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Death of Gerard Dillon, Painter and Artist

Gerard Dillon, Irish painter and artist, dies following a second stroke on June 14, 1971.

Dillon is born in Belfast in 1915 or 1916. He leaves school at the age of fourteen and for seven years works as a painter and decorator, mostly in London. From an early age he is interested in art, cinema, and theatre. About 1936 he starts out as an artist.

Dillon’s Connemara landscapes provide the viewer with context, portraits of the characters who work the land, atmosphere and idiosyncratic colour interpretations. At the age of 18, Dillon goes to London, initially working as a decorator. With the outbreak of World War II, he returns to Belfast. Over the next five years he develops as a painter in Dublin and Belfast. His works during this period are more than simple depictions of the life and people around him, they are reactions and interactions in paint.

In 1942, Dillon’s first solo exhibition is opened by his friend and fellow artist, Mainie Jellett, at The Country Shop, St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin. “Father, Forgive Them Their Sins” features depicting his concerns about the new war that had broken out. Despite a growing reputation, he has to return to London in 1944 to work on demolition gangs to restore his finances. In the late 1940s and during the 1950s, he finds himself favouring the town of Roundstone, County Galway. In 1951 he is introduced to Noreen Rice by her piano teacher. She has no formal training and she takes Dillon and George Campbell as her mentors for decades and her work is of a similar surrealistic and primitive style.

In 1958, Dillon has the double honour of representing Ireland at the Guggenheim International, and Great Britain at the Pittsburg International Exhibition. He and his sister, Mollie, have a property on Abbey Road in 1958. They let out part of the house to Arthur Armstrong and they let a flat to Noreen Rice and her brother. He and Noreen tour junk yards to find objects like leather and string that they include in their artwork.

Dillon travels widely in Europe and teaches for brief periods in the London art schools.

In 1967, Dillon suffers a stroke and spends six weeks in hospital. From this time his work changes direction. A notion of imminent death sends his work almost into another world, a realm of dreams and paintings intimating his death. In 1968 he is back in Dublin, where he helps to design sets and costumes for Seán O’Casey‘s play Juno and the Paycock. He continues to paint and also to make tapestries, sitting at his Singer sewing machine.

In 1969, Dillon pulls his artworks from the Belfast leg of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in purported protest during the Troubles against the “arrogance of the Unionist mob.” However, he does send work to Ulster when he donates work to Sheelagh Flanagan who had organised an exhibition for the relief of victims of the Belfast riots, in October 1969. His picture is hanged alongside the donated works of T. P. Flanagan, William Scott, F. E. McWilliam, Deborah Brown and Carolyn Mulholland as well as more than twenty others. Michael Longley retorts in a further letter, “Belfast needed creativity, it needed people like Gerard Dillon.” During his last years, he is invited to be involved in a children’s art workshop in the National Gallery of Ireland.

Dillon dies of a second stroke at the age of 55 on June 14, 1971. His grave, as requested, is unmarked in Belfast’s Milltown Cemetery. Danlann Gerard Dillon/The Gerard Dillon Gallery in Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich is named in his honour.

In his biography of the artist, James White briefly touches on the artists homosexuality: “such was his religious feeling that although he was drawn to people of that type, if he once had an encounter I believe that it never occurred again.” The artist’s nephew, Martin Dillon, recalls that after his uncle’s death he found a diary entry describing a homosexual encounter with a sense of guilt, but the author Gerard Keenan insists he was “a very well-adjusted homosexual.” Reihill expands on this, pointing to a probably unrequited love for the painter Daniel O’Neill and also highlighted Dillon’s association with Basil Rákóczi and The White Stag Group‘s Kenneth Hall both strong gay connections. Pictures with both overt and covert references are known.

(Pictured: “Washing Day” by Gerard Dillon)


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James FitzGerald, Lord Ophaly, Wins Athy By-Election

At the Athy by-election on June 12, 1741, following the death of Sir Walter Dixon Borrowes, James FitzGerald, styled Lord Ophaly and later 1st Duke of Leinster, is returned. In the course of the election there is a duel between William Paul Warren and Jack Hardy, which leads to Hardy’s right hand and arm being shattered. It is thought that it might have to be amputated.

FitzGerald, an Anglo-Irish nobleman, soldier and politician, is the son of Robert FitzGerald, 19th Earl of Kildare, and Lady Mary, daughter of William O’Brien, 3rd Earl of Inchiquin.

FitzGerald is a member of the Irish House of Commons for Athy from the 1741 by-election until he succeeds his father as 20th Earl of Kildare in 1743. He is sworn of the Privy Council of Ireland in 1746 and in 1747, on the occasion of his marriage, he is created Viscount Leinster, of Taplow in the County of Buckingham, in the Peerage of Great Britain, and takes his seat in the British House of Lords that same year. From 1749 to 1755 he is one of the leaders of the Popular Party in Ireland and serves as the country’s Master-General of the Ordnance between 1758 and 1766, becoming Colonel of the Royal Irish Artillery in 1760. He is promoted to Major General in 1761 and to Lieutenant General in 1770.

In 1761 FitzGerald is created Earl of Offaly and Marquess of Kildare in the Peerage of Ireland and in 1766 he is further honoured when he is made Duke of Leinster, becoming by this time the Premier Duke, Marquess and Earl in the Peerage of Ireland.

FitzGerald marries the 15-year-old Lady Emily Lennox, daughter of Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond, and one of the famous Lennox Sisters, in London on February 7, 1747. She is a great-granddaughter of King Charles II and is therefore a distant fifth cousin of King George III. Both of them are descended from King James VI and I. The couple has nineteen children.

FitzGerald dies at Leinster House, Dublin, on November 19, 1773, aged 51, and is buried in the city’s Christ Church Cathedral. He is succeeded by his second (but eldest surviving) son, William, Marquess of Kildare. The Duchess of Leinster causes a minor sensation by marrying her lover William Ogilvie in 1774 but continues to be known as The Dowager Duchess of Leinster. She has a further three children by him. She dies in London on March 27, 1814, aged 82.

In 1999, Irish Screen, BBC America and WGBH produce Aristocrats, a six-part limited television series based on the lives of Emily Lennox and her sisters. FitzGerald is portrayed by Ben Daniels.


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Death of Leonard McNally, Barrister, Playwright, United Irishman

Leonard McNally, an Irish barrister, playwright, lyricist, founding member of the United Irishmen and spy for the British Government within Irish republican circles, dies in Dublin on June 8, 1820.

McNally is born in Dublin in 1752, the son of a merchant and wine importer. He is raised by his mother with the support of his uncle. He is born into a Roman Catholic family, but at some point in the 1760s he converts to the Church of Ireland. He is passionate about theatre, entirely self-educated and initially becomes a merchant in Bordeaux like his father.

However, in 1774 McNally goes to London to study law at the Middle Temple but returns to Dublin to be called to the Irish bar in 1776. After returning to London in the late 1770s, he qualifies as a barrister in England as well, in 1783. He practises for a short time in London and, while there, supplements his income by writing plays and editing The Public Ledger.

Returning to Ireland, McNally developes a successful career as a barrister in Dublin. He develops an expertise in the law of evidence and, in 1802, publishes what becomes a much-used textbook, The Rules of Evidence on Pleas of the Crown. The text plays a crucial role in defining and publicising the beyond reasonable doubt standard for criminal trials.

Not long after returning to Ireland, McNally becomes involved in radical politics, having already in 1782 published a pamphlet in support of the Irish cause. He becomes Dublin’s leading radical lawyer of the day. In 1792, he represents James Napper Tandy, a radical member of the Irish Parliament, in a legal dispute over parliamentary privilege. In the early 1790s, he becomes a founder member of the United Irishmen, a clandestine society which soon develops into a revolutionary Irish republican organisation. He ranks high in its leadership and acts as the organisation’s chief lawyer, representing many United Irishmen in court. This includes defending Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet, the leaders of the 1798 and 1803 rebellions respectively, at their trials for treason. In 1793, he is wounded in a duel with Sir Jonah Barrington, who had insulted the United Irishmen. Barrington subsequently describes McNally as “a good-natured, hospitable, talented and dirty fellow.”

After McNally’s death in 1820, it emerges that he had for many years been an informant for the government, and one of the most successful British spies in Irish republican circles that there has ever been. In 1794, when a United Irishmen plot to seek aid from Revolutionary France is uncovered by the British government, McNally turns informer to save himself, although, subsequently, he also receives payment for his services. He is paid an annual pension in respect of his work as an informer of £300 a year, from 1794 until his death in 1820.

From 1794, McNally systematically informs on his United Irishmen colleagues, who often gather at his house for meetings. It is he that betrays Lord Edward FitzGerald, one of the leaders of the 1798 rebellion, as well as Robert Emmet in 1803. A significant factor in the failure of the 1798 rebellion is the excellent intelligence provided to the government by its agents. McNally is considered to be one of the most damaging informers.

The United Irishmen represented by McNally at their trials are invariably convicted and he is paid by the crown for passing the secrets of their defence to the prosecution. During the trial of Emmet, he provides details of the defence’s strategy to the crown and conducts his client’s case in a way that assists the prosecution. For example, three days before the trial he assures the authorities that Emmet “does not intend to call a single witness, nor to trouble any witness for the Crown with a cross-examination, unless they misrepresent facts… He will not controvert the charge by calling a single witness.” For his assistance to the prosecution in Emmet’s case, he is paid a bonus of £200, on top of his pension, half of which is paid five days before the trial.

After McNally’s death, his activities as a government agent become generally known when his heir attempts to continue to collect his pension of £300 per year. He is still remembered with opprobrium by Irish nationalists. In 1997, the Sinn Féin newspaper, An Phoblacht, in an article on McNally, describes him as “undoubtedly one of the most treacherous informers of Irish history.”

McNally is a successful dramatist and writes a number of well-constructed but derivative comedies, as well as comic operas. His first dramatic work is The Ruling Passion, a comic opera written in 1771, and he is known to have authored at least twelve plays between 1779 and 1796 as well as other comic operas. His works include The Apotheosis of Punch (1779), a satire on the Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Tristram Shandy (1783), which is an adaptation of Laurence Sterne‘s novel, Robin Hood (1784), Fashionable Levities (1785), Richard Cœur de Lion (1786), and Critic Upon Critic (1788).

McNally also writes a number of songs and operettas for Covent Garden. One of his songs, The Lass of Richmond Hill, becomes very well-known and popular following its first public performance at Vauxhall Gardens in London in 1789. It is said to be a favourite of George III and popularises the romantic metaphor “a rose without a thorn,” a phrase which he used in the song.

Nothing is known of McNally’s first wife Mary O’Brien, other than that she dies in 1786. In London in 1787, he elopes with Frances I’Anson, as her father William I’Anson a solicitor, disapproves of McNally. Frances, and her family’s estate, Hill House in Richmond, North Yorkshire, is the subject of a song with lyrics by McNally and composed by James Hook, The Lass of Richmond Hill. In 1795, Frances dies during childbirth at age 29 and is survived by only one daughter. In early 1799, McNally marries his third wife, Louisa Edgeworth, the daughter of a clergyman from County Longford.

When McNally’s son, who has the same and professions, dies on February 13, 1820, it is widely reported to have been McNally. The son is buried in Donnybrook, Dublin, on February 17, 1820, and McNally sends a letter on March 6, 1820, to the Proprietor of Saunders’s Newsletter seeking damages for the severe injury caused by the circulation of his death. In June 1820, McNally is on his deathbed, and although he had been a Protestant for most of his adult life, he seeks absolution from a Roman Catholic priest. He dies and is also buried in Donnybrook on June 8, 1820.


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Birth of Patrick Campbell, 3rd Baron Glenavy

Patrick Gordon Campbell, 3rd Baron Glenavy, Irish journalist, humorist and television personality, is born in Dublin on June 6, 1913. He writes sixteen books, including Life in Thin Slices, Rough Husbandry, and How to Become a Scratch Golfer.

Campbell is the first son of Charles Campbell, 2nd Baron Glenavy, and Beatrice, Lady Glenavy (the artist Beatrice Elvery). He is educated Crawley’s preparatory school (St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin), Castle Park preparatory school (Dalkey), Rossall School (Lancashire), and, briefly, Pembroke College, Oxford. He leaves Oxford without completing his degree. In 1935, he is taken on by The Irish Times by R. M. “Bertie” Smyllie and reports on “Courts Day by Day.” During World War II, he serves as a chief petty officer in the Irish Marine Service. After the war he re-joins The Irish Times, using the pseudonym “Quidnunc,” and is given charge of the column “Irishman’s Diary.” He has a weekly column for the Irish edition of the Sunday Dispatch before working on the paper in London from 1947 to 1949. He is assistant editor of Lilliput from 1947 to 1953. His writings also appear in The Sunday Times.

Campbell’s books, mostly collections of humorous pieces that were originally published in newspapers and magazines, include A Long Drink of Cold Water (1949), A Short Trot with a Cultured Mind (1950), An Irishman’s Diary (1950), Life in Thin Slices (1951), Patrick Campbell’s Omnibus (1954), Come Here Till I Tell You (1960), Constantly in Pursuit (1962), How to Become a Scratch Golfer (1963), Brewing Up in the Basement (1963), Rough Husbandry (1965), The P-P-Penguin Patrick Campbell (1965), All Ways on Sundays (1966), A Bunch of New Roses (1967), an autobiography My Life and Easy Times (1967), The Coarse of Events (1968), Gullible Travels (1969), The High Speed Gasworks (1970), Waving All Excuses (1971), Patrick Campbell’s Golfing Book (1972), Fat Tuesday Tails (1972), 35 Years on the Job (1973), and The Campbell Companion (1987). Many of his books are illustrated by Quentin Blake.

Campbell is married three times, first in 1941 to Sylvia Alfreda Willoughby Lee, whom he divorces in 1947. He then marries Chery Louise Munro in 1947. The two divorce in 1966, the year he marries Vivienne Orme.

Campbell speaks with a stammer, but nevertheless delights television audiences with his wit, notably as a regular team captain on the long-running show Call My Bluff, opposite his longtime friend, Frank Muir. Muir notes that “When he was locked solid by a troublesome initial letter he would show his frustration by banging his knee and muttering ‘Come along! Come along!'” Some of his funniest short stories describe incidents involving his stammer. He stands six feet five inches tall, and several of his funniest pieces deal with the problems faced by a man of his build in merely finding shoes or clothes that fit him. He also makes regular appearances in That Was The Week That Was.

Campbell lives for many years in the South of France, commuting to England for his television work and continuing to produce his weekly column in The Sunday Times, which he drops in 1978.

In 1972 a period of illness leads to the discovery that Campbell had suffered an undetected heart attack some years previously and has a permanent heart weakness. An attack of viral pneumonia in 1980 exacerbates this condition, and he dies suddenly on November 9, 1980 while talking to a nurse at University College Hospital, London. He is succeeded as the 4th and last Lord Glenavy by his novelist brother Michael.


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Death of Philip Woodroffe, Surgeon at Dr. Steevens’ Hospital

Philip Woodroffe, the resident surgeon at Dr. Steevens’ Hospital in Dublin for over 30 years, dies in Dublin on June 4, 1799. Several eminent surgeons are apprenticed to him. He is the president of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) in 1788.

In his history of the RCSI, physician Charles Cameron writes that he has been unable to learn anything about Woodroffe’s parents or his early life.

Woodroffe is appointed assistant-surgeon to Dr. Steevens’ Hospital in 1763, and resident surgeon from 1765, an office which he holds until his death. In 1780 he becomes surgeon to the House of Industry Hospitals in Dublin and remains so for the rest of his life. In 1769 he is living in Crow Street. He moves to Fownes Street in 1774, and in 1784 he is living in St. Andrew’s Street.

Woodroffe is one of the founding members of the Dublin Society of Surgeons that later becomes the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and is one of those to whom the first charter is granted in 1784. In 1786, he follows William Dease as treasurer to the college, and holds the office for eight years. He is president of the college in 1788. His appointments also include surgeon to the Blue Coat School, the Foundling Hospital, and the Hospital for Incurables, Lazar’s Hill (now Townsend Street). Several notable surgeons such as Abraham Colles are apprenticed to him. Colles takes over as resident surgeon at Dr. Steevens’ Hospital after Woodroffe’s death.

Woodroffe dies on June 4, 1799, in St. Andrew’s Street, and is interred in St. Andrew’s churchyard.

(Pictured: The College of Surgeons, Dublin, 1837)


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Leo Varadkar Elected Taoiseach

On June 2, 2017, Leo Varadkar, son of Indian immigrants, wins the leadership contest against his only rival, Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage Simon Coveney, with 60% of the votes to lead Fine Gael, the biggest party in the coalition government. He is set to become the first openly gay Taoiseach (prime minister) of the Republic of Ireland and the youngest leader in the European Union. His election is seen as a change in political generations and social outlook in Ireland.

The current Taoiseach, 66-year-old Enda Kenny, announced his resignation the previous month after six years at the head of the centrist party, setting off a battle to lead the ruling Fine Gael.

“If somebody of my age, of my mixed-race background and of all the things that make up my character can potentially become leader of our country, then I think that sends out a message to every child born today that there is no office in Ireland that they can’t aspire to,” Varadkar tells Newstalk radio.

The Fine Gael parliamentary party votes overwhelmingly (70 percent) in favor of Varadkar while 65 percent of members favor Coveney. As Varadkar is backed by most lawmakers and local representatives, he gains victory under the center-right party’s electoral college system.

Varadkar’s position is confirmed later in the month after parliament resumes following a break.

Varadkar’s father, Ashok, a doctor, moves to Ireland in the 1970s and his youngest son is born in Dublin in 1979. He studies medicine at Trinity College Dublin and spends several years as a junior doctor before qualifying as a general practitioner in 2010.

Varadkar is first elected in local elections in 2003 and in 2007 to the lower house of Ireland’s assembly, the Dáil Éireann. He comes to public prominence in 2015 when Ireland votes in favor of same-sex marriage.

Varadkar is on the right wing of the centrist Fine Gael party and has held three cabinet posts since 2011 – Minister for Social Protection, Minister for Health and Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport. More recently, in the time leading up to his election as Taoiseach, he heads a publicity campaign highlighting social welfare fraud.

Varadkar’s most pressing first international task is negotiating Ireland’s new arrangement with the United Kingdom after it leaves the European Union.

In a radio interview in 2015, Varadkar speaks for the first time about being gay, “It’s not something that defines me. I’m not a half-Indian politician, or a doctor politician or a gay politician for that matter. It’s just part of who I am. It doesn’t define me. It is part of my character I suppose.”

Varadkar’s partner is also a doctor in Dublin.

(From: “Ireland’s ruling party elects Varadkar new leader” by Jane Mcintosh, Deutsche Welle (DW), http://www.dw.com, June 2, 2017)


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Death of Charles Lever, Novelist & Raconteur

Charles James Lever, Irish novelist and raconteur, dies of heart failure on June 1, 1872, at Trieste, Italy. According to Anthony Trollope, his novels are just like his conversation.

Lever is born in Amiens Street, Dublin, on August 31, 1806. He is the second son of James Lever, an architect and builder, and is educated in private schools. His escapades at Trinity College, Dublin (1823–1828), where he earns a degree in medicine in 1831, are drawn on for the plots of some of his novels. The character Frank Webber in the novel Charles O’Malley is based on a college friend, Robert Boyle, who later becomes a clergyman. He and Boyle earn pocket-money singing ballads of their own composing in the streets of Dublin and play many other pranks which he embellishes in the novels Charles O’Malley, Con Cregan and Lord Kilgobbin.

Before seriously embarking upon his medical studies, Lever visits Canada as an unqualified surgeon on an emigrant ship. Arriving in Canada, he journeys into the backwoods, where he is affiliated to a tribe of Native Americans but has to flee because his life is in danger, as later his character Bagenal Daly does in his novel The Knight of Gwynne.

Back in Europe, Lever pretends he is a student from the University of Göttingen and travels to the University of Jena and then to Vienna. He loves German student life and several of his songs, such as “The Pope He Loved a Merry Life,” are based on student-song models. His medical degree earns him an appointment to the Board of Health in County Clare and then as a dispensary doctor in Portstewart, County Londonderry, but his conduct as a country doctor earns him the censure of the authorities.

In 1833 Lever marries his first love, Catherine Baker, and in February 1837, after varied experiences, he begins publishing The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer in the recently established Dublin University Magazine. Before Harry Lorrequer appears in volume form (1839), he has settled on the strength of a slight diplomatic connection as a fashionable physician in Brussels.

In 1842 Lever returns to Dublin to edit the Dublin University Magazine and gathers round him a typical coterie of Irish wits. In June 1842 he welcomes William Makepeace Thackeray, the author of The Snob Papers, to Templeogue, four miles southwest of Dublin, on his Irish tour. The O’Donoghue and Arthur O’Leary (1845) make his native land an impossible place for Lever to continue in. Thackeray suggests London, but Lever requires a new field of literary observation and anecdote. His creative inspiration exhausted, he decides to renew it on the continent. In 1845 he resigns his editorship and goes back to Brussels, whence he starts upon an unlimited tour of central Europe in a family coach. Now and again, he halts for a few months and entertains to the limit of his resources in some ducal castle or other which he hires for an off season.

Depressed in spirit as Lever is, his wit is unextinguished. He is still the delight of the salons with his stories, and in 1867, after a few years’ experience of a similar kind at La Spezia, he is cheered by a letter from Lord Derby offering him the more lucrative consulship of Trieste. The $600 annual salary does not atone to Lever for the lassitude of prolonged exile. Trieste, at first “all that I could desire,” became with characteristic abruptness “detestable and damnable.”

Lever’s depression, partly due to incipient heart disease, partly to the growing conviction that he is the victim of literary and critical conspiracy, is confirmed by the death of his wife on April 23, 1870, to whom he is tenderly attached. He visits Ireland in the following year and seems alternately in high and low spirits. Death had already given him one or two runaway knocks, and, after his return to Trieste, he fails gradually, dying suddenly, however, and almost painlessly, from heart failure on June 1, 1872, at his home, Villa Gasteiger. His daughters, one of whom, Sydney, is believed to have been the real author of A Rent in a Cloud (1869), are well provided for.


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Death of Henry Capell, 1st Baron Capell of Tewkesbury

Henry Capell, 1st Baron Capell of Tewkesbury KB, PC, English politician who sits in the House of Commons of England between 1660 and 1692, dies in Chapelizod, Dublin, on May 30, 1696.

Capell is born in Little Hadham, Hertfordshire, England, in 1638. He is the son of Arthur Capell, 1st Baron Capell of Hadham, and Elizabeth Morrison. He is baptised on March 6, 1638. His father is raised to the peerage in 1641, and he dies fighting for the King in the English Civil War in 1649 as one of the commanders of the Colchester garrison. His eldest brother is Arthur Capell, 1st Earl of Essex.

Capell founds the Kew Gardens at Kew, a district in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. Later he is elected Member of Parliament for Tewkesbury in the Convention Parliament. He is invested as a Knight of the Order of the Bath, on April 23, 1661. In 1661, he is re-elected MP for Tewkesbury in the Cavalier Parliament. He is a member of the Privy Council of Ireland from April 1673 to March 1684/85. He is re-elected MP for Tewkesbury in the two elections of 1679, is a member of the Privy Council of England from April 22, 1679, to January 31, 1680, and is First Lord of the Admiralty, between 1679 and 1680.

In 1689, Capell is elected MP for Cockermouth and is Lord of the Treasury, between 1689 and 1690. He is invested again as Privy Councillor, on February 14, 1689. He is elected MP for Tewkesbury in 1690, and sits until April 11, 1692, when he is ennobled as Baron Capell of Tewkesbury, in the County of Gloucester. One year later, he becomes Lord Justice of Ireland and in turn a Privy Councillor of Ireland, in June 1693. In 1695 and 1696, he is Lord Deputy of Ireland. His term as Lord Deputy is not considered successful because of him being a firm Whig and presiding over an administration which is deeply divided between Whigs and Tories. He does nothing to help change this situation.

Capell dies at the age of 58 in Chapelizod, County Dublin, on May 30, 1696. He is buried on September 8, 1696, in Little Hadham, Hertfordshire. The barony dies with him.

On February 16, 1659, Capell marries Dorothy Bennet, daughter of Richard Bennet. The marriage is childless but does bring part of what later becomes Kew Palace into the Capell family, leading to its becoming known as Capel House. Dorothy dies in 1721, and through her will endows a number of charities.

(Pictured: “Sir Henry Capel (1638-1696),” oil on canvas by Peter Lely, Metropolitan Museum of Art)


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Birth of Donal Murray, Former Roman Catholic Bishop of Limerick

Donal Brendan Murray, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Limerick from 1996 to 2009, is born in Dublin on May 29, 1940. He previously serves as an Auxiliary Bishop of the Dublin diocese.

Murray is educated at Blackrock College, a voluntary day and boarding Catholic secondary school for boys aged 13–18, in Williamstown, Blackrock, County Dublin. He studies for a BA and master’s degrees in philosophy at University College Dublin (UCD), obtains a B.Div at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, and his License and Doctorate in theology at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum). He is ordained on May 22, 1966.

Murray lectures in the Mater Dei Institute of Education from 1969, becoming professor of moral theology at Holy Cross College, located in Clonliffe Road, Drumcondra, Dublin. He also lectures at University College Dublin from 1973 to 1982 in Catechetics and from 1978 to 1982 in Medical Ethics.

In 1981, Murray is appointed Titular Bishop of Glenndálocha and Auxiliary Bishop of Dublin, making him the youngest bishop at the time, aged only 41. He is appointed as Bishop of Limerick on February 10, 1996, by Pope John Paul II. He is installed as Bishop of Limerick on March 24, 1996.

In November 2009, Murray is pressured to resign from his post after the Murphy Report finds that he had mishandled child sexual abuse allegations within his diocese.

Murray announces his resignation to a congregation, including priests of the Diocese, people working in the Diocesan Office and the Diocesan Pastoral Centre, at 11:00 a.m. (noon in Rome, the hour of the publication of the decision) in St. John’s Cathedral, Limerick.


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Death of Melesina Chenevix Trench, Writer, Poet & Diarist

Melesina Trench (née Chenevix), Irish writer, poet and diarist, dies in Malvern, Worcestershire, England, on May 27, 1827. During her lifetime she is known more for her beauty than her writing. It is not until her son, Richard Chenevix Trench, publishes her diaries posthumously in 1861 that her work receives notice.

Chenevix is born in Dublin on March 22, 1768, to Philip Chenevix and Mary Elizabeth Gervais. She is orphaned before her fourth birthday and is brought up by her paternal grandfather, Richard Chenevix (1698–1779), the Anglican Bishop of Waterford and Lismore. The family is of Huguenot extraction.

After the death of Richard Chenevix, Chenevix goes to live with her other grandfather, the Archdeacon Gervais. On October 31, 1786, she marries Colonel Richard St. George, who dies only four years later in Portugal, leaving one son, Charles Manners St. George, who becomes a diplomat.

Between 1799 and 1800, Melesina travels around Europe, especially Germany. It is during these travels that she meets Lord Horatio Nelson, Lady Hamilton and the cream of European society, including Antoine de Rivarol, Lucien Bonaparte, and John Quincy Adams while living in Germany. She later recounts anecdotes of these meetings in her memoirs.

On March 3, 1803, in Paris she marries her second husband, Richard Trench, who is the sixth son of Frederick Trench and brother of Frederick Trench, 1st Baron Ashtown.

After the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens, Richard Trench is detained in France by Napoleon‘s armies, and in August 1805 Melesina takes it upon herself to petition Napoleon in person and pleads for her husband’s release. Her husband is released in 1807, and the couple settles at Elm Lodge in Bursledon, Hampshire, England.

Their son, Francis Chenevix Trench, is born in 1805. In 1807, when they are on holiday in Dublin, their son Richard Chenevix Trench is born. He goes on to be the Archbishop of Dublin, renowned poet and contemporary of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Her only daughter dies a few years later at the age of four.

Trench corresponds with, amongst others, Mary Leadbeater, with whom she works to improve the lot of the peasantry at her estate at Ballybarney. She dies at the age of 59 in Malvern, Worcestershire on May 27, 1827.

Melesina Trench’s diaries and letters are compiled posthumously by Richard Chenevix Trench as The remains of the late Mrs. Richard Trench in 1861 with an engraving of her taken from a painting by George Romney. Another oil painting, The Evening Star by Sir Thomas Lawrence, has her as a subject, and she is reproduced in portrait miniatures – one in Paris by Jean-Baptiste Isabey and another by Hamilton that is copied by the engraver Francis Engleheart.

Copies of a number of her works are held at Chawton House Library.

(Pictured: “Melesina Chenevix, Mrs. George, later Mrs. Trench,” attributed to George Romney (British, 1734–1802), oil on canvas)