seamus dubhghaill

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

Tag Archives: Harrods (department store)


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Death of Cathal Gannon, Harpsichord Maher & Fortepiano Restorer

Cathal Gannon, harpsichord maker, a fortepiano restorer and an amateur horologist, dies on May 23, 1999.

Gannon is born on August 1, 1910, in Harold’s Cross, Dublin, into a craftsmen family of carpenters, many of whom worked in the famous Guinness Brewery. His education, in two local schools, is rudimentary and at the age of fifteen he starts working as an apprentice carpenter in the Guinness Brewery. His apprenticeship involves learning to make office furniture and attending evening classes in nearby colleges, where he is able to improve his education in a more congenial atmosphere. A love of music and the arts had been encouraged by two maiden aunts. His parents subsequently purchase an upright piano and he learns to play it at the Read Pianoforte School. When his apprenticeship is completed and he is on the dole for some years, he spends much of his spare time buying pictures, books, antiques and old clocks and watches in the various auction rooms and antique shops in Dublin.

During the mid-1930s, Gannon becomes a member of several Dublin-based societies, most notably the Old Dublin Society, and there befriends well-known people such as Grace Plunkett (née Gifford), the widow of Joseph Mary Plunkett, who had been executed following the Easter Rising of 1916. At around this time, he is also introduced to Carl Hardebeck, an arranger of Irish traditional music. At a later stage in his life, he meets Desmond Guinness and his wife Mariga, founders of the Irish Georgian Society, which he subsequently joins.

While reading a series of articles about Tibet in a magazine, Gannon stumbles across an article, which, he believes, is by Violet Gordon-Woodhouse, a British harpsichordist and clavichord player of the period. The article is about the revival of the harpsichord, which interests him. He asks permission to examine the harpsichords on display in the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin, but is given no encouragement by the staff. He is finally allowed to see the instruments when he is in his early twenties. Dismayed, he concludes that they are too expensive to buy and too complicated to make.

While on holidays in Glengarriff in the Beara Peninsula of County Cork during August 1936, Gannon meets his future wife, Margaret Key from Harrow, London. They marry in 1942.

In London with Margaret, who is visiting her parents, Gannon goes to the Benton Fletcher collection of keyboard instruments, which is then in Chelsea, and measures a harpsichord by Jacob and Abraham Kirckman. Back home, he makes a copy of the instrument in a tiny conservatory at the back of his house in the Dublin suburb of Rialto. The harpsichord is played by John S. Beckett for the first time in public in 1959 as the continuo for Johann Sebastian Bach‘s St. Matthew Passion and is praised in the national press. Beckett subsequently persuades the authorities in the Guinness Brewery to provide Gannon with a special workshop, in which he makes five harpsichords and restores several antique pianos. The first harpsichord made in the Brewery is donated to the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin. The second is sold to Harrods of London, and the third is sold to Ireland’s national radio and television station RTÉ. This third instrument is used regularly by the RTÉ Symphony and Concert orchestras and also by the well-known composer and performer of Irish traditional music, Seán Ó Riada.

Gannon continues to make many more harpsichords and restore more pianos during the years to come. In all, he completes twenty harpsichords during his lifetime – the final four are completed by a friend, Patrick Horsley, in England. One of the harpsichords made by Gannon-Horsley returns to Ireland and is presented to NUI Maynooth. A piano of note that he restores is a Broadwood square piano owned by the poet and composer, Thomas Moore, which belonged to Lord and Lady Elveden (later Iveagh).

Gannon is the subject of several RTÉ radio programmes, three RTÉ television programmes (including The Late Late Show) and a television programme, Gallery, made by BBC Northern Ireland. He befriends a great many people, including the artist, writer and conservationist Peter Pearson, and regular musical evenings are held at the family home in Bryan Guinness‘s grounds in the suburbs of Dublin. Because of his interest in antique clocks and watches, he becomes a member of the Irish branch of the Antiquarian Horological Society, founded by his friend William Stuart.

In 1978, Trinity College Dublin (TCD) gives Gannon an honorary MA degree for his contribution to the authentic performance of early music in Ireland. Two years later, he is invited to travel with the New Irish Chamber Orchestra to China, where he tunes and maintains one of his harpsichords and celebrates his seventieth birthday. In 1989, a second honorary MA is given to him, this time by NUI Maynooth.

Following Gannon’s 80th birthday, which is attended by fifty people, he finally settles down to retirement. A series of minor strokes follow, which eventually lead to dementia and ultimately to his death, aged 88, on May 23, 1999.

The Cathal Gannon Early Music Room is opened in the Royal Irish Academy of Music in May 2003. It contains a harpsichord and clavichord made by Gannon, a Broadwood grand piano restored by him, and a square piano.

Part of a transmitted RTÉ programme, Nationwide (January 17, 2007), features archive footage of Gannon and his instruments. Three RTÉ radio programmes, Bowman: Sunday Morning, broadcast in November 2006, feature a 1983 interview with Gannon.


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Birth of Patrick Moylett, Businessman & Irish Nationalist

Patrick Moylett, Irish nationalist and successful businessman in County Mayo and County Galway who, during the initial armistice negotiations to end the Irish War of Independence, briefly serves as president of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), is born in Crossmolina, County Mayo, on March 9, 1878. He is a close associate of Arthur Griffith and frequently travels to London acting as a middleman between Sinn Féin and officials in the British government.

Moylett is born into a farming family and emigrates to London as a young man working in various departments in Harrods for five years before returning to Ireland in 1902. He opens a grocery and provisions business in Ballina and, as it proves successful, he later establishes branches in Galway and London between 1910 and 1914. The London-branch is sold at the outbreak of World War I.

Having founded and organised the recruitment and funding of the Mayo activities of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) he also acts as a justice of the Sinn Féin courts. He is advised to leave the area due to death threats from the Black and Tans and their burning down of his commercial premises in Ballina. On one occasion during the period, according to his military statements, he prevents some over-enthusiastic volunteers from attempting to kidnap and assassinate Prince George, Future King of England, who is sailing and holidaying in the Mayo/Donegal region at the time.

Relocating to Dublin, the Irish overseas Trading Company is formed with a former director of Imperial Chemical Industries. Moylett becomes involved in the Irish nationalist movement and is active in the Mayo and Galway areas during the Irish War of Independence. The Irish Overseas Trading Company, of which he is one of two directors, acts as a front for the importation of armaments covered by consignments of trade goods. According to his subsequent detailed military statements archived in the bureau of military history by the Irish Army, the consignments are imported to a number of warehouses in the Dublin Docks with the three keyholders to the warehouses being Éamon de Valera, Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith.

With Harry Boland in the United States with Éamon de Valera, Moylett succeeds him as president of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and, in October 1920, is selected to go to London as the personal envoy of Arthur Griffith. During the next several months, he is involved in secret discussions with British government officials on the recognition of Dáil Éireann, a general amnesty for members of the Irish Republican Army and the organisation of a peace conference to end hostilities between both parties.

Moylett is assisted by John Steele, the London editor of the Chicago Tribune, who helps him contact high-level members of the British Foreign Office. One of these officials, in particular C.J. Phillps, has frequent meetings with him. Discussions center on the possibility of an armistice and amnesty in Ireland with the hope for a settlement in which a national Parliament will be established with safeguards for Unionists of Ulster. These meetings are later attended by H. A. L. Fisher, the President of the Board of Education and one of the most outspoken opponents of unauthorised reprisals against the Irish civilian population by the British government. One of the main points Fisher expresses to Moylett is the necessity of Sinn Féin to compromise on its demands for a free and united republic. His efforts are hindered however, both to the slow and confused pace of the peace negotiations as well as the regularly occurring violence in Ireland, most especially the Bloody Sunday incident on November 21, 1920, which happens while he is in London speaking with members of the cabinet. During the Irish Civil War, although a supporter of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, he chooses not to participate in the Free State government party which he views as an amalgam of Unionists and the old Irish Party. In 1926, he is a founding member of the Clann Éireann party and becomes an early advocate of the withholding of land annuities.

In 1930, Moylett and his family move to Dublin, and by 1940 his political activities in the city have become a concern for the Gardai. He begins moving in antisemitic, pro-German far-right politic circles while in Dublin, engaging with the likes of Gearóid Ó Cuinneagáin and George Griffith. Indeed alongside Griffith, he is deeply involved with the founding of the People’s National Party, an explicitly anti-Jewish Pro-Nazi party whose membership overlaps greatly with that of the Irish Friends of Germany. He leaves the People’s National Party in October 1939 only when he is expelled from the party and his position as treasurer on charges of embezzling party funds. In 1941 he continues to support these far-right groups when he aids Ó Cuinneagáin in setting up the Youth Ireland Association, a group gathered to fight “a campaign against the Jews and Freemasons, also against all cosmopolitan agenda.” When the group is found to be stealing guns from army reservists, the Gardai shuts the group down in September 1942.

Moylett dies on August 14, 1973, at the age of 95 in County Dublin. He is buried in Dean’s Grange Cemetery, Deansgrange, County Dublin.


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Home of British PM Edward Heath Damaged by Bomb

The London home of the Conservative leader and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Edward Heath is damaged from the impact of a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on December 22, 1974. The attack comes just hours before a Christmas ceasefire is due to come into effect. Heath is not at home at the time of the blast but arrives ten minutes later. His housekeeper, Mrs. Crawford, and her daughter are both in the house at the time but are not injured.

The 21-pound bomb breaks glass, smashes the front door and damages the front room. The only damage to anything valuable is to a painting done in the south of France by Sir Winston Churchill. No one initially admits carrying out the attack, but the IRA is immediately suspected.

Witnesses describe seeing a man emerging from a Ford Cortina and throwing what is believed to have been the bomb onto the first-floor balcony of the house. Two policemen and a patrol car chase the vehicle as it drives off. The Cortina crashes a few minutes later in Chelsea and several men flee from the vehicle.

The police are fearful that the explosion is a “come‐on” tactic where an initial smaller bomb is followed by a larger one after the first has attracted crowds. They seal off all streets around the house for several hours. Heath’s home is about half a mile from Harrods, in Knightsbridge, where a more powerful bomb had gone off the previous night as Christmas shoppers were being evacuated.

Heath tells waiting reporters that Prime Minister Harold Wilson had sent him a message which was “very much appreciated.” Addressed “Dear Ted,” Wilson says, “This attack will only strengthen our united resolve to bring these things to justice.”

Heath, who had been conducting a carol service at his hometown of Broadstairs, Kent, carrying an overnight bag is driven off by police to an undisclosed location after his arrival at home. He returns later to inspect the damage with bomb squad chief, Commander Robert Huntley.

Heath says the attack will not deter him from traveling to Ulster the following day for talks with security forces and Ulster political leaders as previously scheduled. As Leader of the Opposition, Heath has a Special Branch police bodyguard with him at all times. The house is under “short” police patrol which means there are extra cars and foot patrols in the area but not directly outside the building.


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Harrods Bombing

harrods-bombing

A Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) car bomb kills six and injures ninety outside London‘s Harrods department store, a large, upmarket department store in the affluent Knightsbridge district near Buckingham Palace on December 17, 1983. The IRA Army Council claims that it has not authorised the attack and expresses regret for the civilian casualties. After the bombing, the IRA changes its tactic to focus on military targets on the mainland.

Harrods had been the target of an earlier IRA bomb on December 21, 1974, which was placed in the northeast corner of the first floor. There was a very short warning, and the store was in the process of being cleared when it exploded. It was also the target of a much smaller IRA bomb almost ten years later, in January 1993, which injured four people.

From 1973 the Provisional IRA has carried out waves of bombing attacks on commercial targets in London and elsewhere in England as part of its “economic war.” The goal is to damage the economy and cause disruption, which would put pressure on the British government to withdraw from Northern Ireland. On December 10, 1983, the IRA carries out its first attack in London in some time when a bomb explodes at the Royal Artillery Barracks, injuring three British soldiers.

One week later, on the afternoon of December 17, IRA members park a car bomb near the side entrance of Harrods, on Hans Crescent. The bomb contains 25 to 30 lbs. of explosives and is set to be detonated by a timer. It is left in a 1972 blue Austin 1300 GT four-door sedan. At 12:44 PM a man using an IRA codeword phones the central London branch of the Samaritans charity. The caller says there is a car bomb outside Harrods and another bomb inside Harrods and gives the car’s registration plate. According to police, he does not give any other description of the car.

The bomb explodes at about 1:21 PM, as four police officers in a car, an officer on foot and a police dog-handler near the suspect vehicle. Three officers and three bystanders are killed, and 90 others are injured, including 14 police officers. The blast damages 24 cars and all five floors on the side of Harrods, sending a shower of glass down onto the street. The police car absorbs much of the blast and this likely prevents further casualties.

Five people die at the scene of the bombing and a sixth later dies in the hospital. The bystanders who die are Philip Geddes (24), a journalist who had heard about the alert and went to the scene, Jasmine Cochrane-Patrick (25) and Kenneth Salvesen (28), a United States citizen. The Metropolitan Police Service officers killed are Sergeant Noel Lane (28) and Constable Jane Arbuthnot (22). A third officer, Inspector Stephen Dodd (34), dies in the hospital from his injuries on December 24. Constable Jon Gordon survives but loses both legs and part of a hand in the blast.

At the time of the explosion, a second warning call is made by the IRA. The caller says that a bomb has been left in the C&A department store at the east end of Oxford Street. Police clear the area and cordon it off, but this claim is found to be false. In the aftermath of the attack, hundreds of extra police and mobile bomb squads are drafted into London. Aleck Craddock, chairman of Harrods, reports that £1 million in turnover has been lost as a result of the bombing. Despite the damage, Harrods re-opens three days later, proclaiming it will not be “defeated by acts of terrorism.” Denis Thatcher, the husband of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, visits the store and tells reporters “no damned Irishman is going to stop me going there.”