Milligan is the son of an Irish father, Leo Alphonso Milligan, a regimental sergeant major in the British Indian Army, and English mother, Florence Mary Winifred (née Kettleband). He is raised in India and Burma (Myanmar). He is educated at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Poona, and later at St. Paul’s High School, Rangoon. He moves to England with his family in 1933. He serves in the army during World War II and, when he is wounded in combat, begins a struggle with manic-depressive illness that lasts the rest of his life. Toward the end of the war, he meets Harry Secombe, and they work together entertaining the troops. After the war the pair, along with Peter Sellers and Michael Bentine, begin spending time at the Grafton Arms pub, where they develope their comedy routines. BBC radio begins broadcasting the group’s work in 1951, as Crazy People, and in 1952 it is renamed The Goon Show. As such it continues until early 1960 (though Bentine soon leaves the show) and becomes a cult classic.
Milligan later acts onstage and in small parts in movies—including Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)—and writes numerous books of poems, war memoirs, the play The Bedsitting Room (with John Antrobus; first performed 1962), and a number of television series. He also supports a multitude of causes, especially those involving the environment. Because his father is Irish and he is born in India—and despite his years of military service—the British government does not consider him a citizen. Rather than take an oath of allegiance, he takes Irish citizenship. Nonetheless, he is made an honorary Commander of the British Empire in 1992 and is given an honorary knighthood in 2000.
Milligan dies from kidney failure, at the age of 83, on February 27, 2002, at his home on Dumb Woman’s Lane near Rye, East Sussex. On the day of his funeral, March 8, 2002, his coffin is carried to St. Thomas Church in Winchelsea, East Sussex, and is draped in the flag of Ireland. He had once quipped that he wanted his headstone to bear the words: “I told you I was ill.” He is buried at St. Thomas’ churchyard but the Chichester diocese refuses to allow this epitaph. A compromise is reached with the Gaelic translation of “I told you I was ill,” Dúirt mé leat go mé breoite, and in English, “Love, light, peace.” The additional epitaph Grá mhór ort Shelagh can be read as “Great love for you Shelagh.”
According to a letter published in the Rye and Battle Observer in 2011, Milligan’s headstone is removed from St. Thomas’ churchyard in Winchelsea and moved to be alongside the grave of his wife, but is later returned.
Santry is born in Cork, County Cork, on May 14, 1879, to Denis Santry, Sr., a carpenter and joiner. He studies at the Cork Municipal School of Art from 1894 to 1896 after serving an apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker. In 1895, he also studies at the Crawford School of Art. In 1897, he is articled to architect James Finbarre McMullen. From 1897 to 1898, he studies at the Royal College of Art in London under a Lane scholarship. While he is at the college, he wins the Queen’s prize for freehand drawing. After graduating, he returns to McMullen’s office and works there for the next two years.
Santry comes to South Africa at the end of 1901 due to ill health. He settles in Cape Town and is employed at Tully & Waters, an architectural firm, from 1901 to 1902. He then spends a year working for architect William Patrick Henry Black. In 1903, his cartoons begin to appear in local newspapers and magazines, including the South African Review. He uses the pseudonym “Adam” in his cartoons. He continues to work as an architect until 1910 when he begins working as a cartoonist, as well as a metalworker, sculptor and filmmaker. He then moves to Johannesburg and is employed at the Sunday Times and The Rand Daily Mail as a cartoonist. During World War I, his cartoons are reproduced in several other countries. He becomes a pioneer of animated cartoons in South Africa. He is a member of the Royal Society of Arts and a council member of the South African Society of Artists.
Santry comes to Singapore in 1918 and joins the architectural firm Swan & Maclaren as a partner. While in Singapore, he serves as the architect of several prominent buildings and monuments, including the Sultan Mosque, The Cenotaph, the Maritime Building, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Building and the Telok Ayer Chinese Methodist Church. He serves as the first president of the St. Patrick’s Society Singapore, the first president of the Singapore Amateur Boxing Association, the chairman of the Singapore Art Club, a member of the board of control of the Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall, a member of the Censorship Appeal Board and the vice-president of the Straits Settlements Association. He is also a frequent contributor to the Straits Produce, a satirical magazine. He helps to found the Singapore Society of Architects and the Institute of Architects of Malaya and is the founder and the chairman of the Singapore Musical Society. He retires to England in March 1934.
Santry returns to South Africa in 1940. Following the end of World War II, he resumes his practice as a result of lost income caused by the Japanese occupation of Malaya. In 1950, he becomes a member of the Institute of South African Architects. He designs several private houses in Hillcrest, KwaZulu-Natal.
Santry marries Madeline Hegarty in 1904. From 1910 to 1918, he lives in Kleine Schuur on Rhodes Avenue in Johannesburg. The house is designed by prominent architect Herbert Baker. He dies in Durban, South Africa, on April 14, 1960.
A railway engineer by training, Crofts introduces railway themes into many of his stories, which are notable for their intricate planning. Although Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, and authors of the so-called golden age of detective fiction are more famous, he is esteemed by those authors, and many of his books are still in print.
Crofts is born at 26 Waterloo Road, Dublin. His father, also named Freeman Wills Crofts, is a surgeon-lieutenant in the Army Medical Services but dies of fever in Honduras before the young Freeman Wills Crofts is born. In 1883, his mother, Celia Frances (née Wise), marries the Venerable Jonathan Harding, Vicar of Gilford, County Down, later Archdeacon of Dromore, and Crofts is raised in the vicarage at Gilford. He attends Methodist College and Campbell College in Belfast. In 1912, he marries Mary Bellas Canning, daughter of the manager of the Coleraine branch of the Provincial Bank. They have no children.
In 1896, at the age of seventeen, Crofts is apprenticed to his maternal uncle, Berkeley Deane Wise, who is chief engineer of the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway. In 1899, he is appointed Junior Assistant on the construction of the Londonderry and Strabane Extension of the Donegal Railway. In 1900, he becomes District Engineer at Coleraine for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) Northern Counties Committee at a salary of £100pa, living at 11 Lodge Road in the town. In 1922, he is promoted to Chief Assistant Engineer of the railway, based in Belfast. He lives at “Grianon” in Jordanstown, a quiet village some six miles north of Belfast, where it is convenient for him to travel by train each day to the railway’s offices at York Road. One of the projects he works on is the design of the “Bleach Green Viaduct” in Whiteabbey, close to his Jordanstown home. This is a significant ten arch reinforced concrete viaduct approved in 1927 and completed in 1934. It carries a new loop line which eliminates the need for trains between Belfast and the northwest to reverse at Greenisland. He continues his engineering career until 1929. In his last task as an engineer, he is commissioned by the Government of Northern Ireland to chair an inquiry into the Bann and Lough Neagh Drainage Scheme.
In 1919, during an absence from work due to a long illness, Crofts writes his first novel, The Cask (1920), which establishes him as a new master of detective fiction. He continues to write steadily, producing a book almost every year for thirty years, in addition to a number of short stories and plays.
Crofts is remembered best for his fictional detective, Inspector Joseph French, who is introduced in his fifth book, Inspector French’s Greatest Case (1924). Inspector French always solves each of the mysteries presented him in a workmanlike, precise manner – this method sets him apart from most other fictional sleuths.
In 1929, Crofts abandones his railway engineering career and becomes a full-time writer. He settles in the village of Blackheath, near Guildford, in Surrey, and a number of his books are set in the Guildford area, including The Hog’s Back Mystery (1933) and Crime at Guildford (1935). Many of his stories have a railway theme, and his particular interest in the apparently unfalsifiable alibi often emphasizes the intricacies of railway timetables. Near the end of his life, he and his wife relocate to Worthing, West Sussex, in 1953, where they live until his death in 1957, the year in which his last book is published.
Crofts also writes one religious book, The Four Gospels in One Story, several short stories, and short plays for the BBC.
Crofts is not only a railway engineer and writer, but also an accomplished musician. He is organist and choirmaster in Killowen Parish Church, Coleraine, St. Patrick’s Church, Jordanstown, and the parish church of St. Martin’s in Blackheath.
Crofts is esteemed, not only by his regular readers, but also by his fellow writers of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Agatha Christie includes parodies of Inspector French alongside Sherlock Holmes and her own Hercule Poirot in Partners in Crime (1929).
Raymond Chandler describes Crofts as “the soundest builder of them all when he doesn’t get too fancy” (in The Simple Art of Murder). His attention to detail and his concentration on the mechanics of detection makes him the forerunner of the “police procedural” school of crime fiction. However, it has also given rise to a suggestion of a certain lack of flair – Julian Symons describing him as of “the humdrum school.” This may explain why his name has not remained as familiar as other more imaginative Golden Age writers, although he has fifteen books included in the Penguin Books “green” series of the best detective novels and 36 of his books are in print in paperback in 2000.
Barrington is born in 1756 or 1757 in Knapton, Abbeyleix, Queen’s County (now County Laois), the third son of John Barrington, an impoverished Protestantgentleman landowner in Queens’s County and his wife Sibella French of Peterswell, County Galway. He is raised and schooled by his grandparents in Dublin and enters Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 1773, aged 16, but leaves TCD without a degree.
Barrington joins the Irish Volunteers and supports the Irish Patriot Party in the early 1780s. His father raises and commands two Corps: the Cullenagh Rangers and the Ballyroan Light Infantry.
Barrington’s elder brother commands both the Kilkenny Horse and the Durrow Light Dragoons. Through his correspondence with General Hunt Walsh, Barrington’s father secures him a commission in Walsh’s regiment. Upon learning that the regiment is to be sent to America to fight in the American Revolution, and fearful of dying on some foreign battlefield, he writes to Walsh asking him to present the commission to another candidate instead, claiming that he himself is too tender to be of any real use. His fears prove well founded when his replacement, the only child of one of Walsh’s friends, is killed in his first engagement.
Barrington is called to the Irish bar in 1788 and in 1789 he marries Catherine, daughter of Dublin mercer, Edward Grogan. They ultimately have seven children. The following year he enters by the purchase of the seat the pre-1801 Parliament of Ireland as MP for Tuam. He accepts a sinecure post in 1793 at the Dublin customhouse worth £1,000 p.a. generally supporting Henry Grattan and he takes silk the same year. He is a member of the Kildare Street Club in Dublin. Appointed an Admiralty court judge in 1798, he re-enters parliament the same year as member for Clogher and votes against the Act of Union in 1799–1800, rejecting John FitzGibbon, 1st Earl of Clare‘s offer of the solicitor-generalship in 1799. In 1802, he unsuccessfully contests a seat for Dublin City in the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
Barrington’s comments on the Act of Union has a continuing resonance with the Young Ireland, Fenian and Irish Parliamentary Party movements, which hope to re-establish “Grattan’s Parliament” in some way. In particular, his Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation (1833) provides the basis for this romantic idealisation of Grattan’s Parliament adopted by the Irish Parliamentary Party from the 1880s.
Appointed an Admiralty court judge in 1798 at a salary of £500, Barrington finds there is little work to be done and his lack of a degree restricts other opportunities to support extravagant tastes. His award of a knighthood in 1807 brings no increased income. His court orders the sale of two derelict vessels and he gives instructions that the proceeds are to go to his own bank account. In 1810 or 1811 he takes his wife and family to England and from that time on his work in Ireland is carried out by surrogates. Still retaining his judgeship and salary, he moves to France in 1814 to escape his creditors and never returns to Ireland.
In 1828, commissioners learn of Barrington’s financial irregularities. He crosses the channel to London and protests that he is innocent but does not answer the charges based on the documentary evidence produced by the commissioners. In 1830, a parliamentary commission recommends that he be removed from office, finding misappropriations of court funds in 1805, 1806 and 1810. Pursuant to a provision of the Act of Settlement 1701, which seeks to protect the independence of the judiciary, both Houses of the Parliament of the United Kingdom vote for an Address to King William IV praying for his removal, and the King duly dismisses Barrington from office. By then, Barrington’s first 1827 volume of memoirs has sold successfully, and they are republished and expanded. He is the first judge removed from office under the Act of Settlement, and to this day, is the only judge in the United Kingdom to be so removed.
According to one of Barrington’s sometimes spurious personal memoirs, on March 20, 1780, he travels to Donnybrook, Dublin, to duel with Richard Daly. Daly has fought 16 duels in three years – three with swords and thirteen with pistols. Remarkably, he, and his opponents, have always escaped serious injury. Barrington has no pistols so he and his second, Richard Crosbie, spend the previous night constructing a pair “from old locks, stocks and barrels.” At Donnybrook, Daly’s second, Jack Patterson, a nephew of the Chief Justice, approaches Crosbie, explains that it is all a mistake and asks that the two shake hands. Barrington is in favour, but Crosbie has none of it. Taking out a duelling handbook, he points to rule No.7 – “No apology can be received after the parties meet, without a fire.”
Taking up their positions, Barrington loses no time in pressing the trigger and Daly staggers back, puts his hand to his chest, and cries, “I’m hit, Sir.” The ball does not penetrate but does drive part of a brooch slightly into his breastbone. Barrington only then thinks to inquire why the duel is even taking place. This time the rule book notes: “If a party challenged accepts the challenge without asking the reason for it, the challenger is never bound to divulge it afterwards.”
Barrington is most notable today for his memoirs which include scathing but humorous thumbnail portraits of contemporary Irish lawyers, judges and politicians during the last years of the Protestant Ascendancy. Personal sketches also includes vignettes on Irish people from every background. His works are reprinted with frequent additions and renamings.
Since his death, Barrington’s work has been quoted by a wide selection of editors, primarily following two themes: the political drama surrounding the Act of Union and the colourful nature of life in 1700s Ireland.
Fisher is the sixteenth of seventeen children to Jane and Abraham Fisher. The Fishers are a Quaker family with a business in Youghal. They are noted for their charitable works, especially during the Great Famine.
Fisher and Haslam marry on March 20, 1854, in Cork Registry Office. Their marriage is mainly celibate as a result of them not wanting to have children. In later writings Thomas argues in favour of chastity for men. The couple shares a belief in equality for men and women and he supports her campaigns.
Both of the Haslams are expelled from the Society of Friends due to their interests in social reform but both maintain links with the community. Thomas is said to have been disowned for harbouring ideas contrary to Quaker teachings. In 1868, he publishes a pamphlet called “The Marriage Problem,” in which he raises and supports the idea of family limitation and outlines a number of contraceptive methods including the safe period. He dies on January 30, 1917, in his ninety-second year.
Haslam is best remembered today for her work for votes for women. She is a pioneer in every 19th century Irish feminist campaign and fights for votes for women from the year 1866. In 1872, she organises the “General Meeting of the members and friends of the Irish Society for Women’s Suffrage” in Blackrock, Dublin, which is chaired by George Owens and attended by MPs Maurice Brooks (a Home Ruler) and William Johnston (a northern Orangeman) and by the future Liberal Unionist Party MP Thomas Spring Rice, 2nd Baron Monteagle of Brandon. The Haslams are founding members of the Dublin Women’s Suffrage Association (DWSA) in 1876. This marks the start of a remarkable campaign in Dublin for votes for women. Haslam, along with the writing of her husband, continues the campaign and in 1896 women in Ireland win the right to be elected as Poor Law Guardians, members of the official bodies which administer the Poor Law. Ireland’s early women’s rights activists have a close relationship with their English correlatives and share the same discrimination in education, employment, sexual freedom and political participation. The DWSA organises the introduction of a private member’s bill to remove disqualification “by sex or marriage” for election or serving as a poor law guardian. The bill passes in 1896 and the association immediately writes to the newspapers and publishes leaflets explaining the process on how to register to vote and stand for election and encouraged qualified women to go forward as candidate.
By 1900, there are nearly 100 women guardians. Haslam then leads a campaign to encourage qualified women to stand for election in 1898. Women win eligibility to vote in local government elections, and to stand for elections as rural and urban district councillors. In 1913, she steps down as secretary of the Association and is elected life-president.
One of Haslam’s longest campaigns, working alongside the Belfast suffragist Isabella Tod, is for repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864. The acts allow for state regulation of prostitutes in areas in which the army is stationed. The act permits compulsory internment of women for up to three months, which is later extended to one year. Medical treatment is also enforced on the women. The act seeks only to reduce the spread of sexually transmitted diseases among the military. She opposes the act as she feels it legitimises prostitution, commoditises women and undermines family life. It is finally repealed following eighteen years of campaigning.
Haslam is involved in the 1866 petition and gathers 1,499 signatures to extend suffrage to women as well as men. In 1867, male suffrage is extended but it is not until 1911 that the Suffrage movement achieves the significant victory of securing the right of women to stand for election as local councillors.
In 1918, a woman of almost ninety, Haslam goes to the polls “surrounded by flowers and flags,” with women who unite in her honour to celebrate the victory of the vote. This display of unity by activist women from all shades of political opinion acknowledge her role in the fight for the right to vote. The same year in which she dies, in 1922, the Irish Free State extends the vote to all men and women over the age of 21.
Haslam dies on November 28, 1922, at her home in Carlton Terrace, Dublin, of “cardiac dropsy” at the age of 93. She is buried next to her husband in the Quaker burying ground at the Friends Burial Ground in Temple Hill, Blackrock, Dublin.
A memorial seat to Anna and Thomas Haslam is erected in 1923 in St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, with the inscription “in honour of their long years of public service chiefly devoted to the enfranchisement of women.”
In addition to Beckett’s activity as a music critic for The Irish Times, he also writes biographical articles for dictionaries, in particular for the first edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. His books include studies on Franz Liszt and ballet music.
Beckett’s more ambitious musical works from the 1940s and 1950s are a Suite for Orchestra (1945), Four Higgins Songs (1946), The Falaingin Dances (1958) and a Suite of Planxties (1960) for harp and orchestra.
In 1963 Beckett moves to England, where he teaches music at various schools before returning to Ireland in 1970 to succeed A. J. Potter at the RIAM as professor of harmony and counterpoint. In the 1980s he produces a number of remarkable works such as Quartet for Strings (1980) and Dublin Symphony (1989) for narrator, chamber choir and large orchestra. While he is never a modernist, his later works nevertheless contain some advanced harmony, particularly in the quartet.
Beckett is forced to retire from the RIAM in 1985 after suffering a stroke. In 1986 he is elected a member of Aosdána and an Honorary Fellow of the RIAM in 1990. He dies in Dublin on April 3, 1996. He is buried in Rathnew Cemetery, County Wicklow.
Katherine Wilmot, Irish traveler and diarist, dies in Paris, France, on March 28, 1824. She makes a Grand Tour from 1801 to 1803 and documents her experiences through letters, including encounters with notable figures like Napoleon Bonaparte. She later travels to Russia to join her sister Martha Wilmot and lives there from 1805 to 1807. She later moves to France and dies in Paris in 1824. Her writings, letters, and diaries provide insight into the Napoleonic era, on Russian society and on travel in the 19th century. Her works also include her sister’s transcript of the memoirs of Princess Yekaterina Vorontsova-Dashkova.
Wilmot is born around 1773 in Drogheda, County Louth, to Edward and Martha Wilmot (née Moore). She is the eldest daughter of six daughters and three sons. Her father is the port surveyor in Drogheda, having previously served as captain in the 40th Regiment of Foot. He is transferred to a similar post in County Cork in 1775, where Wilmot is raised. The family settles in Glanmire, near the seat of the Earl Mount Cashell in Moore Park. The earl’s family uses the surname Moore.
Wilmot is friendly with Lady Mountcashell, formerly Margaret King, an early and eager pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft. She is invited to accompany the party of Stephen Moore, 2nd Earl Mount Cashell, and his wife on a grand tour of the continent. Her letters from the time survive, in France from November 1801 to October 1802, and in Italy until July 1803. The Mount Cashells entertain lavishly, especially during the first nine months in Paris, and through them she meets Napoleon Bonaparte, and becomes friends with the Austrian painter Angelica Kauffman. She also meets the French diplomat and politician Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, and the Irish republicanRobert Emmet fleetingly. She recounts her meeting in Rome with the English aristocrat Frederick Augustus Hervey, and her audience with Pope Pius VII. She returns to London from Italy in October 1803, via Germany and Denmark, after England and France resume hostilities.
Wilmot then goes to Russia to bring home her sister Martha, and ends up spending two years there. Martha is in the country as a favourite of Princess Dashkova, one of the key figures of the Russian Enlightenment and a close friend of Catherine the Great. Martha is living at the Princess’s estate in Troitskoe on the Oka River, about 100 km from Moscow. Wilmot arrives on August 4, 1805, having set out from Cork on June 5. Her writings from this time record the Russian aristocracy‘s opulence and attitudes to the servile classes (the serfs). The sisters come to know the customs of the Russian elite, as well as the festivals and religious rites of the country people. She leaves Moscow on July 4, 1807, a combination of passport problems, wars and storms at sea, resulting in delays and in her reaching Yarmouth on September 7, 1807, and returning to Ireland in October 1807.
Wilmot moves to France to live in a warmer, drier climate than Ireland. Her health declines when she moves to Paris, and she dies there on March 28, 1824. Her nephew by Martha, Wilmot Henry Bradford, lives to be “Father of the Army.”
Wilmot had taken Martha’s transcript of the memoirs of the Princess Dashkova when she left Russia. These are published by Martha in 1840, as she had burned the original manuscript before her departure from Russia in 1808.
Wilmot’s letters are published a century later, and have been described as a unique portrayal of the Napoleonic period. They describe the social scene, as well as the experience of traveling by coach and ship at that time. The family makes transcriptions of the letters. The collection belonging to Martha is donated to the library of the Royal Irish Academy by Elisabeth van Dedem Lecky, the historian and writer. Among these Russian letters are a number written by Eleanor Cavanagh, who describes the lives of servants. Wilmot’s diaries are published in 1920 by Thomas Sadleir, and later by H. Montgomery Hyde and Edith Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Marchioness of Londonderry.
TheGrand Tours of Katherine Wilmot, France 1801-1803, and Russia 1805-07(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992)
An Irish Peer on the Continent, 1801-03 (1920)
The Russian Journals of Martha and Catherine Wilmot (1934)
More letters from Martha Wilmot; Vienna 1819-29 (1935)
In 1992, Flanagan returns to duty with the RUC as Assistant Chief Constable of Operations, later taking on the responsibilities of Operational Commander for Belfast. He is appointed as head of Special Branch in 1994 and is promoted to Acting Deputy Chief Constable the following year. He becomes the Deputy Chief Constable proper in 1996, and when Chief Constable Hugh Annesley retires later that year, he succeeds him. When the PSNI is established in 2001, he serves as Chief Constable until his retirement the following year. He is replaced by Hugh Orde.
Since then Flanagan has served in Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and is appointed as HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary in 2005. He is tasked to review the police arrangements in Iraq in December 2005 as part of the British involvement there. Following his retirement in December 2008, Denis O’Connor succeeds him as Her Majesty’s Acting Chief Inspector of Constabulary.
Flanagan denies any wrongdoing or acting with any knowledge of the events in question. He agrees that these events had taken place. In the aftermath of the ombudsman’s report, Irish nationalist politicians say he should be forced to resign from his job as Chief Inspector of Constabulary.
The Police Ombudsman criticises Flanagan’s role in the RUC inquiry into the Omagh Bombing of August 15, 1998, in a report published in 2001, to which his response is that he would “publicly commit suicide” if he believed her report was correct, though he later apologises for the form of words he used.
In July 2010, Flanagan appears before the Iraq Inquiry into the UK’s role in the Iraq War. In 2005, he had conducted a review into the UK’s contribution to policing reform in Iraq. As he gives evidence, he has to apologise for the amount of acronyms in his report on Iraq, which is presented to the government in January 2006:
“In my view, and I would like to almost apologise for the number of acronyms in this report – but it wasn’t written with a view to being read publicly. It was written for the people who invented the acronyms…”
Esther Johnson, an Englishwoman known as “Stella” and known to be a close friend of Jonathan Swift, is born in Richmond, Surrey, England, on March 13, 1681. Whether or not she and Swift are secretly married, and if so, why the marriage is never made public, is a subject of debate.
Johnson spends her early years at Moor Park, Farnham, home of Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet. Here, when she is about eight, she meets Swift, who is Temple’s secretary. He takes a friendly interest in her from the beginning and apparently supervises her education.
Johnson’s parentage has been the subject of much speculation. The weight of evidence is that her mother acts as companion to Temple’s widowed sister, Martha, Lady Giffard, and that Johnson, her mother and her sister Anne are regarded as part of the family. Her father is said to have been a merchant who died young. Gossip that she is Temple’s illegitimate daughter seems to rest on nothing more solid than the friendly interest he shows in her. There are similar rumours about his supposed relationship with Swift.
When Swift sees Johnson again in 1696, he considers that she has grown into the “most beautiful, graceful and agreeable young woman in London.” Temple, at his death in 1699, leaves her some property in Ireland, and it is at Swift’s suggestion that she move to Ireland in 1702 to protect her interests, but her long residence there is probably due to a desire to be close to Swift. She generally lives in Swift’s house, though always with female companions like Rebecca Dingley, a cousin of Temple whom she has known since childhood. She becomes extremely popular in Dublin and an intellectual circle grows up around her, although it was said that she finds the company of other women tedious and only enjoys the conversation of men.
In 1704, their mutual friend, the Reverend William Tisdall, tells Swift that he wishes to marry Johnson, much to Swift’s private disgust, although his letter to Tisdall, which outlines his objections to the marriage, is courteous enough, making the practical point that Tisdall is not in a position to support a wife financially. Little is known about this episode, other than Swift’s letter to Tisdall. It is unclear if Tisdall actually proposes to her. If he does, he seems to have been met with a firm rejection, and he marries Eleanor Morgan two years later. He and Swift, after a long estrangement, become friends once more after Johnson’s death.
Johnson’s friendship with Swift becomes fraught after 1707 when he meets Esther Vanhomrigh, daughter of the Dutch-born Lord Mayor of Dublin, Bartholomew Van Homrigh. Swift becomes deeply attached to her and invents for her the name “Vanessa.” She in turn becomes infatuated with him and after his return to Ireland follows him there. The uneasy relationship between the three of them continues until 1723 when Vanessa, who is by now seriously ill from tuberculosis, apparently asks Swift not to see Johnson again. This leads to a violent quarrel between them, and Vanessa, before her death in June 1723, destroys the will she had made in Swift’s favour, leaving her property to two men, George Berkeley and Robert Marshall, who though eminent in their respective callings are almost strangers to her.
Whether Swift and Johnson are married has always been a subject of intense debate. The marriage ceremony is allegedly performed in 1716 by St. George Ashe, Bishop of Clogher, with no witnesses present, and it is said that the parties agree to keep it secret and live apart. Johnson always describes herself as a “spinster” and Swift always refers to himself as unmarried. Rebecca Dingley, who lives with Johnson throughout her years in Ireland, says that Johnson and Swift were never alone together. Those who know the couple best are divided on whether a marriage ever took place. Some, like Mrs. Dingley and Swift’s housekeeper Mrs. Brent laugh at the idea as “absurd.” On the other hand, Thomas Sheridan, one of Swift’s oldest friends, believes that the story of the marriage is true. He reportedly gives Johnson herself as his source. Historians have been unable to reach a definite conclusion on the truth of the matter. Bishop Ashe dies before the story first becomes public, and there are no other witnesses to the supposed marriage.
A collection of Johnson’s witticisms is published by Swift under the titles of “Bon Mots de Stella” as an appendix to some editions of Gulliver’s Travels. A Journal to Stella, a collection of 65 letters from Swift to Johnson, is published posthumously.
In 1722, Martha, Lady Giffard, dies and leaves money to Johnson and Swift’s sister, Mrs. Fenton, who had been her companion in 1711.
Johnson’s health begins to fail in her mid-forties. In 1726, she is thought to be dying and Swift rushes back from London to be with her but finds her better. The following year it becomes clear that she is gravely ill. After sinking slowly for months, she dies on January 28, 1728, and is buried in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. Swift is inconsolable at her death and writes The Death of Mrs. Johnson in tribute to her. When Swift dies in October 1745, he is buried beside her at his own request. A ward in St. Patrick’s University Hospital is named “Stella” in her memory.
In the 1994 film Words Upon the Window Pane, based on the play by William Butler Yeats, Johnson is played by Bríd Brennan. The plot turns on a séance in Dublin in the 1920s, where the ghosts of Swift, Johnson and Vanessa appear to resume their ancient quarrel.
Boycott is the eldest surviving son of William Boycatt (1798–1877), rector of Wheatacrebury, Norfolk, and Elizabeth Georgiana Boycatt (née Beevor). The family name is changed to Boycott by his father in 1862. Educated at a boarding school in Blackheath, London, and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, he is commissioned ensign in the 39th (Dorsetshire) Regiment of Foot on February 15, 1850, and serves briefly in Ireland. He sells his commission on December 17, 1852, having attained the rank of captain, marries Annie Dunne of Queen’s County (County Laois) in 1852, and leases a farm in south County Tipperary.
In 1855, Boycott leaves for Achill Island, County Mayo, where he sub-leases 2,000 acres and acts as land agent for a friend, Murray McGregor Blacker, a local magistrate. He settles initially near Keem Strand but after some years builds a fine house near Dooagh overlooking Clew Bay. He clashes with local landowners and agents and is regularly involved in litigation. Twice summonsed unsuccessfully for assault (1856, 1859), he is involved (1859–60) in a bitter dispute with a land agent over salvage rights for shipwrecks, one of the few lucrative activities on the island. Achill’s remoteness and the difficulties of wresting a living from its harsh environment adds a roughness to the island’s social relations and probably aggravates Boycott’s tendency to high-handedness.
In 1873, Boycott inherits money and moves to mainland County Mayo, leasing Lough Mask House near Ballinrobe and its surrounding 300 acres. He also becomes agent for John Crichton, 3rd Earl Erne‘s neighbouring estate of 1,500 acres, home to thirty-eight tenant farmers paying rents of £500 a year, of which he receives 10 per cent as agent. He also serves as a magistrate and is unpopular because of his brusque and authoritarian manner, and for denying locals such traditional indulgences as collecting wood from the Lough Mask estate or taking short cuts across his farm. In April 1879, he purchases the 95-acre Kildarra estate between Claremorris and Ballinlough and an adjoining wood for £1,125, taking out a mortgage of £600 which stretches his finances.
Boycott is no brutal tyrant, but he is aloof, stubborn, and pugnacious, and believes that the Irish peasantry is prone to idleness and require firm handling. Such qualities and beliefs are unremarkable enough, but in the peculiar circumstances of the land war in County Mayo, they are enough to catapult this rather ordinary man to worldwide notoriety.
In autumn 1879, concerted land agitation begins in County Mayo, and on August 1, 1879, Boycott receives a notice threatening his life unless he reduces rents. He ignores it and evicts three tenants, which embitter relations on the estate. Lough Mask House is placed under Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) surveillance beginning in November 1879. In August 1880, his farm labourers, encouraged by the Irish National Land League, strike successfully for a wage increase from 7s. –11s. to 9s. –15s. Since the harvest is poor, Lord Erne allows a 10 per cent rent abatement. But in September 1880, when Boycott demands the rent, most tenants seek a 25 per cent abatement. Lord Erne refuses, and on September 22, Boycott attempts to serve processes against eleven defaulters. Servers and police are attacked by an angry crowd of local women and forced to take refuge in Boycott’s house. Almost immediately he is subjected to the ostracism against land grabbers advocated by Charles Stewart Parnell in his September 19 speech at Ennis, County Clare. This weapon proves as devastating against an English land agent as an Irish land-grabber. His servants leave him, labourers refuse to work his land, his walls and fences are destroyed, and local traders refuse to do business with him. He is jeered on the roads, is hissed and hustled by hostile crowds in Ballinrobe, and requires police protection.
The campaign against Boycott is largely orchestrated by Fr. John O’Malley, a local parish priest and president of the Neale branch of the Irish National Land League. It is probably O’Malley who coins the term “boycott” as an alternative to the word “ostracise,” which he believes would mean little to the local peasantry. Propagated by O’Malley’s friend, the American journalist, James Redpath, it is adopted by advocates and opponents alike.
On October 22, 1880, before his story breaks on the world, Boycott gives evidence of his treatment to the Bessborough Commission in Galway. He publicises his plight in an October 18, 1880, letter to The Times, and in a long interview with The Daily News on October 24, which is reprinted in Irish unionist newspapers and arouses considerable sympathy for him. Although he rarely uses his former military rank, he becomes universally known as “Captain Boycott,” since it suits both sides to portray him as someone of social standing. Letters of support appear in unionist papers and the Belfast News Letter sets up a “Boycott Relief Fund” and proposes a relief expedition, portraying Boycott as a peaceable English gentleman unjustly subjected to intimidation.
The prospect of hundreds of armed loyalists descending on County Mayo alarms the government, who announce on November 8 that they will provide protection for a small group of labourers to harvest Boycott’s crops. On November 12, fifty-seven loyalists from counties Cavan and Monaghan, “the Boycott Relief Expedition,” arrive at Lough Mask with an escort of almost a thousand troops. After harvesting Boycott’s crops, they leave on November 26. The entire operation costs £10,000 – about thirty times the value of the crops. Although the expedition passes off largely without incident, it focuses international media attention on the affair and establishes the word “boycott” in English and several other languages as a standard term for communal ostracism.
On November 27, Boycott and his wife go to the Hammam Hotel, Dublin, where he receives death threats. On December 1, he travels to London and then to the United States (March–May 1881) to see Murray McGregor Blacker, the friend from his time on Achill Island who has since settled in Virginia. In an interview with the New York Herald, he criticises the liberal government’s weakness toward the Land League and claims that the Irish land question is an intractable problem that can only be solved in the long term by emigration and industrialisation.
Boycott returns to Lough Mask on September 19, 1881, and at an auction in Westport is mobbed and burned in effigy. This, however, is the last outburst of hostility against him, and as the land agitation wanes so does his unpopularity. Although unsuccessful in efforts to win compensation from the government, he receives a public subscription of £2,000. He remains in County Mayo as Lord Erne’s agent until February 1886, when he obtains the post of land agent for Sir Hugh Adair in Flixton, Suffolk, but he keeps the small Kildarra estate, where he continues to holiday. On December 12, 1888, he gives evidence of his treatment to the parliamentary commission on “Parnellism and crime.”
After suffering from ill-health for some years, Boycott dies at Flixton on June 19, 1897, and is buried in the churchyard of Burgh St. Peter. A British-made film, Captain Boycott (1947), stars Cecil Parker in the title role.
seamus dubhghaill 