Eugene Rutherford Watters is the eldest of two sons and two daughters born to Thomas Watters, a soldier, and his wife, Maud Sproule. His second name comes from his grandfather, Rutherford Sproule. He is educated at Garbally College. He enters St. Patrick’s Teacher Training College, Drumcondra, Dublin, in 1939, graduating with a Diploma in Education in 1945. He is awarded an MA, by University College Dublin in 1947.
Ó Tuairisc writes novels, verse, drama and criticism in both Irish and English. His first major publication is his controversial novel Murder in Three Moves (1960), followed by the Irish-language prose epic L’Attaque (1962), which wins an Irish Book Club award. Both works have a strong poetic flavour. His next book is a volume of verse entitled Week-End. His narrative poem The Weekend of Dermot and Grace (1964), an Irish version of Venus and Adonis, is considered his finest work.
Ó Tuairisc’s first wife, the Irish artist Una McDonnell, dies in 1965. He produces little during the five years following McDonnell’s death, which is an unsettled period of limited productivity, changing residence and jobs, and, ultimately, serious depression. In 1972 he marries the writer Rita Kelly, also of Ballinasloe. They live in the lock house at the Maganey Lock on the River Barrow that he had bought near Carlow, County Carlow.
In 1981 Ó Tuairisc publishes The Road to Brightcity: and other stories (Swords: Poolbeg Press, 1981), a translation of nine of the best short stories written originally in Irish by Máirtín Ó Cadhain. Also in 1981, he and Rita Kelly publish a joint collection of their poems, Dialann sa Díseart.
Like Diarmaid Ó Súilleabháin, Ó Tuairisc “challenged the critical orthodoxy by openly proclaiming that their standards could not be those of the Gaeltacht and by demanding a creative freedom that would acknowledge hybridity and reject the strictures of the linguistic purists.”
Ó Tuairisc is an inaugural member of Aosdána, when it is founded in 1981, and the first of its members to die. He is a recipient of an Arts Council of Ireland prize, as well as an Abbey Theatre prize for a Christmas pantomime in Irish.
Ó Tuairisc dies on August 24, 1982. He is survived by his second wife, Rita. A bibliography of his work, together with biographical information, is published in Irish in 1988.
Hone’s most important works are probably the East Window, depicting the Crucifixion, for the Chapel at Eton College, Windsor (1949–1952) and My Four Green Fields, now located in Government Buildings, Dublin. This latter work, commissioned for the Irish Government’s Pavilion, wins first prize for stained glass in the 1939 New York World’s Fair. It graces CIÉ‘s Head Office in O’Connell Street from 1960 to about 1983. The window is then taken into storage by Abbey Glass in Kilmainham, Dublin at the request of the Office of Public Works.
The East Window of Eton College is commissioned following the destruction of the building after a bomb is dropped on the school in 1940 during World War II. She is commissioned to design the East Window in 1949, and the new window is inserted in 1952. This work is featured on an Irish postage stamp in 1969. From December 2005 to June 2006, an exhibition of her work is on display at the National Gallery of Ireland. Saint Mary’s church in Clonsilla also features her stained glass windows.
Hone is extremely devout. She spends time in an Anglican Convent in 1925 at Truro in Cornwall and converts to Catholicism in 1937. This may have influenced her decision to begin working in stained glass. Initially she works as a member of the An Túr Gloine stained glass co-operative before setting up a studio of her own in Rathfarnham.
Unmarried, Hone dies on March 13, 1955, while entering her parish church at Rathfarnham. She is survived by two of her sisters. Over 20,000 people visit a memorial exhibition of her work at University College Dublin (UCD), Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin, in 1958.
(Pictured: “My Four Green Fields” by Evie Hone, which depicts the four provinces of Ireland)
Mary Elizabeth Blundell (née Sweetman), prolific Irish novelist and playwright who writes under the pen nameM. E. Francis, dies on March 9, 1930. She is described as the best-known female novelist of the day.
Blundell is born in 1859 in Killiney Park, County Dublin to Margaret and Michael James Sweetman. The family moves to Brussels in 1873 and she spends her summers in Switzerland. Her family is quite artistic. Her sisters are poet Elinor Sweetman and writer Agnes Castle (aka Mrs. Egerton Castle). Her uncle is the novelist, William Sweetman. She marries her husband, Francis Blundell, on November 18, 1879, and moves to Little Crosby, Lancashire, North West England, where his family has been notable Catholics since the 16th century. They have three children: Francis Nicholas Blundell, Conservative politician, and writers Margaret Elizabeth Clementina Mary Blundell and Agnes Mary Frances Blundell.
Blundell’s husband dies after only five years of marriage. She had written her first story, True Joy, when she was just eight years old and has a publication in the Irish Monthly the day of her wedding. She takes up writing professionally after her husband’s death. In later life she writes in collaboration with her daughters. She later retires to Dorset.
The Ireland of her youth, the Lancashire of her married life, and the Dorset of her retirement provide backgrounds for many of her volumes of fiction.
Dillon is the eldest of five children of Sir James Charles Mathew and Elizabeth Blackmore Mathew. Her family is related to the Butler family, but she does not visit Ireland until 1886. Living in Queen’s Gate Gardens, Kensington, London, she is educated at home. From a young age she attends the ladies’ gallery of the House of Commons, while mixing a busy social life with charitable works.
Dillon begins keeping a diary in 1879, which she continues to write until her death. Her ancestor, Mary Mathew, is also a diarist and keeps the diary for the discipline of the daily activity. She soon begins to write for the love of it, and some have surmised she wrote with the intention her diaries would be read by others. She attends lectures in Old English and literature at King’s College, London from late 1882 to 1884, and begins to learn Irish in 1893.
Dillon’s father supports land reform in Ireland, chairs the evicted tenants commission in 1892, and is a huge influence on her politics. She makes her first political reference on February 25, 1883, when she notes the arrest of the Invincibles, and she then regularly comments on land reform. She travels to Ireland for the first time in August 1886, staying in Killiney, County Dublin. In October 1886, she meets John Dillon and begins to follow the Plan of Campaign so that she can discuss it with him during his visits to the Mathew house in London.
During this time, John Dillon is deeply immersed in politics and is imprisoned on a number of occasions. Being a careful follower of Irish politics, she becomes an anti-Parnellite. She confronts John Dillon in autumn 1895 about their relationship, saying that they can no longer meet as they had become the subject of gossip. He proposes within two weeks, and they are married on November 21, 1895, in Brompton Oratory. They are busy and often apart, with Dillon spending time in a warm climate due to his ill health. She tries to accompany him when she can, but the couple’s large family makes that difficult. They have one daughter and five sons, John Dillon (1896-1970), Anne Elizabeth Dillon (born October 29, 1897), Theobald Wolfe Tone (1898-1946), Myles, James, and Brian.
Finances are strained until John’s uncle Charles bequeaths him his house, 2 North Great George’s Street, Dublin in 1898, and a business in Ballaghaderreen, County Mayo is bequeathed him by a cousin, Anne Deane, in 1905. Dillon runs the business successfully, while also carrying out duties as a politician’s wife such as opening the Belfast ladies’ branch of the United Irish League in June 1905. Her busy life results in her neglecting her diary.
Dillon dies on May 14, 1907, in Dublin, having given birth to a stillborn daughter that morning. Pneumonia is given as the cause of death, but it could have been medical incompetence. She is buried in the family vault in Glasnevin Cemetery. Her husband writes of her death in June 1907, A short narrative of the illness and death of my dearest love. Trinity College Dublin holds her diary and correspondence. Her diaries, edited by Brendan Ó Cathaoir, are published in 2019.
Ó Máille is critical of the proposed Irish Boundary Commission and resigns from Cumann na nGaedheal and founds a new political party called Clann Éireann in 1926.
On each of these occasions Ó Máille is subjected to a smear campaign by his former party colleagues who his pro-Treaty stance during the civil war against him. It is alleged that he had personally selected his fellow county man Liam Mellows for execution. These smears persist despite denials from the Mellows family and from Ó Máille himself. In fact, Mellows is executed in reprisal for the attack on Ó Máille and Sean Hales on December 8, 1922.
Ó Máille serves as a Fianna Fáil Senator in Seanad Éireann from 1934 to 1936. He is re-elected to the new Seanad in 1938 on the Agricultural Panel. From 1939 until his death in 1946 he is re-appointed to the Seanad as a nominee of the TaoiseachÉamon de Valera. He is Leas-Chathaoirleach (Deputy chairman) of the Seanad from May to November 1938.
Ó Máille dies on January 19, 1946. Accorded a guard of honour by the Dublin brigade, he is buried at Glencullen Cemetery, County Dublin.
Faulkner is the elder of two sons of James, owner of the Belfast Collar Company, and Nora Faulkner. His younger brother is Colonel Sir Dennis Faulkner. He is educated initially at Elm Park preparatory school, Killylea, County Armagh, but at 14, preferring to stay in Ireland, is sent to the Church of Ireland-affiliated St. Columba’s College at Whitechurch, County Dublin, although he is Presbyterian. His best friend at the school is Michael Yeats, son of W. B. Yeats. He enters Queen’s University Belfast in 1939 to study law, but, with the advent of World War II, he quits his studies to work full-time in the family shirt-making business. He is the only Prime Minister of Northern Ireland to have been educated in the Irish Free State and one of only two to have been educated in Ireland.
Faulkner becomes involved in unionist politics, the first of his family to do so, and is elected to the Parliament of Northern Ireland as the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of East Down in 1949. His vociferous traditional unionist approach to politics ensures him a prominent backbench position. He is, at the time, the youngest ever MP in the Northern Irish Parliament. He is also the first Chairman of the Ulster Young Unionist Council in 1949. In 1956 he is offered and accepts the job of Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Finance, or Government Chief Whip.
When Terence O’Neill becomes Prime Minister in 1963, he appoints Faulkner, his chief rival for the job, as Minister of Commerce. He resigns in 1969 over the technicalities of how and when to bring in the local government reforms which the British Labour government is pushing for. This is a factor in the resignation of O’Neill, who resigns as Prime Minister in the aftermath of his failure to achieve a good enough result in the 1969 Northern Ireland general election.
In the ensuing leadership contest, Faulkner loses out again when O’Neill gives his casting vote to his cousin, James Chichester-Clark. In 1970, he becomes the Father of the House. He comes back into government as Minister of Development under Chichester-Clark and in a sharp turn-around, begins the implementation of the political reforms that were the main cause of his resignation from O’Neill’s cabinet. Chichester-Clark himself resigns in 1971 as the political and security situation and the more intensive British interest proves difficult.
Faulkner is elected leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and Prime Minister. In his initial innovative approach to government, he gives a non-unionist, David Bleakley, a former Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) MP, a position in his cabinet as Minister for Community Relations. In June 1971, he proposes three new powerful committees at Stormont which would give the opposition salaried chairmanships of two of them.
However, this initiative (radical at the time) is overtaken by events. A shooting by soldiers of two nationalist youths in Derry causes the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), the main opposition, to boycott the Stormont parliament. The political climate deteriorates further when, in answer to a worsening security situation, Faulkner introduces internment on August 9, 1971. This is a disaster and causes the situation to worsen.
Despite this, Faulkner continues his radical approach to Northern Irish politics and, following Bleakley’s resignation in September 1971 over the internment issue, appointes Dr. G. B. Newe, a prominent lay Catholic, as Minister of State in the Cabinet Office. His administration staggers on through the rest of 1971, insisting that security is the paramount issue.
In January 1972, an incident occurs during a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march in Derry, during which paratroopers shoot and killed thirteen unarmed civilians. A fourteenth civilian dies later. What history has come to know as Bloody Sunday is, in essence, the end of Faulkner’s government. In March 1972, he refuses to maintain a government without security powers which the British government under Edward Heath decides to take back. The Stormont parliament is subsequently prorogued, initially for a period of one year, and following the appointment of a Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw, direct rule is introduced.
In June 1973, elections are held to a new devolved parliament, the Northern Ireland Assembly. The elections split the UUP. Faulkner becomes chief executive in a power-sharing executive with the SDLP and the centre-ground Alliance Party, a political alliance cemented at the Sunningdale Conference that year. The power-sharing Executive lasts only six months and is brought down by a loyalistUlster Workers’ Council strike in May 1974. In 1974, he loses the leadership of the UUP to anti-Sunningdale elements led by Harry West. He subsequently resigns from the Ulster Unionist Party and forms the Unionist Party of Northern Ireland (UPNI).
The UPNI fares badly in the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention elections of 1975, winning only five out of the 78 seats contested. Faulkner wins the final seat. In 1976 he announces that he is quitting active politics. He is elevated to the House of Lords in the 1977 New Year Honours list, being created Baron Faulkner of Downpatrick on February 7, 1977.
Faulkner, a keen huntsman, dies on March 3, 1977, following a riding accident while hunting with the County Down Staghounds at the Ballyagherty/Station Road junction near Saintfield, County Down. He is riding at full gallop along a narrow country road when his horse slips, throwing him off and killing him instantly. He is laid to rest at Magherahamlet Presbyterian Church near Spa, County Down where he had been a regular member of the congregation. His twenty-four-day life peerage is thus the shortest-lived until the death of Lord Heywood of Whitehall in 2018 just nine days after ennoblement.
Hope is born in Templepatrick, County Antrim, on August 25, 1764 to a Presbyterian family originally of Covenanter stock. He is apprenticed as a linen weaver but attends night school in his spare time. Influenced by the American Revolution, he joins the Irish Volunteers, but upon the demise of that organisation and further influenced by the French Revolution, he joins the Society of the United Irishmen in 1795.
Hope quickly establishes himself as a prominent organiser and is elected to the central committee in Belfast, becoming close to leaders such as Samuel Neilson, Thomas Russell, and Henry Joy McCracken. He is almost alone among the United Irish leaders in targeting manufacturers as well as landowners as the enemies of all radicals. In 1796, he is sent to Dublin to assist the United Irish organisation there to mobilise support among the working classes, and he is successful in establishing several branches throughout the city and especially in The Liberties area. He also travels to counties in Ulster and Connacht, disseminating literature and organizing localities.
Upon the outbreak of the 1798 rebellion in Leinster, Hope is sent on a failed mission to Belfast by Henry Joy McCracken to brief the leader of the County Down United Irishmen, Rev. William Steel Dickson, with news of the planned rising in County Antrim, unaware that Dickson had been arrested only a couple of days before. He manages to escape from Belfast in time to take part in the Battle of Antrim where he plays a skillful and courageous role with his “Spartan Band,” in covering the retreat of the fleeing rebels after their defeat.
Hope manages to rejoin McCracken and his remaining forces after the battle at their camp upon Slemish mountain, but the camp gradually disperses, and the dwindling band of insurgents are then forced to go on the run. He successfully eludes capture, but his friend McCracken is captured and executed on July 17. Upon the collapse of the general rising, he refuses to avail of the terms of an amnesty offered by Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis on the grounds that to do so would be “not only a recantation of one’s principles, but a tacit acquiescence in the justice of the punishment which had been inflicted on thousands of my unfortunate associates.”
Hope lives the years following 1798 on the move between counties Dublin, Meath and Westmeath but is finally forced to flee Dublin following the failure of Robert Emmet‘s rebellion in 1803. He returns to the north and evades the authorities attentions in the ensuing repression by securing employment with a sympathetic friend from England. He is today regarded as the most egalitarian and socialist of all the United Irish leadership.
After suffering poor health for some years, Hope dies on February 10, 1847 at his son Henry’s home, 1 Lancaster St., Belfast. He is buried in the Mallusk Cemetery, Newtownabbey, County Antrim. The headstone is raised by his friends, Henry Joy McCracken’s sister Mary Ann, and the Shankill Road United Irishman Isreal Milliken. The historian Richard Robert Madden, who had encouraged Hope to write his memoirs, supplies the inscription. The headstone features the outline of a large dog, which supposedly brought provisions to him and his compatriots when they were hiding following the Battle of Antrim.
Boyd Barrett is adopted as a baby and is raised as a Roman Catholic in Glenageary, County Dublin, by his parents, David Boyd Barrett, an accountant, and his wife, Valerie. He attends St. Michael’s College in Dublin. He holds a master’s degree in English literature from University College Dublin (UCD). His birth mother is Sinéad Cusack, with whom he is later reunited in public. Since their reunion, he has had a good relationship with Cusack, her husband Jeremy Irons, and his half-brothers, Sam and Max. In May 2013, he reveals that theatre director Vincent Dowling is his biological father.
Boyd Barrett again contests the Dún Laoghaire constituency at the 2011 Irish general election as part of the United Left Alliance. On the ballot paper, he is named a member of People Before Profit, because the United Left Alliance had not yet been registered as a political party. Following a “nail-biting two days” of counting and recounting votes, he is elected on the 10th count without reaching the quota.
As a TD, Boyd Barrett, supports protests against cuts to Dublin Bus services. In Dáil Éireann, he condemns the 2011 murder of PSNI officer Ronan Kerr as “an utterly brutal action, which leads back down a road which has failed.” Marie O’Halloran in The Irish Times describes his “consistently passionate outrage and opposition to the Government’s handling of the financial and banking crisis.”
Boyd Barrett speaks at the Dublin location of the October 15, 2011 global protests, inspired by the Spanish “Indignants” and the Occupy Wall Street movements. The same month he says Enda Kenny‘s government is engaging in “spin and disingenuity” to cover up its austerity policies, decrying the closure of hospital emergency departments around the country for “health and safety” reasons.
On November 2, 2011, Boyd Barrett leads the United Left Alliance TDs out of the Dáil, in protest against the government’s decision not to hold a debate on the payment of more than €700 million to Anglo Irish Bank bondholders. On December 15, 2011, he helps launch a nationwide campaign against a proposed household charge being brought in as part of the 2012 Irish budget. He is part of an Oireachtas delegation that meets the Bundestag‘s Budgetary and European Affairs committees in Berlin in late January 2012.
Price is born in Belfast on December 16, 1950. She and her sister, Marian, also an IRA member, are the daughters of Albert Price, a prominent Irish republican and former IRA member from Belfast. Their aunt, Bridie Dolan, is blinded and loses both hands in an accident handling IRA explosives.
Price becomes involved in Irish republicanism in the late 1960s and she and Marian participate in the Belfast to Derrycivil rights march in January 1969 and are attacked in the Burntollet Bridge incident.
In 1971 Price and her sister join the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). In 1972 she joins an elite group within the IRA called “The Unknowns” commanded by Pat McClure. The Unknowns are tasked with various secretive activities and transport several accused traitors across the border into the Republic of Ireland where they are “disappeared.” She personally states that she had driven Joe Lynskey across the border to face trial. In addition she states that she, Pat McClure and a third Unknown were tasked with killing Jean McConville, with the third Unknown actually shooting her.
Price leads the car bombing attacks in London on March 8, 1973, which injure over 200 people and is believed to have contributed to the death of one person who suffers a fatal heart attack. The two sisters are arrested, along with Gerry Kelly, Hugh Feeney and six others, on the day of the bombing as they are boarding a flight to Ireland. They are tried and convicted at the Great Hall in Winchester Castle on November 14, 1973. Although originally sentenced to life imprisonment, which is to run concurrently for each criminal charge, their sentence is eventually reduced to 20 years. She serves seven years for her part in the bombing. She immediately goes on a hunger strike demanding to be moved to a prison in Northern Ireland. The hunger strike lasts for 208 days because the hunger strikers are force-fed by prison authorities to keep them alive.
On the back of the hunger-striking campaign, Price’s father contests Belfast West at the February 1974 United Kingdom general election, receiving 5,662 votes (11.9%). The Price sisters, Hugh Feeney, and Gerry Kelly are moved to Northern Ireland prisons in 1975 as a result of an IRA truce. In 1980 she receives the royal prerogative of mercy and is freed on humanitarian grounds in 1981, purportedly suffering from anorexia nervosa due to the invasive trauma of daily force feedings.
After her release in 1980, Price marries Irish actor Stephen Rea, with whom she has two sons, Danny and Oscar. They divorce in 2003.
The Price sisters remain active politically. In the late 1990s, Price and her sister claim that they have been threatened by their former colleagues in the IRA and Sinn Féin for publicly opposing the Good Friday Agreement (i.e. the cessation of the IRA’s military campaign). she is a contributor to The Blanket, an online journal, edited by former Provisional IRA member Anthony McIntyre, until it ceases publication in 2008.
In 2001, Price is arrested in Dublin and charged with possession of stolen prescription pads and forged prescriptions. She pleads guilty and is fined £200 and ordered to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
In February 2010, it is reported by The Irish News that Price had offered help to the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains in locating graves of three men, Joe Lynskey, Seamus Wright, and Kevin McKee. The bodies of Wright and McKee are recovered from a singular grave in County Meath in August 2015. It is unclear if Price played a role in their recovery. The remains of Joe Lynskey have not been recovered as of April 2021.
Price is the subject of the 2018 feature-length documentary I, Dolours in which she gives an extensive filmed interview.
In 2010 Price claims Gerry Adams had been her officer commanding (OC) when she was active in the IRA. Adams, who has always denied being a member of the IRA, denies her allegation. She admits taking part in the murder of Jean McConville, as part of an IRA action in 1972. She claims the murder of McConville, a mother of ten, was ordered by Adams when he was an IRA leader in West Belfast. Adams subsequently publicly further denies Price’s allegations, stating that the reason for them is that she is opposed to the Provisional Irish Republican Army’s abandonment of paramilitary warfare in favour of politics in 1994, in the facilitation of which Adams has been a key figure.
Oral historians at Boston College interview both Price and her fellow IRA paramilitary Brendan Hughes between 2001 and 2006. The two give detailed interviews for the historical record of the activities in the IRA, which are recorded on condition that the content of the interviews is not to be released during their lifetimes. Prior to her death in May 2011, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) subpoena the material, possibly as part of an investigation into the disappearance of a number of people in Northern Ireland during the 1970s. In June 2011, the college files a motion to quash the subpoena. A spokesman for the college states that “our position is that the premature release of the tapes could threaten the safety of the participants, the enterprise of oral history, and the ongoing peace and reconciliation process in Northern Ireland.” In June 2011, U.S. federal prosecutors ask a judge to require the college to release the tapes to comply with treaty obligations with the United Kingdom. On July 6, 2012, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit agrees with the government’s position that the subpoena should stand. On October 17, 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States temporarily blocks the college from handing over the interview tapes. In April 2013, after Price’s death, the Supreme Court turns away an appeal that seeks to keep the interviews from being supplied to the PSNI. The order leaves in place a lower court ruling that orders Boston College to give the Justice Department portions of recorded interviews with Price. Federal officials want to forward the recordings to police investigating the murder of Jean McConville.
On January 24, 2013 Price is found dead at her Malahide, County Dublin home, from a toxic effect of mixing prescribed sedative and anti-depressant medication. The inquest returns a verdict of death by misadventure. Her body is buried at Milltown Cemetery in West Belfast.
McMaster is born as Andrew McMaster, the son of Liverpool-born Andrew McMaster (1855–1940), a master stevedore, and Alice Maude née Thompson (1865–1895). A number of sources make the erroneous claims, based on details supplied by McMaster himself, that he is born in 1893 or 1894 or even 1895 in County Monaghan in Ireland but, according to the Birth Register and the 1901 United Kingdom Census, he is actually born in 1891 in Birkenhead, England. Like his future brother-in-law Micheál Mac Liammóir, who is born in London as Alfred Willmore but claims to have been born in Cork to Gaelic-speaking parents, McMaster reinvents himself as Irish and claims for himself the town of Monaghan as his birthplace, and Warrenpoint, County Down, as the scene of his earliest memories.
At the age of nineteen McMaster gives up a career in banking to pursue one on the stage. He moves to Ireland and tours the country with the O’Brien-Ireland theatrical company from 1910 to 1914. Success quickly follows with his appearance as Jack O’Hara in Paddy the Next Best Thing at the Savoy Theatre (1920). From 1921 he tours Australia in this and other plays, and in 1925 forms his own company, the McMaster Intimate Theatre Company, a ‘fit-up‘ company to tour in the works of Shakespeare, mainly in Ireland but also in Britain and Australia, touring with his theatrical company until 1959. One of the last actor-managers “of the old school – and an epitome of the type,” on occasions he persuades a ‘big name’ to act with his company as a draw for audiences. Frank Benson (1928), Sara Allgood (1929) and Mrs. Patrick Campbell appear with him.
In 1933 at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon McMaster appears as Hamlet opposite Esme Church as Gertrude, Coriolanus, Macduff in Macbeth, Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing, Prince Escalus in Romeo and Juliet, and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. His greatest roles are as Othello and as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, to which he adds King Lear in 1952. Just before World War II he and his company appear at the Chiswick Empire in a Shakespeare season. He tours the United States as James Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill‘s Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1956. Having ‘a great organ voice,’ Harold Pinter, who acts in his company in Ireland from 1951 to 1953 and calls him ‘perhaps the greatest actor-manager of his time,’ later describes McMaster as ‘evasive, proud, affectionate, shrewd, merry.’ In his brief biography Mac (1968), Pinter recalls, “Mac gave about a half dozen magnificent performances of Othello while I was with him… At his best he was the finest Othello I have seen. [He] stood dead in the centre of the role, and the great sweeping symphonic playing would begin, the rare tension and release within him, the arrest, the swoop, the savagery, the majesty and repose.”
McMaster’s only film role is an uncredited appearance as the Judge in Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960).
In 1924 McMaster marries the actress and designer Marjorie Willmore (1894–1970), the sister of Micheál Mac Liammóir. They have two children, the actors John Christopher McMaster (1925–1995) and Mary-Rose McMaster (1926–2018).
McMaster trains a generation of actors who tour with his company and go on to achieve success as actors. These include Pauline Flanagan, Milo O’Shea, T. P. McKenna, Kenneth Haigh, Henry Woolf, Harold Pinter, Donal Donnelly and Patrick Magee. It is while they are touring with McMaster’s company that the actor and dramatist Micheál Mac Liammóir and the actor and producer Hilton Edwards first meet and begin their lifelong partnership.
McMaster’s biography, A Life Remembered: A Memoir of Anew McMaster by his daughter Mary-Rose McMaster, is published in 2017. Harold Pinter also publishes a short biography, Mac, in 1968.
seamus dubhghaill 