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Birth of Evie Hone, Painter & Stained Glass Artist

Eva Sydney Hone RHA, Irish painter and stained glass artist usually known as Evie, is born at Roebuck Grove, County Dublin, on April 22, 1894. She is considered to be an early pioneer of cubism, although her best known works are stained glass. Her most notable pieces are the East Window in the Chapel at Eton College, which depicts the Crucifixion, and My Four Green Fields, which is now in the Government Buildings in Dublin.

Hone is the youngest daughter of Joseph Hone, of the Hone family, and Eva Eleanor (née Robinson), daughter of Sir Henry Robinson and granddaughter of Arthur Annesley, 10th Viscount Valentia. Her mother dies two days after her birth. She is related to artists Nathaniel Hone and Nathaniel Hone the Younger.

Shortly before her twelfth birthday, Hone suffers from polio (infant paralysis), suffering a fall while helping to decorate the Taney parish church for Easter. Her resulting ill health leads to her seeking treatment in Harley Street, Marylebone, Central London. She is educated by a governess, continuing her education in Switzerland, and goes on tours to Spain and Italy before moving to London in 1913. Her three sisters all marry British Army officers, and all are widowed in World War I.

Hone studies at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London and then under Bernard Meninsky at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. She meets Mainie Jellett when both are studying under Walter Sickert at the Westminster Technical Institute. She works under André Lhote and Albert Gleizes in Paris before returning to become influential in the modern movement in Ireland and becoming one of the founders of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. She is considered an early pioneer of Cubism but in the 1930s turns to stained glass, which she studies with Wilhelmina Geddes.

Hone is extremely devout. She spends time in an Anglican Convent in 1925 at Truro in Cornwall and converts to Catholicism in 1937. This possibly influences her decision to begin working in stained glass. Initially, she works as a member of the An Túr Gloine stained glass co-operative before setting up a studio of her own in Rathfarnham.

Hone’s most important works are probably the East Window, depicting the Crucifixion, for the Chapel at Eton College, Windsor (1949–1952) and My Four Green Fields, now located in Government Buildings, Dublin. This latter work, commissioned for the Irish Government’s Pavilion, wins first prize for stained glass in the 1939 New York World’s Fair. It graces CIÉ‘s Head Office in O’Connell Street from 1960 to about 1983. The East Window of Eton College is commissioned following the destruction of the building after a bomb is dropped in 1940 on the school during World War II. She is commissioned to design the East Window in 1949, and the new window is inserted in 1952. This work is featured on an Irish postage stamp in 1969. From December 2005 to June 2006, an exhibition of her work is on display at the National Gallery of Ireland. Saint Mary’s church in Clonsilla also features her stained glass windows.

Despite ill health, Hone continues to produce a huge number of small stained glass panels as well as oils, watercolours, and gouache landscapes. In 1953, she is represented at the Contemporary Irish Art exhibition at Aberystwyth, Wales, and at the Tate gallery in London, receiving as well an honorary LLD from Trinity College Dublin (TCD). In 1954, she is elected an honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA).

Unmarried, Hone dies on March 13, 1955, while entering her parish church at Rathfarnham. She is survived by two of her sisters. Over 20,000 people visit a memorial exhibition of her work at University College Dublin (UCD), Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin, in 1958.

(Pictured: Portrait of Evie Hone by Hilda van Stockum)


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Birth of Thomas Paterson, Historian & Museum Curator

Thomas George Farquhar Paterson, local historian, folklore collector and museum curator, is born on February 29, 1888, in or near Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Paterson is the eldest child in a family of seven sons and one daughter born to John and Rachel (née Farquhar) Paterson. His parents had emigrated from County Armagh, in what is now Northern Ireland. Their first three children are born in Canada, but the family returns to Ireland in the early 1890s, to the family farm in Cornascreeb, five miles south of Portadown, County Armagh. Also known as George, he attends Aghory national school, and leaves at age 14 to be apprenticed to a grocer in Portadown. In 1911, he takes a position in Couser’s, the leading grocery and wine merchant’s business in Armagh. In time becoming the manager, he is acquainted with the local gentry and clergy.

However, the grocery trade is never Paterson’s main interest. From an early age, he is fascinated by the history and folklore of his native place. He becomes an expert on the genealogy of the gentry as well as of the farming families around Armagh, and also collects material on many aspects of Armagh life. His notebooks eventually contain well over a million words of notes on history, archaeology, dialect, folkways and natural history, as well as drawings and plans of traditional houses, fireside accoutrements and farm implements. His knowledge of history, archaeology and natural history is widely recognised, and in 1931 Armagh County Council asks him to become honorary curator of the small museum established by the Armagh Natural History and Philosophical Society. Four years later, he leaves Couser’s and becomes full-time curator of the museum, re-named the Armagh County Museum. He greatly augments and improves the collections, and in the late 1950s oversees the enlargement of the building. His life’s work culminates in the opening of the new building in 1962. He retires a year later at the age of 75.

Paterson’s work wins the respect of scholars, including Emyr Estyn Evans, a lifelong friend, and material that he records has been cited in a wide variety of books and journal articles. Over one hundred citations are listed in a posthumous bibliography in 1972, and since then hundreds of scholarly works have drawn on his published and unpublished material. His manuscripts are in Armagh County Museum, where they form an important resource.

Paterson publishes a book, Country Cracks: Old Tales from the County of Armagh (1939), and a very large number of articles in newspapers and journals, especially in Seanchas Ardmhacha, Ulster Journal of Archaeology and Ulster Folklife. He sometimes uses the pseudonym “Cornascreeb.” He greatly assists researchers interested in the Armagh background of Alexander Campbell and his father Thomas Campbell and is made an honorary member of the Disciples of Christ Historical Society, based in Nashville, Tennessee.

Paterson is a founder member of the committee that re-establishes the Ulster Journal of Archaeology. He is active in local history societies, and for many years is a member of the Ancient Monuments Advisory Council. He records many local sites for the register of ancient monuments. He is a member of the Northern Ireland committee of the National Trust and seeks to preserve Armagh’s architectural heritage and local industrial archaeology. He donates much important archive material to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. He describes and collects folk artefacts, at least thirty years before most academic historians are interested in such objects, and he is a foundation trustee of the Ulster Folk Museum in Cultra, County Down. He is also a member of the first board of the Institute of Irish Studies in Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), from 1965.

Membership of the Royal Irish Academy is an honour not often accorded to someone who has not had a university education, still less to someone who leaves school at the age of 14, but Paterson is elected MRIA in 1941. He is conferred with an honorary MA by QUB in 1944. His service on many public bodies is acknowledged by the award of an Order of the British Empire (OBE).

Paterson never marries and dies in Armagh on April 6, 1971. Hundreds of people contribute to a memorial fund. Some of the money subscribed is used to purchase nineteenth-century drawings for the county museum, and in 1975 the memorial committee also publishes Harvest home: the last sheaf: a selection from the writings of T. G. F. Paterson relating to County Armagh, edited by Emyr Estyn Evans.


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Birth of Hugh Logue, Economist & SDLP Politician

Hugh Anthony Logue, former Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) politician and economist who now works as a commentator on political and economic issues, is born on January 23, 1949, in Derry, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. He is also a director of two renewable energy companies in Europe and the United States. He is the father of author Antonia Logue.

Logue grows up outside the village of Claudy in County Londonderry, the eldest of nine children born to Denis Logue, a bricklayer, and Kathleen (née Devine). He gains a scholarship to St. Columb’s College which he attends from 1961 to 1967. In 1967, he commences at St. Joseph’s Teacher Training college (Queen’s University) in Belfast from which he qualifies as a teacher of Mathematics in 1970. He first comes to prominence as a member of the executive of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), the only SDLP member of the executive. He stands as a candidate in elections to the new Northern Ireland Assembly in 1973 and is elected for Londonderry, at the age of 24, the youngest candidate elected that year. With John Hume and Ivan Cooper, he is arrested by the British Army during a peaceful demonstration in Londonderry in August 1971. Their conviction is ultimately overturned by the Law Lords R. (Hume) v Londonderry Justices (972, N.I.91) requiring the then British Government to introduce retrospective legislation to render legal previous British Army actions in Northern Ireland.

The Northern Ireland State Papers of 1980 show that together with John Hume and Austin Currie, Logue plays a key role in presenting the SDLP’S ‘Three Strands’ approach to the Thatcher Government’s Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Humphrey Atkins in April 1980. The “Three Strands” approach eventually becomes the basis for the Good Friday Agreement. The Irish State papers from 1980 reveal that he is a confidante of the Irish Government of that time, briefing it regularly on the SDLP’s outlook.

Logue is also known for his controversial comments at Trinity College Dublin at the time of the power-sharing Sunningdale Agreement, which many blame for helping to contribute to the Agreement’s defeat, to wit, that: [Sunningdale was] “the vehicle that would trundle Unionists into a united Ireland.” The next line of the controversial speech says, “the speed the vehicle moved at was dependent on the Unionist community.” In an article in The Irish Times in 1997 he claims that this implies that unity is always based on consent and acknowledged by Unionist Spokesman John Laird in the NI Assembly in 1973.

Logue unsuccessfully contests the Londonderry seat in the February 1974 and 1979 Westminster Elections. He is elected to the 1975 Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention and the 1982 Northern Ireland Assembly. He is a member of the New Ireland Forum in 1983. In the 1980s he is a member of the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace and plays a prominent part in its efforts to resolve the 1981 Irish hunger strike. His role is credited in Ten Men Dead: The Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike by David Beresford, Biting the Grave by P. O’Malley and, more recently, in Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-block Hunger Strike (New Island Books, 2016) and Afterlives: The Hunger Strike and the Secret Offer that Changed Irish History (Lilliput Press, 2011) by former Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteer Richard O’Rawe. Following the New Ireland Forum in 1984 and John Hume’s decision to represent the redrawn Londonderry constituency as Foyle and a safe seat, Logue leaves the Dublin-based, National Board for Science and Technology and joins the European Commission in 1984 in Brussels.

Following the 1994 Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire, Logue, along with two EU colleagues, is asked by EU President Jacques Delors to consult widely throughout Northern Ireland and the Border regions and prepare recommendations for a Peace and Reconciliation Fund to underpin the peace process. Their community-based approach becomes the blueprint for the Peace Programme. In 1997, then EU President Jacques Santer asks the team, led by Logue, to return to review the programme and advise for a renewed Peace II programme. Papers published by National University Galway in 2016 from Logue’s archives indicate that he is the originator of the Peace Fund concept within the European Commission.

At the European Commission from 1984 to 1998, Logue creates Science and Technology for Regional Innovation and Development in Europe (STRIDE). In 1992, he is joint author with Giovanni de Gaetano, of RTD potential in the Mezzogiorno of Italy: the role of science parks in a European perspective and, with A. Zabaniotou and University of Thessaloniki, Structural Support For RTD.

Further publications by Logue follow: Research and Rural Regions (1996) and RTD potential in the Objective 1 regions (1997). With the fall of the Berlin Wall, his attention turns to Eastern Europe and in March 1998 publishes a set of studies Impact of the enlargement of the European Union towards central central and Eastern European countries on RTD- Innovation and Structural policies.

Logue convenes the first EU seminar on “Women in Science” in 1993 and jointly publishes with LM Telapessy Women in Scientific and Technological Research in the European Community, highlighting the barriers to women’s advancement in the Research world.

As the former vice-chairman of the North Derry Civil Rights Association, Logue gives evidence at the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday. He is special adviser to the Office of First and Deputy First Minister from 1998 to 2002 and as an official of the European Commission. In 2002–03, he is a fellow of the Institute for British – Irish Studies at University College Dublin (UCD). In July 2006, he is appointed as a board member of the Irish Peace Institute, based at the University of Limerick and in 2009 is appointed Vice Chairman. He is a Life Member of the Institute of International and European Affairs.

On December 17, 2007, Logue is appointed as a director to InterTradeIreland (ITI), the North-South Body established under the Good Friday Agreement to promote economic development in Ireland. There he chairs the ITI’s Fusion programme, bringing north–south industrial development in Innovation and Research. Integrating Ireland economically is a theme of his writing throughout his career, most recently in The Irish Times and in earlier publications as economic spokesman for the SDLP. He is economist at the Dublin-based National Board for Science and Technology from 1981 to 1984.

Logue, after leaving the European Commission in 2005, becomes involved in Renewable Energy and is chairman of Priority Resources as well as a director of two companies, one in solar energy, the other in wind energy. In November 2011, he is elected to the main board of European Association of Energy (EAE).

In November 2023, Logue is awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Galway in recognition of “a lifetime dedicated to civil rights, human rights, equality and peace in Northern Ireland, Ireland and Europe.” He donates an archive of material, more than 20 boxes of manuscripts, documents, photographs and political ephemera, on the development of the SDLP from the early 1970s to the University of Galway.


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Birth of John Hume, Northern Ireland Nationalist Politician

John Hume KCSG, Irish nationalist politician from Northern Ireland, is born into a working-class Catholic family in Derry, County Londonderry, on January 18, 1937. He is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the recent political history of Ireland and is credited as being the thinker behind many political developments in Northern Ireland, from the power-sharing Sunningdale Agreement to the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the Good Friday Agreement. He wins the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998 alongside the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), David Trimble.

Hume is the eldest of seven children of Samuel Hume, a former soldier and shipyard worker, and Anne “Annie” (née Doherty), a seamstress. He has a mostly Irish Catholic background, though his surname derives from one of his great-grandfathers, a Scottish Presbyterian who migrated to County Donegal. He attends St. Columb’s College and goes on to St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, the leading Catholic seminary in Ireland and a recognised college of the National University of Ireland, where he intends to study for the priesthood. Among his teachers is Tomás Ó Fiaich, the future cardinal and Primate of All Ireland.

Hume does not complete his clerical studies but does obtain an M.A. degree in French and history from the college in 1958. He then returns home to his native Derry, where he becomes a teacher at his alma mater, St. Columb’s College. He is a founding member of the Credit Union movement in the city and is chair of the University for Derry Committee in 1965, an unsuccessful fight to have Northern Ireland’s second university established in Derry in the mid-1960s.

Hume becomes the youngest ever President of the Irish League of Credit Unions at age 27. He serves in the role from 1964 to 1968. He once says that “all the things I’ve been doing, it’s the thing I’m proudest of because no movement has done more good for the people of Ireland, north and south, than the credit union movement.”

Hume becomes a leading figure in the civil rights movement in the late 1960s along with people such as Hugh Logue. He is a prominent figure in the Derry Citizens’ Action Committee. The DCAC is set up in the wake of the October 5, 1968, march through Derry which had caused much attention to be drawn towards the situation in Northern Ireland. The purpose of the DCAC is to make use of the publicity surrounding recent events to bring to light grievances in Derry that had been suppressed by the Unionist Government for years. The DCAC, unlike the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), is aimed specifically at a local campaign, improving the situation in Derry for everyone, and maintaining a peaceful stance. The committee also has a Stewards Association that is there to prevent any violence at marches or sit-downs.

Hume becomes an Independent Nationalist member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland in 1969 at the height of the civil rights campaign. He is elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1973 and serves as Minister of Commerce in the short-lived power-sharing Executive in 1974. He stands unsuccessfully for the Westminster Parliament for the Londonderry constituency in October 1974, and is elected for Foyle in 1983.

In October 1971, Hume joins four Westminster MPs in a 48-hour hunger strike to protest at the internment without trial of hundreds of suspected Irish republicans. State papers that have been released under the 30-year rule that an Irish diplomat eight years later in 1979 believes Hume supported the return of internment.

In 1977, Hume challenges a regulation under the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act (Northern Ireland) 1922 which allows any soldier to disperse an assembly of three or more people. The Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, Robert Lowry, holds that the regulation is ultra vires under Section 4 of the Government of Ireland Act 1920 which forbids the Parliament of Northern Ireland to make laws in respect of the army.

A founding member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), Hume succeeds Gerry Fitt as its leader in 1979. He also serves as one of Northern Ireland’s three Members of the European Parliament and serves on the faculty of Boston College, from which he receives an honorary degree in 1995.

Hume is directly involved in secret talks with the British government and Sinn Féin, in an effort to bring Sinn Féin to the discussion table openly. The talks are speculated to lead directly to the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985.

The vast majority of unionists reject the agreement and stage a massive and peaceful public rally in Belfast City Centre to demonstrate their distaste. Many Republicans and nationalists also reject it, as they see it as not going far enough. Hume, however, continues dialogue with both governments and Sinn Féin. The “Hume–Adams process” eventually delivers the 1994 Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire which ultimately provides the relatively peaceful backdrop against which the Good Friday agreement is brokered.

On February 4, 2004, Hume announces his complete retirement from politics and is succeeded by Mark Durkan as SDLP leader. He does not contest the 2004 European Parliament election where his seat is won by Bairbre de Brún of Sinn Féin, nor does he run in the 2005 United Kingdom general election, in which Mark Durkan retains the Foyle constituency for the SDLP.

Hume and his wife, Pat, continue to be active in promoting European integration, issues around global poverty and the Credit Union movement. He is also a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation which campaigns for democratic reformation of the United Nations.

In 2015, Hume is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, of which he had first displayed symptoms in the late 1990s. He dies in the early hours of August 3, 2020, at a nursing home in Derry, at the age of 83. On his death, former Labour Party leader and prime minister Tony Blair says, “John Hume was a political titan; a visionary who refused to believe the future had to be the same as the past.” The Dalai Lama says on Twitter, “John Hume’s deep conviction in the power of dialogue and negotiations to resolve conflict was unwavering… It was his leadership and his faith in the power of negotiations that enabled the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to be reached. His steady persistence set an example for us all to follow.”

(Pictured: John Hume with U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1995)


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Birth of Anthony Cronin, Poet, Activist, Critic & Editor

Anthony Gerard Richard Cronin, Irish poet, arts activist, biographer, commentator, critic, editor and barrister, is born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, on December 28, 1923.

After obtaining a B.A. from the National University of Ireland, Cronin enters the King’s Inns and is later called to the Bar.

Cronin is known as an arts activist as well as a writer. He is Cultural Adviser to Taoiseach Charles Haughey and briefly to Garret FitzGerald. He involves himself in initiatives such as Aosdána, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Heritage Council. He is a founding member of Aosdána, and is a member of its governing body, the Toscaireacht, for many years. He is elected Saoi, a distinction for exceptional artistic achievement, in 2003. He is also a member of the governing bodies of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Ireland, of which he is for a time Acting Chairman.

With Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and Con Leventhal, Cronin celebrates the first Bloomsday in 1954. He contributes to many television programmes, including Flann O’Brien: Man of Parts (BBC) and Folio (RTÉ).

From 1966 to 1968 Cronin is a visiting lecturer at the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana, and from 1968 to 1970 he is poet in residence at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. He reads a selection of his poems for the Irish Poetry Reading Archive in 2015. He has honorary doctorates from several institutions, including the University of Dublin, the National University of Ireland and the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland.

Cronin begins his literary career as a contributor to Envoy, A Review of Literature and Art. He is editor of The Bell in the 1950s and literary editor of Time and Tide (London). He writes a weekly column, “Viewpoint,” in The Irish Times from 1974 to 1980. Later he contributes a column on poetry to the Sunday Independent.

His first collection of poems, called simply Poems (Cresset Press, London), is published in 1958. Several collections follow and his Collected Poems (New Island Books, Dublin) is published in 2004. The End of the Modern World (New Island Books, 2016), written over several decades, is his final publication.

Cronin’s novel, The Life of Riley, is a satire on Bohemian life in Ireland in the mid-20th century, while his memoir Dead as Doornails addresses the same subject.

Cronin knows Samuel Beckett from when they do some work for the BBC during the 1950s and 1960s. He gives a prefatory talk to Patrick Magee‘s reading of The Unnamable on the BBC Third Programme. Beckett is not impressed, saying, “Cronin delivered his discourse… It was all right, not very exciting.” Cronin later publishes a biography of him, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (1996), followed on from No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien (1989).

In his later years, Cronin suffers from failing health, which prevents him from traveling abroad, thus limiting his dealings to local matters. He dies in Dublin on December 27, 2016, one day short of his 93rd birthday.

Cronin firstly marries Thérèse Campbell, from whom he separates in the mid-1980s. She dies in 1999. They have two daughters, Iseult and Sarah. Iseult is killed in a road accident in Spain. He secondly marries the writer Anne Haverty who, along with daughter Sarah, survives him.


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Birth of Sir John Greer Dill, Irish-born British Army Officer

Sir John Greer Dill, senior British Army officer with service in both World War I and World War II, is born on December 25, 1881, at Lurgan, County Armagh. From May 1940 to December 1941, he is the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), the professional head of the British Army, and subsequently serves in Washington, D.C., as Chief of the British Joint Staff Mission and then Senior British Representative on the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS).

Dill is the only son of John Dill, bank manager, and Jane Dill (née Greer). He is educated at Cheltenham College in England before entering the Royal Military College (RMC), Sandhurst. Commissioned as a second lieutenant, he joins the Prince of Wales’s Leinster Regiment (Royal Canadians) in May 1901 and serves in South Africa for the remainder of the Second Boer War. Promoted to captain in 1911, he is a student at the Staff College, Camberley, at the outbreak of World War I. He holds several important staff appointments during the war, including brigade major of 25th Brigade (8th Division) and General Staff Officer (Grade 2) to the Canadian Corps. Present at the battles of Neuve Chapelle, Aubers Ridge, Arras, and Third Ypres, at the end of the war he is serving as chief of operations branch at GHQ with the temporary rank of brigadier general. He is awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) (1915), the Order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG) (1918), the French Legion of Honour and the Belgian Order of the Crown.

Remaining active during the interwar years, Dill serves as chief assistant to the commandant of the Staff College (1919–22) before commanding the Welsh Border Brigade, TA (1922–23), and 2nd Infantry Brigade at Aldershot (1923–26). In late 1926, he is appointed army instructor at the newly established Imperial Defence College. A period in India follows as general staff officer of the Western Command (1929–31), based at Quetta. On return to England, he is promoted to major general and made commandant of the Staff College. Appointments as commander of the British forces in Palestine and Transjordan (1936–37) and the Aldershot Command (1937–39) follow. During this period, he shows a remarkable ability to both train and inspire those under his command. Most of his colleagues expect him to become the new chief of the Imperial General Staff and are surprised when Major General Lord Gort, junior to Dill in both rank and seniority, is appointed to the post.

At the outbreak of World War II Dill commands I Corps British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France and is made a full general. In April 1940, he is made vice-CIGS and in May takes over as CIGS. His initial period in office is not a happy one, and he has to inform the public of setbacks in both Norway and France. His workload is enormous, and after the evacuation at Dunkirk in late May he devotes himself to preparing the defences of Britain against invasion. He clashes with Winston Churchill throughout 1941, advocating a more cautious and realistic approach to the situations in North Africa, Greece, and Crete.

The workload begins to affect his health adversely, and in November 1941 it is announced that he will resign as CIGS on reaching the age of 60 and serve as governor-designate of Bombay with the rank of field marshal. He seeks to be more actively involved in the war effort, however, and in December 1941 he visits the United States with Churchill, remaining there as head of the British joint staff mission in Washington, D.C. He plays a significant role in promoting Anglo–American military cooperation and attends the Casablanca, Quebec, and Tehran conferences.

In late 1944 his health again breaks down and he dies from aplastic anemia on November 4, 1944, at the Walter Reed General Hospital, Washington, D.C. After a memorial service at Washington National Cathedral, he is buried with full military honours at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington County, Virginia. President Franklin D. Roosevelt later pays tribute to him as a great soldier and friend, “the most important figure in the remarkable accord which has been developed in the combined operations of our two countries.”

Dill first marries (1907) Ada Maud Le Mottée, daughter of Col. William Le Mottée of the 18th Regiment. Their son, Major John de Guerin Dill, serves as an artillery officer throughout World War II. In October 1941, Dill marries Nancy Isabelle Charrington, widow of Brigadier Denis Walter Furlong. Dill’s honours include a GCB (1942), an honorary degree from Princeton University (1944), the Howland Memorial Prize of Yale University (1944), and a posthumous Distinguished Service Medal (DSM) from the United States government. There are portraits of him in Cheltenham College and the Imperial War Museum, and a statue in Washington, D.C.

(From: “Dill, Sir John Greer” by David Murphy, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: Sir John Greer Dill, bromide print, 1932, by Walter Stoneman, National Portrait Gallery, London)


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Birth of John Cole, Northern Irish Journalist & BBC Broadcaster

John Morrison Cole, Northern Irish journalist and broadcaster best known for his work with the BBC, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on November 23, 1927. He serves as deputy editor of The Guardian and The Observer and, from 1981 to 1992, is the BBC’s political editor. Donald Macintyre, in an obituary in The Independent, describes him as “the most recognisable and respected broadcast political journalist since World War II.”

Cole is the son of George Cole, an electrical engineer, and his wife Alice. The family is Ulster Protestant, and he identifies himself as British. He receives his formal education at the Belfast Royal Academy.

Cole starts his career in print journalism in 1945, joining the Belfast Telegraph as a reporter and industrial correspondent. He subsequently works as a political reporter for the paper. He gains a scoop when he interviews the then Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, who is holidaying in Ireland.

Cole joins The Guardian, then The Manchester Guardian, in 1956, reporting on industrial issues. He transfers to the London office in 1957 as the paper’s labour correspondent. Appointed news editor in 1963, succeeding Nesta Roberts, he takes on the task of reorganising the paper’s “amateurish” system for gathering news. He heads opposition to a proposed merger with The Times in the mid-1960s, and later serves as deputy editor under Alastair Hetherington. When Hetherington leaves in 1975, Cole is in the running for the editorship, but fails to secure the post, for reasons which may include his commitment to the cause of unionism in Northern Ireland, as well as what is seen by some as inflexibility and a lack of flair. Unwilling to continue at The Guardian, he then joins The Observer as deputy editor under Donald Trelford, remaining there for six years.

After Tiny Rowland takes over as proprietor of The Observer in 1981, Cole gives evidence against him at the Monopolies Commission. The following day he receives a call from the BBC offering him the job of political editor, succeeding John Simpson. He has little previous television experience but proves a “natural broadcaster.” Reporting through most of the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, he becomes a familiar figure on television and radio.

Cole’s health is put under strain by the workload, and he suffers a heart attack in February 1984. Returning to report on that year’s conference season, he covers the Brighton hotel bombing, getting a “memorable” interview with Thatcher on the pavement in its immediate aftermath, in which she declares that the Tory conference will take place as normal. An astute observer of the political scene, he is one of the earliest to forecast Thatcher’s resignation as Prime Minister in 1990, in what colleague David McKie refers to as “perhaps his greatest exclusive.”

Cole establishes a strong reputation for his “gentle but probing” interviewing style, for his political assessments, and for presenting analysis rather than “bland reporting.” Held in enormous affection by viewers, he is trusted by both politicians and the public. He is known for speaking in the language used by ordinary people rather than so-called Westminster experts. His distinctive Northern Irish accent leads the way for BBC broadcasters with regional accents.

Cole retires as political editor in 1992 at the age of 65, compulsory at the time, but continues to appear on television, including making programmes on golf and travel. He also continues to appear on the BBC programme Westminster Live for several years after he retired as political editor.

In addition to his journalistic writing, Cole authors several books. The earliest are The Poor of the Earth, on developing countries, and The Thatcher Years (1987). After his retirement as BBC political editor, he spends more time writing. His political memoir, As It Seemed to Me, appears in 1995 and becomes a best-seller. He also publishes a novel, A Clouded Peace (2001), set in his birthplace of Belfast in 1977.

In 2007, Cole writes an article for the British Journalism Review, blaming both politicians and the media for the fact that parliamentarians are held in such low esteem, being particularly scathing of Alastair Campbell‘s influence during Tony Blair‘s premiership.

In 1966, the Eisenhower Fellowships selects Cole to represent Great Britain. He receives the Royal Television Society‘s Journalist of the Year award in 1991. After his retirement in 1992, he is awarded an honorary degree from the Open University as Doctor of the University and receives the Richard Dimbleby Award from BAFTA in 1993. He turns down a CBE in 1993, citing the former The Guardian newspaper rule that journalists can only accept gifts which can be consumed within 24 hours.

In his private life Cole is a supporter of the Labour Party and is a believer in the trades union movement. He considers that the combating of unemployment is one of the most important political issues. He is a British Republican and a committed Christian, associating in the latter part of his life with the United Reformed Church at Kingston upon Thames.

Cole suffers health problems in retirement including heart problems and two minor strokes. In 2009, he is diagnosed with cancer. He subsequently develops aphasia. He dies at his home at Claygate in the county of Surrey on November 7, 2013.

Tributes are paid by journalists, broadcasters and politicians across the political spectrum. Prime Minister David Cameron calls Cole a “titan at the BBC” and an “extraordinary broadcaster.” Labour Party leader Ed Miliband says that “my generation grew up watching John Cole. He conveyed the drama and importance of politics.” The Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond says that Cole is “an extremely able journalist but also extraordinarily helpful and generous to a young politician.” The BBC’s political editor at the time, Nick Robinson, writes that Cole “shaped the way all in my trade do our jobs.”


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Death of Philip Twysden, Lord Bishop of Raphoe

Philip Twysden, Anglican clergyman who serves in the Church of Ireland as Lord Bishop of Raphoe from 1747 to 1752, dies bankrupt on November 2, 1752, after having been shot while allegedly masquerading as a highwayman. The circumstances of his death later become the subject of scandalous rumour.

Twysden is born in Kent, in the South East England region, on September 7, 1713, the third son of Sir William Twysden, 5th Baronet of Roydon Hall, East Peckham, Kent, by his wife (and distant cousin) Jane Twisden.

Twysden studies at University College, Oxford, from 1732. He is awarded a Master of Arts degree, and the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law in 1745.

Twysden marries twice: firstly to Mary Purcell, who dies in 1743, and secondly to Frances Carter, daughter of The Rt Hon. Thomas Carter, Master of the Rolls in Ireland. After Twysden’s death, she marries her cousin, General James Johnston.

By his second wife, Twysden has two children: Mary, who dies in infancy, and a posthumous daughter named Frances (1753–1821). Frances, later Countess of Jersey, is one of the many mistresses of King George IV when he is Prince of Wales.

Twysden is ordained a priest in the Church of England. He is instituted in 1738 as rector of Eard and in 1745, for a short time, serves as the rector of Eastling in Kent. He accompanies Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, to Dublin as his chaplain, upon the Earl’s appointment as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

Twysden is nominated to the Bishopric of Raphoe in Ulster on March 3, 1746, and is consecrated by the Archbishop of Dublin, assisted by the bishops of Derry and Clonfert, at St. Michan’s Church, Dublin, on March 29, 1747.

Twysden dies on November 2, 1752, at home in Jermyn Street, St. James’s, London. However, according to ecclesiastical historian and author Henry Cotton, he dies at Roydon Hall, East Peckham, his father’s country house. He is buried in the south chancel of St. Michael’s Church, East Peckham, under a plain stone with no inscription.

A story grows up that, having been made bankrupt, Twysden is shot while attempting to rob a stagecoach. The location of his alleged attempted career as a highwayman is either Hounslow Heath (west of London) or Wrotham Heath in Kent.

(Pictured: The Cathedral of St Eunan, Raphoe, the episcopal seat of the pre-Reformation and Church of Ireland bishops of Raphoe)


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Death of Playwright George Shiels

George Shiels, playwright, dies following a lengthy illness in Carnlough, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, on September 19, 1949.

Shiels is born on June 24, 1881, in Milltown, Ballybrakes, near Ballymoney, County Antrim, one of seven sons of Robert Shiels, a railway worker, and Eliza Shiels (née Sweeney), who also has one daughter. The family soon moves to Castle Street, Ballymoney, where he attends the local Roman Catholic national school. His elder brothers emigrate to the United States when young. With there being no chance of further schooling even if he wanted it, he leaves Ireland when he is 19 years old. He works as a casual labourer in many places in western North America: as a farmworker and miner in Idaho and Montana, and as a lumber camp worker in British Columbia, Canada. In 1904 he is employed by the Canadian Pacific Railway to supervise a gang of workers who are building a stretch of railway in Saskatchewan. In a serious accident, he is badly injured. Despite surgery on his back, he is never able to walk again, and he receives a disability pension from the railway company.

After a long convalescence in Canada, Shiels returns to his mother’s house in Ballymoney around 1908. He sets up in business in Main Street as a shipping agent and as an agent for the Canadian Pacific Railway, taking bookings from intending emigrants. He is encouraged by his parish priest, Fr. John Hasson, by a local solicitor, Jack Pinkerton, and by James Pettigrew, a teacher, to write short stories. To try to preserve anonymity in a small community, he at first uses the pseudonym “George Morshiel,” and is successful with Western stories and other short fiction. His friends urge him to try writing dramas, and in 1918 Away from the Moss is produced by the Ulster Literary Theatre in Belfast.

After further success there with two short plays in which Shiels is learning his craft, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin accepts a one-act play, Bedmates, which is performed in January 1921. With great regularity for the next twenty years, he writes twenty-two plays for the Abbey Theatre. His work forms the basis of the repertoire in the 1920s and 1930s and attracts large audiences. Plays such as The New Gossoon (1930) provide Dublin theatregoers with entertainment, but also help form the style of acting and production which for many years characterises the Abbey and its actors. Three of his plays, Paul Twyning (1922), Professor Tim (1925) and The New Gossoon, are later performed in theatres in London and are also published in a 1945 volume, which is twice reprinted. Professor Tim, produced by the touring Abbey Theatre, receives enthusiastic reviews in Philadelphia, and The New Gossoon appears successfully on Broadway in New York City in 1932, 1934, and 1937.

Shiels’s earlier work is perhaps easiest for audiences to enjoy. Comedies such as Moodie in Manitoba (1918) portray characters so realistic that north Antrim people believe with some alarm that it might be possible to identify who Shiels had in mind when he created them, and he is at first somewhat less than popular in Ballymoney. He superbly reproduces local language and thoroughly understands the local way of life. Plays he writes late in his career are first performed by the Group Theatre in Belfast, and in these productions (and in the radio versions broadcast by the BBC) his work becomes widely known, almost beloved, in the north of Ireland. During the first half of the twentieth century amateur drama groups throughout Ireland are much more important in local life than they have been since the advent of television. Probably all such societies have at some time staged a Shiels play, and this tradition continues. His plays contain amusing dialogue, carefully crafted plots, and usually more or less happy endings.

However, Shiels’s later works, notably The Passing Day (1936), first broadcast as a radio play, and The Rugged Path (1940), which breaks all records at the Abbey Theatre in a run of three months, tackle darker subject matter and feature characters still less sympathetic even than the rogues and hypocrites of the earlier work. In The Rugged Path and its sequel, The Summit (1941), he explores the moral crisis facing Ireland after the political changes of the 1920s. One critic sees in it an allegory for the contemporary struggle against Adolf Hitler. His view of life in the small towns and farms of Ireland is never in the slightest rosy-tinted, but in the symbolism of The Passing Day, he achieves “bitter intensity” (The Irish Times review, quoted by Casey).

Shiels’s modesty leads him to refuse an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), in 1931. He is reticent about his experiences and beliefs and does little to foster his own reputation. In one early interview he expresses the belief that Ulster theatre needs dramatic material that reflects the psychology and setting of the region. His own work, at its best, achieves this and more. The very qualities which make his work popular in the north of Ireland permit some metropolitan literary critics to dismiss his plays as “kitchen comedies.” However, with the passage of time, his importance as a chronicler of a vanishing way of life can be set alongside the recognition due to him as a prolific and gifted dramatist.

Shiels suffers from a lengthy illness, and though he undergoes an operation in Ballymoney in 1949, dies soon afterwards at his house, New Lodge, in Carnlough, County Antrim, on September 19, 1949. He is buried in the graveyard of Our Lady and St. Patrick in Ballymoney. In the month that he dies, the Group Theatre and Garvagh Young Farmers’ Club are both rehearsing Shiels plays, and there have since been many productions of his plays in the north and elsewhere. Ballymoney Drama Festival presents a portrait of Shiels to the Abbey Theatre, and a new production of The Passing Day is staged there to celebrate his centenary in 1981.


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Birth of Geraldine Kennedy, First Female Editor of “The Irish Times”

Geraldine Kennedy, Irish journalist and politician who serves as the first female editor of The Irish Times newspaper, is born on September 1, 1951, in Tramore, County Waterford. She previously serves as a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dún Laoghaire constituency from 1987 to 1989.

Kennedy studies at Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) and begins her journalistic career with a regional newspaper, The Munster Express. She moves to The Cork Examiner after less than a year but spends only a few years there before joining The Irish Times.

On the foundation of the Sunday Tribune in 1980, Kennedy joins it as the paper’s political correspondent. The paper’s publisher, John Mulcahy, had become familiar with Kennedy when she had contributed to his journal, The Hibernia Magazine. When the Tribune briefly ceases production, she moves to the Sunday Press.

In 1982, Kennedy’s telephone, along with those of two other journalists, is tapped by former Minister for Justice Seán Doherty. Early in 1987, she successfully sues the incumbent Charles Haughey-led Fianna Fáil government for illegally tapping her phone. The revelation in 1992 that Charles Haughey had personally ordered the phone taps leads to Haughey’s resignation as Taoiseach.

Kennedy stands in the 1987 Irish general election as a candidate for the newly formed Progressive Democrats party in Dún Laoghaire. She comes in third in the poll, winning 9.4% of the first-preference vote. She is one of fourteen Progressive Democrat TDs elected to Dáil Éireann in that election, a feat the party never achieves again. She is appointed the party’s spokesperson for foreign affairs.

She stands again in the 1989 Irish general election and wins 9% of the first-preference vote but fails to retain her seat.

Following her election defeat, Kennedy returns to The Irish Times, then edited by Conor Brady, whom she had worked with at the Tribune when he was the editor. She avoids party-political journalism for several years, but she returns to covering politics in the early 1990s and becomes the political editor of The Irish Times in 1999. She becomes the newspaper’s first female editor upon the departure of Brady in late 2002. One of her rivals for the editor’s chair is the paper’s high-profile columnist, Fintan O’Toole.

Kennedy is paid more than the editor of Britain’s top non-tabloid newspaper The Daily Telegraph, which has a circulation of about nine times that of The Irish Times. Later columnist Fintan O’Toole tells the Sunday Independent, “We as a paper are not shy of preaching about corporate pay and fat cats but with this there is a sense of excess. Some of the sums mentioned are disturbing. This is not an attack on Ms. Kennedy, it is an attack on the executive level of pay. There is double standard of seeking more job cuts while paying these vast salaries.”

In September 2006, Kennedy approves the publication of an article in The Irish Times giving confidential details of investigations being made into payments purported to have been made in 1993 to Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. She refuses, upon request of the investigating Mahon Tribunal, to provide details of the source of the printed information. She responds that the documents have since been destroyed. Her refusal causes the Tribunal to seek High Court orders compelling her to provide details of the source. On October 23, 2007, the High Court grants the orders compelling her to go before the Tribunal and answer all questions. In its judgment, the High Court, criticising her decision to destroy the documents, says it was an “astounding and flagrant disregard of the rule of law.” In 2009, however, the Supreme Court of Ireland overturns this ruling, holding that the High Court had not struck the correct balance between the journalists’ right to protect their source and the tribunal’s right to confidentiality.

Kennedy announces on March 12, 2011, her intention to retire from The Irish Times by September, after a nine-year term as editor. She actually retires in June and is succeeded by news editor Kevin O’Sullivan on June 23, 2011.

In August 2012, Kennedy is appointed Adjunct Professor of Journalism at the University of Limerick. She has been awarded five honorary doctorates from Irish universities.