Alexander Gordon “Alex” Higgins, Northern Irish professional snooker player, who is remembered as one of the most iconic figures in the game, dies in Belfast, Northern Ireland on July 24, 2010. He is nicknamed “Hurricane Higgins” because of his fast play.
Higgins is born in Belfast on March 18, 1949. He starts playing snooker at the age of eleven, often in the Jampot club in his native Sandy Row area of south Belfast and later in the YMCA in the nearby city centre. At age fourteen and weighing seven and a half stone (47.6 kg), he leaves for England and a career as a jockey. However, he never makes the grade because, in his youth, he drinks a lot of Guinness and eats a lot of chocolate, making him too heavy to ride competitively. He returns to Belfast and by 1965, at the age of sixteen, he has compiled his first maximum break. In 1968 he wins the All-Ireland and Northern Ireland Amateur Championships.
Higgins turns professional at the age of 22, winning the World Snooker Championship at his first attempt in 1972, against John Spencer winning 37–32. Higgins is then the youngest ever winner of the title, a record retained until Stephen Hendry‘s 1990 victory at the age of 21. In April 1976, Higgins reaches the final again and faces Ray Reardon. Higgins leads 11–9, but Reardon makes four centuries and seven breaks over 60 to pull away and win the title for the fifth time with the score of 27–16. Higgins is also the runner-up to Cliff Thorburn in 1980, losing 18–16, after being 9–5 up. Higgins wins the world title for a second time in 1982 after beating Reardon 18–15 (with a 135 total clearance in the final frame). It was an emotional as well as professional victory for him. Higgins would have been ranked No. 1 in the world rankings for the 1982-1983 season had he not forfeited ranking points following disciplinary action.
Throughout his career, Higgins wins 20 other titles, one of the most notable being the 1983 UK Championship. In the final he trails Steve Davis 0–7 before producing a famous comeback to win 16–15. He also wins the Masters twice, in 1978 and in 1981, beating Cliff Thorburn and Terry Griffiths in the finals respectively. Another notable victory is his final professional triumph in the 1989 Irish Masters at the age of 40 when he defeats a young Stephen Hendry, which becomes known as “The Hurricane’s Last Hurrah.”
Higgins comes to be known as the “People’s Champion” because of his popularity, and is often credited with having brought the game of snooker to a wider audience, contributing to its peak in popularity in the 1980s. He has a reputation as an unpredictable and difficult character. He is a heavy smoker, struggles with drinking and gambling, and admits to using cocaine and marijuana.
First diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998, Higgins is found dead in bed in his flat on July 24, 2010. The cause of death is a combination of malnutrition, pneumonia, and a bronchial condition. Higgins’ funeral service is held in Belfast on August 2, 2010. He is cremated and his ashes are interred in Carnmoney Cemetery in Newtownabbey, County Antrim.
In April 1943 backbench dissent forces Andrews from office. He is replaced as Prime Minister by Basil Brooke, 1st Viscount Brookeborough. He remains, however, the recognised leader of the UUP for a further three years. Five years later he becomes the Grand Master of the Orange Order. From 1949, he is the last parliamentary survivor of the original 1921 Northern Ireland Parliament, and as such is recognised as the Father of the House. He is the only Prime Minister of Northern Ireland not to have been granted a peerage. His predecessor and successor receive hereditary viscountcies, and later prime ministers are granted life peerages.
Throughout his life Andrews is deeply involved in the Orange Order. He holds the positions of Grand Master of County Down from 1941 and Grand Master of Ireland (1948–1954). In 1949 he is appointed Imperial Grand Master of the Grand Orange Council of the World.
Andrews is a committed and active member of the Non-subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland. He regularly attends Sunday worship, in the church built on land donated by his great-grandfather, James Andrews, in his hometown Comber. He serves on the Comber Congregational Committee from 1896 until his death on August 5, 1956, holding the position of Chairman from 1935 onwards. He is buried in the small graveyard adjoining the church.
Paul Vincent Carroll, Irish playwright and writer of movie scenarios and television scripts is born in Blackrock, County Louth on July 10, 1900, to Michael Carroll and Catherine Smyth.
Carroll marries clothing designer Helena Reilly in Glasgow in 1923. They have four children, actress Helena Carroll, musician and producer Theresa Perez, journalist Kathleen Carroll and son Brian Carroll who resides in London. He is grandfather to Helena Perez Reilly and great grandfather to Paul Vincent Reilly. His brother, Niall Carroll, is a film critic.
Carroll founds two theater groups in Glasgow: the Curtain Theatre company, with Grace Ballantine and Molly Urquhart, in 1933 and the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre in 1943. He remains the director and playwright in residence of the Citizens’ Theatre until his death.
The Wayward Saint is made into an opera in Germany in the 1960’s and his daughter Theresa commissions and produces an opera of his Beauty is Fled from the collection Plays For My Children which opens at Phoenix Symphony Hall in the 1970s as part of Theresa’s “Children’s Opera Series.”
Carroll dies at the age of 68 from undisclosed causes in Bromley, Kent, England on October 20, 1968.
Brugha is born Charles William St. John Burgess of mixed Roman Catholic and Protestant parentage in Dublin on July 18, 1874. He attends Colmkille Schools until 1888 when he is admitted to Belvedere College. He intends to study medicine, but this does not come to fruition after his father’s business fails in 1890. He is seen as an austere figure, not very different from Éamon de Valera, and is known not to smoke cigarettes, swear or drink alcohol.
In 1899, Brugha joins the Gaelic League, and he subsequently changes his name from Charles Burgess to Cathal Brugha. He meets his future wife, Caitlín Kingston, at an Irish class in Birr, County Offaly, and they marry in 1912. The marriage produces six children. He becomes actively involved in the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and in 1913 he becomes a lieutenant in the Irish Volunteers. He leads a group of twenty Volunteers to receive the arms smuggled into Ireland in the Howth gun-running of 1914.
Brugha is second-in-command at the South Dublin Union under Commandant Éamonn Ceannt in the Easter Rising of 1916. On the Thursday of Easter Week, being badly wounded, he is unable to leave when the retreat is ordered. Brugha, weak from loss of blood, continues to fire upon the enemy and is found by Eamonn Ceannt singing “God Save Ireland” with his pistol still in his hands. He recovers over the next year but is left with a permanent limp.
Brugha proposes a Republican constitution at the 1917 Sinn Féin convention, which is unanimously accepted. In October 1917, he becomes Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army and holds that post until March 1919.
Brugha is elected Ceann Comhairle of Dáil Éireann at its first meeting on January 21, 1919, and he reads out the Declaration of Independence in Irish, which ratifies “the establishment of the Irish Republic.” On the following day he is appointed president of the ministry pro tempore. He retains this position until April 1, 1919, when Éamon de Valera takes his place.
Brugha has differences with Michael Collins, who, although nominally only the Irish Republican Army‘s (IRA) Director of Intelligence, has far more influence in the organisation as a result of his position as a high-ranking member of the IRB, an organisation that Brugha sees as undermining the power of the Dáil and especially the Ministry for Defence. He opposes the oath of allegiance required for membership of the IRB. In 1919, his proposition that all Volunteers should swear allegiance to the Irish Republic and the Dáil is adopted.
At a top-level IRA meeting in August 1920, Brugha argues against ambushes of Crown forces unless there is first a call to surrender, but it is dismissed as unrealistic by the brigade commanders present. He also has the idea of moving the front line of the war to England but is opposed by Collins.
On January 7, 1922, Brugha votes against the Anglo-Irish Treaty. During the Treaty debates, he points out that Collins has only a middling rank in the Department for Defence, which supervises the IRA, even though Griffith hails him as “the man who had won the war.” It is argued that, by turning the issue into a vote on Collins’ popularity, Brugha swings the majority against his own side. Frank O’Connor, in his biography of Collins, states that two delegates who had intended to vote against the Treaty changed sides in sympathy with Collins. Brugha leaves the Dáil and is replaced as Minister for Defence by Richard Mulcahy.
In the months between the Treaty debates and the outbreak of Irish Civil War, Brugha attempts to dissuade his fellow anti-treaty army leaders, including Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows and Joe McKelvey, from taking up arms against the Free State. When the IRA occupies the Four Courts, he and Oscar Traynor call on them to abandon their position. When they refuse, Traynor orders the occupation of the area around O’Connell Street in the hope of easing the pressure on the Four Courts and of forcing the Free State to negotiate.
On June 28, 1922, Brugha is appointed commandant of the forces in O’Connell Street. The outbreak of the Irish Civil War ensues in the first week of July when Free State forces commence shelling of the anti-treaty positions.
Most of the anti-Treaty fighters under Traynor escape from O’Connell Street when the buildings they are holding catch fire, leaving Brugha in command of a small rearguard. On July 5, he orders his men to surrender, but refuses to do so himself. He then approaches the Free State troops, brandishing a revolver. He sustains a bullet wound to the leg which “severed a major artery causing him to bleed to death.” He dies on July 7, 1922, eleven days before his 48th birthday. He had been re-elected as an anti-Treaty TD at the 1922 Irish general election but dies before the Dáil assembles. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
Lemass is a member of the 3rd Battalion, Dublin Brigade of the IRA. He along with his younger brother Seán, later Ireland’s fourth Taoiseach, take part in the Easter Rising where he fights at the General Post Office (GPO). He is employed as an engineer in Dublin Corporation. When the Irish Civil War breaks out in 1922 both he and his brother take the Anti-Treaty side, and both fight together at the Four Courts.
After the fall of the Four Courts, Lemass is imprisoned but manages to escape and makes his way to England. He returns to Ireland in the summer of 1923 when the cease-fire has been declared and goes back to his former employers at the Dublin Corporation, hoping to resume his work there. He offers the town clerk, John J. Murphy, if he would forward a letter to the authorities that he plans to write, “stating that he had no intention of armed resistance to the Government.”
In July 1923, two months after the Irish Civil War ends, Lemass is kidnapped in broad daylight by Free State agents outside MacNeils Hardware shop, at the corner of Exchequer and Drury Street. Three months later, on October 13, his decomposed body is found on the Featherbed Mountain near Sally Gap, twenty yards from the Glencree Road, in an area known locally as ‘The Shoots.’
The body is clothed in a dark tweed suit, light shirt, silk socks, spats and a knitted tie. The pockets contain Rosary beads, a watch-glass, a rimless glass, a tobacco pouch and an empty cigarette case. The trousers’ pockets are turned inside out, as if they had been rifled. There is what appears to be an entrance bullet wound on the left temple and the top of the skull is broken, suggesting an exit wound. He has been shot at least three times in the head and his left arm is fractured, his teeth have been brutally forced from his jaws and his right foot is never found. It is likely that he is killed elsewhere and dumped at this spot.
Meeting two days later, Dublin Council passes a strongly worded vote of sympathy with Lemass’s family. Describing their fellow employee as an “esteemed and worthy officer of the Council who had been foully and diabolically murdered,” the Council adjourns for one week as a mark of respect.
(Pictured: Captain Noel Lemass Memorial Stone at the spot where his body was found on Featherbed Mountain)
McCaughey comes to Australia with an uncle, Charles Wilson, a brother of Sir Samuel Wilson, and lands at Melbourne in April 1856. He immediately goes to the country and begins working as a jackaroo. Within three months he is appointed an overseer and two years later becomes manager of Kewell station while his uncle is on a visit to England.
In 1860, after his uncle’s return, McCaughey acquires an interest in Coonong station near Urana with two partners. His brother John who comes out later becomes a partner in other stations.
During the early days of Coonong station McCaughey suffers greatly from drought conditions but overcomes these by sinking wells for artesian water and constructing large tanks, making him a pioneer of water conservation in Australia.
In 1871 McCaughey is away from Australia for two years on holiday, and on his return does much experimenting in sheep farming. At first, he seeks the strains that can produce the best wool in the Riverina district. Afterwards, when the mutton trade develops, he considers the question from that angle.
In 1880 Sir Samuel Wilson goes to England and McCaughey purchases two of his stations, Toorale and Dunlop Stations, during his absence. He then owns about 3,000,000 acres. In 1886 he again visits the old world and imports a considerable number of Vermont sheep from the United States and also introduces fresh strains from Tasmania. He ultimately owns several million sheep, earning the nickname of “The Sheep King.”
In 1900 McCaughey purchases North Yanco and, at great cost, constructs about 200 miles of channels and irrigates 40,000 acres. The success of this scheme is believed to have encouraged the New South Wales government to proceed with the dam at Burrinjuck.
Ewart Milne, Irish poet, is born in Dublin on May 25, 1903, He describes himself on various book jackets as “a sailor before the mast, ambulance driver and courier during the Spanish Civil War, a land worker and estate manager in England during and after World War II” and also “an enthusiast for lost causes – national, political, social and merely human.”
Milne is born of English and Welsh Irish parents and is educated at Christchurch Cathedral Grammar School. In 1920 he signs on as a seaman and works on boats, off and on, until 1935. During the 1930s he begins writing and has his first poems published in 1935.
The background to the Spanish Civil War contributes to Milne’s political awakening and he comes to England to work as a voluntary administrator for the Spanish Medical Aid Committee in London, for whom he often acts as a medical courier. He also was once unwillingly involved in an arms deal while visiting Spain on their behalf.
After Spanish Medical Aid Committee is wound up, Milne returns to Ireland but remains politically active in support of the campaign for the release of Frank Ryan, the leader of the Connolly Column of Irish volunteers on the Republican side, who had been captured and imprisoned in Spain. At one point he takes part in a delegation to Westminster seeking Labour Party support for this. In August 1938 he is reported in The Worker’s Republic as being one of the twelve-member committee of the James Connolly Irish club in London.
During his time in England and Spain, Milne gets to know the left-leaning poets who support the Republican cause, including W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. In 1938 his first collection of poems, Forty North Fifty West, is published in Dublin, followed by two others in 1940 and 1941. Having taken a pro-British line in neutral Ireland, he is informed by Karl Petersen, the German press attaché in Dublin, that he is on the Nazi death list. This convinces him to help in the British war effort and he returns to England with the help of John Betjeman, then working at the British embassy in Ireland.
Between 1942–1962 Milne is resident in England and an active presence on the English literary scene. In particular he becomes associated with the poets grouped around the magazine Nine, edited by Peter Russell and Ian Fletcher. He and his wife Thelma also back the young Irish poet Patrick Galvin when he launches his own magazine, Chanticleer. This generous encouragement of younger writers is later extended to several others, including John F. Deane, Gerald Dawe and Maurice Scully.
Milne regards his return to Dublin in 1962 as a disaster, as his four-year stay is overshadowed by quarrels with the establishment, the discovery of betrayal by a friend and the death of his wife from lung cancer. The misery of those events is recorded in Time Stopped (1967). The artistic frustration of the time also results in the poems included in Cantata Under Orion (1976). Returning to England in 1966, he settles in Bedford. Politically he remains involved and speaks alongside Auberon Waugh at the rally on behalf of Biafra in 1968, but his views move further to the right in later years. He writes to The Irish Times on April 13, 1976, saying that he has been “taken in by Stalin and that Leninism is Satanism.” He also sides with the Loyalist position in the Ulster conflict. He dies in Bedford of a heart attack on January 14, 1987.
Milne is twice married, first to Kathleen Ida Bradner in 1927, by whom he has two sons; then in 1948 to Thelma Dobson, by whom he has two more sons.
(Pictured: A portrait of Ewart Milne by Cecil F. Salkkeld, as it appears in Milne’s book Forty North Fifty West)
Simnel is born around 1477. His real name is not known, and contemporary records call him John, not Lambert, and even his surname is suspect. Different sources have different claims of his parentage, but he is most definitely of humble origin. At the age of about ten, he is taken as a pupil by an Oxford-trained priest named Richard Simon who apparently decides to become a kingmaker. He tutors the boy in courtly manners and contemporaries describe the boy as handsome. He is taught the necessary etiquette and is well educated by Simon.
Simon notices a striking resemblance between Lambert and the sons of Edward IV, so he initially intends to present Simnel as Richard, Duke of York, son of King Edward IV, the younger of the vanished Princes in the Tower. However, when he hears rumours (at the time false) that the Edward Plantagenet, 17th Earl of Warwick has died during his imprisonment in the Tower of London, he changes his mind. The real Warwick is a boy of about the same age, having been born in 1475, and has a claim to the throne as the son of George Plantagenet, 1st Duke of Clarence, King Edward IV’s executed brother.
Simon spreads a rumour that Warwick has actually escaped from the Tower and is under his guardianship. He gains some support from Yorkists. He takes Simnel to Ireland where there is still support for the Yorkist cause and presents him to the head of the Irish government, Gerald FitzGerald, 8th Earl of Kildare, Lord Deputy of Ireland. Kildare is willing to support the story and invade England to overthrow King Henry. Simnel is paraded through the streets, carried on the shoulders of “the tallest man of the time,” an individual called D’Arcy of Platten.
On May 24, 1487, Simnel is crowned in Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin as King Edward VI. He is about 10 years old. Lord Kildare collects an army of Irish soldiers under the command of his younger brother, Thomas FitzGerald of Laccagh.
Simnel’s army, mainly Flemish and Irish troops, lands on Piel Island in the Furness area of Lancashire on June 5, 1487, and are joined by some English supporters. However, most local nobles, with the exception of Sir Thomas Broughton, do not join them. They clash with the King’s army on June 16 at the Battle of Stoke Field in Nottinghamshire and are defeated. Lincoln and Thomas FitzGerald are killed. Lovell goes missing and there are rumours that he has escaped to Scotland with Sir Thomas Broughton and hidden to avoid retribution. Simons avoids execution due to his priestly status but is imprisoned for life. Kildare, who had remained in Ireland, is pardoned.
King Henry pardons young Simnel, probably because he recognises that Simnel had merely been a puppet in the hands of adults and puts him to work in the royal kitchen as a spit-turner. When he grows older, he becomes a falconer. Almost no information about his later life is known. He dies sometime between 1525 and 1535. He seems to have married, as he is probably the father of Richard Simnel, a canon of St. Osyth’s Priory in Essex during the reign of Henry VIII.
Brady is a member of the Irish National Invincibles, usually known as the Invincibles, a splinter group of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. This group of assassins is active in Dublin between late 1881 and 1883, with an intent to kill the authorities in Dublin Castle.
The first assassination in the park is committed by Brady, who attacks Burke with a 12-inch knife, followed in short order by Tim Kelly, who knifes Cavendish. Both men use surgical knives. The British press expresses outrage and demands that the “Phoenix Park Murderers” be brought to justice.
A large number of suspects are arrested. By playing one suspect against another, Superintendent Mallon of G Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police gets several of them to reveal what they know. The Invincibles’ leader, James Carey, and Michael Kavanagh agree to testify against the others. Carey is ultimately given passage to South Africa but is shot on board the Melrose Castle by Patrick O’Donnell. O’Donnell is brought back to England and hanged in December 1883.
Brady, Michael Fagan, Thomas Caffrey, Dan Curley and Tim Kelly are hanged by William Marwood in Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin beginning with Brady’s execution on May 14 and and continuing until June 4. Others are sentenced to long prison terms.
No member of the founding executive, however, is ever brought to trial by the British government. John Walsh, Patrick Egan, John Sheridan, Frank Byrne, and Patrick Tynan are welcomed in the United States, where sentiment toward the murders is less severe, although not celebratory.
Brady by all accounts was a mountain of a man. The Times writes following his execution: “He was brought up as a stonemason of herculean strength, his occupation developing the muscular power of his arms, which told with such terrible effect when he drove the knives into the bodies of Lord Cavendish and his secretary T. H. Burke.”
Kilmainham Gaol contains the graves of the Invincibles convicted and executed for the Phoenix park stabbings.
Once settled, Columba sets about converting most of pagan Scotland and northern England to the Christian faith. Iona’s fame as a missionary centre and outstanding place of learning eventually spreads throughout Europe, turning it into a place of pilgrimage for several centuries to come. Iona becomes a sacred isle where kings of Scotland, Ireland andNorway are buried.
Columba is born of royal blood in 521 AD in Ireland, or Scotia as it is then called. He is the grandson of the Irish King Niall. He leaves Ireland for Scotland not as a missionary but as an act of self-imposed penance for a bloody mess he had caused at home. He had upset the king of Ireland by refusing to hand over a copy of the Gospel he had illegally copied, leading to a pitched battle in which Columba’s warrior family prevailed. Full of remorse for his actions and the deaths he had ultimately caused, he flees, ultimately settling on Iona as it is the first place he finds from which he is unable to see his native Ireland. One of the features on the island is even called “The Hill with its back to Ireland.”
Columba, however, is not the shy retiring type and sets about building Iona’s original abbey from clay and wood. In this endeavour he displays some strange idiosyncrasies, including banishing women and cows from the island. The abbey builders have to leave their wives and daughters on the nearby Eilean nam Ban (Woman’s Island). Stranger still, he also banishes frogs and snakes from Iona, although how he accomplishes this feat is not well documented.
The strangest claim of all however is that Columba is prevented from completing the building of the original chapel until a living person has been buried in the foundations. His friend Oran volunteers for the job and is duly buried. It is said that Columba later requests that Oran’s face be uncovered so he can bid a final farewell to his friend. Oran’s face is uncovered and he is found to be still alive but utters such blasphemous descriptions of Heaven and Hell that Columba orders that he be covered up immediately.
Over the centuries the monks of Iona produce countless elaborate carvings, manuscripts and Celtic crosses. Perhaps their greatest work is the exquisite Book of Kells, which dates from 800 AD, currently on display in Trinity College, Dublin. Shortly after this, in 806 AD, come the first of the Viking raids and many of the monks are slaughtered and their work destroyed.
The Celtic Church, lacking central control and organisation, diminishes in size and stature over the years to be replaced by the much larger and stronger Roman Church. Even Iona is not exempt from these changes and in 1203 a nunnery for the Order of the Black Nuns is established and the present-day Benedictine abbey, Iona Abbey, is built. The abbey is a victim of the Reformation and lay in ruins until 1899 when restoration is started.
No part of Columba’s original buildings have survived, however on the left hand side of the abbey entrance can be seen a small roofed chamber which is claimed to mark the site of the Columba’s tomb.
(From: “St. Columba and the Isle of Iona” by Ben Johnson, historic-uk.com, pictured is the Iona Abbey and Nunnery)
seamus dubhghaill 