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Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

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Birth of Annie Horniman, Theatre Patron & Manager

Annie Elizabeth Fredericka Horniman CH, English theatre patron and manager, is born at Surrey Mount, Forest Hill, London, on October 3, 1860. She establishes the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and founds the first regional repertory theatre company in Britain at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester. She encourages the work of new writers and playwrights, including W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and members of what become known as the Manchester School of dramatists.

Horniman, the elder child of Frederick John Horniman and his first wife Rebekah (née Emslie). Her father is a tea merchant and the founder of the Horniman Museum. Her grandfather is John Horniman who founds the family tea business of Horniman and Company. She and her younger brother, Emslie, are educated privately at their home. Her father is opposed to the theatre, which he considers sinful, but their German governess takes her and Emslie secretly to a performance of The Merchant of Venice at The Crystal Palace when she is fourteen years old.

Horniman’s father allows her to enter the Slade School of Fine Art in 1882. Here she discovers that her talent in art is limited but she develops other interests, particularly in the theatre and opera. She takes great pleasure in Richard Wagner‘s Der Ring des Nibelungen and in Henrik Ibsen‘s plays. She cycles in London and twice over the Alps, smokes in public and explores alternative religions. The “lonely rich girl” has become “an independent-minded woman.” In 1890 she joins the occult society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where she remains a member until disagreements with its leaders lead to her resignation in 1903. During this time she meets and becomes a friend of W. B. Yeats, acting as his amanuensis for some years. Their friendship endures. Frank O’Connor recalls that on the day Yeats hears of her death, he spends the entire evening speaking of his memories of her.

Horniman’s first venture into the theatre is in 1894 and is made possible by a legacy from her grandfather. She anonymously supports her friend Florence Farr in a season of new plays at the Royal Avenue Theatre, London. This includes a new play by Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire, and the première of George Bernard Shaw’s play Arms and the Man. In 1903, Yeats persuades her to go to Dublin to back productions by the Irish National Theatre Society. Here she discovers her skill as a theatre administrator. She purchases a property and develops it into the Abbey Theatre, which opens in December 1904. Although she moves back to live in England, she continues to support the theatre financially until 1910. Meanwhile, in Manchester she purchases and renovates the Gaiety Theatre in 1908 and develops it into the first regional repertory theatre in Britain.

At the Gaiety, Horniman appoints Ben Iden Payne as the director and employs actors on 40-week contracts, alternating their work between large and small parts. The plays produced include classics such as Euripides and Shakespeare, and she introduces works by contemporary playwrights such as Ibsen and Shaw. She also encourages local writers who form what becomes known as the Manchester School of dramatists, the leading members of which are Harold Brighouse, Stanley Houghton and Allan Monkhouse. The Gaiety company undertakes tours of the United States and Canada in 1912 and 1913. Horniman becomes a well-known public figure in Manchester, lecturing on subjects which include women’s suffrage and her views about the theatre. In 1910 she is awarded the honorary degree of MA by the University of Manchester. During World War I the Gaiety continues to stage plays but financial difficulties lead to the disbandment of the permanent company in 1917, following which productions in the theatre are by visiting companies. In 1921 she sells the theatre to a cinema company.

As a result of her tea connection, Horniman is known as “Hornibags.” She holds court at the Midland Hotel, wearing exotic clothing and openly smoking cigarettes, which is considered scandalous at the time. She introduces Manchester to what is called at the time “the play of ideas.” The theatre critic James Agate notes that her high-minded theatrical ventures have “an air of gloomy strenuousness” about them.

Horniman moves to London where she keeps a flat in Portman Square. In 1933 she is made a Companion of Honour. She and Algernon Blackwood might be the only past or present members of an occult society to receive a United Kingdom honour.

Horniman dies, unmarried, on August 6, 1937, while visiting friends in Shere, Surrey. Her estate amounts to a little over £50,000. The Annie Horniman Papers are held in the John Rylands Research Institute and Library at the University of Manchester. Her portrait, painted by John Butler Yeats in 1904, hangs in the public area of the Abbey Theatre.


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Death of Annie Horniman, Theatre Patron & Manager

Annie Elizabeth Fredericka Horniman CH, English theatre patron and manager, dies on August 6, 1937, while visiting friends in Shere, Surrey, England. She establishes the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and founds the first regional repertory theatre company in Britain at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester. She encourages the work of new writers and playwrights, including W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and members of what become known as the Manchester School of dramatists.

Horniman is born at Surrey Mount, Forest Hill, London, on October 3, 1860, the elder child of Frederick John Horniman and his first wife Rebekah (née Emslie). Her father is a tea merchant and the founder of the Horniman Museum. Her grandfather is John Horniman who founds the family tea business of Horniman and Company. She and her younger brother Emslie are educated privately at their home. Her father is opposed to the theatre, which he considers sinful, but their German governess takes her and Emslie secretly to a performance of The Merchant of Venice at The Crystal Palace when she is fourteen years old.

Horniman’s father allows her to enter the Slade School of Fine Art in 1882. Here she discovers that her talent in art is limited but she develops other interests, particularly in the theatre and opera. She takes great pleasure in Richard Wagner‘s Der Ring des Nibelungen and in Henrik Ibsen‘s plays. She cycles in London and twice over the Alps, smokes in public and explores alternative religions. The “lonely rich girl” has become “an independent-minded woman.” In 1890 she joins the occult society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where she remains a member until disagreements with its leaders lead to her resignation in 1903. During this time she meets and becomes a friend of W. B. Yeats, acting as his amanuensis for some years. Their friendship endures. Frank O’Connor recalls that on the day Yeats hears of her death, he spends the entire evening speaking of his memories of her.

Horniman’s first venture into the theatre is in 1894 and is made possible by a legacy from her grandfather. She anonymously supports her friend Florence Farr in a season of new plays at the Royal Avenue Theatre, London. This includes a new play by Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire, and the première of George Bernard Shaw’s play Arms and the Man. In 1903 Yeats persuades her to go to Dublin to back productions by the Irish National Theatre Society. Here she discovers her skill as a theatre administrator. She purchases a property and develops it into the Abbey Theatre, which opens in December 1904. Although she moves back to live in England, she continues to support the theatre financially until 1910. Meanwhile, in Manchester she purchases and renovates the Gaiety Theatre in 1908 and develops it into the first regional repertory theatre in Britain.

At the Gaiety, Horniman appoints Ben Iden Payne as the director and employs actors on 40-week contracts, alternating their work between large and small parts. The plays produced include classics such as Euripides and Shakespeare, and she introduces works by contemporary playwrights such as Ibsen and Shaw. She also encourages local writers who form what becomes known as the Manchester School of dramatists, the leading members of which are Harold Brighouse, Stanley Houghton and Allan Monkhouse. The Gaiety company undertakes tours of the United States and Canada in 1912 and 1913. Horniman becomes a well-known public figure in Manchester, lecturing on subjects which include women’s suffrage and her views about the theatre. In 1910 she is awarded the honorary degree of MA by the University of Manchester. During World War I the Gaiety continues to stage plays but financial difficulties lead to the disbandment of the permanent company in 1917, following which productions in the theatre are by visiting companies. In 1921 she sells the theatre to a cinema company.

As a result of her tea connection, Horniman is known as “Hornibags.” She holds court at the Midland Hotel, wearing exotic clothing and openly smoking cigarettes, which is considered scandalous at the time. She introduces Manchester to what is called at the time “the play of ideas.” The theatre critic James Agate notes that her high-minded theatrical ventures have “an air of gloomy strenuousness” about them.

Horniman moves to London where she keeps a flat in Portman Square. In 1933 she is made a Companion of Honour. She and Algernon Blackwood might be the only past or present members of an occult society to receive a United Kingdom honour.

Horniman dies, unmarried, on August 6, 1937, while visiting friends in Shere, Surrey. Her estate amounts to a little over £50,000. The Annie Horniman Papers are held in the John Rylands Research Institute and Library at the University of Manchester. Her portrait, painted by John Butler Yeats in 1904, hangs in the public area of the Abbey Theatre.


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Birth of E. R. Dodds, Irish Classical Scholar

Eric Robertson Dodds, Irish classical scholar, is born in Banbridge, County Down, on July 26, 1893. He is Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford from 1936 to 1960.

Dodds is the son of schoolteachers. His father Robert is from a Presbyterian family and dies of alcoholism when Dodds is seven years old. His mother Anne is of Anglo-Irish ancestry. When he is ten, he moves with his mother to Dublin, and he is educated at St. Andrew’s College, where his mother teaches, and at Campbell College in Belfast. He is expelled from the latter for “gross, studied, and sustained insolence.”

In 1912, Dodds wins a scholarship at University College, Oxford, to read classics, or Literae Humaniores, a two-part, four-year degree program consisting of five terms of study of Latin and Greek texts followed by seven terms of study of ancient history and ancient philosophy. His friends at Oxford include Aldous Huxley and T. S. Eliot. In 1916, he is asked to leave Oxford due to his support for the Easter Rising, but he returns the following year to take his final examinations in Literae Humaniores, and is awarded a first-class degree to match the first-class awarded him in 1914 in Honour Moderations, the preliminary stage of his degree. His first tutor at Oxford is Arthur Blackburne Poynton.

After graduation, Dodds returns to Dublin and meets W. B. Yeats and George William Russell. He teaches briefly at Kilkenny College and in 1919 is appointed as a lecturer in classics at the University of Reading, where in 1923 he marries a lecturer in English, Annie Edwards Powell. They have no children.

In 1924, Dodds is appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Birmingham, and comes to know W. H. Auden, whose father George, Professor of Public Medicine and an amateur classicist, is a colleague. He is also responsible for Louis MacNeice‘s appointment as a lecturer at Birmingham in 1930. He assists MacNeice with his translation of Aeschylus, Agamemnon (1936), and later becomes the poet’s literary executor. He publishes one volume of his own poems, Thirty-Two Poems, with a Note on Unprofessional Poetry (1929).

In 1936, Dodds becomes Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford, succeeding Gilbert Murray. Murray decisively recommends him to British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and it is not a popular appointment. He is chosen over two prominent Oxford dons, Maurice Bowra of Wadham College and John Dewar Denniston of Hertford College. His lack of service in World War I and his support for Irish republicanism and socialism in addition to his scholarship on the non-standard field of Neoplatonism, also does not make him initially popular with colleagues. He is treated particularly harshly by Denys Page at whose college, Christ Church, the Regius Chair of Greek is based.

Dodds has a lifelong interest in mysticism and psychic research, being a member of the council of the Society for Psychical Research from 1927 and its president from 1961 to 1963.

On his retirement in 1960, Dodds is made an Honorary Fellow of University College, Oxford, until his death on April 8, 1979. He dies in the village of Old Marston, northeast of Oxford.

Among Dodds’s works are The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), which charts the influence of irrational forces in Greek culture up to the time of Plato, and Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, a study of religious life in the period between Marcus Aurelius and Constantine I. He is also editor of three major classical texts for the Clarendon Press, Proclus: Elements of Theology, Euripides‘ The Bacchae and Plato’s Gorgias, all published with extensive commentaries, and a translation in the case of the first. His autobiography, Missing Persons, is published in 1977. He edits Louis MacNeice’s unfinished autobiography The Strings are False (1965) and MacNeice’s Collected Poems (1966).


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Birth of Frank McGuinness, Playwright & Poet

Frank McGuinness, award-winning Irish playwright and poet, is born in Buncrana, a town located on the Inishowen peninsula of County Donegal on July 29, 1953. As well as his own works, which include The Factory Girls, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me and Dolly West’s Kitchen, he is recognised for a “strong record of adapting literary classics, having translated the plays of Jean Racine, Sophocles, Henrik Ibsen, Federico García Lorca, and August Strindberg to critical acclaim.”

McGuinness is educated locally and at University College Dublin, where he studies Pure English and medieval studies to postgraduate level.

He first comes to prominence with his play The Factory Girls but establishes his reputation with his play about World War I, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, which is staged in Dublin‘s Abbey Theatre and internationally. The play makes a name for him when it is performed at Hampstead Theatre, drawing comments about McGuinness’s Irish Catholic background. It wins numerous awards including the London Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright for McGuinness and the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. He has also written new versions of classic dramas, including works by Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and Euripides, adapting the literal translations of others. In addition, he writes the screenplay for the film Dancing at Lughnasa, adapting the stage play by fellow Ulsterman Brian Friel.

McGuinness’s first poetry anthology, Booterstown, is published in 1994. Several of his poems have been recorded by Marianne Faithfull, including Electra, After the Ceasefire and The Wedding.

McGuinness previously lectured in Linguistics and Drama at the University of Ulster, Medieval Studies at University College, Dublin and English at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Then he is a writer-in-residence lecturing at University College Dublin before being appointed Professor of Creative Writing in the School of English, Drama and Film there in 2007.