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Death of Stephen Lucius Gywnn, Writer & Politician

Stephen Lucius Gwynn, Irish journalist, biographer, author, poet and Protestant Nationalist politician, dies on June 11, 1950, at Terenure, Dublin. As a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) he represents Galway Borough as its Member of Parliament from 1906 to 1918. He serves as a British Army officer in France during World War I and is a prominent proponent of Irish involvement in the Allied war effort. He founds the Irish Centre Party in 1919, but his moderate nationalism is eclipsed by the growing popularity of Sinn Féin.

Gwynn is born in St. Columba’s College in Rathfarnham, County Dublin, where his father John Gwynn (1827–1917), a biblical scholar and Church of Ireland clergyman, is warden. His mother, Lucy Josephine (1840–1907), is the daughter of the Irish nationalist William Smith O’Brien. He is the eldest of ten children (eight brothers and two sisters). Shortly after his birth the family moves to Ramelton in County Donegal to the parish where his father has been appointed parson. He later becomes Regius Professor of Divinity at Trinity College Dublin (TCD).

Gwynn spends his early childhood in rural County Donegal, which is to shape his later view of Ireland. He attends Brasenose College, Oxford, where, as scholar, in 1884 he is awarded first-class honours in classical moderations and in 1886 literae humaniores. During term holidays he returns to Dublin, where he meets several of the political and literary figures of the day.

After graduating, Gwynn spends ten years from 1886 tutoring as a schoolmaster, for a time in France, which creates a lifelong interest in French culture, as expressed in his Praise of France (1927). By 1896 he has developed an interest in writing, becoming a writer and journalist in London focused on English themes, until he comes into contact with the emerging Irish literary revival, when he serves as secretary of the Irish Literary Society.

This is the beginning of a long and prolific career as a writer covering a wide range of literary genres, from poetry and biographical subjects to general historical works. The eighteenth century is Gwynn’s particular specialism. He writes numerous books on travel and on the topography of his own homeland, as well as on his other interests: wine, eighteenth-century painting and fishing.

Gwynn returns to Ireland in 1904 when he enters politics. In the 1906 Galway Borough by-election he wins a seat for Galway Borough, which he represents as a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party until 1918. During this period, he is active in the Gaelic League and is one of the few Irish MPs to have close links to the Irish literary revival. Along with Joseph Maunsel Hone and George Roberts he founds the Dublin publishing house of Maunsel and Company. He is opposed to the demand for the Irish language to be a compulsory subject for matriculation. He supports the campaign which wins the establishment of a Catholic university when he serves on the Irish University Royal Commission in 1908. During the debate on the third Home Rule Bill, and at the request of his party leader John Redmond, he writes The case for Home Rule (1911) and is in charge of much of the party’s official publicity and its replies to criticism from Sinn Féin.

On the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Gwynn strongly supports Redmond’s encouragement of Irish nationalists and the Irish National Volunteers to support the Allied and British war effort by enlisting in Irish regiments of the Irish Divisions, especially as a means to ensure the implementation of the suspended Home Rule Act at the end of an expectedly short war. Now over fifty, he enlists in January 1915 with the 7th Leinster Regiment in the 16th (Irish) Division. In July he is commissioned as a captain in the 6th (Service) Battalion, Connaught Rangers and serves with them on the Western Front at Messines, the Somme and elsewhere.

Gwynn is one of five Irish Nationalist MPs who enlist and serve in the army, the others being John L. Esmonde, Willie Redmond, William Redmond and D. D. Sheehan, as well as former MP Tom Kettle. Together with Kettle and William Redmond, he undertakes a recruitment drive for the Irish divisions, co-operating with Kettle on a collection of ballads called Battle Songs for the Irish Brigade (1915). He is made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in July 1915. In 1916, he is appointed to the Dardanelles Commission.

Recalled to Ireland in late 1917 to participate in the Irish Convention chaired by Sir Horace Plunkett, Gwynn sides with the Redmondite faction of the Irish Party in supporting a compromise with the southern unionists in an attempt to reach consensus on a Home Rule settlement which would avoid partition. On the death of Redmond in March 1918, he takes over as leader of the moderate nationalists in the Convention. He opposes the threat of compulsory military service during the Conscription Crisis of 1918, though as a member of the Irish Recruiting Council he continues to support voluntary recruitment, encountering intense opposition led by Sinn Féin.

Gwynn forms the Irish Centre Party in 1919 and stands unsuccessfully as an Independent Nationalist for Dublin University in the 1918 Irish general election. The party merges with Plunkett’s Irish Dominion League to press for a settlement by consent on the basis of dominion status, but Gwynn subsequently breaks with Plunkett due to his willingness to accept partition as a temporary compromise. The polarities which divide Ireland during the Irish War of Independence and Irish Civil War increasingly sideline his brand of moderate cultural nationalism. Although he supports the newly emergent nation, he equally condemns some of the excesses, such as the burning of houses belonging to Free State senators.

Gwynn’s personal life also becomes complicated at this stage and around 1920. He has a romantic association with married artist Grace Henry who is perhaps the best-known female artist in Ireland at the time. During this period, he and Grace travel in France and Italy and at various stages in his life she painted portraits of him including a very distinguished looking one of him in his late 60s or early 70s. Their relationship contributes significantly to the separation of Henry from her artist husband Paul Henry in 1930.

During the 1920s, Gwynn also devotes himself to writing, covering political events as Irish correspondent to The Observer and The Times. Later in his career, he writes some substantial works, and together with his son Denis Gwynn (The Life of John Redmond, 1932) does much to shape the retrospective image and self-justification of John Redmond. In the mid-1930s he authors three books with a connecting theme of fishing with the artist Roy Beddington serving as illustrator: The Happy Fisherman (1936), From River to River (1937), and Two in a Valley (1938).

Gwynn is awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the National University of Ireland in 1940, and a Litt.D. by the University of Dublin in 1945. The Irish Academy of Letters awards him the Gregory Medal in April 1950. In his literary writings he stands for a humanism and tolerance, which qualities, due to political upheavals, were relatively rare in the Ireland of his day.

Gwynn dies on June 11, 1950, at his home in Terenure, Dublin, and is buried at Tallaght Cemetery, south County Dublin.

Gwynn marries his cousin Mary Louisa (d. 1941), daughter of Rev. James Gwynn. She later converts to Catholicism. They have three sons and two daughters who are brought up in her religion, of whom Aubrey (1892–1983) becomes a Jesuit priest and professor of medieval history at University College Dublin (UCD). Their second son, Denis Rolleston (1893–1971), is professor of modern Irish history at University College Cork (UCC).

Gwynn’s brother Edward John (1868–1941) becomes provost of Trinity College and another brother Robert Malcolm becomes its senior dean. His sister Lucy Gwynn is the first woman registrar of Trinity. A third brother, Charles, has a successful career in the British Army and retires as a Major General. Younger brothers Lucius and Jack are noted cricketers.


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Death of Andrew O’Connor, American Irish Sculptor

Andrew O’Connor, American Irish sculptor whose work is represented in museums in the United States, Ireland, Britain and France, dies in Dublin on June 9, 1941.

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.

O’Connor returns with his family to the United States on the outbreak of World War I, and sets up a studio in Paxton, Massachusetts. In 1918, his standing statue of the youthful Abraham Lincoln is placed outside the Illinois State Capitol at Springfield, Illinois. He later presents a marble head of Lincoln to the American ambassador’s residence, Phoenix Park, Dublin. His memorial in Chicago to President Theodore Roosevelt (1919) is commissioned as a tribute to Roosevelt’s associations with the Boy Scouts of America. The design of four standing scouts, modelled on O’Connor’s sons, is exhibited at the Philadelphia Art Alliance in 1920. He becomes an associate of the National Academy of Design, New York in 1919. In the early 1920s he executes an equestrian statue of the Marquis de Lafayette for South Park, at Mount Vernon, Baltimore, Maryland.

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)


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Birth of Julia O’Faolain, Novelist & Short Story Writer

Julia O’Faolain, Irish novelist and short story writer, is born in London on June 6, 1932. She works as a writer, language teacher, editor and translator and lives in France, Italy, and the United States.

Although born in England when her father, Irish writer Seán Ó Faoláin, is lecturing at the Catholic college, St. Mary’s College, at Strawberry Hill, London, O’Faolain grows up in Ireland. The family returns to Ireland when she is just one year old. They live first in Killough House in County Wicklow, where future Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald is a playmate, artist Paul Henry a neighbour and Cork writer Frank O’Connor a regular visitor. The family then moves to Knockaderry House in Killiney, County Dublin, where her father publishes the literary journal The Bell from an outhouse at the bottom of the garden. Writers, poets and intellectuals such as Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan and Conor Cruise O’Brien are regular visitors and often have to entertain her while waiting to speak with her father.

O’Faolain does not begin school until she is eight years old as her mother, Irish writer and teacher Eileen Gould, has little time for nuns. Following her schooling, she completes an arts degree at University College Dublin (UCD) and then further studies at the Sapienza University of Rome and the Sorbonne in Paris. A formidable student and strikingly beautiful, she makes a strong impression on those who meet her.

In search of love, literature and freedom from 1950s Ireland, the young O’Faolain remains abroad working variously as a translator, language teacher, editor and writer in London. She makes lifelong friends who speak highly of her generosity, loyalty and kindness. As well as maintaining a strong interest in politics throughout her life, she attains a black belt in karate and attends karate classes until her early 70s.

In her 2013 memoir, O’Faolain recounts a number of her adult loves before she meets and marries Lauro Martines in Florence in 1957. The couple lives in Florence for a year while Martines completes a travelling fellowship from Harvard University. They then move to Portland, Oregon, where their son Lucien is born in 1959. While in the United States, she teaches French at Reed College in Portland. The family returns to live in Florence from 1962-66 while her husband carries out research. When he is offered a professorship at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1966, they move back to the United States. However, not keen to live full-time in the United States, they purchase a house in Hampstead in 1970 and later in central London where she spends a good deal of time. From the 1990s onwards, she and Lauro spend more and more time in London, and they visit Ireland more during these years. Lucian, a painter and picture repairer, lives in London.

O’Faolain’s novels include No Country for Young Men, which is nominated for the Booker Prize in 1980, Women in the Wall (1975), The Obedient Wife (1982) and The Judas Cloth (1992) which is set in 19th-century Italy. Her first collection of short stories, We Might See Sights and Other Stories, is published in 1968, followed by Man in the Cellar (1974), Melancholy Baby (1978) and Daughters of Passion (1982). And with her husband, she edits Not in God’s Image: Women in History from the Greeks to the Victorians (1973).

O’Faolain’s writings are suffused with themes of clerical intrigue, women’s role in society, power, faith and sexuality. She says once that she is more detached from her characters than her father was. “He was fond of his characters whereas I was more impatient of mine… The fact that he often forgave their foolishness showed that he was fond of Ireland itself, where he lived for the most of his life. I instead left it and found I was happier elsewhere.”

As a writer, O’Faolain is not particularly well-known in Ireland. Following the publication of her memoir in 2013, she is asked by The Irish Times journalist Arminta Wallace if it bothers her that her name does not often figure in lists of famous Irish writers, perhaps because she did not live here. She replies, “Not only do I not live here but when my last book came out someone wrote an article naming me as a ‘forgotten writer’… which was not a cheerful read. It wasn’t in any way offensive, but it wasn’t very comforting…I suppose I didn’t write enough. You mustn’t let too many years go by between books – and I did that.”

O’Faolain dies at the age of 88 in London on October 27, 2020, following a long illness. Her papers, which include manuscripts of her writing and a significant correspondence between her and her father, are donated to UCD in 2018. At the time, archivists expect them to be available to researchers by 2022.


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Death of Helen Maybury Roe, Librarian & Antiquarian

Helen Maybury Roe, Irish librarian and antiquarian and a champion of medieval Irish art and iconography, dies on May 28, 1988, at Grove Nursing Home in Killiney, County Dublin.

Born on December 18, 1895, Roe is the daughter of William Ernest Roe and Anne Lambert Sheilds of Mountrath, County Laois. Her grandfather is Francis Henry Sheilds of Parsonstown (now Birr, County Offaly), owner of the King’s County Chronicle. She is sent first to the local primary school and then to the Preston School in Abbeyleix. Although she attends Trinity College Dublin (TCD), she does not begin her career due to the outbreak of World War I. She joins the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade and serves at the Cambridge Military Hospital and at Aldershot Barracks. In the immediate aftermath, she continues her medical career with the Military Hospital in Bray, County Wicklow. She also spends time touring in Europe visiting museums and beginning her appreciation for medieval art. She is raised Protestant and has done her duty as part of the aristocracy by serving in the war. But the soldiers treat her as Irish and abuse her especially during the Easter Rising of 1916. The result is that she supports nationalism from that point forward. She goes back to TCD and completes her degree in modern languages in 1921. She finally completes her MA in 1924 and begins a teaching career. She spends time working in the Royal School, Dungannon, and Alexandra College, Milltown, Dublin.

In 1926, Roe’s parents need her, and she returns home. She then becomes the County Librarian in Laois. While working as a librarian she is able to study further and, as a rare person with a car, she tours sites and visits schools. One result of her presentations to schools is to inspire Ireland’s first female archaeologist, Ellen Prendergast. In 1940, she retires from the library and moves to Dublin where she is able to buy a house and garden. Apart from her antiquarian work, she is a regular supporter of charities and is honorary secretary of The Queen’s County Protestant Orphan’s Society and actively involved in The Dublin University Mission to Chota Nagpur, India.

Roe becomes a regular contributor to various journals and newspapers including Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, An Leabharlann, Béaloideas, Seanchas Ard Mhacha, Carloviana, the The Irish Press and the Leinster Express. From 1965 until 1968 she serves as the president of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, the first woman to be elected to the position. She is elected to be a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1984. She continues touring and lecturing into her nineties.

Roe lives at Santry, Dublin, and later at Oak House, Sussex Road, Dublin. She dies on May 28, 1988, at Grove Nursing Home, Killiney, County Dublin, and is buried beside her parents at St. Peter’s Churchyard, Mountrath, County Laois.

The Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland have an annual lecture in her honour and have named one of their lecture rooms after her.


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Birth of Ernie O’Malley, Republican Revolutionary & Writer

Ernest Bernard (Ernie) O’Malley, Irish republican revolutionary and writer, is born on May 26, 1897, in Ellison Street, Castlebar, County Mayo, the second child among nine sons and two daughters of Luke Malley, solicitor’s clerk, of County Mayo, and Marion Malley (née Kearney) of County Roscommon. Christened Ernest Bernard Malley, his adoption of variations on this name reflects his enthusiasm for a distinctively Irish identity – an enthusiasm that lay at the heart of his republican career and outlook.

In 1906, O’Malley’s family moves to Dublin, where he attends the Christian Brothers‘ School, North Richmond Street. In 1915, he begins to study medicine at University College Dublin (UCD). Having initially intended to follow his older brother into the British Army, he rather joins the Irish Volunteers in the wake of the 1916 Easter Rising, as a member of F Company, 1st Battalion, Dublin Brigade. He becomes a leading figure in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish War of Independence which the Easter Rising helps to occasion. In 1918, having twice failed his second-year university examination, he leaves home to commit himself to the republican cause. He is initially a Volunteer organiser with the rank of second lieutenant, under the instruction of Richard Mulcahy, operating in Counties Tyrone, Offaly, Roscommon, and Donegal. His work in 1918 involves the reorganisation, or new establishment, of Volunteer groups in the localities.

In August 1918, O’Malley is sent to London by Michael Collins to buy arms. During 1919 he works as an IRA staff captain attached to General Headquarters (GHQ) in Dublin, and also trains and organises Volunteers in Counties Clare, Tipperary, and Dublin. He has a notable military record with the IRA during the Irish War of Independence and is a leading figure in attacks on Hollyford barracks in County Tipperary (May 1920), Drangan barracks in County Kilkenny (June 1920), and Rearcross barracks in County Tipperary (July 1920). His IRA days thus involve him with comrades such as Dan Breen, Séumas Robinson, and Seán Treacy. In December 1920, he is captured in County Kilkenny by Crown forces. He escapes from Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol in February 1921, to take command of the IRA’s 2nd Southern Division, holding the rank of commandant-general.

O’Malley’s republican commitment has political roots in his conviction that Ireland should properly be fully independent of Britain, and that violence is a necessary means to achieve this end. But the causes underlying his revolutionism are layered. Family expectations of respectable, professional employment combined with a religious background and an enthusiasm for soldiering provide some of the foundations for his IRA career. As an IRA officer he enjoys professional, military expression for a visceral Catholic Irish nationalism. He also finds excitement, liberation from the frequent dullness of his life at home, defiant rebellion against his non-republican parents, an alternative to his stalled undergraduate career, and, in political and cultural Irish separatism, a decisive resolution of the profound tension between his anglocentrism and his anglophobia.

O’Malley rejects the 1921 Anglo–Irish Treaty as an unacceptable compromise. He spends the 1921 truce period training IRA officers in his divisional area, in preparation for a possible renewal of fighting. He is, in the event, to be a leading anti-treatyite in the 1922–23 Irish Civil War. In the Four Courts in 1922, at the start of the latter conflict, he is captured on the republicans’ capitulation on June 30 but then manages to escape from captivity. Subsequently he is appointed assistant Chief of Staff of the anti-Treaty IRA and also becomes part of a five-man anti-Treaty army council, along with Liam Lynch, Liam Deasy, Frank Aiken and Thomas Derrig.

O’Malley is dramatically captured and badly wounded by Free State forces in Dublin in November 1922. Imprisoned until July 1924, he is during the period of his incarceration elected as a TD for Dublin North in the 1923 Irish general election and is also a forty-one-day participant in the republican hunger strike later that year. Following release from prison, he returns home to live with his parents in Dublin. He decides not to focus his post-revolutionary energy on a political career. During 1926–28 and 1935–37 he unsuccessfully tries to complete his medical degree at UCD, but increasingly his post-1924 efforts are directed toward life as a Bohemian traveler and writer. He spends much of 1924–26 on a recuperative journey through France, Spain, and Italy; and 1928–35 traveling widely in North America. During 1929–32 he spends time in New Mexico and Mexico City. In Taos, New Mexico, he mixes with, and is influenced by, writers and artists as he works on what are to become classic autobiographies of the Irish revolution: On Another Man’s Wound (1936) and The Singing Flame (1978).

O’Malley meets Helen Hooker, daughter of Elon and Blanche Hooker, in Connecticut in 1933. They marry in London in 1935, each rejecting something of their prior lives in the process: he, his Irish republicanism, through marriage to somebody entirely unconnected with that world; she, her wealthy and respectable upbringing, through liaison with a Catholic, Irish, unemployed, bohemian ex-revolutionary. They settle first in Dublin then, from 1938 onward, primarily in County Mayo. Burrishoole Lodge, near Newport, is his main base until 1954, when he moves to Dublin. Three children are born to the O’Malleys: Cahal (1936), Etáin (1940), and Cormac (1942). Sharing enthusiasm for the arts, he and Helen enjoy several years of intimacy. However, by the mid-1940s their relationship has frayed. In 1950, Helen kidnaps (the word is used by both parents and by all three children) the couple’s elder two children and takes them to the United States. From there she divorces O’Malley in 1952. Cormac remains with his father.

O’Malley’s post-American years are devoted to a number of projects. He writes extensively, including work for The Bell and Horizon. He is involved with the film director John Ford in the making of his Irish films, including The Quiet Man (1952). He gives radio broadcasts on Mexican painting for BBC Third Programme (1947), and on his IRA adventures for Radio Éireann (1953). In the latter year he suffers a heart attack, and his remaining years are scarred by ill health. He dies of heart failure on March 25, 1957, in Howth, County Dublin, at the house of his sister Kathleen. Two days later he is given a state funeral with full military honours. He is buried in the Malley family plot in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.

O’Malley exemplifies some important themes in modern Irish political and intellectual history. His powerful memoirs form part of a tradition of writing absorbedly about Ireland, while under idiosyncratic emigrant influences which lend the writing much of its distinctiveness. His aggressive republicanism exemplifies a persistent but ultimately unrealisable tradition of uncompromising IRA politics. His unflinching single-mindedness is the condition for much courageous and striking activity, but also lay behind his infliction and his suffering of much pain. Literary, intellectual, and defiantly dissident, he is the classic bohemian revolutionary. His historical significance lies in his having been both a leading Irish revolutionary and the author of compelling autobiographical accounts of those years. His memoirs are distinguished from their rivals on the shelf by subtlety, self-consciousness, and literary ambition. In particular, his preparedness to identify motives for Irish revolutionary action, beyond the terms of ostensible republican purpose, renders his writing of great value to historians. Similarly, the large body of archival material left in his name (especially, perhaps, the papers held in UCD archives, and those in the private possession of his children) leaves scholars in his debt. The most striking and evocative visual images of O’Malley are, arguably, the set of photographic portraits taken in 1929 by Edward Weston and held at the University of Arizona‘s Center for Creative Photography (CCP). These capture with precision his reflective concentration, his piercing earnestness, and his troubled intensity.

(From: “O’Malley, Ernest Bernard (‘Ernie’)” by Richard English, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: Photograph of Ernie O’Malley taken by Helen Hooker, New York City, 1934)


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Death of Thomas Staples, Last Surviving Member of the Irish House of Commons

Sir Thomas Staples, 9th Baronet, Anglo-Irish politician and lawyer, dies on May 14, 1865, in Dublin, County Dublin, eleven weeks short of his 90th birthday. He is the last surviving person to have been a member of the Irish House of Commons, albeit only having been in the House for a short time.

Staples is born on July 31, 1775, the son of John Staples (1736-1820) and Henrietta Molesworth (1745-1813), a daughter of Richard Molesworth, 3rd Viscount Molesworth. His siblings are Rev. John Molesworth Staples (1776-1858), Grace “Marchioness of Ormonde” Louisa Staples Butler (1779-1860) and Hon. Frances Staples Ponsonby (1782-1858).

Between March and April 1800, he is the Member of Parliament for Knocktopher in the Irish House of Commons, before resigning. In 1832, he inherits his cousin’s baronetcy. He is a barrister in Dublin and is appointed a Queen’s Advocate in Ireland in 1845.

Staples lives at Lissan House, near the market town of Cookstown, County Tyrone. He marries Catherine Hawkins (1796-1872), daughter and heiress of Reverend John Hawkins and Anne Montgomery, on October 27, 1813. They have no children.

Staples dies in Dublin on May 14, 1865, and is buried in the Lissan Church of Ireland Churchyard in Cookstown. His title is inherited by his nephew.


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Death of Vincent Dowling, Actor, Director & Producer

Vincent Gerard Dowling, Irish theatre actor, director and producer, dies at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston on May 10, 2013.

Dowling is born in Kimmage, Dublin, on September 7, 1929, the sixth of four sons and three daughters of William Dowling, a ship’s captain, and his wife Mary (née Kelly). His father is violent toward the family and leaves when he is a toddler. Helped by money provided by a priest, the Dowlings move in 1934 from the basement of his maternal uncle’s flat in Merrion Square, Dublin, to a house in Mount Merrion, County Dublin. In 1942, financial necessity forces the family’s move to a smaller residence in Marlborough Road, Donnybrook, Dublin.

Dowling is educated at St. Mary’s College in Rathmines, Dublin, having previously attended Kilmacud National School and CBS Dún Laoghaire, both in County Dublin. He is a bright student, but with his fees in arrears, the dean of studies induces him to leave school early in September 1945 for a clerkship with the Standard Life Assurance Company. A few years later, he finds his vocation when he accompanies a girlfriend to the academy of acting run by Brendan Smith. He signs up in 1948 for a two-year course during which he performs in and stage-manages academy plays and stage-manages for Smith’s professional company. Upon quitting Standard Life in June 1950, he spends a year touring Ireland with Smith’s company, both as an actor and the touring group’s manager.

Dowling comes to prominence in the 1950s for his role as Christy Kennedy in the long-running radio soap opera, The Kennedys of Castleross, and as a member of the Abbey Theatre company. He returns to the Abbey as artistic director from 1987 to 1990.

Following two months in the United States in 1969 lecturing and directing at Loyola University Chicago, he spends periods during 1972–74 directing for the Missouri Repertory Theatre and lecturing and directing at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. On extended leave from the Abbey, he directs in various American theatres throughout 1975, the year he married Olwen O’Herlihy, daughter of the Irish actor Dan O’Herlihy. After his request for six months leave each year is refused, he quits the Abbey in 1976, having done over a hundred major roles for the company.

In 1976, Dowling becomes a U.S. citizen and is appointed artistic and producing director of the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival (GLSF) in Cleveland, Ohio, from 1976 to 1984, where he directs, produces and acts in many classical works, by William Shakespeare and others. He is credited with discovering actor Tom Hanks. He receives an Ohio Valley Emmy Award for the 1983 PBS broadcast of his 1982 GLSF production of The Playboy of the Western World.

Dowling is visiting professor at the College of Wooster in Ohio during the 1986-87 academic year. He founds the Miniature Theatre of Chester (now the Chester Theatre Company), in Chester, Massachusetts, in 1990.

Dowling marries actress Brenda Doyle in 1952. They have four daughters, including actress Bairbre Dowling, before divorcing in 1975. In 1975, he marries Olwen O’Herlihy, with whom he has a son.

Politician Richard Boyd Barrett is the biological son of Dowling and recording artist and actress Sinéad Cusack from a 1966 relationship while both are at the Abbey Theatre. Boyd Barrett is adopted as an infant. Dowling contacts Boyd Barrett after his connection with Cusack is publicly revealed in 2007. Their relationship is made known after his death.

Dowling dies on May 10, 2013, in Massachusetts General Hospital due to complications arising from surgery. Following a funeral service at the First Congregational Church of Chester, his remains are interred in the nearby cemetery.

Dowling receives honorary doctorates from Westfield State University in Massachusetts, and from Kent State University, John Carroll University and the College of Wooster, all in Ohio. His papers, from 1976 onward, are housed at the Kent State University and John Carroll University libraries.


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Death of Actress Betty Chancellor

Betty Chancellor, Irish actress, dies in Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin, at the age of 74 on April 27, 1984.

Chancellor is born at 8 Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin, on January 9, 1910. Her parents are John William Chancellor, a Dublin clockmaker, jeweler, and photographer, and Cicely Chancellor (née Granger). They marry in Billericay, Essex, in 1904. She has an elder sister, Joyce Fanny, who also becomes an actress. She attends Nightingale Hall and Alexandra College, going on to train as a secretary.

Chancellor’s first appearance on stage is as a fairy in a benefit performance at the Gaiety Theatre in 1914. She appears again at the Gaiety in 1922 as Gwennie in F. Anstey‘s The Man from Blankley’s, and then studies drama under Frank Fay. In the 1920s, she acts in the Dublin Drama League’s productions in the Abbey Theatre. Once she joins the Gate Theatre her career progresses, establishing her as one of the principal actresses in the Gate by the early 1930s.

Chancellor plays Naomi alongside Orson Welles in a production of Jud Süss in October 1931. Welles becomes infatuated with her and later describes her as “the sexiest thing that ever lived.” In 1931, she debuts in J. B. Fagan‘s production of The New Gossoon by George Shiels as Biddy Henley at the Apollo Theatre. Her most noted roles are as Toots in Youth’s the Season in 1932 by Mary Manning, Laura in a production of Carmilla in 1932, based on the Gothic novella by Sheridan Le Fanu, Ophelia in 1932 and Cicely in The Importance of Being Earnest in 1933. Touring with the Gate company in 1935, she plays Stella in its production of Lord Longford‘s Yahoo performed in the Westminster Theatre, London. She stars with James Mason in the Gate’s production of Pride and Prejudice in 1937. Disappointed with the parts she is getting at the Gate after that and much to the annoyance of Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards, she joins Lord Longford’s first provincial tour in 1937.

In the late 1930s, Chancellor works more often in London. Following her appearance as Baby Furze in the 1938 production of Spring Meeting by Molly Keane and John Perry, she is nominated as “Star of the Future” by the Daily Mail. She acts alongside Alec Guinness and Peggy Ashcroft in 1940 in Clemence Dane‘s Cousin Muriel at the Globe Theatre, directed by John Gielgud.

Chancellor returns to the Gaiety Theatre in 1941 to act with Hilton Edwards in a production of Caesar and Cleopatra by George Bernard Shaw, a production that marks the 75th anniversary of the Gaiety. The press welcomes her return to the company, but her fellow actors are disturbed by the fact she is then living with Denis Johnston, the husband of fellow actress Shelah Richards. After Johnston’s divorce, they marry in March 1945 in Dungannon, County Tyrone. She partly retires from acting to raise their sons, but also due to her increasing deafness that had begun in her teens.

In 1947, Chancellor appears in Johnston’s The Moon in the Yellow River at the Arts Theatre in London with Jack Hawkins. The family moves to the United States in November 1948, where she has the lead role in Shaw’s Candida at Amherst College, Massachusetts in 1950.

In 1969, Chancellor returns to Ireland with her family and settles in Dalkey, County Dublin. She dies in Dún Laoghaire on April 27, 1984, and is buried in the close of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.


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Birth of Evie Hone, Painter & Stained Glass Artist

Eva Sydney Hone RHA, Irish painter and stained glass artist usually known as Evie, is born at Roebuck Grove, County Dublin, on April 22, 1894. She is considered to be an early pioneer of cubism, although her best known works are stained glass. Her most notable pieces are the East Window in the Chapel at Eton College, which depicts the Crucifixion, and My Four Green Fields, which is now in the Government Buildings in Dublin.

Hone is the youngest daughter of Joseph Hone, of the Hone family, and Eva Eleanor (née Robinson), daughter of Sir Henry Robinson and granddaughter of Arthur Annesley, 10th Viscount Valentia. Her mother dies two days after her birth. She is related to artists Nathaniel Hone and Nathaniel Hone the Younger.

Shortly before her twelfth birthday, Hone suffers from polio (infant paralysis), suffering a fall while helping to decorate the Taney parish church for Easter. Her resulting ill health leads to her seeking treatment in Harley Street, Marylebone, Central London. She is educated by a governess, continuing her education in Switzerland, and goes on tours to Spain and Italy before moving to London in 1913. Her three sisters all marry British Army officers, and all are widowed in World War I.

Hone studies at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London and then under Bernard Meninsky at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. She meets Mainie Jellett when both are studying under Walter Sickert at the Westminster Technical Institute. She works under André Lhote and Albert Gleizes in Paris before returning to become influential in the modern movement in Ireland and becoming one of the founders of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. She is considered an early pioneer of Cubism but in the 1930s turns to stained glass, which she studies with Wilhelmina Geddes.

Hone is extremely devout. She spends time in an Anglican Convent in 1925 at Truro in Cornwall and converts to Catholicism in 1937. This possibly influences 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.

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 East Window of Eton College is commissioned following the destruction of the building after a bomb is dropped in 1940 on the school 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.

Despite ill health, Hone continues to produce a huge number of small stained glass panels as well as oils, watercolours, and gouache landscapes. In 1953, she is represented at the Contemporary Irish Art exhibition at Aberystwyth, Wales, and at the Tate gallery in London, receiving as well an honorary LLD from Trinity College Dublin (TCD). In 1954, she is elected an honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA).

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: Portrait of Evie Hone by Hilda van Stockum)


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Death of Harry White, IRA Paramilitary

Harry White, an Irish republican paramilitary, dies in Dublin on April 12, 1989, following a sudden illness.

Born in Blackwater Street off Grosvenor Road in west Belfast in 1916, White is one of ten children (five sons and five daughters) of Billy White, water technician with Belfast Corporation, and his wife Kathleen (née McKane). As a boy he sings in the choir of Clonard Monastery. He plays in a céilí band as a teenager and is a lifelong aficionado of Irish music and plays the banjo and other string instruments (often smuggling guns in their cases). As a young man he is also an active member of Granuaile GAA club, playing hurling and Gaelic football.

White works as a plumber and joins the Irish Republican Army (IRA) at an early age, being imprisoned several times during the 1930s. He travels to England to take part in the IRA’s “S-Plan” bombing campaign of 1939 to 1940, then returns to Dublin to pass his bomb-making skills on to new recruits, including Brendan Behan. He then returns to England to become the IRA’s Manchester Operations Officer but, after a bomb he is working on goes off in the flat he is renting, he flees to Glasgow, then back to Ireland.

Shortly after returning to Ireland, White is arrested while giving a lecture on explosives in County Offaly and is interned at the Curragh Camp. The republican prisoners are split into two groups, one led by Pearse Kelly, and the other by Liam Leddy. White is unhappy with the situation and refuses to take sides. Shortly after his arrival, IRA Chief of Staff Seán McCool is also interned, and is concerned that the locations of many of the IRA’s arms caches are known only to him. McCool asks him to get the information to the new leadership by “signing out,” declaring that he is no longer involved with a paramilitary group. He refuses as doing so would be breaking IRA orders, but McCool persists, suggesting that he could resign from the army before signing out, thereby not contravening IRA rules. Once released, he immediately rejoins the IRA and passes on the information. He is also made IRA Quartermaster General by Chief of Staff Charlie Kerins. However, he is suspected of involvement in the killing of a police officer, Dinny O’Brien – something which he always denies – and has to go on the run.

In October 1942, White and a comrade are cornered in a house. Here the details are unclear. Tim Pat Coogan claims that White is in a house in Donnycarney in County Dublin with Maurice O’Neill (executed in Mountjoy Prison on November 12, 1942), while Danny Morrison claims that White is at a wedding reception in Cavan with Paddy Dermody. Both agree that there is a shoot-out in which one officer is killed, enabling White to escape, but he falls down a railway embankment and hides for two days before emerging, hoping that the police hunt is over. In Coogan’s version, he catches a bus to Dublin, covered in blood and mud; while, according to Morrison, he is assisted by a sympathetic soldier who helps him recover and cycles to Dublin with him. They agree that he reaches a safe house once in the capital. Morrison claims that the Donnycarney shootout occurs four months later and that White travels north, rather than returning to Dublin a second time.

On arrival in the north, White is made Officer Commanding of the IRA Northern Command. Kerins is arrested in Dublin in June 1944 and later tried for murder and hanged. White becomes the only member of the IRA leadership still free. A wanted man, he travels around until work is arranged for him by supporters in Altaghoney, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. There, he works as a handyman and barber and sets up a dance band, also managing to acquire some explosives from a local Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officer who wants rocks cleared from his field. For at least part of his time in Altaghoney, he serves as the IRA Chief of Staff.

White is finally captured and tried in October 1946 and is handed over to the Irish authorities. He is sentenced to death, but this is reduced to twelve years’ imprisonment on appeal, a defence in which his former comrade Seán MacBride is involved. He is actually released early in 1948 following a change in government which leaves Mac Bride in a ministerial post.

Following his release, White remains active in the IRA, but in a less high-profile way, as he is married and settles in Dublin. He supports the Provisional IRA following its split in 1970 and is involved in smuggling weapons across the border.

White publishes his autobiography in 1985, actually ghostwritten by Uinseann MacEoin. Entitled Harry, it attracts press attention for naming the IRA members who killed Kevin O’Higgins, names which Peadar O’Donnell separately confirms. White’s nephew, Danny Morrison, becomes a prominent Irish republican from the 1970s onward.

White dies on April 12, 1989, in Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, following a sudden illness. He is buried in the republican plot in Glasnevin Cemetery. He and his wife Kathleen, later a leading member of the National Graves Association, have a son and three daughters.