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Tag Archives: Ernest Hemingway


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Death of John Henry Patterson, Army Officer, Hunter, Author & Zionist

John Henry Patterson, known as J. H. Patterson, Irish officer in the British Army, game hunter, author and Christian Zionist, dies in Bel Air, California, on June 18, 1947.

Patterson is born on November 10, 1867 at Forgney, Ballymahon, County Longford, the son of a Protestant father and a Roman Catholic mother. He joins the British Army at Dublin in 1885 and is posted with the 3rd Dragoon Guards to India. In 1892 he is seconded to the Indian military works department as a supervisor of civil engineering projects. In 1894 he marries Frances Helena Gray, daughter of William Gray of Cork and Belfast, a building surveyor who founded the free library movement in Belfast. She goes on to earn science and law degrees.

In 1898 Patterson is sent to British East Africa to supervise 3,000 Indian and African labourers who are building a railway bridge spanning the Tsavo River as part of the Mombasa to Lake Victoria line. Construction is interrupted when two man-eating lions repeatedly attack the labourers’ camp at night. He embarks on a lion hunt, but by the time he shoots the two lions they have mauled and mutilated between 130 and 140 labourers.

Patterson volunteers for service in the South African War in 1900. He is mentioned in dispatches by Lord Frederick Roberts and Lord Herbert Kitchener and is awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO). In 1902 he is appointed lieutenant colonel commanding the 33rd Battalion Imperial Yeomanry. While on a shooting trip in east Africa in 1906, he discovers a new species of eland, which is named Taurotragus oryx pattersonianus after him. His account of his adventures in Africa, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, is published in 1907 to instant international acclaim. His exploits are twice made the subject of films: Bwana Devil (1952) and The Ghost and the Darkness (1996). In 1907 he is seconded as chief game warden, British East Africa Protectorate (Kenya), and he combines his work of conducting surveys with escorting private safari parties.

The following year Patterson leads a safari trip in the protectorate accompanied by Audley James Blyth, a son of James Blyth, 1st Baron Blyth, and his wife, Ethel Jane. During the expedition Blyth shoots himself in the head with a revolver and dies. Patterson claims that Blyth was suffering from heat stroke, but there are rumours of a romantic attachment between Patterson and Mrs. Blyth. The colonial secretary Lord Crewe exonerates Patterson in return for his resignation as chief game warden. The incident serves as the plot for Ernest Hemingway‘s short story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”

In 1913 Patterson commands the West Belfast division of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and sees service in Flanders before being sent to Egypt in early 1915. In Alexandria, two Russian Jewish Zionists, the journalist Ze’ev Jabotinsky and veteran of the Russo–Japanese War Joseph Trumpeldor, ask General John Maxwell, commander of the British forces in Egypt, to establish a Jewish legion that will liberate the Holy Land from the Turks. Maxwell refuses, proposing instead that the Jews form a volunteer transport unit to serve in Gallipoli. Patterson, who is imbued with a deep knowledge of the Old Testament, and draws spiritual sustenance from biblical heroes such as Joshua and Gideon, is appointed commander of the Assyrian Jewish refugee mule corps, a colonial corps of the Egyptian expeditionary force. He sails with the Zion Mule Corps, as it is popularly known, to Gallipoli in April 1915, where the corps serves with distinction, carrying water and ammunition to the Allied troops on the peninsula. He falls ill in November 1915, and is sent to convalesce in London. The Zion Mule Corps is evacuated from Gallipoli in December, and disbanded in March 1916.

When manpower and political considerations persuade the British authorities to create the Jewish Legion in 1917, Patterson is appointed its commander. He marches his 38th Battalion Royal Fusiliers through the City of London and Whitechapel, cheered by a crowd of several thousand Jews. The Jewish Legion participates in General Edmund Allenby‘s sustained attack, which successfully pushes the Turks out of Palestine. His experiences with his Jewish soldiers turn him into a committed Zionist. In 1916 he writes With the Zionists in Gallipoli, and in 1922 With the Judaeans in the Palestine Campaign, which contain a scathing attack on Britain’s policy towards the Jews during and after World War I.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Patterson increasingly allies himself with the revisionist Zionist agenda espoused by Jabotinsky’s New Zionist Organisation. When World War II breaks out, he travels with Jabotinsky to the United States, moving permanently to La Jolla, California, in 1940. With others, including the Irish Jew and later Lord Mayor of Dublin Robert Briscoe, he agitates for the formation of a large Jewish army that would fight with the Allies against Nazi Germany. After Jabotinsky’s death in 1940, he works with Benzion Netanyahu, the Palestinian Jewish executive director of the American revisionist Zionists. In 1946 he becomes godfather to Netanyahu’s first son, who is named Yonatan (the closest Hebrew name to John) in Patterson’s honour. Yonatan later leads Operation Entebbe, the successful 1976 Israeli raid on Entebbe Airport to free Israeli hostages.

On June 18, 1947, just a year before the establishment of the Zionist state of Israel, for which he had worked so hard, Patterson dies at Bel Air, California. A week later, the United Zionist Revisionists of Great Britain hold a memorial meeting at the Anglo–Palestinian Club near Piccadilly Circus in Patterson’s memory. His documents and personal effects are held at the Jabotinsky Institute and Museum in Tel Aviv. His uniform and other memorabilia are on display in Beit Hagdudim, the Jewish Legions Museum at Netanya, Israel. His two man-eating lions are on display in Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, where his son Bryan Patterson later serves as curator.

(From: “Patterson, John Henry” by Yanky Fachler, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie)


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Birth of Philip Ó Ceallaigh, Short Story Writer & Translator

Philip Ó Ceallaigh, Irish short story writer and translator, is born in Ireland on March 23, 1968. He wins the 2006 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and is shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He speaks six languages.

One of Ó Ceallaigh’s classmates in school is Sinéad O’Connor. He once tells an interviewer, “She told me she wanted to become famous and I tried to talk her out of it.”

Ó Ceallaigh graduates from University College Dublin (UCD) with a degree in philosophy. After receiving his degree, he travels the world, doing a variety of jobs, including waiter, newspaper editor, freelance journalist and volunteer for clinical trials. He moves to Bucharest, Romania, so that he can live cheaply and pursue his desire to write.

Ó Ceallaigh has spent much of his adult life in Eastern Europe, starting in Russia in the early 1990s. Since 1995 he has lived mostly in Bucharest, Romania. He has also lived for a while in the United States.

Ó Ceallaigh has published over 40 short stories, as well as essays and criticism. His work has appeared in Granta, The Irish Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. In 2010, he edits Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails, an anthology of new short stories by twenty-two Irish and international writers, for The Stinging Fly Press. He translates Mihail Sebastian‘s autobiographical novel For Two Thousand Years. It tells the story of the author’s early years as a Jew in Romania during the 1920s. It is published in 2016.

Ó Ceallaigh has written an unpublished novel but reduces it to a long short story and believes “if you’ve got something to say and you can say it with less, that’s the way to go.”

The first story in Ó Ceallaigh’s third collection, Trouble, involves a security guard and the theft of sum of money from a gangster. He uses time he spent as a security guard in Dublin to form the basis of this fiction.

Ó Ceallaigh eschews the prevailing style of Irish short story writing in that his works are rarely set in Ireland, and instead are set in a variety of locations across the world, predominately in Romania. His stories generally feature solitary men, with women playing more incidental roles. He acknowledges being influenced in his writing style by Charles Bukowski, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, and Ivan Turgenev.

Ó Ceallaigh wins the Hennessy Award for his first published work in 1998. He wins the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Glen Dimplex New Writers’ Award for his collection Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse in 2006. His second collection, The Pleasant Light of Day, is shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He is the first Irish writer to receive this honour.


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Birth of Dermot Healy, Novelist, Playwright, Poet & Short Story Writer

Dermot Healy, Irish novelist, playwright, poet and short story writer, is born in Finnea, County Westmeath, on November 9, 1947. A member of Aosdána, he is also part of its governing body, the Toscaireacht. He is described variously as a “master,” a “Celtic Hemingway” and as “Ireland’s finest living novelist.”

Healy is the son of a Guard. As a child the family moves to Cavan, where he attends the local secondary school. In his late teens he moves to London and works in a succession of jobs, including barman, security man and as a labourer. He later returns to Ireland, settling in Ballyconnell, County Sligo, a small settlement on the Atlantic coast.

Often overlooked due to his relatively low public profile, Healy’s work is admired by his Irish literary predecessors, peers and successors alike, many of whom idolise him. Among the writers to have spoken highly of him are Seamus Heaney, Eugene McCabe, Roddy Doyle, Patrick McCabe and Anne Enright.

Healy’s work is influenced by an eclectic range of writers from around the world, including Anna Akhmatova, John Arden, Isaac Babel, Matsuo Bashō, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Angela Carter, J. M. Coetzee, Emily Dickinson, Maria Edgeworth, T. S. Eliot, Hermann Hesse, Nâzım Hikmet, Aidan Higgins, Miroslav Holub, Eugène Ionesco, Franz Kafka, Mary Lavin, Federico García Lorca, Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, William Shakespeare and Robert Louis Stevenson. Healy writes in a shed and is fascinated by etymology. However, on being a writer, he is quoted as saying, “I know writing is what I do but I still don’t see myself as one.”

Healy is longlisted for the Booker Prize with his novel A Goats Song. He wins the Hennessy Literary Award (1974 and 1976), the Tom-Gallon Trust Award (1983), and the Encore Award (1995). In 2011, he is shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award for his 2010 poetry collection, A Fool’s Errand. Long Time, No See is nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, the world’s most valuable literary award for a single work in the English language, by libraries in Russia and Norway.

Healy dies at his home in Ballyconnell on June 29, 2014, while awaiting an ambulance after suddenly being taken ill. He is laid to rest at Carrigans Cemetery following funeral mass by Fr. Michael Donnelly at St. Patrick’s Church in Maugherow.


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Birth of Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, American novelist, essayist, short story and screenwriter, is born into an Irish Catholic family on September 24, 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized. During his lifetime, he publishes four novels, four collections of short stories, and 164 short stories. Although he achieves temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, he receives critical acclaim only after his death, and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

The son of middle-class Irish Catholics Edward and Mary McQuillan Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald is raised primarily in New York. He attends Princeton University, but owing to a failed relationship with socialite Ginevra King and a preoccupation with writing, he drops out in 1917 to join the United States Army. While stationed in Alabama, he romances Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belongs to Montgomery‘s exclusive country-club set. Although she rejects Fitzgerald initially, because of his lack of financial prospects, she agrees to marry him after he publishes the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel becomes a cultural sensation and cements his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.

Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propels him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he writes numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s: The National Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, he frequents Europe, where he befriends modernist writers and artists of the “Lost Generation” expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), receives generally favorable reviews but is a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now widely praised, with some labeling it the “Great American Novel.” Following the deterioration of his wife’s mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, he completes his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).

Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works amid the Great Depression, Fitzgerald turns to Hollywood, writing and revising screenplays. While living in Hollywood, he cohabits with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attains sobriety only to die of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, at the age of 44. His friend Edmund Wilson completes and publishes an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald’s death.

At the time of his death, the Roman Catholic Church denies the family’s request that Fitzgerald, a non-practicing Catholic, be buried in the family plot in the Catholic St. Mary’s Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. He is buried instead with a simple Protestant service at Rockville Union Cemetery. When Zelda Fitzgerald dies in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in 1948, she is originally buried next to him at Rockville Union. In 1975, Fitzgerald’s daughter Scottie successfully petitions to have the earlier decision revisited and her parents’ remains are moved to the family plot in Saint Mary’s.


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Birth of Frank Delaney, Novelist, Journalist & Broadcaster

frank-delaneyFrank Delaney, Irish novelist, journalist and broadcaster, is born in County Tipperary on October 24, 1942. He is the author of The New York Times best-seller Ireland, the non-fiction book Simple Courage: A True Story of Peril on the Sea, and many other works of fiction, non-fiction and collections.

Delaney begins working as a newsreader for the Irish state radio and television network RTÉ in 1970. In the early 1970s he becomes a news reporter for the BBC in Dublin, and covers an intense period of violence known as the Troubles. After five years of reporting on the violence, he moves to London to work in arts broadcasting. In 1978 he creates the weekly Bookshelf programme for BBC Radio 4, which covers books, writers and the business of publishing. Over the next five-and-a-half years he interviews over 1,400 authors, including Anthony Burgess, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Christopher Isherwood and Stephen King.

On television, Delaney writes and presents for Omnibus, the BBC’s weekly arts series. He serves as the Literature Director of the Edinburgh Festival in 1980, and hosts his own talk show Frank Delaney in the early 1980s, which features many cultural and literary personalities. Afterward, he creates and presents Word of Mouth, the BBC’s radio programme about language, as well as a variety of radio and television documentaries including specials on James Joyce, Robert Graves, Ernest Hemingway in Paris, and the Shakespeare industry. He presents The Book Show on the Sky News satellite channel for many years.

Delaney’s first book, James Joyce’s Odyssey (1981), is well received and becomes a best-seller in the UK and Ireland. He writes and presents the six-part documentary series The Celts: Rich Traditions and Ancient Myths (1987) for the BBC, and writes the accompanying book. He subsequently writes five books of non-fiction (including Simple Courage), ten novels (including Ireland, Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show and Tipperary), one novella, and a number of short stories. He also edits many compilations of essays and poetry.

After moving to the United States and settling in Kent, Connecticut in 2002, Delaney writes the screenplay for an adaptation of Goodbye, Mr. Chips (2002), which stars Martin Clunes and is shown on ITV in Britain, and in the Masterpiece Theatre series in the United States. His articles are published by newspapers in United States, the UK and Ireland, including on the Op-ed pages of The New York Times. He is a frequent public speaker, and is a contributor and guest on National Public Radio (NPR) programmes.

On Bloomsday 2010, Delaney launches Re:Joyce, a series of short weekly podcasts that go page-by-page through James Joyce’s Ulysses, discussing its allusions, historical context and references.

Frank Delaney dies in Danbury Hospital in Danbury, Connecticut on February 21, 2017 after suffering a stroke the previous day.


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Birth of Joe Gilmore, Head Barman

joe-gilmoreJoe Gilmore, one of the longest running Head Barmen at the Savoy Hotel‘s American Bar, is born in Belfast on May 19, 1922.

The Gilmores own a popular tobacconist shop at the top of the Limestone Road, which remains in business through the Troubles until the mid-1990s. But Gilmore has plans to go places so, at the age of sixteen, he sets out with a friend for London.

His first job is packing rolls of wallpaper at a Sanderson’s factory before moving to a Lyons Corner House as a dish washer with the prospect of getting some decent dinners. He begins training as a barman at London’s La Coquille and The Olde Bell at Hurley, where a chance encounter serving a stylish couple sets the scene for the remarkable life that follows.

At the age of eighteen, Gilmore starts as a trainee barman at The American Bar in 1940 and is appointed Head Barman in 1955, a position he holds until he retires in 1976. Over his years as Head Barman, Gilmore invents numerous cocktails to mark special events and important guests, a longstanding tradition at the American Bar.

Gilmore has invented cocktails in honor of a number of royalty, politicians, and celebrities including the Prince of Wales, Prince William, Princess Anne, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, Prince Andrew, Sir Winston Churchill, and American Presidents Harry S. Truman and Richard Nixon. He also invents cocktails to commemorate the first walk on the moon in 1969 by Neil Armstrong, and the American and Russian link-up in space in 1975.

In addition to serving five generations of royals at private receptions and parties, Gilmore has also served Errol Flynn, Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Grace Kelly, George Bernard Shaw, Ernest Hemingway, Noël Coward, Agatha Christie, Alice Faye, Ingrid Bergman, Julie Andrews, Laurence Olivier, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra.

Gilmore never forgets his Irish roots or family, and never loses his soft Belfast accent. Joe Gilmore dies at the age of 93 on December 18, 2015. His funeral is arranged by A. France & Son, undertakers to Admiral Nelson and near-neighbours in Lamb Conduit Street for more than 50 years. The Savoy sends their senior management and bar staff in their smart white uniforms.