William George Digges La Touche, diplomat and banker, is born in Dublin on August 28, 1747, the third son of James Digges La Touche and his second wife, Martha (née Thwaites) of St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin. He is admitted to St. Paul’s School, London, on August 30, 1757. In 1764, he accompanies “Mr. Moore,” the British resident at Basra, to the Persian Gulf. La Touche acts as personal secretary to Moore for a number of years before succeeding him as British resident. Basra is then one of the key trading places for the East India Company, and both the British and Dutch governments have official representation there. La Touche obtains the respect of both Arabs and Europeans. At the siege of Basra in 1775, he gives refuge to prominent citizens of the city and their families. When Az Zubayr is captured by the Persians in the same year, La Touche allegedly ransoms all of the inhabitants at his own expense to save them from slavery.
While serving in the east for twenty years, La Touche collects illuminated Persian manuscripts, some of which come from the royal library at Shiraz. A number of these volumes are presented to Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 1786 and 1787. He returns to London around 1784 and marries Grace, daughter of John Puget, a wealthy London-based banker of Huguenot origins.
By 1786, he settles in Dublin and becomes a partner of the La Touche bank. In the years 1786, 1788, 1790, 1792, 1794, and 1796, he sits on the board of the Bank of Ireland. He is an active opponent of the Acts of Union and chairs a large meeting on the subject in 1798. Like other members of his family, he gives large sums to charity and is a governor of Dr. Steevens’ Hospital and the Lying-in Hospital, Dublin, and a director of the Grand Canal Company. He lives on St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, and at Sans Souci, a country estate that he purchases at Booterstown, Dublin.
La Touche dies in Dublin on November 6, 1803, leaving four sons. A small pastel portrait of him, and another of his wife Grace, probably by Hugh Douglas Hamilton is in the Bank of Ireland collection. Lye is known to have had his portrait painted in oils by Gilbert Stuart.
(From: “La Touche, William George Digges,” by Daniel Beaumont, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Roberts is born in Waterford in 1712 or 1714, the son of Thomas Roberts, an architect and builder. Little is known of his early life, although he possibly trains in London for a time. At 17, he elopes with Mary Susannah Sautelle, a Huguenot heiress who also lives in Waterford.
In 1785, Roberts builds a house in Waterford for William Morris, now the Harbour Commissioners’ headquarters and the Chamber of Commerce. In 1786, he designs Newtown House, later Newtown School, a Quaker school. In 1787, he designs The Leper Hospital and Church of St. Stephen. He also builds the Assembly Rooms on Waterford’s Mall in 1788, which is now the Theatre Royal and City Hall.
Roberts has between 21 and 24 children with his wife Susannah, of whom eight live to adulthood, including the painters Thomas Roberts and Thomas Sautelle Roberts. They live for many years in the old bishop’s palace, opposite the cathedral, with a country residence at Roberts Mount. He is nicknamed “Honest John” because he pays his workers so reliably, sometimes giving half their pay directly to their wives so that it would not be wasted on alcohol.
Roberts dies on May 23, 1796, after falling asleep on the floor of the Cathedral of the Most Holy Trinity, Waterford, and contracting pneumonia. The main square in Waterford is named John Roberts Square in his honour.
Gray meets her husband, Edmund Dwyer Gray, in September 1868 when she witnesses him saving five people from a wrecked schooner during a storm in Killiney Bay, near Dún Laoghaire. She later meets him, and the couple are married in 1869. They had four children, with three surviving to adulthood: Edmund, Mary and Sylvia. She places both of her daughters in convents after their education and the early death of their father, supposedly as she fears they will harm her chances of remarrying.
Gray is a noted hostess during her husband’s political career, in particular while he is Lord Mayor of Dublin. Following his death in 1888, she holds over 40% of the shares in her husband’s newspaper, the Freeman’s Journal. While she is not involved in the day-to-day running of the company, she does exert influence over the newspaper. When Charles Stewart Parnell‘s party splits, the paper sides with Parnell at Gray’s consent. She is one of a number of prominent Catholic women in Dublin who continue to support Parnell. In 1891, she appears with Parnell in public, leading to the Archbishop of Dublin describing her as “a rock of scandal.”
It is only when the Freeman’s Journal‘s circulation and revenue suffers after the establishment of an anti-Parnell newspaper, the National Press, that Gray’s loyalty to Parnell wavers. Influenced by her son, she decides that the Freeman’s Journal will abandon its relationship with Parnell. This decision is formalised at a special general meeting to the Freeman company on September 21, 1891, seeing the pro-Parnell board replaced with one that includes her son and Captain Maurice O’Conor. The Freeman’s Journal and the National Press merge in March 1892, after which Gray is bought out of the company with her son and O’Conor stepping down from the board, thus ending the Gray family’s 50-year relationship with the Freeman’s Journal.
Gray marries Captain O’Conor in November 1891. A Captain, and later a Major, with the Connaught Rangers, he is a relative of Charles Owen O’Conor and George Moore. She is twelve years his senior, and the couple has no children. They live on Inisfale Island on Lough Allen, County Leitrim. She lives the last thirty years of her life there, with failing eyesight and eventual blindness. She dies there April 15, 1927. O’Conor dies in a hotel in Dún Laoghaire on January 3, 1941, in poor circumstances.
Sterne is born on November 24, 1713, in Clonmel, County Tipperary, to a British military officer stationed there. Following his father’s postings, the family moves briefly to Yorkshire before returning to Ireland, where they live largely in poverty and move frequently throughout the rest of Sterne’s youth. When the elder Sterne is dispatched to Jamaica, where he would die in 1731, he places his son with a wealthy uncle who supports the boy’s education.
Sterne attends Jesus College, Cambridge, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, Richard Sterne, who had been Master of the College. After being ordained as an Anglican priest, he takes up the vicarship of Sutton-on-the-Forest, where he marries Elizabeth Lumley. The couple lives there for the next 20 years.
Through his paternal family line, Sterne is connected to several powerful clergymen. His uncle, Archdeacon Jaques Sterne, encourages him to contribute to Whig political journals, and consequently he writes several articles supporting Sir Robert Walpole. However, when his political fervency fails to match his uncle’s, prompting him to abandon the role of political controversialist, Jaques Sterne cuts ties with his nephew and refuses to support his career. Nevertheless, Sterne continues writing.
Sterne’s first long work, a sharp satire of the spiritual courts entitled A Political Romance, makes him as many enemies as allies. Though the work is not widely distributed and indeed is burned at the request of those targeted by its Swiftian-style criticism, it represents Sterne’s first foray into the kind of humorous satire for which he would become famous. At age 46, he steps back from managing his parishes and turns his full attention to writing.
Sterne begins what becomes his best-known work, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, at a moment of personal crisis. He and his wife are both ill with tuberculosis and, in the same year that the first volumes of his long comic novel appear, his mother and uncle Jaques die. The blend of sentiment, humour and philosophical exploration that characterises his works matures during this difficult period. Tristram Shandy is an enormous success, and Sterne becomes, for the first time in his life, a famous literary figure in London. Still suffering from tuberculosis, he leaves England for Continental Europe, where his travels influence his second major work, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768).
Sterne’s narrator in A Sentimental Journey is Parson Yorick, a sensitive but also comic figure who first appears in Tristram Shandy and who becomes Sterne’s fictive alter ego. In A Sentimental Journey, Parson Yorick wears a “little picture of Eliza around his neck,” and in the last year of his life Sterne writes the autobiographical Journal to Eliza under the pseudonym Yorick. Eliza is Eliza Draper, the wife of an East India Company official, and the literary and emotional muse of Sterne’s final years. After Draper returns to India, the two continue to exchange letters, some of which Draper allows to be published after Sterne’s death in the volume Letters from Yorick to Eliza.
In early 1768, less than a month after A Sentimental Journey is published, Sterne’s strength fails him and he dies in his lodgings at 41 Old Bond Street in London on March 18, 1768, at the age of 54. He is buried in the churchyard of St. George’s Hanover Square Church.
(Pictured: Portrait of Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), oil on canvas by Joshua Reynolds, 1760)
Kavanagh’s mother insists that he be brought up and have opportunities like any other child and places him in the care of the doctor Francis Boxwell, who believes that an armless and legless child can live a productive life. Kavanagh learns to ride horses at the age of three by being strapped to a special saddle and managing the horse with the stumps of his arms. With the help of the surgeon Sir Philip Crampton, Lady Harriet has a mechanical wheelchair constructed for her son, and encourages him to ride horses and engage in other outdoor activities. He also goes fishing, hunting, draws pictures and writes stories, using mechanical devices supplementing his physical capacities. His mother teaches him how to write and paint holding pens and brushes in his mouth.
In 1846, Lady Harriet takes three of her children, Thomas, Harriet and Arthur, traveling to the Middle East for two years. Kavanagh nearly drowns in the Nile when he falls in while fishing and is rescued by a local antiquities salesman who dives in to pull him out.
In 1849, Kavanagh’s mother discovers that he has been having affairs with girls on the family estate, so she sends him into exile to Uppsala, and then to Moscow with his brother and a clergyman, whom he comes to hate. He travels extensively in Egypt, Anatolia, Persia, and India between 1846 and 1853. In India, his letter of credit from his mother is cancelled when she discovers that he has spent two weeks in a harem, so he persuades the East India Company to hire him as a despatch rider. Other sources say that this is due to the death of his eldest brother, Charles, of tuberculosis in December 1851, which leaves him with only 30 shillings.
Kavanagh dies of pneumonia in London at the age of 58 on December 25, 1889. He is buried in Ballicopagan cemetery. He is succeeded in the title of The MacMurrough by his son, Walter MacMurrough Kavanagh, who also serves as MP for County Carlow from 1908 to 1910. The 1901 novel The History of Sir Richard Calmady, written by Lucas Malet (pseudonym of Mary St. Leger Kingsley), is based on his life.
Kavanagh marries his cousin, Mary Frances Forde-Leathley, in 1855. Assisted by his wife, he is a philanthropic landlord, active county magistrate, and chairman of the board of guardians. Together, they have seven children.
Sankey is the fourth son of Eleanor and Matthew Sankey. His mother is herself from a family of military men, her father being Colonel Henry O’Hara, J.P of O’Hara Broom, County Antrim. His father is a barrister at Bawnmore, County Cork and Modeshil, County Tipperary. He does his schooling at Rev. Flynn’s School on Harcourt Street in Dublin and enters the East India Company’s Addiscombe Military Seminary at Addiscombe, Surrey in 1845. At Addiscombe he is awarded for his excellence at painting.
Sankey is commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Madras Engineer Group in November 1846 and is then trained in military engineering with the Royal Engineers at Chatham, Kent from January 1, 1847, holding temporary rank as an ensign in the British Army. He then arrives in India in November 1848. After two years of service at Mercatur, he officiates in 1850 as Superintending Engineer at Nagpur. During this time, he makes a small collection of fossils of Glossopteris from the Nagpur district and writes a paper on the geology of the region in 1854. The collection is moved from the Museum of Practical Geology to the British Museum in 1880.
In 1856, Sankey is promoted as the Superintendent of the East Coast Canal at Madras. In May 1857, he is promoted Under-Secretary of the Public Works Department under Col. William Erskine Baker in Calcutta. During the Indian Rebellion of 1857, he is commissioned as the Captain of the Calcutta Cavalry Volunteers but is soon despatched to Allahabad where he leads the construction of several embankments and bridges across the Yamuna and Ganges. He is involved in the construction of shelters to advancing troops along the Grand Trunk Road to aid the quelling of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. He arrives in course of this work at Cawnpore (now Kanpur) a day before the Second Battle of Cawnpore. He also is involved in crucial civil works that aid the quelling of the rebellion by bridging the Ghaghara and Gomti rivers at Gorakhpur and Phulpur that enable the Gurkha regiment to cross these rivers.
Sankey receives several commendations from his commanders here and later in the taking of the fort at Jumalpur, Khandua nalla and Qaisar Bagh, vital actions in the breaking of the Siege of Lucknow. For his actions at Jumalpur he is recommended for the Victoria Cross, although he does not receive this honour. He receives a medal for the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and is promoted to second captain on August 27, 1858, and given brevet promotion to major the following day for his services in the quelling of the rebellion. He is sent to the Nilgiris due to ill-health during this time.
Sankey spends a year in Burma as the executive engineer and Superintendent of the jail at Moulmein. On June 29, 1861, he is promoted to substantive captain and is posted as the Garrison Engineer at Fort William, Calcutta and later as the assistant to Chief Engineer, Mysore until 1864, when he is made the Chief Engineer. During this period, he creates a system within the irrigation department to deal with old Indian water catchment systems, surveying the catchment area and determining the area drained and the flows involved. Due to the reorganisation of the armed forces following the assumption of Crown rule in India he is transferred to the Royal Engineers on April 29, 1862.
In 1870, at the request of the Victorian Colonial Government in Australia, in view of his experience with hydrological studies in Mysore, Sankey is invited to be Chairman of the Board of Enquiry on Victorian Water Supply. During this visit, he also gives evidence to the Victorian Select Committee on Railways, as well as reports on the Yarra River Floods, and the Coliban Water Supply, and later contributes to the report on the North West Canal. While in Australia, he is also invited to the colony of South Australia to report on the water supply of Adelaide.
Sankey is appointed as an under-secretary to the Government of India in 1877, which earns him the Afghanistan Medal. In 1878, he is promoted as the Secretary in the public works department at Madras and is promoted substantive colonel on December 30. He is appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath on July 25, 1879, and also commands the Royal Engineers on the advance from Kandahar to Kabul during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. For about five years he is in Madras where he becomes a member of the legislative council in Madras and is elected as a Fellow of the University of Madras. He also helps in the creation and improvements of the Marina, the gardens and the Government House grounds. He is promoted major general on June 4, 1883, and retires from the army on January 11, 1884, with the honorary rank of lieutenant general. He also receives the distinguished service award in India.
After retirement, Sankey returns to Ireland, where he becomes the Chairman of the Board of Works. He is promoted Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath on May 25, 1892, for his work in Ireland. He also undertakes projects in Mexico. Later he settles in London where he dies at St. George’s Hospital on November 11, 1908, and is interred at Hove, East Sussex.
Sankey is memorialised in Phoenix Park, Dublin. A circle of trees bears the name Sankey’s Wood. A plaque dated 1894 lies half-hidden in the undergrowth there.
After preparatory education at Worplesdon and at Greenford, near Harrow, Kean is sent to Eton College, where he remains for three years. In 1827, he is offered a cadetship in the East India Company‘s service, which he is prepared to accept if his father would settle an income of £400 on his mother. The elder Kean refuses to do this, so he determines to become an actor. He makes his first appearance at Drury Lane on October 1, 1827 as Norval in John Home‘s Douglas, but his continued failure to achieve popularity leads him to leave London in the spring of 1828 for the provinces. In Glasgow, on October 1 of that year, father and son act together in Arnold Payne’s Brutus, the elder Kean in the title role and his son as Titus.
After a visit to the United States in 1830, where he is received with much favour, Kean appears in 1833 at Covent Garden as “Sir Edmund Mortimer” in George Colman‘s The Iron Chest, but his success is not pronounced enough to encourage him to remain in London, especially as he has already won a high position in the provinces. In January 1838, however, he returns to Drury Lane, and plays Hamlet with a success which gives him a place among the principal tragedians of his time. He marries the actress Ellen Tree (1805-1880) on January 25, 1842, and pays a second visit to the United States with her from 1845 to 1847.
From his “tour round the world” Kean returns to England in 1866 in broken health, and dies at the age of 57 in London on January 22, 1868. He is buried in All Saints Churchyard, Catherington, East Hampshire district, Hampshire.
Holwell grows up in London and studies medicine at Guy’s Hospital. He gains employment as a surgeon in the East India Company and is sent to India in 1732. He serves in this capacity until 1749. In 1751, he is appointed as zamindar of the 24 Parganas district of Bengal. He then serves as a member of the Council of Fort William (Calcutta) and defends the settlement against Siraj ud-Daulah in 1756.
In June 1756, Holwell is a survivor of the Black Hole of Calcutta, the incident in which British subjects and others are crammed into a small poorly ventilated chamber overnight, resulting in many deaths. His 1758 account of this incident obtains wide circulation in England and some claim this gains support for the East India Company’s conquest of India. His account of the incident is not publicly questioned during his lifetime nor for more than a century after his death. However, in recent years, his version of the event has been called into question by many historians.
Holwell succeeds Robert Clive as temporary Governor of Bengal in 1760, but is dismissed from the Council in 1761 for remonstrating against the appointment of Henry Vansittart as Governor of Bengal. He is elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1767.
Holwell has also become an important source for modern historians of medicine, as a result of his description of the practice of smallpox variolation in eighteenth-century Bengal, An Account of the Manner of Inoculating for the Small Pox in the East Indies with Some Observations on the Practice and Mode of Treating that Disease in those Parts (London, 1767).
Ellen Kean, one of the finest English actresses of her day, dies in Bayswater, City of Westminster, England on August 20, 1880. She is known as Ellen Tree until her marriage in 1842, after which she is known both privately and professionally as Mrs. Charles Kean and always appears in productions together with her husband.
Kean is born Eleanora Tree in Ireland on December 12, 1805, the third of four daughters of Cornelius Tree, an official of the East India Company in London. Her three sisters become actresses, but, unlike Ellen, retire from the stage when they marry. Her professional stage debut is in a musical version of Twelfth Night in London in 1822 as Olivia alongside her sister Maria as Viola. She gains experience touring in the provinces, and from 1826 is a regular member of the companies at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and Theatre Royal Haymarket, making a success in The Wonder and The Youthful Queen. At the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, she takes on the roles of William Shakespeare‘s Romeo to the Juliet of Fanny Kemble, Françoise de Foix in Francis I, and Lady Townley in The Provoked Husband.
In 1832, by now established as a leading actress, Tree accepts an engagement in Hamburg, Germany, where a junior member of the company is Charles Kean. He had made an undistinguished debut at Drury Lane in 1827, and he and Tree had acted together in 1828 in a play called Lovers’ Vows and later in Othello. In the German season they fall in love but are persuaded by family and friends not to marry in haste. Tree returns to London and resumes her successful West End career, including a considerable success in Ion in another breeches role. At the end of 1836, Tree goes to the United States, where she tours in Shakespeare for more than three years, playing heroines such as Rosalind, Viola and Beatrice, among other roles. By the time of her return to England in 1839, she has made a profit of £12,000 on the tour, equivalent to at least £1 million in modern terms.
By 1841 Charles Kean has established himself as a successful actor, and he and Tree appear together in Romeo and Juliet at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. They are married the next year, and she at once switches her professional name from Ellen Tree to Mrs. Charles Kean. For the next nine years they appear together at the Haymarket, making a joint visit to the United States in 1846. In 1850, Kean takes over the management of the Princess’s Theatre in London. The Times called this “the most important period of Mrs. Kean’s career…. Hitherto she had been the Rosalind and the Viola of the stage; henceforward her name was to be associated with characters of a more matronly type” in roles including Lady Macbeth and Gertrude in Hamlet. The same writer also credits her for “the good taste and artistic completeness” of Kean’s productions. Ellen Terry, who makes her first stage appearance as the boy Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale, remembers Kean “as Hermione wearing a Greek wreath round her head and a crinoline with many layers of petticoats.”
Charles Kean dies in 1868, and his widow retires from the stage, living quietly in Bayswater, in the City of Westminster, where she dies at the age of 73 on August 20, 1880. The Times in its obituary says, “Mrs. Kean is not to be numbered with the greatest votaries of the English stage, but her acting was distinguished by considerable power, tenderness and refinement.” She is buried in a vault alongside her husband at Catherington, Hampshire.
(Pictured: “Charles Kean and Wife Ellen Tree” by Mathew Brady Studio (1844-1894), modern albumen print from wet plate collodion negative, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)
Abraham Roberts is a member of a famous Waterford city family. He is the son of Anne Sandys and The Reverend John Roberts, a magistrate in County Waterford and a rector of Passage East. He marries Frances Isabella Ricketts, daughter of George Poyntz Ricketts, on July 20, 1820. On the death of his first wife he marries Isabella Bunbury, daughter of Abraham Bunbury, on August 2, 1830.
Roberts is invested as a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (GCB). He leaves India in 1853 to live in Ireland with his second wife, who outlives him. He also has a house at 25 Royal York Crescent, Bristol, Somerset, England.
From 1862 until his death on December 28, 1873, Roberts is Colonel of the 101st Regiment of Foot (Royal Bengal Fusiliers).
Roberts had two sons, Major General George Ricketts Roberts by Frances Isabella and Field Marshal Frederick Sleigh Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts (1832-1914) by Isabella Bunbury, who both obtain the highest ranks in the British Army. Frederick and a grandson, Frederick Hugh Sherston Roberts (1872-1899), receive the Victoria Cross, the highest decoration for bravery in the face of the enemy in the British Army.
seamus dubhghaill 