Reid is born on April 4, 1818, in Ballyroney, a hamlet near Katesbridge, County Down, in present day Northern Ireland, the son of the Rev. Thomas Mayne Reid, a Presbyterian minister and later a senior clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, and his wife, a daughter of the Rev. Samuel Rutherford. He is educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. He rebels against his father’s plans for him and decides not to pursue a career in the church. He briefly runs a school at Ballyroney before emigrating to the United States in 1839. Arriving in New Orleans, Louisiana, he finds a job as a corn factor’s clerk in the corn market. After six months he leaves because he refuses to whip slaves. Travelling across America, he works as a teacher, a clerk and an Indian-fighter, and anonymously publishes his first poem in August 1843. Later that year he meets Edgar Allan Poe in Philadelphia and the two become close friends. Poe later admits that Reid was “a colossal but most picturesque liar,” but was impressed by his brilliant story-telling abilities.
With the outbreak of the Mexican-American War in 1846 Reid enlists in the 1st New York Infantry Regiment and is commissioned second lieutenant. Contributing a series of reports from the front under the pseudonym ‘Ecolier,’ he performs with great bravery in the Battle of Chapultepac on September 13, 1847. Wounded during the battle, he is promoted to first lieutenant three days later. Following his discharge from the army in 1848 he claims to have reached the rank of captain, but this is another of his inventions.
Reid’s first play, Love’s Martyr, is staged at the Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, for five nights in October 1848, and the following year he publishes an embellished account of his experiences in Mexico entitled War Life. All of his works are published under the name ‘Captain Mayne Reid.’ In July 1849 he sails to England with a group of Hungarian radicals but decides against accompanying them to the Continent. Returning briefly to Ireland, he settles in London in 1850 and writes a novel, The Rifle Rangers. It is an immediate success and is followed quickly by The Scalp Hunters (1851), The Desert Home (1852), and The Boy Hunters (1853). While in England in 1851 he meets and falls in love with a 13-year-old girl, Elizabeth Hyde, daughter of his publisher, G. W. Hyde, an English aristocrat. When he discovers her age, he tells her that she is “getting old enough to have a lover, and you must have me.” Two years later he continues with his suit, and this time is successful as they marry in 1853. He is immensely proud of his young bride and later writes a semi-autobiographical novel The Child Wife (1868), based on their relationship.
Establishing a reputation as one of the most popular novelists of his generation, Reid does much to enhance the romantic image of the American West. His internationally successful books include The White Chief (1855), Bush Boys (1856), Oceola (1859), and The Headless Horseman (1865), and his novel about miscegenation, The Quadroon (1856), is later plagiarised by Dion Boucicault for The Octoroon (1859). A champion croquet player, he writes a treatise on the subject in 1863.
Disaster strikes in November 1866 when Reid is declared bankrupt. He had squandered all his money on the construction of “The Ranche,” a Mexican-style hacienda in England. To raise money, he returns to the United States and embarks on a successful lecturing tour. Settling at Newport, Rhode Island, he writes another novel, The Helpless Hand (1868), which is a huge success and alleviates some of his difficulties. His wife hates America, however, and after he is briefly hospitalised in 1870, they decide to return to England.
Ill health, artistic doubts, and financial insecurity plagued Reid’s final years. Diagnosed with acute depression, he is unable to recapture his earlier audience and, despite a pension from the U.S. government, he struggles for money. He dies at Ross-on-Wye in Herefordshire on October 22, 1883, and is buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in London.
Although not regarded as an important novelist, Reid none the less has a significant influence on subsequent writers. The young Vladimir Nabokov is deeply impressed by his adventure stories, and one of his own first works is a poetic recreation of The Headless Horseman in French alexandrine. Both Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle are admirers, and politicians as diverse as Theodore Roosevelt and Leon Trotsky also make reference to his varied output. In total, Reid publishes over sixty novels, which are printed in ten languages.
Spence, the sixth of seven children, is born and raised in the Shankill Road area of West Belfast in Northern Ireland, the son of William Edward Spence, a member of the Ulster Volunteers who fought in World War I, and Isabella “Bella” Hayes. The family home is 66 Joseph Street in an area of the lower Shankill known colloquially as “the Hammer.” He is educated at the Riddel School on Malvern Street and the Hemsworth Square school, finishing his education at the age of fourteen. He is also a member of the Church Lads’ Brigade, a Church of Ireland group, and the Junior Orange Order. His family has a long tradition of Orange Order membership.
Spence takes various manual jobs in the area until joining the British Army in 1957 as a member of the Royal Ulster Rifles. He rises to the rank of Provost Sergeant (battalion police). He is stationed in Cyprus and sees action fighting against the forces of Colonel Georgios Grivas. He serves until 1961 when ill-health forces him to leave. He then finds employment at the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast, where he works as a stager (builder of the scaffolding in which the ships are constructed), a skilled job that commands respect among working class Protestants and ensures for him a higher status within the Shankill.
From an early age Spence is a member of the Prince Albert Temperance Loyal Orange Lodge, where fellow members include John McQuade. He is also a member of the Royal Black Institution and the Apprentice Boys of Derry. Due to his later involvement in a murder, he is expelled from the Orange Order and the Royal Black Institution. The Reverend Martin Smyth is influential in his being thrown out of the Orange Order.
Spence’s older brother Billy is a founding member of Ulster Protestant Action (UPA) in 1956, and he is also a member of the group. He is frequently involved in street fights with republicans and garners a reputation as a “hard man.” He is also associated loosely with prominent loyalists such as Ian Paisley and Desmond Boal and is advised by both men in 1959 when he launches a protest against Gerry Fitt at Belfast City Hall after Fitt had described Spence’s regiment as “murderers” over allegations that they had killed civilians in Cyprus. He, along with other Shankill Road loyalists, break from Paisley in 1965 when they side with James Kilfedder in a row that follows the latter’s campaigns in Belfast West. Paisley intimates that Kilfedder, a rival for the leadership of dissident unionism, is close to Fine Gael after learning that he had attended party meetings while a student at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). The Shankill loyalists support Kilfedder and following his election as MP send a letter to Paisley accusing him of treachery during the entire affair.
Spence claims that he is approached in 1965 by two men, one of whom was an Ulster Unionist Party MP, who tells him that the Ulster Volunteer Force is to be re-established and that he is to have responsibility for the Shankill. He is sworn in soon afterward in a ceremony held in secret near Pomeroy, County Tyrone. Because of his military experience, he is chosen as the military commander and public face of the UVF when the group is established. However, RUC Special Branch believes that his brother Billy, who keeps a much lower public profile, is the real leader of the group. Whatever the truth of this intelligence, Spence’s Shankill UVF team is made up of only around 12 men on its formation. Their base of operations is the Standard Bar, a pub on the Shankill Road frequented by Spence and his allies.
On May 7, 1966, a group of UVF men led by Spence petrol bomb a Catholic-owned pub on the Shankill Road. Fire also engulfs the house next door, killing the elderly Protestant widow, Matilda Gould (77), who lives there. On May 27, he orders four UVF men to kill an Irish Republican Army (IRA) member, Leo Martin, who lives on the Falls Road. Unable to find their target, the men drive around in search of any Catholic instead. They shoot dead John Scullion (28), a Catholic civilian, as he walks home. Spence later writes “at the time, the attitude was that if you couldn’t get an IRA man you should shoot a Taig, he’s your last resort.” On June 26, the same gang shoots dead Catholic civilian Peter Ward (18) and wounds two others as they leave a pub on Malvern Street in the lower Shankill. Two days later, the government of Northern Ireland uses the Special Powers Act to declare the UVF illegal. Shortly after, Spence and three others are arrested.
In October 1966, Spence is sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Ward, although he has always claimed his innocence. He is sent to Crumlin Road Prison. During its July 12, 1967, march, the Orange lodge to which he belongs stops outside the prison in tribute to him. This occurs despite him having been officially expelled from the Orange Order following his conviction. His involvement in the killings gives him legendary status among many young loyalists and he is claimed as an inspiration by the likes of Michael Stone. Tim Pat Coogan describes Spence as a “loyalist folk hero.” The murder of Ward is, however, repudiated by Paisley and condemned in his Protestant Telegraph, sealing the split between the two.
Spence appeals against his conviction and is the subject of a release petition organised by the Ulster Constitution Defence Committee, although nothing comes of either initiative. Despite the fact that control of the UVF lay with his closest ally, Samuel “Bo” McClelland, from prison he is often at odds with the group’s leadership, in particular with regards to the 1971 McGurk’s Bar bombing. Spence now argues that UVF members are soldiers and soldiers should not kill civilians, as had been the case at McGurk’s Bar. He respects some Irish republican paramilitaries, who he feels also live as soldiers, and to this end he writes a sympathetic letter to the widow of Official IRA leader Joe McCann after he is killed in 1972.
Spence is granted two days leave in early July 1972 to attend the wedding of his daughter Elizabeth to Winston Churchill “Winkie” Rea. The latter had formally asked Spence for his daughter’s hand in marriage during a prison visit. Met by two members of the Red Hand Commando upon his release, Spence is informed of the need for a restructuring within the UVF and told not to return to prison. He initially refuses and goes on to attend his daughter’s wedding. Afterward a plot is concocted where Jim Curry, a Red Hand Commando member, will drive Spence back to prison but the car is to be stopped and Spence “kidnapped.” As arranged, the car in which he is a passenger is stopped in Springmartin and he is taken away by UVF members. He remains at large for four months and during that time gives an interview to ITV‘s World in Action in which he calls for the UVF to take an increased role in the Northern Ireland conflict against the Provisional IRA. At the same time, he distances himself from any policy of random murders of Catholics. He also takes on responsibility for the restructuring, returning the UVF to the same command structure and organisational base that Edward Carson had utilised for the original UVF, with brigades, battalions, companies, platoons and sections. He also directs a significant restocking of the group’s arsenal, with guns mostly taken from the security forces. He gives his permission for UVF brigadier Billy Hanna to establish the UVF’s Mid-Ulster Brigade in Lurgan. His fugitive status earns him the short-lived nickname the “Orange Pimpernel.” He is arrested along with around thirty other men at a UVF drinking club in Brennan Street, but after giving a false name, he is released.
Spence’s time on the outside comes to an end on November 4 when he is captured by Colonel Derek Wilford of the Parachute Regiment, who identifies him by tattoos on his hands. He is sent directly to Long Kesh Detention Centre soon afterward, where he shares a cell with William “Plum” Smith, one of the Red Hand Commandos whom he had met upon his initial release and who had since been jailed for attempted murder.
Spence soon becomes the UVF commander within the Long Kesh Detention Centre. He runs his part of Long Kesh along military lines, drilling inmates and training them in weapons use while also expecting a maintenance of discipline. As the loyalist Long Kesh commander, he initially also has jurisdiction over the imprisoned members of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), although this comes to an end in 1973 when, following a deterioration in relations between the two groups outside the prison walls, James Craig becomes the UDA’s Maze commander. By this time Spence polarises opinion within the UVF, with some members fiercely loyal to a man they see as a folk hero and others resenting his draconian leadership and increasing emphasis on politics, with one anonymous member even labelling him “a cunt in a cravat.”
Spence begins to move toward a position of using political means to advance one’s aims, and he persuades the UVF leadership to declare a temporary ceasefire in 1973. Following Merlyn Rees‘ decision to legalise the UVF in 1974, Spence encourages them to enter politics and support the establishment of the Volunteer Political Party (VPP). However, his ideas are abandoned as the UVF ceasefire falls apart that same year following the Ulster Workers’ Council strike and the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. The carnage of the latter shocks and horrifies Spence. Furthermore, the VPP suffers a heavy defeat in West Belfast in the October 1974 United Kingdom general election, when the DUP candidate, John McQuade, captures six times as many votes as the VPP’s Ken Gibson.
Spence is increasingly disillusioned with the UVF, and he imparts these views to fellow inmates at Long Kesh. According to Billy Mitchell, Spence quizzes him and others sent to Long Kesh about why they are there, seeking an ideological answer to his question. When the prisoner is unable to provide one, Spence then seeks to convince them of the wisdom of his more politicised path, something that he accomplishes with Mitchell. David Ervine and Billy Hutchinson are among the other UVF men imprisoned in the mid-1970s to become disciples of Spence. In 1977, he publicly condemns the use of violence for political gain, on the grounds that it is counterproductive. In 1978, he leaves the UVF altogether. His brother Bobby, also a UVF member, dies in October 1980 inside the Maze, a few months after the death of their brother Billy.
Released from prison in 1984, Spence soon becomes a leading member of the UVF-linked Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) and a central figure in the Northern Ireland peace process. He initially works solely for the PUP but eventually also sets up the Shankill Activity Centre, a government-supported scheme to provide training and leisure opportunities for unemployed youths.
Spence is entrusted by the Combined Loyalist Military Command (CLMC) to read out their October 13, 1994, statement that announces the loyalist ceasefire. Flanked by his PUP colleagues Jim McDonald and William Plum Smith, as well as Ulster Democratic Party (UDP) members Gary McMichael, John White and David Adams, he reads the statement from Fernhill, a former Cunningham family home on their former Glencairn estate in Belfast’s Glencairn area. This building had been an important training centre for members of Edward Carson’s original UVF. A few days after the announcement, he makes a trip to the United States along with the PUP’s David Ervine and Billy Hutchinson and the UDP’s McMichael, Adams and Joe English. Among their engagements is one as guests of honour of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. He goes on to become a leading advocate for the Good Friday Agreement.
In August 2000, Spence is caught up in moves by Johnny Adair‘s “C” Company of the UDA to take control of the Shankill by forcing out the UVF and other opponents. Due to his involvement in the peace process and the eventual Good Friday Agreement, the authorities insist against his wishes to install additional security measures to the doors and windows. As a result, when Adair’s men try to force their way into Spence’s Shankill home, they only manage to push a long stick through a partially open window of the bungalow and dislodge a few of his military frames off the opposite wall. There is no other damage and other than that small disruption no one is able to gain any physical entry into the property. When Spence’s wife dies three years later, he says that C Company is responsible for her death, as the events had taken on her health.
On May 3, 2007, Spence reads out the statement by the UVF announcing that it will keep its weapons but put them beyond the reach of ordinary members. The statement also includes a warning that activities could “provoke another generation of loyalists toward armed resistance.” He does not specify what activities or what is being resisted.
Spence marries Louie Donaldson, a native of the city’s Grosvenor Road, on June 20, 1953, at Wellwood Street Mission, Sandy Row. The couple has three daughters, Elizabeth (born 1954), Sandra (1956) and Catherine (1960). Louie dies in 2003. Spence, a talented footballer in his youth with Old Lodge F.C., is a lifelong supporter of Linfield F.C.
Spence dies in a Belfast hospital at the age of 78 on September 25, 2011. He had been suffering from a long-term illness and was admitted to hospital 12 days prior to his death. He is praised by, among others, PUP leader Brian Ervine, who states that “his contribution to the peace is incalculable.” Sinn Féin‘s Gerry Kelly claims that while Spence had been central to the development of loyalist paramilitarism, “he will also be remembered as a major influence in drawing loyalism away from sectarian strife.”
However, a granddaughter of Matilda Gould, a 74-year-old Protestant widow who had died from burns sustained in the UVF’s attempted bombing of a Catholic bar next door to her home, objects to Spence being called a “peacemaker” and describes him as a “bad evil man.” The unnamed woman states, “When you go out and throw a petrol bomb through a widow’s window, you’re no peacemaker.”
Spence’s funeral service is held in St. Michael’s Church of Ireland on the Shankill Road. Notable mourners include Unionist politicians Dawn Purvis, Mike Nesbitt, Michael McGimpsey, Hugh Smyth and Brian Ervine, UVF chief John “Bunter” Graham and UDA South Belfast brigadier Jackie McDonald. In accordance with his wishes, there are no paramilitary trappings at the funeral or reference to his time in the UVF. Instead, his coffin is adorned with the beret and regimental flag of the Royal Ulster Rifles, his former regiment. He is buried in Bangor, County Down.
Drew is the son of the Rev. Thomas Drew, son of a Limerick grocer, and Isabella Drew (née Dalton), daughter of a Dublin attorney. He is one of four sons and eight daughters of the couple, although most of the children die young. His sister, Catherine Drew, is a prominent Londonjournalist and an early champion of women’s rights.
Drew is trained under Sir Charles Lanyon before moving to work in Dublin, where he becomes principal assistant to William George Murray. In 1865, he becomes the diocesan architect of the united dioceses of Down, Connor and Dromore, and from that point forward Church architecture is his principal activity. He is consulting architect for both St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin.
Drew marries Adelaide Anne, sister of William George Murray, in 1871.
From 1885 to 1892, Richard Orpen works with Drew as a managing assistant. Drew’s most significant work in Belfast is St. Anne’s Cathedral, completed in 1899.
Janet McNeill, prolific Irish novelist and playwright, is born on September 14, 1907, in Dublin. Author of more than 20 children’s books, as well as adult novels, plays, and two opera libretti, she is best known for her children’s comic fantasy series My Friend Specs McCann.
McNeill is born to Rev. William McNeill, a minister at Adelaide Road Presbyterian Church, and Jeannie Patterson (Hogg) McNeill. In 1913, the family moves to Birkenhead, Merseyside, England, where her father becomes minister at Trinity Road Church. She attends public school in Birkenhead and studies classics at the University of St. Andrews in St. Andrews, Scotland, completing a MA degree in 1929. While at university, she is involved in writing and acting with the College Players. In 1924, the family returns to Ireland due to her father’s failing health, and Rev. McNeill becomes the minister of a village church in Rostrevor, County Down, Northern Ireland, while Janet joins the Belfast Telegraph as a secretary.
In 1933, McNeill marries Robert Alexander, the chief engineer in the Belfast city surveyor’s department, and the couple settles in Lisburn, where they raise their four sons. One son is the zoologist Professor Robert McNeill Alexander, CBE, FRS. Though she plans to write her first novel early on, she finds it impossible to write seriously until the children grow up, saying, “It was four years before I had a baby and twenty-five before I produced the book.”
In 1946, McNeill wins a prize in a BBC competition for her play Gospel Truth. She begins writing radio dramas, which are broadcast by the BBC. She suffers an intracerebral hemorrhage in 1953. During her recovery, she begins writing novels both for adults and children, producing a large body of work between 1955 and 1964. Her popular children’s character, Specs McCann, who debuts in a 1955 book and makes several reappearances, also inspires a newspaper cartoon strip by Rowel Friers, a Belfast artist and friend of hers.
Her 1944 novel The Maiden Dinosaur is her first to be published in the United States, twenty-two years later. She also has three writing credits on television with series and plays. Several of her plays are staged at the Ulster Group Theatre.
In 1964, McNeill’s husband retires, and the couple moves to Bristol, South West England. She writes one more novel after she leaves Northern Ireland but continues to write children’s books for another decade. During this time, she writes her only children’s play, published as Switch On, Switch Off, and other plays (1968), which presents different moral themes in scenes set in “domestic and workplace settings in contemporary England.” Her children’s book The Battle of St. George Without is televised by the BBC in 1969.
In her adult fiction, McNeill focuses on the lifestyle and social mores of Belfast and Ulster in the mid-twentieth century. Her characters are primarily “menopausal, middle-aged, middle-class Protestants.” She depicts the “dreary, Ulster religiosity” of ministers and laymen alike, and the class conventions and sexual repression of middle-aged, upper-middle-class women. The theme of suppressing self-identity and goals, both by wives in deference to their husbands and parents on behalf of their children, pervades her adult novels.
McNeill has a number of health problems and dies in Bristol in October 1994.
Campbell is the eldest son of Thomas Campbell and Jane Campbell (née Corneigle), who marry in 1787 and later have four daughters and two younger sons. His father, the son of soldier Archibald Campbell and his wife Alice McNally, is born on February 1, 1763, at Sheepbridge, near Newry, County Down. The Presbyterian minister William Campbell may have been a relation.
Archibald Campbell is born Catholic but joins the Church of Ireland, while his son joins the seceding branch of the Presbyterian church and studies at the University of Glasgow, graduating with a Master of Arts degree in 1786, although he does not appear in the published records of the university. He becomes a teacher but is determined to become a minister, and studies in the Anti-Burgher Divinity Hall in Whitburn, West Lothian (or the Seceder Theological Seminary in Whithorn, Wigtownshire, according to another source) for two months each year for five years. He is ordained a minister in the seceding congregation of Ahorey, County Armagh, probably in 1798. Although at first a member of the Anti-Burgher party in his church, Thomas Campbell begins to believe that divisions between and within denominations are prejudicial to true Christianity. He writes a report in 1804 suggesting that Burgher and Anti-Burgher Presbyterians in Ireland should unite. When this is vetoed in 1805 by the General Associate Synod of Scotland, Thomas Campbell, then moderator of the Irish Seceding Synod, initiates an unsuccessful move to seek independence from Scottish control. His experiences with church authorities undoubtedly increase his belief in the need to rediscover the scriptural basis of religion, freed from man-made creeds.
In 1804, Thomas Campbell sets up an academy at Richhill, County Armagh. In 1798, he is one of the founders of the Evangelical Society of Ulster in which clergymen from differing sects cooperate but resigns when this enterprise is frowned on by seceding authorities.
In poor health in 1806, Thomas Campbell resigns from Ahorey, and goes to the United States in 1807, where he preaches in small congregations around Washington, Pennsylvania. He is soon accused of doctrinal unsoundness, of disciplinary laxity and of administering the sacraments to non-Presbyterians. His appeal to the Associate Synod of North America is unsuccessful, and in 1809 he ceases to be a minister of the seceder church. His liberal views on Christian unity and on the paramount importance of the Bible attract supporters, and in 1809 they found the Christian Association of Washington. He publishes a declaration and address in which he sets out the principles of this body. His followers claim it represents a “second reformation” or a “restoration.” It forms the basis of the doctrine of what becomes America’s most important indigenous religious development, and is regarded as significant in the history of the wider ecumenical movement. He publishes a great many other tracts and articles. Thomas Campbell dies in Bethany, West Virginia, on January 4, 1854.
Thomas had married Jane Corneigle in 1787 and their eldest son Alexander is born on September 12, 1788, in Broughshane, County Antrim, where his father is teaching. His parents intend him for the ministry, and he receives a good education, partly from his father, and religious training from both parents. He is greatly influenced by his strongminded and pious mother. In October 1808 his family sets sail for America to join his father. The ship is wrecked on the island of Islay, off Scotland. All on board are saved, partly thanks to Alexander’s strength and leadership. Rather than continuing the voyage by other means, Alexander spends eight months in the University of Glasgow to prepare himself for the ministry.
In the summer of 1809, the family finally arrives in Pennsylvania, among many emigrants from Ulster. On January 1, 1812, Campbell is ordained as a minister by his father’s Brush Run Church, and quickly takes over the leadership of the fledgling church. By 1812, most of their followers, thenceforth often called Campbellites, have undergone baptism by immersion; a union with the Baptist denomination results, but does not survive after 1830, by which date Campbell’s work on a translation of the Greek New Testament has convinced him that baptism is unscriptural. Controversy between the two groups continues for many years.
A very able preacher and debater, whose public discussions attract much attention, Campbell attacks the creeds and governance of established churches. In 1823, he founds the journal the Christian Baptist. Subsequently in 1830, after the break with the Baptists, he starts the Millennial Harbinger. Both periodicals are largely written by Campbell and his father, Thomas, and are widely influential. He is convinced that church unity will usher in a millennial age of peace and harmony. Primitive Christianity is thus to bring about a utopian future. His book Christianity Restored (1835) is widely read, in Britain as well as in the United States. In 1826, a translation of the Greek New Testament is printed by Campbell’s press in Bethany, West Virginia. Largely based on recent translations by others, it nonetheless contains variant readings by Campbell and furthers his aim of providing followers with authoritative texts on which to base their beliefs. In 1841, he founds Bethany College, West Virginia, and is its president until his death in Bethany on March 4, 1866, when he leaves it $10,000 and a large library.
In 1832, several fledgling churches join the Campbellites, and form a new body called the Christian Church, or Disciples of Christ, which today has over 3,000 congregations in the United States. The two guiding principles of the lifelong beliefs of the Campbells are in the end irreconcilable. An emphasis on the literal interpretation of scripture allows believers to form beliefs at variance from those of co-religionists, and neither Alexander Campbell’s great authority in the denomination nor Thomas Campbell’s emphasis on the need for church unity are enough to prevent the fissions inevitable in a church that so strongly opposes man-made creeds. There are now at least six major divisions of the Church of Christ, one of several alternative names.
On March 2, 1811, Campbell marries Margaret Brown, and thenceforth derives his income from the large farm that had belonged to her family. They have eight children, who all die in their father’s lifetime. Margaret Brown Campbell dies on October 22, 1827. On July 31, 1828, in fulfilment of his wife’s dying request, the widower marries the English-born Selina Huntington Bakewell, and has six children with her. Four of those children survive him. Selina Campbell writes a memoir of her husband, published in 1882, and lives until 1897.
(From: “Campbell, Alexander” by Linde Lunney, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, last revised May 2021)
Living in the nationalist Beechmount neighbourhood of the Falls, he stands for the Falls as a candidate for the Dock Labour Party in a city council by-election in 1956, but loses to Paddy Devlin of the Irish Labour Party, who later becomes his close ally. In 1958, he is elected to Belfast City Council as a member of the Irish Labour Party.
Many sympathetic British Members of Parliament (MPs) are present at a civil rights march in Derry on October 5, 1968, when Fitt and others are beaten by the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Fitt also supports the 1969 candidacy of Bernadette Devlin in the Mid Ulster by-election who runs as an anti-abstentionist ‘Unity‘ candidate. Devlin’s success greatly increases the authority of Fitt in the eyes of many British commentators, particularly as it produces a second voice on the floor of the British House of Commons who challenge the Unionist viewpoint at a time when Harold Wilson and other British ministers are beginning to take notice.
In August 1970, Fitt becomes the first leader of a coalition of civil rights and nationalist leaders who create the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). By this time Northern Ireland is charging headlong towards near-civil war and the majority of unionists remain hostile.
After the collapse of Stormont in 1972 and the establishment of the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1973 Fitt becomes deputy chief executive of the short-lived Power-Sharing Executive created by the Sunningdale Agreement.
Fitt becomes increasingly detached from both his own party and also becomes more outspoken in his condemnation of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. He becomes a target for republican sympathisers in 1976 when they attack his home. He becomes disillusioned with the handling of Northern Ireland by the British government. In 1979, he abstains from a crucial vote in the House of Commons which brings down the Labour government, citing the way that the government had failed to help the nationalist population and tried to form a deal with the Ulster Unionist Party.
In 1979, Fitt is replaced by John Hume as leader of the SDLP and he leaves the party altogether after he agrees to constitutional talks with British Secretary of StateHumphrey Atkins without any provision for an ‘Irish dimension’ and then sees his decision overturned by the SDLP party conference. Like Paddy Devlin before him, he claims the SDLP has ceased to be a socialist force.
In 1981, he opposes the hunger strikes in the Maze prison in Belfast. His seat in Westminster is targeted by Sinn Féin as well as by the SDLP. In June 1983, he loses his seat in Belfast West to Gerry Adams, in part due to competition from an SDLP candidate. The following month, on October 14, 1983, he is created a UK life peer as Baron Fitt, of Bell’s Hill in County Down. His Belfast home is firebombed a month later and he moves to London.
Gerry Fitt dies in London on August 26, 2005, at the age of 79, after a long history of heart disease.
Scriven is born on September 10, 1819, of prosperous parents in Banbridge, County Down. He graduates with a degree from Trinity College Dublin in 1842. His fiancée accidentally drowns in 1843, the night before they are to be married. In 1844, at the age of 25, he leaves his native country and migrates to Canada, settling in Woodstock, Ontario. He leaves his country feeling a spiritual calling to serve the Lord in his Plymouth Brethren faith. He remains in Canada only briefly after becoming ill but returns for good in 1847.
For two or three years Scriven conducts a private school at Brantford. In 1855, while staying with James Sackville in Bewdley, Ontario, north of Port Hope, he receives news from Ireland of his mother being terribly ill. He writes a poem to comfort his mother called “Pray Without Ceasing.” It is later set to music and renamed by Charles Crozat Converse, becoming the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Scriven does not have any intentions nor dream that his poem would be published in the newspaper and later become a favorite hymn among the millions of Christians around the world.
About 1857, Scriven moves near to Port Hope, Ontario. Here he again falls in love and is due to be married, but in August 1860 his fiancée becomes ill with pneumonia and dies. He then devotes the rest of his life to tutoring, preaching and helping others.
In 1869, Scriven publishes a collection of 115 hymns entitled Hymns and other verses which does not include “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”
Scriven drowns at age 66 on August 10, 1886. At the time of his death, he is very ill with fever and has been brought to a friend’s home to recover. It is a very hot night, and he goes outside possibly to cool down or to get a drink of cold water from the spring. His friend reports, “We left him about midnight. I withdrew to an adjoining room to watch and pray. You may imagine my surprise and dismay when upon visiting his room I found it empty. All search failed to find a trace of the missing man, until a little after noon his body was discovered in the nearby river, lifeless and cold in death.” To this day, no one knows for certain if his death is an accident or a suicide. He is buried next to his second fiancée in her family cemetery, Pengelley Family Cemetery, at Pengelly Landing, Peterborough County, Ontario, Canada.
A tall obelisk is built upon his grave with the words from the song and the following inscription:
“This monument was erected to the memory of Joseph M. Scriven, B.A., by lovers of his hymn, which is engraved hereon, and is his best memorial. Born at Seapatrick, Co. Down, Ireland, 10 Sept. 1819, emigrated to Canada 1844. Entered into rest at Bewdley, Rice Lake, 10 August 1886, and buried here. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.“
A plaque can be found on the Port Hope-Peterborough Highway with the following inscription:
“Four miles north, in the family Pengelley Cemetery, lies the philanthropist and author of this great masterpiece, written at Port Hope, 1857. The composer of the music, Charles C. Converse, was a well-educated versatile and successful Christian, whose talents ranged from law to professional music. Under the pen name of Karl Reden, he wrote numerous scholarly articles on many subjects. Though he was an excellent musician and composer with many of his works performed by the leading American orchestras and choirs of his day, his life is best remembered for this simple music so well suited to Scriven’s text.“
Lukas Media LLC releases the full-length documentaryFriends in Jesus, The stories and Hymns of Cecil Frances Alexander and Joseph Scriven in 2011. The 45-minute documentary movie details the life of Scriven and his influence on popular hymns.
O’Connor is born on June 7, 1874, at Worcester, Massachusetts, the eldest of three sons and two daughters of Andrew O’Connor, a stonecutter from Lanarkshire, Scotland, who becomes a professional sculptor, and Marie Anne O’Connor (née McFadden), of County Antrim. Educated in Worcester public schools, at the age of 14 he becomes apprenticed to his father, helping him to design monuments for cemeteries. He is employed in the early 1890s on sculptural work for the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago World’s Fair), being active in the studio of William Ordway Partridge, and assisting Daniel Chester French on his colossal Statue of the Republic, a landmark of the 1893 Columbian exposition.
Moving to London (1894–98), O’Connor works on bas-reliefs in the studio of the painter John Singer Sargent, who uses him as a model for his mural Frieze of Prophets for the Boston Public Library. His first independent work, Sea Dreams, a relief of a head, is exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1896. Returning to the United States (1898–1903), he becomes a studio assistant of French, through whom he receives his first public commission, for the Vanderbilt Memorial Doors for St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, Manhattan, New York, a project completed in 1902 to wide critical acclaim. He also executes the tympanum and lateral friezes.
Around 1900, O’Connor marries an artist’s model named Nora, by whom he has a daughter. In 1902, he hires as studio model Jessie Phoebe Brown from New Jersey and of County Down parentage. The following year he elopes with her to Paris, where they marry and have four sons, the youngest of whom, Patrick O’Connor, becomes an artist and gallery curator. Jessie continues for many years as his primary model, sitting for the heads of both female and male figures, O’Connor coarsening the features for the latter.
During his years in Paris (1903–14), O’Connor is influenced by the work of Auguste Rodin, whom he befriends. Among his pupils in Paris is the American sculptor and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt Whitney. He continues to fulfil numerous commissions for funerary and public monuments in the United States, an example of the former being the Recuillement in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, near Tarrytown, New York. From 1906 he exhibits annually at the Salon in Paris, where he is the first foreigner to win a second-class medal, for his bronze statue of Gen. Henry Lawton. Included in his only exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy (1907) is a bronze relief of the prophet Nehemiah adapted from a panel of the Vanderbilt doors. The relief is subsequently included in his one-man show at the Galerie Hébrard, Paris in 1909.
In 1909, O’Connor wins a competition open to sculptors of Irish descent to execute a monument to Commodore John Barry, the County Wexford-born “father of the American navy,” for Washington, D.C. His design includes a frieze depicting events in Irish history, flanked by a group of three nude Irish emigrants entitled Exile from Ireland, and another group representing the Genius of Ireland, which includes a female figure of the “Motherland.” Probably owing to opposition from the Barry family to the depiction of their ancestor as a rough-and-ready sailor, the commission is not completed. His marble statue of Gen. Lew Wallace (author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ), a plaster of which is exhibited at the Salon in Paris in 1909, is placed by the state of Indiana in the National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol, Washington, D.C. Another marble, Peace by Justice, is commissioned as a gift from the United States to the Peace Palace in The Hague in 1913.
Returning to Paris in the mid-1920s, O’Connor becomes the first foreigner to win a gold medal at the Salon des Artistes in 1928, for the marble sculpture Tristan and Iseult, now held in the Brooklyn Museum, New York. The French government makes him a Chevalier of the National Order of the Legion of Honour in 1929. In 1926 he had exhibited a plaster group, Monument aux morts de la Grande Guerre, at the Salon in Paris. The sculpture is requested in 1932 by the people of Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin, as a memorial to Christ the King, O’Connor obligingly altering the interpretation of his iconography. Imposed on a “Tree of life” are three figures of Christ, representing in turn “Desolation,” “Consolation” and “Triumph.” Cast in bronze, throughout World War II the statue remains hidden in Paris to avoid its being melted down for the valuable metal. Transported to Dún Laoghaire in 1949, due to clerical opposition to its unconventional iconography, it is not at first erected, but for years lay on its side in a garden in Rochestown Avenue until its eventual unveiling in 1978 as Triple Cross in Haigh Terrace, where it stands in Moran Park. His other chief work in Ireland is a bronze statue of Daniel O’Connell in the Bank of Ireland, College Green, Dublin. Inspired by Rodin’s famous Monument to Balzac, the work is executed at his studio in a converted stable at Leixlip Castle, County Kildare in 1931–32.
During the 1930s, O’Connor lives and works in London and Ireland, where he has residences at Glencullen House, County Wicklow, and 77 Merrion Square, Dublin. He dies at the latter address on June 9, 1941, and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery. His own bronze relief, Le feu sacré, marks the grave. A portrait painting, executed by his son Patrick in 1940, is in Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, which also holds twenty-six sculptures presented by O’Connor late in his life, and posthumously by his family. The collection includes a marble self-portrait bust of 1940, a bronze of the Lafayette cast by the gallery in 1984 from a reduced plaster model presented by the artist, and a bronze group entitled The Victim, on view in Merrion Square Park, from an uncommissioned and uncompleted war memorial conceived by O’Connor under the general title Le Débarquement. The National Gallery of Ireland has the Desolation maquette for the Triple Cross. A centenary exhibition of his work is held at Trinity College Dublin in 1974. His widow dies in Dublin in 1974.
(From: “O’Connor, Andrew” by Lawrence William White and Carmel Doyle, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
O’Byrne is the son of James Burns, a farmer, and his wife Isabella (née Arnett). His biographer states that his parents came from County Wicklow, which would imply that their name had been anglicised from the form “O’Byrne,” which their son readopts. He never marries and spends most of his life living with his unmarried sister Teresa. He has other siblings, as he is survived by four nieces and two nephews.
O’Byrne’s childhood is spent in the Balmoral district of south Belfast in a comfortable but slightly precarious middle-class Catholic environment. Although sparse in direct autobiographical references, his writings contain references to excursions around the Malone and Stranmillis areas, with particular reference to the Botanic Gardens. He is educated at St. Malachy’s College. After leaving school, he manages a spirit grocery on the Beersbridge Road in east Belfast and is active in the Sexton Debating Society, named after Thomas Sexton, then home rule MP for Belfast West, and led by Joseph Devlin, who remains a lifelong friend despite their later political differences. He also studiess music with Carl Hardebeck, acquiring an extensive knowledge of Irish folk music and becoming an accomplished singer of Irish tunes in Hardebeck’s arrangements.
O’Byrne subsequently joins the Belfast Gaelic League, becoming a leading member, though he never masters the Irish language. He moves in the literary and antiquarian circles around Francis Joseph Bigger, whose friendship becomes central to his career and self-definition. He is a regular participant in Bigger’s soirées and establishes friendships with many prominent political and cultural figures, among them Roger Casement and Alice Milligan. Although he is usually seen as a specifically northern writer, he draws extensively on a wider Irish tradition of defensively self-glorifying Catholic-nationalist antiquarianism, including the works of W. H. Grattan Flood and Archbishop of Tuam, John Healy, a major source for his later pamphlet on Saint Patrick and for the descriptions of Ulster monasteries in As I Roved Out: A Book of the North (1946).
In 1900, O’Byrne publishes a collection of verses, A Jug of Punch, of which no copies are known to survive, and in 1905 collaborates with Cahir Healy on another collection, The Lane of the Thrushes, which applies Celtic revival imagery to rural Ulster. He publishes another collection, The Grey Feet of the Wind, in 1917. The manuscript of his unpublished Collected Poems (1951) is in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.
In 1902, O’Byrne gives up the spirit grocery to work full time as a journalist, singer, and storyteller. He appears at a wide variety of concerts, where he cuts a striking figure in Gaelic dress with saffron kilt. He provides musical interludes at productions by the Ulster Literary Theatre, and his recitation of Eleanor Alexander’s humorous piece on the battle of Scarva inspires Harry Morrow’s celebrated satirical play Thompson in Tir-na-nOg (1912). In 1913, he founds and manages the Celtic Players, a theatre company which stages some plays of his own composition, including The Dream of Bredyeen Dara, possibly a nativity story incorporating Saint Brigid of Kildare.
During World War I O’Byrne achieves immense cross-community success with a weekly dialect column in the Unionist paper Ireland’s Saturday Night, describing the domestic activities of “Mrs. Twigglety” and her working-class friends. At the same time, he has abandoned his earlier support for Devlin’s home rule politics to embrace physical-force republicanism under the influence of Denis McCullough. During Casement’s imprisonment and trial, he carries on an intense correspondence with him, comforting him, urging him to convert to Catholicism, and sending him religious icons. Some commentators have detected homoerotic undertones in their exchanges, though this is a matter of opinion.
After the Easter Rising of 1916, O’Byrne is active in the reconstituted Irish Republican Army (IRA), and in 1919–20 he smuggles arms from Belfast to Dublin. In August 1920, he emigrates to the United States, where he goes on a six-month lecture tour to raise funds for victims of the Belfast pogroms. He allegedly raises $100,000 and funds the construction of Amcomri Street in west Belfast. He spends the next eight years in the United States as a speaker and entertainer, contributing to American Catholic publications. He develops an abiding fondness for Chicago and considers applying for American citizenship. At one point he corresponds with the film star Rudolph Valentino, who admires his verses on Italian themes.
O’Byrne returns to Belfast in September 1928 with the intention of opening a bookshop in Dublin, but this has to be abandoned after the loss of his savings in the Wall Street crash of October 1929. He settles into respectable semi-poverty in Cavendish Street, off the Falls Road, and remains a presence on the fringes of Belfast literary life. In 1930, he founds the Cathal O’Byrne Comedy Company, which performs plays of his own composition, notably the slight comedies The Returned Swank and The Burden, drawing on The Drone, by Samuel Waddell. In 1932, he sings at a concert in the Dublin Mansion House held to mark the Eucharistic Congress. He writes extensively for Catholic publications in Ireland and elsewhere, in particular the Capuchin Annual, Irish Monthly, and Irish Rosary, and publishes several pamphlets with the Catholic Truth Society (CTS). The sensibility displayed in these writings has much in common with that of Brian O’Higgins, Aodh de Blácam, Daniel Corkery and Gearoid Ó Cuinneagáin.
O’Byrne also publishes The Gaelic Source of the Brontë Genius (1932), Pilgrim in Italy (1930), and the story collection From Far Green Hills (1935), which retells gospel episodes in the style of an Irish storyteller with elements of Wildean orientalist exoticism. Pilgrim in Italy is published by the Three Candles Press of Colm Ó Lochlainn, an old friend through the Bigger circle, as is his last story collection, Ashes on the Hearth (1948), a series of slight reveries in which the narrator, wandering the back streets of Dublin, relives such resonant moments as the last days of James Clarence Mangan.
O’Byrne is best remembered, however, for As I Roved Out (1946), a collection of 128 articles on Belfast history originally published from the late 1930s in the Belfast Irish News. It displays considerable knowledge of Belfast history, drawn from lifelong reading and from conversations with Bigger, and can be seen as at once the summation of and a lament for the northern branch of the Irish revival associated with such figures as Bigger and Alice Milligan. The pieces, moving out from central Belfast to surrounding rural districts are held together by the storyteller surveying the landscape. Surveys of Belfast by journalistic flâneurs are not unprecedented, O’Byrne dismisses the mercantile and unionist establishment of Belfast as hopelessly materialistic and oppressive, casting himself and, by implication, his Catholic/nationalist readers as internal exiles forced into the side streets of history, treasuring a martyred religious faith and gazing back wistfully to the bright and fleeting hope represented by the Society of United Irishmen and the cultural revival. The book is punctuated by expressions of anger against the whole heritage of the Ulster plantation. The economic success of the planters is attributed solely to their plunder of the natives. The textile industry is discussed solely in terms of exploitation and starvation wages. Shipbuilding is dismissed with a remark that ships were built in Ulster long before the planters arrived. Finally, the history of Belfast is summed up in the confrontation between the Belfast merchant, ancestor of the unionist “establishment,” and would-be slave-trader Waddell Cunningham and the United Irishman and self-declared “Irish slave” William Putnam McCabe.
There are numerous contemptuous references to the Sabbatarianism and respectable dullness of late Victorian Belfast, contrasted with the lively artistic activities of the volunteer period. The book is reprinted three times in O’Byrne’s lifetime and is seen by nationalists as an underground classic. Its image of Belfast layered with fragmentary and hidden memories has been drawn on by authors as diverse as Ciaran Carson and Gerry Adams, and in the early twenty-first century O’Byrne is commemorated as one of the city’s significant writers. A plaque is placed on his Cavendish Street house in 2004. It is ironic that his reputation should rest on his memorialisation of Belfast, for he denounced it as “interminable miles of mean streets . . . one of the ugliest cities in the world.”
O’Byrne is believed by some, though not all, of his acquaintances to be homosexual. This view is supported by references to the descriptions of male beauty (based on Gaelic saga models) which recur in his writings and by the expressions of longing which permeate his work (which might also reflect a wider sense of loneliness or cultural displacement). His last years, 1954–57, are spent in the Nazareth Nursing Home in Ormeau Road, Belfast, where he dies on August 1, 1957, a month after suffering a stroke. His funeral is crowded, and his gravestone describes him as “singer, poet and writer who brought joy into the lives of others.”
(From: “O’Byrne, Cathal” by Patrick Maume, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Frederick Edward McWilliamCBERA, Northern Irish surrealistsculptor, dies in London on May 13, 1992. He works chiefly in stone, wood and bronze. His style of work consists of sculptures of the human form contorted into strange positions, often described as modern and surreal.
McWilliam is born in Banbridge, County Down,on April 30, 1909, the son of Dr. William McWilliam, a local general practitioner. Growing up in Banbridge has a great influence on his work. He makes references to furniture makers such as Carson the Cooper and Proctors in his letters to his friend, Marjorie Burnett.
McWilliam attends Campbell College in Belfast and later attends Belfast College of Art from 1926. After 1928, he continues to study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. He originally intends to become a painter, but influenced by Alfred Horace Gerrard, head of the sculpture department at the Slade, and by Henry Moore whom he meets there, he turns to sculpture. He receives the Robert Ross Leaving Scholarship which enables him and his wife, Beth (née Crowther), to travel to Paris where he visits the studio of Constantin Brâncuși.
During the first year of World War II, he joins the Royal Air Force and is stationed in England for four years where he is engaged in interpreting aerial reconnaissance photographs. He is then posted to India. While there he teaches art in the Hindu Art School in New Delhi.
After his return from India, McWilliam teaches for a year at the Chelsea School of Art. He is then invited by A. H. Gerrard to teach sculpture at the Slade. He continues in this post until 1968.
During the Northern IrelandTroubles McWilliam produces a series of bronzes in 1972 and 1973 known as Women of Belfast in response to the bombing at the Abercorn Tea-Rooms.
In 1964 McWilliam is awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Queen’s University Belfast. In 1966 he is appointed CBE and in 1971 he wins the Oireachtas Gold Medal. He is represented in many public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and Tate Britain in London. In 1984 the National Self-Portrait Gallery purchases a McWilliam self-portrait amongst acquisitions from fellow Northerners Brian Ballard, Brian Ferran and T. P. Flanagan.
seamus dubhghaill 