil war” (February 27, 1778) create considerable excitement when published. Government loyalists denounce Dickson as a traitor.
Political differences are probably at the root of a secession from his congregation in 1777. The seceders form a new congregation at Kircubbin, County Down, in defiance of the authority of the general synod.
In 1771 Dickson marries Isabella Gamble, a woman of some means, who dies on July 15, 1819. They have at least eight children, but he outlives them all. One of his sons is in the Royal Navy and dies in 1798.
Dickson enters with zest into the volunteer movement of 1778, being warmly in favour of the admission of Roman Catholics to the ranks. This is resisted “through the greater part of Ulster, if not the whole.” In a sermon to the Echlinville volunteers on March 28, 1779, he advocates the enrolment of Catholics and though induced to modify his language in printing the discourse, he offends “all the Protestant and Presbyterian bigots in the country.” He is accused of being a papist at heart, “for the very substantial reason, among others, that the maiden name of the parish priest’s mother was Dickson.”
Though the contrary has been stated, Dickson is not a member of the Volunteer conventions at Dungannon in 1782 and 1783. He throws himself heart and soul into the famous election for County Down in August 1783, when the families of Hill and Stewart, compete for the county seat in Parliament. He, with his forty-shilling freeholders, fails to secure the election of Robert Stewart. But in 1790 he successfully campaigns for the election of Stewart’s son, better known as Lord Castlereagh. Castlereagh proves his gratitude by referring at a later date to Dickson’s popularity in 1790, as proof that he was “a very dangerous person to leave at liberty.”
In December 1791, Dickson joins Robert White’s son, John Campbell White, taking the “test” of the first Society of United Irishmen, organised in October in Belfast following a meeting held with Theobald Wolfe Tone, Protestant secretary of the Catholic Committee in Dublin. According to Dickson himself, he attends no further meetings of the Society but devotes himself to spreading its principles among the volunteer associations, in opposition to the “demi-patriotic” views of the Whig Club.
At a great volunteer meeting in Belfast on July 14, 1792, Dickson opposes a resolution for the gradual removal of Catholic disabilities and assists in obtaining a unanimous pledge in favour of total and immediate emancipation. Parish and county meetings are held throughout Ulster, culminating in a provincial convention at Dungannon on February 15, 1793. He is a leading spirit at many of the preliminary meetings, and, as a delegate from the Barony of Ards, he has a chief hand in the preparation of the Dungannon resolutions. Their avowed object is to strengthen the throne and give vitality to the constitution by “a complete and radical reform.” He is nominated on a committee of thirty to summon a national convention. The Irish parliament goes no further in the direction of emancipation than the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793, which receives the royal assent on April 9, and remains unextended until 1829. While the passing of Lord Clare‘s Convention Act, still in force, makes illegal all future assemblies of delegates “purporting to represent the people, or any description of the people.”
In March and April 1798, Dickson is in Scotland arranging some family affairs. During his absence plans are made for an insurrection in Ulster, and soon after his return he agrees to take the place of Thomas Russell, who had been arrested, as adjutant-general of the United Irish forces for County Down. A few days before the county is to rise, he is himself arrested at Ballynahinch.
Dickson is conveyed to Belfast and lodged in the “black hole” and other prisons until August 12 when he is removed to a prison ship with William Tennant, Robert Hunter, Robert Simms, David Bailie Warden and Thomas Ledlie Birch, and detained there amid considerable discomfort. On March 25, 1799, Dickson, Tennant, Hunter, and Simms join the United Irish “State Prisoners” on a ship bound for Fort George, Highland prison in Scotland. This group, which includes Samuel Neilson, Arthur O’Connor, Thomas Russell, William James MacNeven, and Thomas Addis Emmet, arrives in Scotland on April 9, 1799. He spends two years there.
Unlike the more high-profile prisoners like O’Connor and MacNeven who are not released until June 1802, Tennant, Dickson, and Simms are permitted to return to Belfast in January 1802.
Dickson returns to liberty and misfortune. His wife has long been a helpless invalid, his eldest son is dead, his prospects are ruined. His congregation at Portaferry had been declared vacant on November 28, 1799. William Moreland, who had been ordained as his successor on June 16, 1800, at once offers to resign, but Dickson will not hear of this. He has thoughts of emigration but decides to stand his ground. At length, he is chosen by a seceding minority from the congregation of Keady, County Armagh, and installed minister on March 4, 1803.
Dickson’s political engagement ends with his attendance on September 9, 1811, of a Catholic meeting in Armagh, on returning from which he is cruelly beaten by Orangemen. In 1815 he resigns his charge in broken health and henceforth subsists on charity. Joseph Wright, an Episcopalian lawyer, gives him a cottage rent-free in the suburbs of Belfast, and some of his old friends make him a weekly allowance. His last appearance in the pulpit is early in 1824. He dies on December 27, 1824, having just passed his eightieth year, and is buried “in a pauper’s grave” at Clifton Street Cemetery, Belfast.
Cunningham is born in 1728 or 1729 at Ballymacilhoyle in the parish of Killead, County Antrim, the youngest son in the large family of John Cunningham and his wife, Jane, daughter of James Waddell of Islandderry, a townland in the parish of Dromore, County Down. The extended families of Cunningham and Waddell have interests in farming, linen, provisioning, and overseas trade. By 1752, no doubt with support from his family, Cunningham is in New York City trading near the meal market. Just as the Seven Years’ War is beginning in May 1757, he becomes the local partner of a Belfast merchant, Thomas Greg. While carrying on a wide range of commercial activities, the firm of Greg & Cunningham specialises in the flaxseed trade with Ireland and becomes “the most successful Irish American transatlantic trading partnership of the colonial period.” He amasses a large fortune from trade, some of it illicit, during the war, and becomes one of the largest shipowners in the American port. This enables the partners to purchase a 150-acre estate, which they rename “Belfast,” on the West Indies island of Dominica, just as it is passing, by the Treaty of Paris (1763), from French to British rule. It is possible that the estate is managed by Greg’s brother, John.
Sometime after suffering imprisonment for assaulting a fellow merchant (July–August 1763), Cunningham returns to Ireland, leaving the firm in the charge of junior partners until its dissolution in 1775. In Belfast he enters into a second partnership with Greg in May 1765 comprising all their business activities other than those in New York. In November 1765, he also marries Greg’s sister-in-law Margaret, second daughter of a Belfast merchant, Samuel Hyde. He lives in a large house in Hercules Street, later renamed Royal Avenue, which serves also as the premises for his many business interests, commercial, financial, industrial, and agricultural. In 1767, he and Greg start the manufacture of vitriol at a factory by the River Lagan at Lisburn, 12 km from Belfast. They open up fisheries in Donegal and Sligo, exporting herring to the West Indies as food for slaves. They also trade Irish horses and mules for West Indian sugar and American tobacco, the sugar being processed by them at the New Sugar House in Waring Street, Belfast. During the American Revolutionary War (1775–83), he illegally ships linen uniforms to the insurgent colonists. He becomes a middleman on the estate of Arthur Chichester, 5th Earl of Donegall, by obtaining leases of land in the Templepatrick district of County Antrim, a venture that involves him in disputes with tenant farmers resulting in an attack by the Hearts of Steel on Belfast and the destruction by fire of his home on December 23, 1771.
Despite this setback, Cunningham becomes the foremost Belfast merchant. As well as those mentioned, he has interests in shipping, brewing, glass manufacture and flour milling. When a chamber of commerce is set up in 1783, he is elected president, a position he holds until 1790. In the 1780s, in partnership with William Brown, John Campbell and Charles Ranken, he opens a bank. Known as Cunningham’s Bank, it closes on December 31, 1793, likely as a result of the recession brought on by the outbreak of war between England and France.
A prominent Volunteer, Cunningham joins the movement as a lieutenant in 1778 and is captain of the 1st Belfast company from 1780 until the dissolution of the Volunteers in 1793. Entering politics, he fails to be nominated as a parliamentary candidate for Belfast by its patron, Lord Donegall, at the general election of 1783, but stands for Carrickfergus at a February 1784 by-election on a platform of parliamentary reform and is returned – a rare distinction for a Presbyterian – by 474 votes to 289. A petition against his return is lodged successfully, but he remains an MP until March 1785, when he is defeated in a new election. It is during this period that he, probably the wealthiest, most enterprising merchant in Belfast and having, as he does, Caribbean interests, proposes in December 1784 fitting out a ship to engage in the Atlantic slave trade. The proposal comes to nothing but is the subject of intense debate in the 1920s between two rival Belfast local historians, Francis Joseph Bigger and Samuel Shannon Millin.
Cunningham plays a prominent role on several Belfast boards – those of White Linen Hall, the harbour, poorhouse, and dispensary. He gives money to the first Catholic chapel, St. Mary’s, opened in the town in 1784, and to the First Belfast Presbyterian congregation, as well as providing a site for a meeting house for his own congregation, Second Belfast, in 1767. Staunch in his advocacy of the reform of parliament, he becomes a member of the Northern Whig Club in 1790. He is cautious, however, about Catholic relief, for he fears its possible consequences. On July 14, 1792, an organiser of a Volunteer display to mark the third anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, he balks even at a very moderately worded resolution in favour of the Catholics. Thereafter he becomes increasingly ill-disposed toward reform and when the Belfast yeoman infantry is formed in 1797, he becomes captain of the 4th company.
Cunningham dies on December 15, 1797, at his restored house in Hercules Street. He and his wife have no children. His property in Ireland (worth £60,000) passes to James Douglas, youngest son of his sister Jane, who had married their first cousin, Cunningham’s personal clerk Robert Douglas. His name had already passed to Thomas Greg’s son, Cunningham Greg, who takes over Greg’s business after his death. Cunningham’s portrait is painted by Robert Home. A mausoleum is built over the Cunningham vault at Knockbreda Church cemetery overlooking Belfast.
(From: “Cunningham, Waddell” by C. J. Woods, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
He serves in the American Revolutionary War (1775–81), first seeing action at the Battles of Lexington and Concord and the Battle of Bunker Hill. He is rewarded with an English peerage in 1783. He succeeds his father as Earl of Moira in 1793. When the Whigs come to power in 1806, he is appointed Master-General of the Ordnance, a post he resigns on the fall of his party in 1807. Taking an active part in the business of the House of Lords, he belongs to the circle of the Prince of Wales (later George IV), through whose influence he is appointed Governor-General of India, on November 11, 1812. He lands at Calcutta (Kolkata) and assumes office in October 1813. Facing an empty treasury, he raises a loan in Lucknow from the nawab-vizier there and defeats the Gurkhas of Nepal in 1816. They abandon disputed districts, cede some territory to the British, and agree to receive a British resident (administrator). For this success, in 1817 he is raised to the rank of Marquess of Hastings together with the subsidiary titles Viscount Loudoun and Earl of Rawdon.
He then has to deal with a combination of Maratha powers in western India whose Pindaris, bands of horsemen attached to the Maratha chiefs, are ravaging British territory in the Northern Sarkars, in east-central India. In 1817, he offers the Marathas the choice of cooperation with the British against the Pindaris or war. The Peshwa, the Prime Minister of the Maratha Confederacy, the raja of Nagpur, and the army under Holkar II, ruler of Indore, chose war and are defeated. The Pindari bands are broken up, and, in a settlement, the Peshwa’s territories are annexed, and the Rajput princes accept British supremacy. By 1818 these developments establish British sovereignty over the whole of India east of the Sutlej River and Sindh. Rawdon-Hastings also suppresses pirate activities off the west coast of India and in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. In 1819, Sir Stamford Raffles, under his authority, obtains the cession by purchase of the strategic island of Singapore.
In internal affairs, Rawdon-Hastings begins the repair of the Mughal canal system and brings the pure water of the Yamuna River (Jumna) into Delhi, encourages education in Bengal, begins a process of Indianization by raising the status and powers of subordinate Indian judges, and takes the first measures for the revenue settlement of the extensive “conquered and ceded” provinces of the northwest.
Rawdon-Hastings’s competent administration, however, ends under a cloud because of his indulgence to a banking house. Though he is cleared of any corrupt motive, the home authorities censure him. He resigns and returns to England in 1823, receiving the comparatively minor post of Governor of Malta in 1824. He dies at sea off Naples on November 28, 1826, aboard HMS Revenge, while attempting to return home with his wife. She returns his body to Malta, and following his earlier directions, cuts off his right hand and preserves it, to be buried with her when she dies. His body is then laid to rest in a large marble sarcophagus in Hastings Gardens, Valletta. His hand is eventually interred, clasped with hers, in the family vault at Loudoun Kirk.
In 1828, two years after Rawdon-Hastings’s death, members of the India House, to make some amends for their vote of censure, give £20,000 to trustees for the benefit of Hastings’s son.
(Pictured: “Portrait of Francis Rawdon, 2nd Earl of Moira, later 1st Marquess of Hastings (1754 – 1826)” possibly by Martin Archer Shee, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Ireland)
Thompson is the eldest son of William Thompson, a prosperous linen merchant, and Elizabeth Thompson (née Callwell). He has at least two older sisters and several younger brothers. His mother’s father is Robert Callwell, a printer, book-collector, partner in the Commercial Bank, Belfast, and one of the owners of the Northern Star newspaper.
After attending the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (RBAI) from 1818, Thompson is apprenticed in the linen business of William Sinclair in 1821. When his apprenticeship ends, he goes with his cousin George Langtry, later a wealthy shipowner, on a four-month tour (May–September 1826) of the Low Countries, the Rhine, Switzerland, and Italy. On his return to Belfast, he sets up his own business in linen bleaching. Despite early success, losses are incurred. As family and economic circumstances change, he increasingly concentrates on his natural history studies. By 1831 he has given up business. A self-taught naturalist, related by ties of kinship or friendship to most of the liberal and cultivated families of the “northern Athens,” he is shy and fastidious, but is persuaded in 1826 to join the Belfast Natural History Society by its founder, his friend James Lawson Drummond. He reads his first scientific paper, The Birds of the Copeland Islands, to the society on August 13, 1827. In that year he becomes a member of the Belfast Natural History Society’s council, and in 1833 he is chosen as one of the society’s vice-presidents. He is president from 1843 until his death.
Thompson becomes the most important naturalist in mid nineteenth-century Ireland. From 1827 to 1852 he contributes almost eighty papers on Irish natural history to the Magazine of Zoology and Botany and the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. From 1836 to 1851 he contributes to The Magazine of Natural History. Invited to travel to the Levant and the Aegean Sea in April–July 1841 with Edward Forbes, professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh, on HMS Beacon, he observes twenty-three species of birds on migratory flights and publishes “Notice of migratory birds” in The Annals of Natural History. His authoritative observations add considerably to knowledge of the still-to-be-ascertained details of migratory patterns. Indeed, some people refuse to believe, even at that date, that birds do migrate. He publishes other papers in the same journal during 1841–43. At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Glasgow in 1840 his Report on the fauna of Ireland (Vertebrata) attracts favourable notice. He presents and publishes a second and final part enumerating the invertebrates at the Cork meeting of the British Association in August 1843. The two reports form the most complete catalogue of Irish fauna yet published. Thanks to an assiduous correspondence with a network of informants, as well as his own extensive observations, he adds perhaps more than 800 species to Irish fauna lists.
Thompson’s chief work, The Natural History of Ireland, becomes the standard text in Irish zoology in the nineteenth century. The first three volumes, published between 1849 and 1851, deal with birds, particularly their habits and habitats rather than physical descriptions. He is one of the first naturalists to note the effects of industrialisation and other human activities on birdlife. He leaves instructions for his manuscripts on the remaining vertebrates and all the invertebrates to be prepared for publication by Robert Patterson and James Ramsey Garrett. Robert Ball and George Dickie also assist. His notes, though detailed and comprehensive, all require checking, and are found on tiny scraps of paper, even scribbled on the flaps of old envelopes. James Thompson of Macedon, Belfast, painstakingly gums them all into blank notebooks to facilitate the work of his brother’s literary executors, who preface the posthumous publication in 1856 with a lengthy memoir of their friend.
From about 1820 to 1852 Thompson lives with his mother at 1 Donegall Square West, Belfast, commuting from Holywood House, Holywood, County Down, during the summer. His daily routine begins with research, correspondence, or writing for publications for four hours after breakfast. After a two- or three-hour exercise period and dinner, he returns to work for a further two to three hours. He is president of the Belfast Literary Society (1837–39) and also an enthusiastic patron of the visual arts in the city. He enjoys hunting, wildfowling, shooting in Scotland, and gardening, though his health deteriorates from the 1840s.
Early in 1852 Thompson travels to London to make arrangements for that year’s Belfast meeting of the British Association. On February 15 he becomes ill, having suffered a minor stroke. He dies, unmarried, at his Jermyn Street lodgings on the day he is due to return home, February 17, 1852. He is buried in Clifton Street Cemetery, Belfast. He bequeaths his collection to the Belfast Natural History Society, and in March 1852 the Society adds a memorial Thompson Room to its museum, paid for by subscription.
Thompson is a corresponding member of natural history societies in Boston and Philadelphia and has many friends. He is known to assist many other researchers in Ireland, Britain, and the Continent. One of those who thinks highly of his work is Charles Darwin, with whom he corresponds. He also helps many local people, including the poet Francis Davis, with money and practical assistance. He is much loved, and his friends are deeply saddened by his death. His niece, Sydney Mary Thompson, later known by her married surname, Christen, who is born in Belfast, is an amateur naturalist, geologist, and artist, one of the first women to achieve distinction in geology.
(From: “Thompson, William” by Andrew O’Brien and Linde Lunney, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
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