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Birth of Alexander Campbell, Ulster Scots Minister

Alexander Campbell, an Ulster Scots immigrant who becomes an ordained minister in the United States, is born on September 12, 1788, near Ballymena, in the parish of Broughshane, County Antrim.

Campbell is the eldest son of Thomas Campbell and Jane Campbell (née Corneigle), who marry in 1787 and later have four daughters and two younger sons. His father, the son of soldier Archibald Campbell and his wife Alice McNally, is born on February 1, 1763, at Sheepbridge, near Newry, County Down. The Presbyterian minister William Campbell may have been a relation.

Archibald Campbell is born Catholic but joins the Church of Ireland, while his son joins the seceding branch of the Presbyterian church and studies at the University of Glasgow, graduating with a Master of Arts degree in 1786, although he does not appear in the published records of the university. He becomes a teacher but is determined to become a minister, and studies in the Anti-Burgher Divinity Hall in Whitburn, West Lothian (or the Seceder Theological Seminary in Whithorn, Wigtownshire, according to another source) for two months each year for five years. He is ordained a minister in the seceding congregation of Ahorey, County Armagh, probably in 1798. Although at first a member of the Anti-Burgher party in his church, Thomas Campbell begins to believe that divisions between and within denominations are prejudicial to true Christianity. He writes a report in 1804 suggesting that Burgher and Anti-Burgher Presbyterians in Ireland should unite. When this is vetoed in 1805 by the General Associate Synod of Scotland, Thomas Campbell, then moderator of the Irish Seceding Synod, initiates an unsuccessful move to seek independence from Scottish control. His experiences with church authorities undoubtedly increase his belief in the need to rediscover the scriptural basis of religion, freed from man-made creeds.

In 1804, Thomas Campbell sets up an academy at Richhill, County Armagh. In 1798, he is one of the founders of the Evangelical Society of Ulster in which clergymen from differing sects cooperate but resigns when this enterprise is frowned on by seceding authorities.

In poor health in 1806, Thomas Campbell resigns from Ahorey, and goes to the United States in 1807, where he preaches in small congregations around Washington, Pennsylvania. He is soon accused of doctrinal unsoundness, of disciplinary laxity and of administering the sacraments to non-Presbyterians. His appeal to the Associate Synod of North America is unsuccessful, and in 1809 he ceases to be a minister of the seceder church. His liberal views on Christian unity and on the paramount importance of the Bible attract supporters, and in 1809 they found the Christian Association of Washington. He publishes a declaration and address in which he sets out the principles of this body. His followers claim it represents a “second reformation” or a “restoration.” It forms the basis of the doctrine of what becomes America’s most important indigenous religious development, and is regarded as significant in the history of the wider ecumenical movement. He publishes a great many other tracts and articles. Thomas Campbell dies in Bethany, West Virginia, on January 4, 1854.

Thomas had married Jane Corneigle in 1787 and their eldest son Alexander is born on September 12, 1788, in Broughshane, County Antrim, where his father is teaching. His parents intend him for the ministry, and he receives a good education, partly from his father, and religious training from both parents. He is greatly influenced by his strongminded and pious mother. In October 1808 his family sets sail for America to join his father. The ship is wrecked on the island of Islay, off Scotland. All on board are saved, partly thanks to Alexander’s strength and leadership. Rather than continuing the voyage by other means, Alexander spends eight months in the University of Glasgow to prepare himself for the ministry.

In the summer of 1809, the family finally arrives in Pennsylvania, among many emigrants from Ulster. On January 1, 1812, Campbell is ordained as a minister by his father’s Brush Run Church, and quickly takes over the leadership of the fledgling church. By 1812, most of their followers, thenceforth often called Campbellites, have undergone baptism by immersion; a union with the Baptist denomination results, but does not survive after 1830, by which date Campbell’s work on a translation of the Greek New Testament has convinced him that baptism is unscriptural. Controversy between the two groups continues for many years.

A very able preacher and debater, whose public discussions attract much attention, Campbell attacks the creeds and governance of established churches. In 1823, he founds the journal the Christian Baptist. Subsequently in 1830, after the break with the Baptists, he starts the Millennial Harbinger. Both periodicals are largely written by Campbell and his father, Thomas, and are widely influential. He is convinced that church unity will usher in a millennial age of peace and harmony. Primitive Christianity is thus to bring about a utopian future. His book Christianity Restored (1835) is widely read, in Britain as well as in the United States. In 1826, a translation of the Greek New Testament is printed by Campbell’s press in Bethany, West Virginia. Largely based on recent translations by others, it nonetheless contains variant readings by Campbell and furthers his aim of providing followers with authoritative texts on which to base their beliefs. In 1841, he founds Bethany College, West Virginia, and is its president until his death in Bethany on March 4, 1866, when he leaves it $10,000 and a large library.

In 1832, several fledgling churches join the Campbellites, and form a new body called the Christian Church, or Disciples of Christ, which today has over 3,000 congregations in the United States. The two guiding principles of the lifelong beliefs of the Campbells are in the end irreconcilable. An emphasis on the literal interpretation of scripture allows believers to form beliefs at variance from those of co-religionists, and neither Alexander Campbell’s great authority in the denomination nor Thomas Campbell’s emphasis on the need for church unity are enough to prevent the fissions inevitable in a church that so strongly opposes man-made creeds. There are now at least six major divisions of the Church of Christ, one of several alternative names.

On March 2, 1811, Campbell marries Margaret Brown, and thenceforth derives his income from the large farm that had belonged to her family. They have eight children, who all die in their father’s lifetime. Margaret Brown Campbell dies on October 22, 1827. On July 31, 1828, in fulfilment of his wife’s dying request, the widower marries the English-born Selina Huntington Bakewell, and has six children with her. Four of those children survive him. Selina Campbell writes a memoir of her husband, published in 1882, and lives until 1897.

(From: “Campbell, Alexander” by Linde Lunney, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, last revised May 2021)


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Founding of the Auxiliaries Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary

The Auxiliary Division, generally known as the Auxiliaries or Auxies, a paramilitary unit of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) during the Irish War of Independence (1919-21), is founded on July 27, 1920, by Major-General Henry Hugh Tudor. It is made up of former British Army officers, most of whom come from Great Britain and had fought in World War I.

In September 1919, the Commander-in-Chief, Ireland, Sir Frederick Shaw, suggests that the police force in Ireland be expanded via the recruitment of a special force of volunteer British ex-servicemen. During a Cabinet meeting on May 11, 1920, the Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill, suggests the formation of a “Special Emergency Gendarmerie, which would become a branch of the Royal Irish Constabulary.” Churchill’s proposal is referred to a committee chaired by General Sir Nevil Macready, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in Ireland. Macready’s committee rejects Churchill’s proposal, but it is revived two months later, in July, by the Police Adviser to the Dublin Castle administration in Ireland, Major-General Henry Hugh Tudor. In a memo dated July 6, 1920, Tudor justifies the scheme on the grounds that it will take too long to reinforce the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) with ordinary recruits. Tudor’s new “Auxiliary Force” is to be strictly temporary with its members enlisting for a year. Their pay is to be £7 per week (twice what a constable is paid), plus a sergeant’s allowances, and are to be known as “Temporary Cadets.” At that time, one of high unemployment, a London advertisement for ex-officers to manage coffee stalls at two pounds ten shillings a week receives five thousand applicants.

The Auxiliary Division is recruited in Great Britain from among ex-officers who had served in World War I, especially those who had served in the British Army (including the Royal Flying Corps). Most recruits are from Britain, although some are from Ireland, and others come from other parts of the British Empire. Many have been highly decorated in the war and three, James Leach, James Johnson, and George Onions, have been awarded the Victoria Cross (VC). Enlisted men who had been commissioned as officers during the war often find it difficult to adjust to their loss of status and pay in civilian life, and some historians have concluded that the Auxiliary Division recruited large numbers of these “temporary gentlemen.”

Piaras Béaslaí, a former senior member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) who supports the Anglo-Irish Treaty, while paying tribute to the bravery of the Auxiliaries, notes that the force is not composed exclusively of ex-officers but contains “criminal elements,” some of whom robbed people on the streets of Dublin and in their homes.

Recruiting began in July 1920, and by November 1921, the division is 1,900 strong. The Auxiliaries are nominally part of the RIC, but actually operate more or less independently in rural areas. Divided into companies, each about one hundred strong, heavily armed and highly mobile, they operate in ten counties, mostly in the south and west, where IRA activity is greatest. They wear either RIC uniforms or their old army uniforms with appropriate police badges, along with distinctive tam o’ shanter caps. They are commanded by Brigadier-General Frank Percy Crozier.

The elite ex-officer division proves to be much more effective than the Black and Tans especially in the key area of gathering intelligence. Auxiliary companies are intended as mobile striking and raiding forces, and they score some notable successes against the IRA. On November 20, the night before Bloody Sunday, they capture Dick McKee and Peadar Clancy, the commandant and vice-commandant of the IRA’s Dublin Brigade, and murder them in Dublin Castle. That same night, they catch Liam Pilkington, commandant of the Sligo IRA, in a separate raid. A month later, in December, they catch Ernie O’Malley completely by surprise in County Kilkenny. He is reading in his room when a Temporary Cadet opens the door and walks in. “He was as unexpected as death,” says O’Malley. In his memoirs, the commandant of the Clare IRA, Michael Brennan, describes how the Auxiliaries nearly capture him three nights in a row.

IRA commanders become concerned about the morale of their units as to many Volunteers the Auxiliaries seem to be “super fighters and all but invincible.” Those victories which are won over the Auxiliaries are among the most celebrated in the Irish War of Independence. On November 28, 1920, for example, a platoon of Auxiliaries is ambushed and wiped out in the Kilmichael Ambush by Tom Barry and the 3rd Cork Brigade. A little more than two months later, on February 2, 1921, another platoon of Auxiliaries is ambushed by Seán Mac Eoin and the North Longford Flying Column in the Clonfin Ambush. On March 19, 1921, the 3rd Cork Brigade of the IRA defeats a large-scale attempt by the British Army and Auxiliary Division to encircle and trap them at Crossbarry. On April 15, 1921, Captain Roy Mackinnon, commanding officer of H Company of the Auxiliary Division, is assassinated by the Kerry IRA.

Successes require reliable intelligence and raids often bring no result — or sometimes worse. In one case, they arrest a Castle official, Law Adviser W. E. Wylie, by mistake. In another, more notorious case, on April 19, 1921, they raid the Shannon Hotel in Castleconnell, County Limerick, on a tip that there are suspicious characters drinking therein. The “suspicious characters” turn out to be three off-duty members of the RIC. Both sides mistake the other for insurgents and open fire. Three people, an RIC man, an Auxiliary Cadet and a civilian, are killed in the shootout that follows.

The Auxiliary Division is disbanded along with the RIC in 1922. Although the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty requires the Irish Free State to assume responsibility for the pensions of RIC members, the Auxiliaries are explicitly excluded from this provision. Following their disbandment, many of its former personnel join the Palestine Police Force in the British-controlled territory.

The anti-insurgency activities of the Auxiliaries Division have become interchangeable with those conducted by the Black and Tans, leading to many atrocities committed by them being attributed to the Black and Tans. Nevertheless, both British units remain equally reviled in Ireland.

The Auxiliaries are featured in historical drama films like Michael Collins, The Last September, and The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

(Pictured: Cap badge design for F Company of the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary)


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Death of Edith Anne Stoney, First Woman Medical Physicist

Edith Anne Stoney, considered to be the first woman medical physicist, dies in Bournemouth, England, on June 25, 1938.

Stoney is born into an old-established Anglo-Irish scientific family at 40 Wellington Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin, on January 6, 1869. The daughter of George Johnstone Stoney, FRS, an eminent physicist who coins the term “electron” in 1891 as the “fundamental unit quantity of electricity,” and his wife and cousin, Margaret Sophia Stoney. One of her two brothers, George Gerald, is an engineer and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). One of her two sisters, Florence Stoney, is a radiologist and receives an OBE. Her cousin is the Dublin-based physicist George Francis FitzGerald FRS (1851–1901), and her uncle Bindon Blood Stoney FRS is Engineer of Dublin Port, renowned for building a number of the main Dublin bridges and developing the Quayside.

Stoney demonstrates considerable mathematical talent and gains a scholarship at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she achieves a First in the Part I Tripos examination in 1893. However, she is not awarded a University of Cambridge degree as women are excluded from graduation until 1948. During her time at Newnham, she is in charge of the College telescope. She is later awarded a BA and an MA from Trinity College Dublin, after they accept women in 1904.

After briefly working on gas turbine calculations and searchlight design for Sir Charles Algernon Parsons, she takes a mathematics teaching post at the Cheltenham Ladies’ College.

Following the 1876 Medical Act, it is illegal for academic institutions to prevent access to medical education based on gender. The first medical school for women in Britain is established in 1874 by Dr. Sophia Jex-Blake in anticipation of this law. The London School of Medicine for Women quickly becomes part of the University of London, with clinical teaching at the Royal Free Hospital. Stoney’s sister Florence is a student at the school, graduates in medicine with honours in 1895 (MB BS) and obtains her MD in 1898. Meanwhile, Stoney gains an appointment as a physics lecturer at the school in 1899. Her first tasks are to set up a physics laboratory and design the physics course. The laboratory is planned for 20 students, and the course content is pure physics, as required by university regulations. It includes mechanics, magnetism, electricity, optics, sound, heat and energy. In her obituary in The Lancet, an ex-student of hers notes: “Her lectures on physics mostly developed into informal talks, during which Miss Stoney, usually in a blue pinafore, scratched on a blackboard with coloured chalks, turning anxiously at intervals to ask ‘Have you taken my point?’. She was perhaps too good a mathematician … to understand the difficulties of the average medical student, but experience had taught her how distressing these could be”.

In 1901, the Royal Free Hospital appoints Florence into a new part-time position of medical electrician. The following April, the two sisters open a new x-ray service in the electrical department. During their time at the Royal Free Hospital, the two sisters actively support the women’s suffrage movement, though oppose the direct violent action with which it is later associated.

During her time at the school, Stoney also plays a central role in the British Federation of University Women (BFUW). She is elected treasurer, in her absence, at the first executive meeting on October 9, 1909, a position she holds until the end of May 1915. She becomes increasingly engaged with the political lobbying of the Federation. At the executive meeting on October 19, 1912, she proposes the names of two members for a subcommittee to secure the passing into law of a bill to enable women to become barristers, solicitors or parliamentary agents. The legislation is eventually enacted after the war within the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919.

Stoney resigns her post at the school in March 1915 and it is recorded that “with due regret and most unwillingly a change is desirable in the physics lectureship.” She is offered £300 on tendering her resignation.

Both Stoney and Florence offer their services to the British Red Cross at the War Office in London, to provide a radiological service to support the troops in Europe, on the day Britain declares war. Their offer is refused, because they are women. Florence sets up her own unit with the Women’s Imperial Service League and spends the next 6 months in Europe. Stoney organises supplies from London where she also serves on the League’s committee. Florence returns to London at the time Stoney resigns from the London School of Medicine for Women. She contacts the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH), an organisation formed in 1914 to give medical support in the field of battle and financed by the women’s suffrage movement. The organisation has gained agreement to set up a new 250-bed tented hospital at Domaine de Chanteloup, Sainte-Savine, near Troyes (France), funded by the Cambridge women’s colleges of Girton and Newnham and it becomes her role to plan and operate the x-ray facilities. She establishes stereoscopy to localise bullets and shrapnel and introduces the use of x-rays in the diagnosis of gas gangrene, interstitial gas being a mandate for immediate amputation to give any chance of survival.

The hospital is near the front line and, in her own words, by September 1915, “the town had been evacuated, the station had been mined, and we heard the heavy guns ever going at nighttime.” The unit is entirely female, except for two part-time male drivers, and her technical assistant, Mr. Mallett.

They are assigned to the Corps Expéditionnaire d’Orient and ordered to move to Serbia. After boarding the steamship Mossoul in Marseille, they reach Salonika (known as Thessaloniki in modern Greece) on November 3, where they take the night train north to Ghevgheli (now Gevgelija in modern North Macedonia), on the Serbian side of the Greek border. They set up a hospital in an unused silk factory where they treat 100 patients with injuries ranging from frostbite to severe lung and head wounds. Following defeats at the hands of Bulgarian forces, Stoney and her staff retreat to Salonika by December 6, 1916. Eleven days later, they have re-established the hospital on a drained low swamp by the sea, and by New Year’s Day 1917 she has the lights on and the x-rays working. Despite the lack of equipment and resources, she establishes an electrotherapy department and various equipments for the muscular rehabilitation of the soldiers in their care. She also assists with problems on two British hospital ships, on which the x-ray systems have been damaged during a storm and gives support to the SWH unit in Ostrovo (now Arnissa on Lake Vegoritida formerly lake Ostrovo in Northern Greece), which arrives during September 1916. She has a break for sick leave in December 1917 and returns the following summer. She applies for an appointment as an army camp radiologist in Salonika, but her demand is blocked by the War Office.

In October 1917, Stoney returns to France to lead the x-ray departments at the SWH hospitals of Royaumont and Villers-Cotterêts. In March 1918, she has to supervise a camp closure and retreat for the third time, when Villers-Cotterêts is overrun by the German troops. During the final months of the war the fighting intensifies and there is a steep increase in workload. In the month of June alone the x-ray workload peaks at over 1,300, partly because of an increased use of fluoroscopy.

Stoney’s war service is recognised by several countries, and she is awarded the Médaille des épidémies du ministère de la Guerre and the Croix de Guerre from France, the Order of St. Sava from Serbia, and the Victory Medal and British War Medal from Britain.

On returning to England, Stoney takes a post as lecturer in physics in the Household and Social Science department at King’s College for Women which she holds until retirement in 1925. After leaving King’s she moves to Bournemouth, where she lives with her sister Florence, who is suffering from spinal cancer, dying in 1932.

During her retirement, Stoney resumes her work with the BFUW for which she had acted as the first treasurer before the war. She becomes one of the earliest (and oldest) members of the Women’s Engineering Society and plays an active part in the organisation until shortly before her death. She travels widely and, in 1934, she speaks to the Australian Federation of University Women on the subject of women in engineering, highlighting the contribution made by women workers during the war. In 1936, she establishes the Johnstone and Florence Stoney Studentship in the BFUW, for “research in biological, geological, meteorological or radiological science undertaken preferably in Australia, New Zealand or South Africa.” The studentship is now administered by Newnham College, Cambridge, and supports clinical medical students going abroad for their elective period. The declaration of Trust is dated February 11, 1942 and the Johnstone And Florence Stoney Studentship Fund Charity is registered on March 25, 1976.

Stoney dies on June 25, 1938, at age 69, and obituaries are printed in both the scientific and medical press – Nature, The Lancet, The Woman Engineer and national newspapers in England, The Times and Australia.

Stoney is remembered for her considerable bravery and resourcefulness in the face of extreme danger, and her imagination in contributing to clinical care under the most difficult conditions of war. As a strong advocate of education for women, she enables young graduate women to spend time on research overseas and another to enable physicists to enter medical school thanks to the fund she created. Through her work and engagements, she is remembered as a pioneer of medical physics.

(Pictured: Edith Anne Stoney during her time in Cambridge in the early 1890s)


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Birth of Richard Colley Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley

Richard Colley Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley, Anglo-Irish politician and colonial administrator, is born on June 20, 1760, at Dangan Castle, County Meath. He, as governor of Madras (now Chennai) and governor-general of Bengal (both 1797–1805), greatly enlarges the British Empire in India and, as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1821–28, 1833–34), attempts to reconcile Protestants and Roman Catholics in a bitterly divided country. Throughout his life he displays an ever-increasing jealousy of his younger brother Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, despite his own achievements.

Born Richard Colley Wesley, he is the eldest son of Garret Wesley, 1st Earl of Mornington (he changes the family surname to Wellesley in 1789). He is educated at the Royal School, Armagh, Harrow School, Eton College, and Christ Church, Oxford, although he leaves the latter in 1781, following his father’s death, before completing his degree. He enters the Irish House of Commons in 1780 and, after he inherits his father’s Irish titles in 1781, moves to the Irish House of Lords. A moderately liberal disciple of Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, he wins a seat in the British House of Commons in 1784 and serves there until 1797. From 1793 he is a member of the British Privy Council and a commissioner of the India Board of Control.

As Governor-General of India, Wellesley uses military force and diplomacy to strengthen and expand British authority. East India Company forces defeat and kill Tipu Sultan, Indian Muslim ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore (present-day Mysuru) and sympathizer for Revolutionary France, in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War (1799), and he then restores the Hindu dynasty there that had been deposed by Tipu’s father, Hyder Ali. He annexes much territory after his brother Arthur and General Gerard Lake defeat the Maratha Confederacy of states in the Deccan Plateau (peninsular India). In addition, he forces the Oudh State to surrender numerous important cities to the British, and he contracts with other states a series of “subsidiary alliances” by which all parties recognize British preponderance. He receives a barony in the British peerage in 1797 at the time of his appointment as governor-general, and in 1799 he is awarded a marquessate in the Irish peerage for his victory in the Mysore War.

When Wellesley is faced with an invasion by Zaman Shah Durrani, ruler (1793–1800) of Kabul (Afghanistan), he utilizes his envoy, Captain John Malcolm, to induce Fatḥ-Alī Shah Qajar of Qajar Iran to restrain Zaman Shah Durrani and to give British political and commercial interests preference over the French. On receiving a British government order to restore to France its former possessions in India, he refuses to comply. His policy is vindicated when the Treaty of Amiens (1802) is violated, and Great Britain resumes war against Napoleonic France.

Wellesley’s annexations and the vast military expenditure that he had authorized alarms the court of directors of the East India Company. In 1805, he is recalled, and soon afterward he is threatened with impeachment, although two years later he refuses an offer of the foreign secretaryship. In 1809, he goes to Spain to make diplomatic arrangements for the Peninsular War against France and later that year becomes foreign secretary under Prime Minister Spencer Perceval. In that office he antagonizes his colleagues, who consider him an indolent megalomaniac and welcome his resignation in February 1812. Unlike most of them, however, he had urged a stronger war effort in Spain and had advocated political rights for British Roman Catholics. After Perceval’s assassination on May 11, 1812, he attempts unsuccessfully to form a government at the request of the prince regent (the future King George IV).

As Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Wellesley disappoints the anti-Catholic George IV, and he is about to be removed when his brother, Arthur, is appointed prime minister in January 1828. He then resigns because his brother is opposed to Roman Catholic emancipation, although the duke is constrained to accept that policy as a political necessity in 1829. His second term as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1833–34) ends with the fall of Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey’s reform government. When the Whig Party returns to power in April 1835, he is not sent back to Ireland, and in his rage, he threatens to shoot the prime minister, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne. He wants to be created Duke of Hindustan so that his rank will equal that of his brother.

Wellesley dies at the age of 82 on September 26, 1842, at Knightsbridge, London. He is buried in Eton College Chapel, at his old school. He and Arthur, after a long estrangement, had been once more on friendly terms for some years. Arthur weeps at the funeral and says that he knows of no honour greater than being Lord Wellesley’s brother.

Wellesley’s library is sold at auction in London by R. H. Evans on January 17, 1843 (and three following days); a copy of the catalogue, annotated with prices and buyers’ names, is held at Cambridge University Library.

Wellesley has several children, including three sons, but none are legitimate. The marquessate thus becomes extinct upon his death. The earldom of Mornington goes to his next surviving brother, William Wellesley-Pole.

(From: “Richard Colley Wellesley, Marquess Wellesley, British statesman,” written and fact-checked by the Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com, April 2024 | Pictured: “Richard Colley Wellesley, Marquess of Wellesley (1760-1842),” oil on canvas portrait by Thomas Lawrence, 1812-13)


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Death of Andrew O’Connor, American Irish Sculptor

Andrew O’Connor, American Irish sculptor whose work is represented in museums in the United States, Ireland, Britain and France, dies in Dublin on June 9, 1941.

O’Connor is born on June 7, 1874, at Worcester, Massachusetts, the eldest of three sons and two daughters of Andrew O’Connor, a stonecutter from Lanarkshire, Scotland, who becomes a professional sculptor, and Marie Anne O’Connor (née McFadden), of County Antrim. Educated in Worcester public schools, at the age of 14 he becomes apprenticed to his father, helping him to design monuments for cemeteries. He is employed in the early 1890s on sculptural work for the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago World’s Fair), being active in the studio of William Ordway Partridge, and assisting Daniel Chester French on his colossal Statue of the Republic, a landmark of the 1893 Columbian exposition.

Moving to London (1894–98), O’Connor works on bas-reliefs in the studio of the painter John Singer Sargent, who uses him as a model for his mural Frieze of Prophets for the Boston Public Library. His first independent work, Sea Dreams, a relief of a head, is exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1896. Returning to the United States (1898–1903), he becomes a studio assistant of French, through whom he receives his first public commission, for the Vanderbilt Memorial Doors for St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, Manhattan, New York, a project completed in 1902 to wide critical acclaim. He also executes the tympanum and lateral friezes.

Around 1900, O’Connor marries an artist’s model named Nora, by whom he has a daughter. In 1902, he hires as studio model Jessie Phoebe Brown from New Jersey and of County Down parentage. The following year he elopes with her to Paris, where they marry and have four sons, the youngest of whom, Patrick O’Connor, becomes an artist and gallery curator. Jessie continues for many years as his primary model, sitting for the heads of both female and male figures, O’Connor coarsening the features for the latter.

During his years in Paris (1903–14), O’Connor is influenced by the work of Auguste Rodin, whom he befriends. Among his pupils in Paris is the American sculptor and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt Whitney. He continues to fulfil numerous commissions for funerary and public monuments in the United States, an example of the former being the Recuillement in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, near Tarrytown, New York. From 1906 he exhibits annually at the Salon in Paris, where he is the first foreigner to win a second-class medal, for his bronze statue of Gen. Henry Lawton. Included in his only exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy (1907) is a bronze relief of the prophet Nehemiah adapted from a panel of the Vanderbilt doors. The relief is subsequently included in his one-man show at the Galerie Hébrard, Paris in 1909.

In 1909, O’Connor wins a competition open to sculptors of Irish descent to execute a monument to Commodore John Barry, the County Wexford-born “father of the American navy,” for Washington, D.C. His design includes a frieze depicting events in Irish history, flanked by a group of three nude Irish emigrants entitled Exile from Ireland, and another group representing the Genius of Ireland, which includes a female figure of the “Motherland.” Probably owing to opposition from the Barry family to the depiction of their ancestor as a rough-and-ready sailor, the commission is not completed. His marble statue of Gen. Lew Wallace (author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ), a plaster of which is exhibited at the Salon in Paris in 1909, is placed by the state of Indiana in the National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol, Washington, D.C. Another marble, Peace by Justice, is commissioned as a gift from the United States to the Peace Palace in The Hague in 1913.

O’Connor returns with his family to the United States on the outbreak of World War I, and sets up a studio in Paxton, Massachusetts. In 1918, his standing statue of the youthful Abraham Lincoln is placed outside the Illinois State Capitol at Springfield, Illinois. He later presents a marble head of Lincoln to the American ambassador’s residence, Phoenix Park, Dublin. His memorial in Chicago to President Theodore Roosevelt (1919) is commissioned as a tribute to Roosevelt’s associations with the Boy Scouts of America. The design of four standing scouts, modelled on O’Connor’s sons, is exhibited at the Philadelphia Art Alliance in 1920. He becomes an associate of the National Academy of Design, New York in 1919. In the early 1920s he executes an equestrian statue of the Marquis de Lafayette for South Park, at Mount Vernon, Baltimore, Maryland.

Returning to Paris in the mid-1920s, O’Connor becomes the first foreigner to win a gold medal at the Salon des Artistes in 1928, for the marble sculpture Tristan and Iseult, now held in the Brooklyn Museum, New York. The French government makes him a Chevalier of the National Order of the Legion of Honour in 1929. In 1926 he had exhibited a plaster group, Monument aux morts de la Grande Guerre, at the Salon in Paris. The sculpture is requested in 1932 by the people of Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin, as a memorial to Christ the King, O’Connor obligingly altering the interpretation of his iconography. Imposed on a “Tree of life” are three figures of Christ, representing in turn “Desolation,” “Consolation” and “Triumph.” Cast in bronze, throughout World War II the statue remains hidden in Paris to avoid its being melted down for the valuable metal. Transported to Dún Laoghaire in 1949, due to clerical opposition to its unconventional iconography, it is not at first erected, but for years lay on its side in a garden in Rochestown Avenue until its eventual unveiling in 1978 as Triple Cross in Haigh Terrace, where it stands in Moran Park. His other chief work in Ireland is a bronze statue of Daniel O’Connell in the Bank of Ireland, College Green, Dublin. Inspired by Rodin’s famous Monument to Balzac, the work is executed at his studio in a converted stable at Leixlip Castle, County Kildare in 1931–32.

During the 1930s, O’Connor lives and works in London and Ireland, where he has residences at Glencullen House, County Wicklow, and 77 Merrion Square, Dublin. He dies at the latter address on June 9, 1941, and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery. His own bronze relief, Le feu sacré, marks the grave. A portrait painting, executed by his son Patrick in 1940, is in Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, which also holds twenty-six sculptures presented by O’Connor late in his life, and posthumously by his family. The collection includes a marble self-portrait bust of 1940, a bronze of the Lafayette cast by the gallery in 1984 from a reduced plaster model presented by the artist, and a bronze group entitled The Victim, on view in Merrion Square Park, from an uncommissioned and uncompleted war memorial conceived by O’Connor under the general title Le Débarquement. The National Gallery of Ireland has the Desolation maquette for the Triple Cross. A centenary exhibition of his work is held at Trinity College Dublin in 1974. His widow dies in Dublin in 1974.

(From: “O’Connor, Andrew” by Lawrence William White and Carmel Doyle, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Birth of Ernie O’Malley, Republican Revolutionary & Writer

Ernest Bernard (Ernie) O’Malley, Irish republican revolutionary and writer, is born on May 26, 1897, in Ellison Street, Castlebar, County Mayo, the second child among nine sons and two daughters of Luke Malley, solicitor’s clerk, of County Mayo, and Marion Malley (née Kearney) of County Roscommon. Christened Ernest Bernard Malley, his adoption of variations on this name reflects his enthusiasm for a distinctively Irish identity – an enthusiasm that lay at the heart of his republican career and outlook.

In 1906, O’Malley’s family moves to Dublin, where he attends the Christian Brothers‘ School, North Richmond Street. In 1915, he begins to study medicine at University College Dublin (UCD). Having initially intended to follow his older brother into the British Army, he rather joins the Irish Volunteers in the wake of the 1916 Easter Rising, as a member of F Company, 1st Battalion, Dublin Brigade. He becomes a leading figure in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish War of Independence which the Easter Rising helps to occasion. In 1918, having twice failed his second-year university examination, he leaves home to commit himself to the republican cause. He is initially a Volunteer organiser with the rank of second lieutenant, under the instruction of Richard Mulcahy, operating in Counties Tyrone, Offaly, Roscommon, and Donegal. His work in 1918 involves the reorganisation, or new establishment, of Volunteer groups in the localities.

In August 1918, O’Malley is sent to London by Michael Collins to buy arms. During 1919 he works as an IRA staff captain attached to General Headquarters (GHQ) in Dublin, and also trains and organises Volunteers in Counties Clare, Tipperary, and Dublin. He has a notable military record with the IRA during the Irish War of Independence and is a leading figure in attacks on Hollyford barracks in County Tipperary (May 1920), Drangan barracks in County Kilkenny (June 1920), and Rearcross barracks in County Tipperary (July 1920). His IRA days thus involve him with comrades such as Dan Breen, Séumas Robinson, and Seán Treacy. In December 1920, he is captured in County Kilkenny by Crown forces. He escapes from Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol in February 1921, to take command of the IRA’s 2nd Southern Division, holding the rank of commandant-general.

O’Malley’s republican commitment has political roots in his conviction that Ireland should properly be fully independent of Britain, and that violence is a necessary means to achieve this end. But the causes underlying his revolutionism are layered. Family expectations of respectable, professional employment combined with a religious background and an enthusiasm for soldiering provide some of the foundations for his IRA career. As an IRA officer he enjoys professional, military expression for a visceral Catholic Irish nationalism. He also finds excitement, liberation from the frequent dullness of his life at home, defiant rebellion against his non-republican parents, an alternative to his stalled undergraduate career, and, in political and cultural Irish separatism, a decisive resolution of the profound tension between his anglocentrism and his anglophobia.

O’Malley rejects the 1921 Anglo–Irish Treaty as an unacceptable compromise. He spends the 1921 truce period training IRA officers in his divisional area, in preparation for a possible renewal of fighting. He is, in the event, to be a leading anti-treatyite in the 1922–23 Irish Civil War. In the Four Courts in 1922, at the start of the latter conflict, he is captured on the republicans’ capitulation on June 30 but then manages to escape from captivity. Subsequently he is appointed assistant Chief of Staff of the anti-Treaty IRA and also becomes part of a five-man anti-Treaty army council, along with Liam Lynch, Liam Deasy, Frank Aiken and Thomas Derrig.

O’Malley is dramatically captured and badly wounded by Free State forces in Dublin in November 1922. Imprisoned until July 1924, he is during the period of his incarceration elected as a TD for Dublin North in the 1923 Irish general election and is also a forty-one-day participant in the republican hunger strike later that year. Following release from prison, he returns home to live with his parents in Dublin. He decides not to focus his post-revolutionary energy on a political career. During 1926–28 and 1935–37 he unsuccessfully tries to complete his medical degree at UCD, but increasingly his post-1924 efforts are directed toward life as a Bohemian traveler and writer. He spends much of 1924–26 on a recuperative journey through France, Spain, and Italy; and 1928–35 traveling widely in North America. During 1929–32 he spends time in New Mexico and Mexico City. In Taos, New Mexico, he mixes with, and is influenced by, writers and artists as he works on what are to become classic autobiographies of the Irish revolution: On Another Man’s Wound (1936) and The Singing Flame (1978).

O’Malley meets Helen Hooker, daughter of Elon and Blanche Hooker, in Connecticut in 1933. They marry in London in 1935, each rejecting something of their prior lives in the process: he, his Irish republicanism, through marriage to somebody entirely unconnected with that world; she, her wealthy and respectable upbringing, through liaison with a Catholic, Irish, unemployed, bohemian ex-revolutionary. They settle first in Dublin then, from 1938 onward, primarily in County Mayo. Burrishoole Lodge, near Newport, is his main base until 1954, when he moves to Dublin. Three children are born to the O’Malleys: Cahal (1936), Etáin (1940), and Cormac (1942). Sharing enthusiasm for the arts, he and Helen enjoy several years of intimacy. However, by the mid-1940s their relationship has frayed. In 1950, Helen kidnaps (the word is used by both parents and by all three children) the couple’s elder two children and takes them to the United States. From there she divorces O’Malley in 1952. Cormac remains with his father.

O’Malley’s post-American years are devoted to a number of projects. He writes extensively, including work for The Bell and Horizon. He is involved with the film director John Ford in the making of his Irish films, including The Quiet Man (1952). He gives radio broadcasts on Mexican painting for BBC Third Programme (1947), and on his IRA adventures for Radio Éireann (1953). In the latter year he suffers a heart attack, and his remaining years are scarred by ill health. He dies of heart failure on March 25, 1957, in Howth, County Dublin, at the house of his sister Kathleen. Two days later he is given a state funeral with full military honours. He is buried in the Malley family plot in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.

O’Malley exemplifies some important themes in modern Irish political and intellectual history. His powerful memoirs form part of a tradition of writing absorbedly about Ireland, while under idiosyncratic emigrant influences which lend the writing much of its distinctiveness. His aggressive republicanism exemplifies a persistent but ultimately unrealisable tradition of uncompromising IRA politics. His unflinching single-mindedness is the condition for much courageous and striking activity, but also lay behind his infliction and his suffering of much pain. Literary, intellectual, and defiantly dissident, he is the classic bohemian revolutionary. His historical significance lies in his having been both a leading Irish revolutionary and the author of compelling autobiographical accounts of those years. His memoirs are distinguished from their rivals on the shelf by subtlety, self-consciousness, and literary ambition. In particular, his preparedness to identify motives for Irish revolutionary action, beyond the terms of ostensible republican purpose, renders his writing of great value to historians. Similarly, the large body of archival material left in his name (especially, perhaps, the papers held in UCD archives, and those in the private possession of his children) leaves scholars in his debt. The most striking and evocative visual images of O’Malley are, arguably, the set of photographic portraits taken in 1929 by Edward Weston and held at the University of Arizona‘s Center for Creative Photography (CCP). These capture with precision his reflective concentration, his piercing earnestness, and his troubled intensity.

(From: “O’Malley, Ernest Bernard (‘Ernie’)” by Richard English, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: Photograph of Ernie O’Malley taken by Helen Hooker, New York City, 1934)


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Birth of Michael Doheny, Writer, Lawyer & Co-founder of the IRB

Michael Doheny, Irish writer, lawyer, member of the Young Ireland movement, and co-founder of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), is born on May 22, 1805, at Brookhill, parish of Fethard, County Tipperary, the second son of Michael Doheny of Brookhill, a small farmer, and Ellen Doheny (née Keley).

Doheny receives a rudimentary education from an itinerant scholar while labouring on his father’s holding, and in 1826 attends Maher’s classical academy near Emly for nine months. Educating himself in the late 1820s and early 1830s while teaching the children of local farmers, he determines on a career in law to help secure political redress for the disenfranchised poor. He is admitted to Gray’s Inn in November 1834, enters the King’s Inns, Dublin, in 1835 and is called to the Irish bar in 1838. Settling later that year in Cashel, County Tipperary, he first practises in the local courts and then on the southern circuit. Appointed legal assessor to the borough of Cashel under the Municipal Corporations (Ireland) Act 1840, he successfully prosecutes former borough officers for misappropriation of funds and fraudulent transfer of property, winning wider attention. He had supported the campaign for repeal in the early 1830s, and in 1841 joins Daniel O’Connell‘s Repeal Association, becoming active in forming temperance bands and setting up town meetings. By May 1841 he is on the association’s general committee. O’Connell finds him less tractable than most and is ruffled by his queries into the association’s financial management.

During 1842 Doheny begins to associate with the more militant members of the repeal movement such as Thomas Davis. There is a marked gap in age and class between Doheny and most of this group and some look down on his lack of refinement. Others, however, admire his zeal and sincerity, and an anonymous colleague describes him as “rough, generous, bold, a son of the soil, slovenly in dress, red-haired and red-featured, but a true personification of the hopes, passions, and traditions of the people.” Assisting in the launch of The Nation in October 1842, he is chagrined to find most of his articles rejected as unfit for publication, although fifteen are published between January 1843 and September 1844. He also publishes a competent History of the American Revolution (1846) for The Nation‘s “Library of Ireland” series. More impressive as a speaker than a writer, he contributes regularly to repeal meetings at Conciliation Hall, Burgh Quay, Dublin. He enthuses at the apparent martial potential of the immense, ordered crowds attending the “monster” repeal meetings of 1843, and is one of the main organisers of the Cashel meeting of May 31, 1843, at which he is loudly cheered. However, his later claim to have deliberately set up these meetings, with Davis and John Blake Dillon, on quasi-military lines in order to prepare the peasantry for a future war with Britain, is far-fetched. His opposition to O’Connell’s decision to submit to proclamation of the proposed meeting of October 8, 1843, at Clontarf again greatly irritates O’Connell.

An active member of the Repeal Association parliamentary committee from February 1844, in February and March 1845 Doheny chairs a sub-committee of five senior barristers investigating the legality of withdrawal from the House of Commons by the body of repeal MPs, coming “reluctantly” to the verdict that such an action is open to criminal prosecution. O’Connell’s gruff dismissal of his report testifies to their awkward relationship. He further vexes O’Connell by his advocacy of non-denominational university education during debates over the Maynooth College Act 1845. Irrevocable divisions between the Young Irelanders and O’Connell open up between April and July 1846 when Doheny leads calls for endorsement of the conduct of William Smith O’Brien – imprisoned for a month for refusal to serve on a parliamentary committee – and voices Young Ireland’s martial convictions in a speech at Liverpool. After the secession of the Young Irelanders from the Repeal Association in July 1846, he opposes attempts at reconciliation and is one of the founders of the Irish Confederation on January 13, 1847.

During the summer of 1847, Doheny begins setting up “Confederate Clubs” in east Tipperary and aids James Fintan Lalor in organising a failed tenant league meeting at Holycross, County Tipperary, on September 19. He is one of the few Young Irelanders attracted to Lalor’s revolutionary agrarian philosophy, but supports Smith O’Brien against John Mitchel in January 1848, deploring irresponsible demands for insurrection. However, after Mitchel’s conviction for treason felony in May, he supports armed action. Arrested for seditious speechmaking at Cashel on July 12, he is bailed on July 20. During the confused period of “rebellion” in late July, he attempts to organise the peasantry in Tipperary but is frustrated by O’Brien’s vacillation.

After the collapse of the armed adventure at Ballingarry on July 31, Doheny takes refuge near Slievenamon and, with James Stephens, eludes pursuit for nearly two months, until he finally escapes, disguised as a clergyman, on a cattle-ship from Cork to Bristol. Some days later he reaches Paris, where he stays for two months with Stephens and John O’Mahony before leaving for New York City. Practising law in New York, he dedicates himself to the development of an Irish American republican movement. Tensions between conservative and radical Young Ireland exiles, perhaps aggravated by social snobbery, surface by late 1849, when he is arrested for attempting to push Thomas D’Arcy McGee into an open cellar on a New York street, angered by accusations of boasting, drunkenness, and incompetence. Similar criticisms are made by John Blake Dillon and appear to have some foundation.

Doheny finds time to write The Felon’s Track (1849), a polemical account of the repeal agitation and the 1848 insurrection that is highly critical of O’Connell. Despite a rambling narrative, it becomes a popular work and is reprinted several times. He also gives several lectures on historical and literary subjects to Irish American societies and contributes a memoir on Geoffrey Keating to O’Mahony’s translation (1857) of Foras Feasa ar Éirinn.

Involved with the New York Irish militia from his arrival, he is elected lieutenant colonel of the 69th Infantry Regiment in November 1851, and in September 1852 becomes colonel of a new regiment, the Irish Republican Rifles. These formations are often wracked by dissension over strategy and leadership, and in February 1856 he and O’Mahony found the Emmet Monument Association, planning to mobilise an Irish American force to invade Ireland. Efforts to acquire Russian backing fails on the close of the Crimean War in March 1857.

In autumn 1857, Doheny and O’Mahony make overtures to James Stephens to reorganise the republican movement in Ireland, and in March 1858 they accept Stephens’s demands for undisputed authority there, though by the winter of 1858–59 Doheny shows increasing distrust of Stephens’s ambitions. Adopting the organisational structure set out by Stephens in establishing the IRB in 1858, he and O’Mahony found the American equivalent, the Fenian Brotherhood, in early 1859, although he plays a subordinate part. In July 1859, he founds and edits a short-lived newspaper in New York, The Phoenix, to promote Fenian ideals. Active in opposing the national petition for self-government of 1860–61, he argues that Britain will only yield to force. He assists in making preparations for the funeral of Terence Bellew MacManus in Ireland and acts as one of the pallbearers in New York. Travelling to Ireland in October 1861, he appears to argue for using the excitement engendered by the funeral to spark an insurrection in Dublin but is thwarted by Stephens.

Doheny dies suddenly on April 1, 1862, in New York and is buried in Calvary Cemetery in the city’s borough of Queens.

(From: “Doheny, Michael” by James Quinn and Desmond McCabe, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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The First Famine Ship Arrives at Grosse Île

The Syria, the first ship to arrive during what Québécois call the “Summer of Sorrow,” lands at the Canadian quarantine station in the St. Lawrence River, just north of Quebec on May 15, 1847.

When the authorities in Quebec hear the news of ships arriving with sick passengers, they quickly set up Grosse Île as a port of entry and quarantine station at which all ships are required to dock before moving on to the mainland. The island had dealt with epidemics before. In 1830, about 30,000 immigrants arrived in Quebec, and two-thirds were Irish. These huge waves of immigration were concurrent with cholera epidemics in Great Britain and Europe.

Areas in the west of Ireland – mostly Mayo, Donegal, and Galway – are experiencing potato crop failure. In fact, the crop fails to various degrees all over the country throughout the 1830s, though no one is sure exactly when the blight that caused the successive crop failures of 1845-49 arrived in Ireland. In 1847, 100,000 Irish people travel to Grosse Île to escape starvation, unaware of the hardships they will encounter upon arrival.

The Syria, the first “coffin ship,” named for their crowded and deadly conditions, arrives on May 17, 1847, the ice still an inch thick on the river. Of the ship’s 241 passengers, 84 are stricken with fever and 9 died on board during the Atlantic crossing. The first victim dies on the day the Syria arrives. Her name is Ellen Kane, a four-year-old from Kilmore, County Mayo.

With the hospital equipped for only 150 cases of fever, the situation quickly spins out of control. More and more ships arrive at Grosse Île each day, sometimes lining up for miles down the St. Lawrence River throughout the summer. On these coffin ships the number of passengers stricken by fever increases exponentially.

The island is ill-equipped, to say the least. Hastily built, the quarantine hospitals lack proper sanitation, supplies, and space to accommodate all the sick patients. Many of the doctors dispatched to Grosse Île have never even seen the effects of cholera let alone treated it, and all are overworked. Being taken to a quarantine hospital is soon viewed as more of a death sentence than an opportunity to get better.

Between 1832 and 1937, Grosse Île’s term of operation, the official register lists 7,480 burials on the island. In 1847 alone, 5,424 burials take place, the majority are Irish immigrants. In that same year, over 5,000 Irish people on ships bound for Canada are listed as having been buried at sea.

Today, the island is a National Historic Site that serves as a Famine memorial. It is dedicated in 1996 after a four-year-long campaign to protect the mass gravesite.

The Grosse Île Celtic Cross, erected by the Ancient Order of Hibernians in 1909, bears an inscription in Irish commemorating the victims of the epidemic and condemning colonial rule. In English, it reads: “Children of the Gael died in their thousands on this island having fled from the laws of foreign tyrants and an artificial famine in the years 1847-48. God’s blessing on them. Let this monument be a token and honor from the Gaels of America. God Save Ireland.”

(From: “When 40 Irish Famine ships anchored at Grosse Île quarantine station in 1847” by Aliah O’Neill, IrishCentral, http://www.irishcentral.com, May 31, 2023)


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Death of Seán Ó Faoláin, Short Story Writer

Seán Proinsias Ó Faoláin, short story writer of international repute and one of the most influential figures in 20th-century Irish culture, dies in Dublin on April 20, 1991. He is also a leading commentator and critic.

Ó Faoláin is born John Francis Whelan in Cork, County Cork, on February 27, 1900. He is educated at the Presentation Brothers College secondary school in Cork. He comes under the influence of Daniel Corkery, joining the Cork Dramatic Society, and increasing his knowledge of the Irish language, which he had begun in school. Shortly after entering University College Cork (UCC), he joins the Irish Volunteers and fights in the Irish War of Independence. During the Irish Civil War, he serves as censor for The Cork Examiner and as publicity director for the Irish Republican Army (IRA). After the Republican loss, he receives MA degrees from the National University of Ireland (NUI) and from Harvard University where he studies for three years. He is a Commonwealth Fellow from 1926 to 1928 and is a Harvard Fellow from 1928 to 1929.

Ó Faoláin writes his first stories in the 1920s, eventually completing ninety stories over a period of sixty years. From 1929 to 1933 he lectures at the Catholic college, St. Mary’s College, at Strawberry Hill, London, during which period he writes his first two books. His first book, Midsummer Night Madness, is published in 1932. It is a collection of stories partly based on his Civil War experiences. He afterward returns to Ireland. He publishes four novels, seven additional volumes of short stories, six biographies, three travel books, a play, a memoir, a history book, translations and literary criticism, including one of the rare full-length studies of the short story, The Short Story (1948). He also writes a cultural history, The Irish, in 1947. His last short story volume, Foreign Affairs, is published in 1976. His Collected Stories is published in 1983.

Ó Faoláin produces critical studies of the novel and the short-story form, introduces texts of historical and literary merit, and contributes scores of articles, reviews, and uncollected stories to periodicals in Ireland, Britain, and the United States.

Ó Faoláin is a founder member and editor of the Irish literary periodical The Bell from 1940 to 1946. Under his editorship, The Bell participates in many key debates of the day. It also provides a crucial outlet for established and emerging writers during the lean war years. The list of contributors to The Bell include many of Ireland’s foremost writers, among them Patrick Kavanagh, Patrick Swift, Flann O’Brien, Frank O’Connor and Brendan Behan.

A recurring thread in Ó Faoláin’s work is the idea that national identities are historically produced and culturally hybrid; an additional thesis is that Irish history should be conceived in international terms, and that it should be read, in particular, in the context of social and intellectual developments across Europe.

Ó Faoláin serves as director of the Arts Council of Ireland from 1956 to 1959.

Ó Faoláin marries Eileen Gould, a children’s book writer who publishes several books of Irish folk tales, in 1929. They have two children: Julia (1932–2020), who becomes a Booker-nominated novelist and short story writer, and Stephen (b. 1938).

Ó Faoláin dies in Dublin at the age of 91 on April 20, 1991.

Ó Faoláin is a controversial figure in his own lifetime and two of his books are banned for “indecency” in Ireland — his debut collection of short stories and his second novel, Bird Alone (1936). His legacy has proven divisive. If some consider him a social liberal cosmopolitan who challenges “proscriptive” definitions of Irish culture, others see him as a chauvinistic snob who paradoxically restricts the development of Irish writing. Proto-revisionist or nascent postcolonial, O’Faoláin has been considered both, sometimes within the same critical survey. Either way, his work is central to the evolution of a post–Literary Revival aesthetic, and his voice is one of the most prominent, and eloquent, in the fight against censorship in Ireland.

(Pictured: Portrait of Seán Ó Faoláin by Howard Coster, 1930s, National Portrait Gallery)


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Death of Matilda Tone, Wife of Theobald Wolfe Tone

Matilda Tone, wife of Theobald Wolfe Tone, dies in Georgetown, District of Columbia, on March 18, 1849. She is instrumental in the preservation and publication of Wolfe Tone’s papers.

Tone is born Martha Witherington in Dublin on June 17, 1769. She is the eldest daughter of merchant William Witherington and his wife Catherine (née Fanning). Her father is listed as a woolen draper on Grafton Street, Dublin, from 1768 to 1784, as a wine merchant from 1784 to 1788, and finally as a merchant from 1788 to 1793. It is claimed that he is a lieutenant in the Royal Navy and sits on the merchants’ guild on Dublin’s common council from 1777 to 1783. Her mother is a housekeeper to her father after he is widowed.

Tone receives a good education and maintains an interest in drama and literature throughout her life. Katherine Wilmot visits her in Paris in 1802 and comments on the books she has by French, Italian and English authors. When she is fifteen years old, she gets to know Wolfe Tone through her older brother. He is still a student in Trinity College Dublin, and it is he that renames her Matilda. They marry when she is just sixteen, on July 21, 1785, in St. Ann’s Church, Dublin, honeymooning in Maynooth. Upon their return they live with the Witheringtons, though they are not on good terms, and then with Wolfe Tone’s parents in Bodenstown, County Kildare.

The Tone’s first child, Maria, is born before October 1786. She is followed by a son, Richard, who is named for their neighbour Richard Griffith, who dies in infancy. Tone stays with her husband’s family while he is studying for the bar in London from 1787 to 1788. When he returns, the couple has two more sons: William Theobald Wolfe Tone, born on April 29, 1791, and Francis Rawdon Tone, born on June 23, 1793. Francis is known as Frank and is named after Francis Rawdon-Hastings. William is born in Dublin and Frank is probably born in Bodenstown. By this time, the family has a cottage in Bodenstown which Wolfe Tone had inherited from his uncle Jonathan Tone, which the family jokingly refers to as Château Boue. They live there until May 1795, when they leave for Princeton, New Jersey, due to political reasons.

Tone and her children come back to Europe to join Wolfe Tone in France eighteen months later. The family settles in Paris, at first living with Colonel Henry Shee at Nanterre, later moving to the suburb, Chaillot. She educates her children at home. Very few of her letters survive, but many of her husband’s letters and diaries are addressed or intended for her. From these and her letter to her friend Eliza Fletcher, it is clear she shares her husband’s interest in politics. Following her husband’s death in November 1798, she moves to a small apartment at 51 Rue Saint-Jacques in the Latin Quarter of Paris. This is to be close to her son William, who is attending Lycée Louis-le-Grand. She is awarded a pension of 1,200 francs for herself and 400 for each of her children after the expiration of the Treaty of Amiens on May 1, 1803.

Tone’s daughter Maria dies in April 1803, and then her son Frank dies in 1807, both of tuberculosis. William is displaying symptoms of the disease as well, which prompts her to move to the United States in 1807. From there, they attempt to sort out her husband’s affairs, which had been entrusted to James Reynolds. They retrieve only a few of Wolfe Tone’s pre-1795 diaries, and all of the post-1795 letters and diaries, which they add to the autobiography she already has in her possession. When William enters the Cavalry School at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in November 1810 as a cadet, she moves to be close to him, living at the Hôtel de la Surintendance. By approaching Napoleon in 1811, who knew Wolfe Tone, she ensures that her son receives French citizenship and the privileged status of “élève du gouvernement.” In January 1813, when William begins his service, she returns to Paris to live on the Rue de Lille and later moves to the Latin Quarter.

Following the defeat of Napoleon in June 1815, William is refused entry to Ireland or to visit Britain. This leads to both mother and son returning to the United States. Before she leaves Paris, she marries her old friend Thomas Wilson on August 19, 1816. Wilson is a Scottish businessman and advocate who has taken care of her financial affairs after the death of her husband. The couple visit Scotland, and then move to New York City in 1817, and finally to Georgetown, District of Columbia, around 1820. She lives there until her death and calls herself Matilda Tone-Wilson.

Starting in 1824, The New Monthly Magazine begins the unauthorised publication of extracts from Wolfe Tone’s autobiography. In response, Tone decides to publish all of Wolfe Tone’s papers and writing, including the autobiography, pamphlets and diaries, edited by their son William. What results is two large volumes entitled the Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone, published in May 1826. She adds a memoir of her own life in Paris following his death in 1798. The book is a best-seller, and ensures the legacy of Wolfe Tone, as well as being an important contemporary document of both Irish and French revolutionary politics.

William Tone dies in 1828, after which Tone lives more privately. She dies in Georgetown on March 18, 1849. Thomas Wilson predeceases her in 1824. Just two weeks prior to her death she is interviewed by a Young Irelander, Charles Hart. She is initially buried near William Tone at Marbury burying-ground, Georgetown. After that cemetery is sold, she is reinterred in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York, on October 31, 1891, by her great-grandchildren. A new monument is dedicated to her, which is later restored in 1996.