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Death of Florence Stoney, First Female Radiologist in the UK

Florence Ada Stoney, Irish physician who is the first female radiologist in the United Kingdom, dies of vertebral cancer in Bournemouth, Dorset, England, on October 7, 1932. During World War I she serves abroad as head of the X-ray department and of staff in makeshift hospitals.

Stoney is born in Dublin on February 4, 1870, to George and Margaret Sophia Stoney. Her father is a mathematical physicist who later serves as Secretary of Queen’s University of Ireland and is an advocate for women’s right to higher education in Ireland. His efforts are considered to be among the principal reasons that women can qualify for a medical license. Of weak health as a child, she is at first privately educated in the home but then attends the Royal College for Science of Ireland with her sister Edith. In 1883, the Stoney family moves to London in order to provide higher education for the daughters since this is unavailable for women in Ireland at the time. She attends the London School of Medicine for Women where she is a distinguished student with great academic achievements in subjects such as anatomy and physiology. She obtains her MBBS with honours in 1895 and a Doctor of Medicine in 1898, going on to specialise in radiology.

Stoney works as an ENT clinical assistant at the Royal Free Hospital as well as spending six years as a demonstrator in anatomy at the London School of Medicine for Women.

After this she spends a short amount of time in the Victoria Hospital for Sick Children in Kingston upon Hull and then goes on to establish an X-ray department in the Elizabeth Garret Anderson Hospital for Women in London in 1902. At the hospital she carries out a variety of work but mainly deals with X-rays, often developing the radiographic plates at her own house. She is the first female radiologist to work in the United Kingdom at a time when knowledge on radiology and the equipment involved is still in its developmental stages. She is forced to work in poor conditions with badly ventilated rooms and a lack of space for X-ray work. She is given no assistance and has to do the majority of the work on her own. Furthermore, she is excluded as a member of the medical staff and from the X-ray department committee. In 1906 she sets up a practice in Harley Street.

Stoney leaves the hospital at the start of the war. She has 13 years of experience in her field when World War I breaks out in August 1914. She and her sister Edith, a medical physicist, volunteer to assist the British Red Cross, but both are refused by surgeon Frederick Treves since they were women. Despite the refusal, Stoney prepares an X-ray installation and helps to organise a unit of women volunteers alongside Mrs. St. Clair Stobart, Women’s Imperial Service League and the Belgian Red Cross to aid the Belgian soldiers in Antwerp. The team converts an abandoned music hall into a makeshift hospital where she manages the surgical unit as head of the medical staff and radiologist. The hospital comes under fire and after enduring ongoing shellfire for 18 hours, the hospital is evacuated. The team walks to Holland, where they manage to cross the Scheldt River on buses carrying ammunition, twenty minutes before the bridge is blown up. She and her unit earn the 1914 Star for bravery.

Stoney continues working in a hospital near Cherbourg in France, mainly dealing with cases relating to compound fractures and locating bullet fragments in wounds. During this time, she becomes experienced in recognizing dead bone and discovers that removing it will speed up recovery.

In March 1915, the Cherbourg hospital is no longer needed, and Stoney moves back London. She begins full-time work at the 1,000-bed Fulham Military Hospital. She is one of the first female physicians granted to serve as a full-time worker under the British War Office and goes on to receive the Order of the British Empire in June 1919. She works as the Head of the X-ray and Electrical Department and remains there until 1918.

In her later years, Stoney suffers from ill health, largely attributed to her over-exposure to radiation in her work. It is reported that she has X-ray dermatitis of her left hand, a painful skin condition associated in modern times with radiation therapy as a treatment for cancer. She moves to the south coastal town of Bournemouth in England where she is on the staff of two hospitals, practicing radiology part-time. She occupies the position of Honorary Medical Officer to the Electrical Department of the Royal Victoria and West Hants Hospital in Bournemouth. She is the founder and president of the Wessex branch of the British Institute of Radiology. She serves as the consulting actinotherapist at the Victoria Cripples Home. During retirement she pens a number of articles in contribution to the medical literature of the time. She publishes research on topics such as fibroids, goitre, Graves’ disease, soldier’s heart, rickets and osteomalacia.

Stoney retires from all of her hospital positions in 1928 at the age of 58. She, along with her older sister Edith, travel in retirement. One trip is to India, where she writes her final scientific paper, the subject of which is osteomalacia (bone softening), in particular in relation to pelvic deformities in childbirth. She studies and investigates this topic overseas, and specifically the association between UV exposure, vitamin D and skeletal development. In India, she also uses her expertise to advise on the use of UV light in hospitals.

Stoney dies at the age of 62, on October 7, 1932. She is suffering from a long and painful illness, vertebral cancer, again largely attributed to her work in the presence of high levels of radiation. Her funeral takes place on October 11 at Golders Green Crematorium, London. The British Journal of Radiology publishes her official obituary which spans five pages, containing many warm personal testimonials. After her sister’s death, Edith Stoney continues to travel and research.


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Death of Con Leventhal, Lecturer, Essayist & Critic

A.J. Con Leventhal, Irish lecturer, essayist, and critic, dies in Paris on October 3, 1979, following a battle with cancer.

Leventhal is born Abraham Jacob Leventhal in Lower Clanbrassil Street, Dublin, on May 9, 1896. His parents are Moses (Maurice) Leventhal and Rosa (née Levenberg). His father is a draper, and his mother is a poet. She is a Zionist, who is a founding member of the Women’s Zionist Society. He lives in the “Little Jerusalem” area of Dublin, the area around the South Circular Road, in his youth. He attends Wesley College, Dublin, and then Trinity College Dublin (TCD) to study modern languages. He edits the TCD student magazine in 1918. It is in TCD that he acquires the nickname “Con,” an allusion to his father’s job as a “Continental” agent. He joins the first Zionist commission and travels to Palestine after World War I and helps to found the newspaper Palestine Weekly. He is then invited to join the Jewish National Fund‘s London office and begins working on the Zionist Review. He returns to Dublin to complete his degree in 1920, and in 1921 travels to Paris where he meets James Joyce.

Leventhal marries Gertrude Zlotover in October 1922. He works with his father-in-law, Joseph Zlotover, at the family furniture business on Mary Street for a time. After, he starts a number of unsuccessful businesses of his own, including the Irish Book Shop on Dawson Street from 1924 to 1925. It is possibly his business failures that inspire the idea of the TCD Students Appointment Association, which would give students pragmatic business skills. TCD accepts this proposal and employes him as the first administrator.

Leventhal completes a PhD in contemporary French literature, and in 1932 is appointed to the staff of the French department at TCD. He replaces his friend Samuel Beckett. During his time in TCD, he is an assistant editor to Hermathena, to which he also contributes his translations of French poetry. He is associated with a number of progressive cultural movements in Dublin of the 1920s and 1930s. He is a regular attendee at meetings held to promote Jewish culture and nationalism and lectures this group on Joyce. Through his interest in Joyce, he becomes an associate of Seumas O’Sullivan, and The Dublin Magazine. When the printers refuse to set his review of Ulysses in 1923 for The Dublin Magazine, he is moved to found his own magazine, The Klaxon, in response to the censorship. The only issue of the magazine publishes a shortened version of the review under the pseudonym “Lawrence K. Emery.” He is also associated with Francis Stuart‘s Tomorrow magazine. He is also interested in drama and is a member of the avant-garde Dublin Drama League, occasionally performing with them. Among his close friends are Daisy Bannard Cogley, Micheál Mac Liammóir, and Lennox Robinson. From 1943 to 1958 his column, “Dramatic commentary”, is published in The Dublin Magazine. He is also published in The Irish Times, The Irish Press, The Listener, Westminster Weekly, Financial Times, and International Herald Tribune. He is a regular contributor to Radio Éireann and BBC broadcasts.

Leventhal begins a long-term relationship with Ethna MacCarthy, marrying her after the death of his first wife in 1956. She dies in 1959. He retires from TCD in 1963 and moves to Paris, where he becomes Beckett’s literary assistant. He lives on Boulevard du Montparnasse with his partner Marion Leigh.

Leventhal dies of cancer in Paris on October 3, 1979. There are two known portraits of Leventhal, one by John Russell (1920) and a second by Avigdor Arikha. The Leventhal Scholarship at TCD is founded in his memory. TCD and the Harry Ransom Center hold papers relating to Leventhal.


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Death of Sir James Shaw Willes

Sir James Shaw Willes, a judge of the English Court of Common Pleas, kills himself at his residence near Watford, Hertfordshire, England, on October 2, 1872, while suffering a nervous breakdown.

Willes is born on February 13, 1814, in Cork, County Cork, the eldest among six children of James Willes, physician, and his wife, Elizabeth Aldworth, daughter of John Shaw, mayor of Cork in 1792. Educated at Dr. Porter’s school in Cork and Trinity College Dublin (TCD), he graduates BA in 1836, having entered the King’s Inns the previous year. In 1837, he goes to London and joins the Inner Temple as a pupil of the noted barrister Thomas Chitty (1802–78), in whose chambers he remains as a salaried assistant and special pleader before being called to the English bar on June 12, 1840. The Willes and Chitty families are connected, and James’s younger sister, Mary, later marries Thomas Chitty’s son.

Willes joins the home circuit, though his practice is chiefly in London in mercantile and maritime law. A leading junior in the Court of Exchequer, he holds the post of tubman from 1851, an honorary position in the gift of the Lord Chief Baron. Known for his erudition, he is persuaded to edit, with Sir Henry Singer Keating, the third and fourth editions of John William Smith‘s Leading Cases (1849, 1856). In 1850, his reputation is such that he is appointed one of the commissioners to draft the common law procedure bill (1854) and is credited with having effected most of the reform therein. On July 3, 1855, he is appointed judge of the Court of Common Pleas, though he has not yet taken silk and is only 41, the youngest lawyer but one to have been appointed to the bench since 1778.

A classical scholar and linguist who knows oriental as well as European languages, who travels widely, loves poetry, and frequents literary men, and whose judgments are clear and philosophical, Willes is accounted among the best common law judges of his day, and is celebrated for the simplicity and lucidity of his style. Notable judgments include Esposito v. Bowden (1857), which lays down that the force of a declaration of war is equal to that of an act of parliament prohibiting commercial transactions with the enemy. In the law of torts, he gives an oft-cited judgment in the case of Indermaur v. Dames (1866), which has been accepted almost as statutory, on the liability of the occupier of a building for the safety of a visitor. In 1868, as one of the first judges appointed to try election petitions, he lays down the rules of practice generally followed afterward. A strong British patriot, he serves in the Inns of Court Volunteers from 1859 until shortly before his death.

On November 3, 1871, Willes is sworn of the privy council. However, his health has deteriorated through overwork and an emotional temperament, and he has long suffered heart disease and gout. In August 1872, after a heavy assize at Liverpool, he returns to his house, Otterspool, Watford, Hertfordshire, and succumbs to a nervous breakdown, which leads to his shooting himself on October 2, 1872. He is buried on October 7 at Brompton Cemetery in London. He is survived fifteen years by his wife, Helen, daughter of Thomas Jennings of Cork, whom he married on May 17, 1856. There have no children.

A tall, reserved man, with a prominent nose and sad eyes, Willes has great affection for children and animals and is singularly emotional. He is known to return to his room and shed tears before passing sentence on a criminal. He never loses his Irish accent. His marriage is allegedly unhappy, as he had been forced into it after he had fallen out of love. Sir Frederick Pollock (1845–1937), author of the magisterial History of English Law before the Time of Edward I and sometime marshal to Willes, dedicates to him his first textbook on torts in 1879, writing that he was “one of those whose knowledge is radiant and kindles answering fire.” A century later, A. W. B. Simpson maintains that “his reputation as a jurist will last as long as the law reports of England are read.”

(From: “Willes, Sir James Shaw” by Bridget Hourican, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Birth of Danny McNamee, Wrongly Convicted of Conspiracy to Cause Explosions

Gilbert “Danny” McNamee, former electronic engineer from Crossmaglen, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, is born on September 29, 1960. He is wrongly convicted in 1987 of conspiracy to cause explosions, including the Provisional Irish Republican Army‘s (IRA) Hyde Park bombing on July 20, 1982.

McNamee is arrested on August 16, 1986, at his home in Crossmaglen by the British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), then flown to London and charged with conspiracy to cause explosions. At his trial at the Old Bailey, he denies even having sympathy for the IRA, and no evidence is ever presented that he has any paramilitary links. Additionally, the IRA itself states that he is not a member, and never claimed him as a “prisoner of war.” However, his fingerprint is found on electronic circuits in an arms cache that is linked to the Hyde Park bombing. At his trial, he explains that he may have handled the circuits when working for a previous employer, whom he did not know had IRA connections. After five hours of deliberation by the jury, he is found guilty on all charges and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

In September 1994, McNamee and Paul Magee are among six prisoners who escape from Whitemoor Prison, shooting and wounding a prison officer as they do so, before being captured two hours later.

In 1997, McNamee’s case is examined by Channel 4‘s Trial and Error programme. He is later to be the first case referred to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), and his conviction is overturned on December 17, 1998, because of other, much more prominent, fingerprints on the same circuits, belonging to known IRA bomb-maker Dessie Ellis, which were not disclosed at McNamee’s original trial. Despite quashing McNamee’s conviction, the appeal judges state, “The Crown makes a strong case that the appellant [McNamee] was guilty of a conspiracy to cause explosions.” Supporters of the campaign to clear his name include the comedian Jeremy Hardy.

In February 1999, McNamee reads the IRA Roll of Honour at the Burns and Moley commemoration and the following month he sits with the Caraher family during the trial of Michael Caraher and other members of the Provisional IRA South Armagh Brigade sniper team.


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Birth of Sir Shane Leslie, 3rd Baronet

Sir John Randolph Leslie, 3rd Baronet, Anglo-Irish diplomat and writer commonly known as Sir Shane Leslie, is born in Glaslough, County Monaghan, on September 24, 1885. He is a first cousin of Sir Winston Churchill. In 1908, he becomes a Roman Catholic and supports Irish Home Rule.

Leslie is born into a wealthy Anglo-Irish landowning family. His father is Sir John Leslie, 2nd Baronet, and his mother, Leonie Jerome, is the sister of Winston Churchill’s mother, Jennie. Both are daughters of Leonard W. Jerome. His ancestor, The Right Reverend John Leslie, Bishop of the Isles, moves from Scotland to Ireland in 1633 when he is made Bishop of Raphoe in County Donegal and is made Bishop of Clogher in 1661. Bishop Leslie is a vocal opponent of Oliver Cromwell.

Together with his brother Norman, Leslie’s early education begins at home where a German governess, Clara Woelke, is their first teacher. As children the brothers have more contact with servants than they have with their parents. His own daughter, Anita, says, “In my parents’ view schools performed the same functions that kennels did for dogs. They were places where pets could be conveniently deposited while their owners travelled.”

Leslie is educated at Ludgrove School, then Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge University he becomes a Roman Catholic and a supporter of Irish Home Rule. He adopts an anglicised Irish variant of his name (“Shane”). Not overly impressed by Eton, as a lower boy he and his roommates occupy “an old, battered warren betwixt the chapel cemetery and Wise’s horse yard … [T]he food was wretched and tasteless … As for thrashings which tyrannised rather than disciplined our house, they were excessive. Bullying was endemic and Irish boys were ridiculed, especially on St Patrick’s Day.”

Leslie refuses to send his own sons to Eton. They are educated at Roman Catholic Benedictine schools: Jack at Downside School and Desmond at Ampleforth College.

In the January 1910 United Kingdom general election Leslie stands as the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) candidate for the Londonderry City constituency, losing by just 57 votes. In the second general election later that year he is again narrowly defeated by the Unionist candidate.

Before World War I, Leslie travels extensively and in 1912 he marries Marjorie Ide, the youngest daughter of Henry Clay Ide, then United States ambassador to Spain and former Governor-General of the Philippines. His parents and other family members move temporarily to London at the outbreak of war.

During the war Leslie is in a British Ambulance Corps, until invalided out. He is then sent to Washington, D.C. to help the British Ambassador, Sir Cecil Spring Rice, soften Irish American hostility toward England and obtain American intervention in the war in the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin and the execution of its leaders. But he also looks to Ireland for inspiration when writing and edits a literary magazine that contains much Irish verse. He becomes a supporter of the ideals of Irish nationalism, although not physical force republicanism.

In the 1918 United Kingdom general election in Ireland, the Irish Parliamentary Party loses massively to Sinn Féin, putting an end to Leslie’s political career, but as the first cousin of Winston Churchill he remains a primary witness to much that is said and done outside the official record during the negotiation of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. Disappointed, he feels unwanted in Ireland and abandoned by the British. Like many members of the landed gentry from the 1880s who were obliged to turn to other occupations, he can no longer rely on income from landholdings.

Leslie writes extensively, in a wide range of styles, in verse, prose, and polemic, over several decades. His writings include The End of a Chapter (1916), while hospitalised during World War I, The Oppidan (1922), a roman à clef about his life and contemporaries at Eton, an edition of the Letters of Herbert Cardinal Vaughan to Lady Herbert of Lea (1942), and a biography Mrs. Fitzherbert: a life chiefly from unpublished sources (1939), together with an edition of her letters (with Maria Anne Fitzherbert), The letters of Mrs. Fitzherbert and connected papers; being the second volume of the life of Mrs. Fitzherbert (1944). He also writes Mark Sykes: His Life and Letters (1923), a biography of the English traveler, Conservative Party politician and diplomatic advisor. He advises budding novelist Scott Fitzgerald on the title of his first novel, they share correspondence with the future Mnsg. William A. Hemmick, who is Fitzgerald’s teacher at the Newman School.

A passionate advocate of reforestation, Leslie finds the business of running an estate uncreative and boring, and transfers the estate entailed to him to his eldest son, John Norman Leslie, who succeeds as the 4th Baronet. He transfers St. Patrick’s Purgatory on Lough Derg to the Roman Catholic Bishop of Clogher, Eugene O’Callaghan.

The wealth of the Leslies wanes by the 1930s following the Wall Street crash of 1929 and a farm that is loss making. In his unpublished memoirs, Leslie writes “a gentleman’s standing in his world was signalled by his list of clubs and it was worth paying hundreds of pounds in subs.” They continue to maintain their lifestyle, involving attendance at the London season and the entertainment of distinguished visitors, including Anthony Eden at Glaslough. At the outbreak of World War II in 1939 he joins the Home Guard. He spends the remainder of his life between Glaslough and London.

Leslie’s first wife, Marjorie, dies on February 8, 1951. On May 30, 1958, at the Catholic Church of St. Peter & Edward, Westminster, he marries Iris Carola Frazer, who is the daughter of Charles Miskin Laing and Etheldreda Janet Laing.

Leslie dies at the age of 85 at 15b Palmeira Court, Hove, East Sussex, on April 14, 1971. A Requiem Mass is held for him in Westminster Cathedral on October 12, 1971.


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Birth of Sir Thomas Drew, Anglo-Irish Architect

Sir Thomas Drew, Anglo-Irish architect, is born in Victoria Place, Belfast, on September 18, 1838.

Drew is the son of the Rev. Thomas Drew, son of a Limerick grocer, and Isabella Drew (née Dalton), daughter of a Dublin attorney. He is one of four sons and eight daughters of the couple, although most of the children die young. His sister, Catherine Drew, is a prominent London journalist and an early champion of women’s rights.

Drew is trained under Sir Charles Lanyon before moving to work in Dublin, where he becomes principal assistant to William George Murray. In 1865, he becomes the diocesan architect of the united dioceses of Down, Connor and Dromore, and from that point forward Church architecture is his principal activity. He is consulting architect for both St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin.

Drew marries Adelaide Anne, sister of William George Murray, in 1871.

Among other projects, Drew is responsible for the design of the Ulster Bank on Dame Street, Rathmines Town Hall (completed 1899) and the Graduates Memorial Building at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). He takes an interest in historic buildings and is the first to draw serious attention to the architectural and historic importance of the St. Audoen’s Church, Dublin’s oldest parish church, in 1866. He produces detailed plans of the church for which he wins an award from the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI), carries out excavations and draws up a paper on the church and its history.

From 1885 to 1892, Richard Orpen works with Drew as a managing assistant. Drew’s most significant work in Belfast is St. Anne’s Cathedral, completed in 1899.

Drew is knighted in the 1900 Birthday Honours and is inaugural president of the Royal Society of Ulster Architects, serving from 1901 to 1903. In addition, he is president of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI), the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (RSAI) and the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) and holds the chair in architecture at the National University of Ireland. He lives in Gortnadrew, Monkstown, County Dublin.

Drew dies on March 13, 1910, a month after an unsuccessful operation for appendicitis. He is buried in Dean’s Grange Cemetery.

Selected works:


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Birth of Liam Ó Briain, Irish Language Expert & Political Activist

Liam Ó Briain, Irish language expert and political activist, is born at 10 Church Street, North Wall, Dublin, on September 16, 1888.

Christened as William O’Brien, the seventh child of Arthur O’Brien, clerk, and Mary O’Brien (née Christie), who is from County Meath, Ó Briain takes an interest in the Irish language from an early age and begins learning Irish by himself from a grammar book, as it is not encouraged by his teachers at the Christian Brothers’ O’Connell School nor spoken by his parents. While still at the O’Connell School, he starts using the Irish version of his name. He also attends meetings of the Gaelic League, then attends University College Dublin (UCD) on a scholarship, where he studies French, English and Irish, receiving a BA (1909) and an MA (1910).

UCD decides to start awarding one annual scholarship for overseas travel in 1911, and Ó Briain wins the first one, using it to visit Germany and study under Kuno Meyer and Rudolf Thurneysen. After three years, he returns home, where he rejoins the Gaelic League and begins teaching French at UCD. He also joins the Irish Volunteers then, the following year, Seán T. O’Kelly convinces him to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB).

During the 1916 Easter Rising, Ó Briain sees action with the Irish Citizen Army. He comes into conflict with his commander, Michael Mallin, as he wants to pursue a strategy without the Dublin brigade being “cooped up in the city.” However, Mallin overrules him and insists they should focus on taking Dublin Castle. He spends two months in Wandsworth Prison in London and six months in Frongoch internment camp in Wales before being released to discover that he has been fired from his job. However, he quickly obtains a professorship in Romance languages at University College Galway (UCG).

Around this time, Ó Briain joins Sinn Féin, and he stands unsuccessfully for the party in Mid Armagh at the 1918 United Kingdom general election in Ireland, taking 5,689 votes. His campaign leads, indirectly, to his arrest and three months in jail in Belfast. In 1920, following his release, he is appointed a judge in the then-illegal republican court system in Galway, and visits both France and Italy to try to source weapons for the Irish Republican Army (IRA). In November 1920, he is arrested in the UCG dining room by Black and Tans, and is imprisoned for thirteen months, first in Galway and then in the Curragh camp in County Kildare, thereby missing the conclusion of the Irish War of Independence. By the time he is released, the Anglo-Irish Treaty has been signed. He supports the treaty and takes no further part in militant activity.

In the newly independent Ireland, Ó Briain remains a professor at Galway. He also stands in the 1925 Seanad election, although he is not successful. He is the founding secretary of the Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe theatre, also acting in many of its productions, and spends much time translating works from English and the Romance languages into Irish. He stands to become president of UCG in 1945, but is not elected, and in the 1940s and 1950s is best known for his many appearances on television and radio.

From his retirement in 1959, Ó Briain lives in Dublin. In 1974, the National University of Ireland (NUI) confers an honorary doctorate on him. He dies on August 12, 1974, at St. Gabriel’s Hospital, Cabinteely, County Dublin. His funeral to Glasnevin Cemetery is almost a state occasion, with a huge attendance of public figures, and a military firing party at the graveside, where the oration is given by Micheál Mac Líammóir and a lesson is read by Siobhán McKenna. For days after his death, the newspapers carry tributes to his many-sided career and personality. On the one hundredth anniversary of his birth, Proinsias Mac Aonghusa and Art Ó Beoláin write commemorative articles in Feasta.

On September 1, 1921, Ó Briain marries Helen Lawlor, of Dublin, who dies two years before him. The couple’s only child is Eibhlín Ní Bhriain, who is a journalist for The Irish Times and other periodicals.


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Birth of Siobhan Fahey, Founding Member of Bananarama

Siobhan Maire Fahey, Irish singer and founding member of the British girl group Bananarama, who have ten top-10 hits including the U.S. number one hit single “Venus,” is born on September 10, 1958, in County Meath. She is the first Irish-born woman to have written two number one singles on the Irish charts. She later forms the musical act Shakespears Sister, who have a UK number one hit with the 1992 single “Stay.” She joins the other original members of Bananarama for a 2017 UK tour, and, in 2018, a North America and Europe tour.

Fahey is the daughter of Helen and Joseph Fahey, both from County Tipperary. She has two younger sisters, Maire (who plays Eileen in the video of the 1982 song “Come On Eileen,” a hit for Dexys Midnight Runners) and Niamh, a producer and editor. She lives in Ireland for several years before her father joins the British Army and the family moves to England, then to Germany for several years, and back to England when she is nine years old. When she is 14, she and her family move to Harpenden, Hertfordshire, and, two years later, she leaves home for London and becomes involved in the punk scene of the late 1970s.

Fahey takes a course in fashion journalism at the London College of Fashion, where she meets Sara Dallin in 1980. Along with Keren Woodward, they found Bananarama and record their first demo “Aie a Mwana” in 1981. Bananarama then works with the male vocal trio Fun Boy Three, releasing two top-five singles with them in early 1982 before having their own top-five hit with “Shy Boy” later that year. Fahey, with Dallin and Woodward, co-write many of the group’s hits, including “Cruel Summer,” “Robert De Niro’s Waiting…,” “I Heard a Rumour,” and “Love in the First Degree.”

In 1988, frustrated with the direction she feels Bananarama is heading, Fahey leaves the group and forms Shakespears Sister. Initially, she effectively is Shakespears Sister, though American singer/songwriter Marcella Detroit later becomes an official member, making the outfit a duo. Their 1992 single “Stay” spends eight weeks at number one on the UK Singles Chart and wins the 1993 Brit Award for Best British Video. At the 1993 Ivor Novello Awards, she, Detroit, and Dave Stewart receive the award for Outstanding Contemporary Song Collection. She often appears in the band’s music videos and on-stage as a vampish glam figure. After two successful albums, tensions begin to rise between Fahey and Detroit and they split up in 1993. That year, Fahey admits herself into a psychiatric unit with severe depression.

In 1996, Fahey continues as Shakespears Sister by herself and releases the single “I Can Drive.” Intended as the first single from Shakespears Sister’s third album and her first record since her split with Marcella Detroit, the single performs disappointingly (UK number 30), which prompts London Records not to release the album. Following this, she leaves the label and, after a lengthy battle, finally obtains the rights to release the album (entitled #3) independently through her own website in 2004.

Fahey briefly re-joins Bananarama in 1998 to record a cover version of ABBA‘s “Waterloo” for the Channel 4 Eurovision special A Song for Eurotrash. She reteams with Bananarama again in 2002 for a “last ever” reunion at the band’s 20th-anniversary concert at G-A-Y in London. The trio performs “Venus” and “Waterloo.”

Fahey continues to make music into the new millennium. In 2005, she independently releases The MGA Sessions, an album recorded with frequent collaborator Sophie Muller in the mid-1990s. Her most recent single under her own name, “Bad Blood,” is released on October 17, 2005.

Fahey’s track “Bitter Pill” is partially covered by the pop band The Pussycat Dolls on their 2005 debut album PCD. The verses, which were slightly altered, and the overall sound of the song are from “Bitter Pill,” but added in is the chorus of Donna Summer‘s “Hot Stuff.” The song is renamed “Hot Stuff (I Want You Back)” and a remix is included as a B-side to their hit single “Beep.”

In 2008, Fahey appears in the Chris Ward-written and directed short film What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor, based on the life of artist/model Nina Hamnett, self-styled “Queen of Bohemia,” with Fahey playing the role of Hamnett opposite actor Clive Arrindel, Donny Tourette, frontman with punk band Towers of London, and Honey Bane, former vocalist of the punk band Fatal Microbes.

In 2009, Fahey decides to resurrect the Shakespears Sister name and releases a new album. Entitled Songs from the Red Room, it is released on her own record label, SF Records, and includes various singles she had released under her own name in recent years. She performs her first live show in almost 15 years as Shakespears Sister in Hoxton, London, on November 20, 2009. In 2014 she joins the line-up of Dexys Midnight Runners for some shows, including at Glastonbury Festival.

In 2017, it is announced that Fahey has joined her former Bananarama bandmates for an upcoming UK tour. This is the first live tour she has done as a member of Bananarama.

In 2019, Fahey reunites with Marcella Detroit for Shakespears Sister dates, commencing with an appearance on BBC One‘s The Graham Norton Show on May 10, 2019.

Fahey marries Dave Stewart of Eurythmics in 1987; the couple divorces in 1996. They have two sons, Samuel (born November 26, 1987) and Django James (born 1991). The two brothers form a musical band called Nightmare and the Cat. As an infant, Samuel Stewart appears in early Shakespears Sister videos for “Heroine” and “You’re History.” Django Stewart is also an actor. Samuel is currently the guitarist for the American indie rock band Lo Moon.

Prior to her marriage to Stewart, Fahey is romantically involved with Jim Reilly, the drummer for the Northern Irish punk rock band Stiff Little Fingers and Scottish singer Bobby Bluebell of The Bluebells, with whom she co-writes the UK No. 1 “Young at Heart.”


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Birth of Journalist Terry Keane

Terry Keane, Irish social columnist and fashion journalist, is born in Guildford, Surrey, England, on September 9, 1939.

Born Ann Teresa O’Donnell, she studies medicine at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). She drops out without taking a degree and later marries a young barrister, Ronan Keane. The couple separates in the 1990s, but never divorce. Ronan Keane goes on to become Chief Justice of Ireland (2000-2004).

Keane spends the majority of her career working for the Irish newspaper, the Sunday Independent, where she is the principal contributor of the newspaper’s long-running gossip column, “The Keane Edge.”

In “The Keane Edge” column there are often hints of a relationship with a prominent political figure, named in the column as Sweetie, and her relationship is apparently widely known in certain circles, though never openly confirmed. She leaves the paper on bad terms after selling the story of her 27-year affair with former Taoiseach Charles Haughey to the British newspaper The Sunday Times, a rival to the affiliated London Independent newspapers, though she admits her affair on The Late Late Show in 1999.

Keane’s death on May 31, 2008, after a long illness is announced by her son-in-law, the Irish garden designer and television personality Diarmuid Gavin. She is survived by her children Jane, Madeleine and Justine, who is married to Gavin. Her son Tim dies in 2004. One of her granddaughters, Holly Carpenter, is Miss Ireland in 2011.


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Death of Frederick May, Composer & Arranger

Frederick May, Irish composer and arranger, dies in Dublin on September 8, 1985. His musical career is seriously hindered by a lifelong hearing problem, and he produces relatively few compositions.

May is born on June 9, 1911, into a Dublin Protestant family who lives in the suburb of Donnybrook. His father, also named Frederick, is employed at the Guinness Brewery. He pursues his musical studies at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he is taught composition by John Larchet. In 1930, McCullough Pigott and Co. publishes his Irish Love Song. That same year he is awarded the Esposito Cup at the Feis Ceoil and as a result of this he is nominated as the first recipient of a new scholarship prize worth £100 to be spent on the further study of piano. In July 1930, he takes his preliminary examination for the Bachelor of Music at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) before departing Dublin to utilise his scholarship in London. In September he enrolls at the Royal College of Music (RCM) where his teachers include Charles Kitson, Ralph Vaughan Williams, R. O. Morris and Gordon Jacob. He takes his final TCD examination in December 1931 submitting a string quartet and on December 10 his degree is conferred. During 1932 his study is funded by the RCM’s Foli Scholarship and in October he is awarded the Octavia Travelling Scholarship.

May’s compositions are few in number and he produces most of his small output in the 1930s and early 1940s. His first significant work is the Scherzo for Orchestra, written while he is still a student in London. The first orchestral run through of Scherzo for Orchestra takes place on March 17, 1933, and it receives its first public performance on December 1 when it is heard as part of the Patron’s Concert. Between the months of May and October he composes his Four Romantic Songs, which receive their premiere in London at a Macnaghten-Lemare concert on January 22, 1934. At some point, probably in the second half of 1933, he follows in the footsteps of other Octavia Scholarship winners and travels to Vienna to study with Egon Wellesz.

On January 1, 1936, May takes up the position of Director of Music at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, a position he retains until he is fired in 1948. His duties mainly consist of leading the piano trio which bears the title “The Abbey Orchestra” in music during the intervals of productions. In 1936, he composes what is today his best-known composition, the String Quartet in C Minor, described in the Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians as “one of the most individual statements from an Irish composer in the first half of the 20th century.” He composes the quartet as his hearing is beginning to deteriorate and he later describes it as “an appeal for release.” String Quartet in C Minor is not premiered until 1948 when it is performed by the Martin Quartet in the Wigmore Hall, London. This is followed by Symphonic Ballad (1937), Suite of Irish Airs (1937), Spring Nocturne (1938), Songs from Prison (1941) and Lyric Movement for Strings (1942). He effectively ceases original composition at this point.

Following a long break from composition, May produces what is to be his valedictory work in 1955, the nine-minute orchestral piece Sunlight and Shadows. It is given its first performance on January 22, 1956, by the Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra at Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre. Although this is his last original work, he does not abandon music completely. He produces arrangements of Irish music for Radio Éireann, which while not perhaps rewarding artistically, does help to alleviate his always precarious financial situation. He also composes a number of songs for voice and piano and a short piece entitled Idyll for violin and piano. The latter is chosen as a set work for the junior violin competition at the Feis Ceoil in 2017.

Throughout his life May suffers from significant mental health issues which result in hospitalisation. He also experiences otosclerosis, as a result of which he gradually becomes increasingly deaf. In addition, he suffers from severe tinnitus with constant ringing noises in his head. In later life he becomes homeless for a time due to alcoholism and sleeps at night in Grangegorman Asylum, Dublin. He is rescued by some friends led by Garech Browne whose record company, Claddagh Records, records the String Quartet in 1974.

Throughout his career May is an advocate of better musical education in Ireland and expresses his views on this and other musical matters through the medium of The Bell, a monthly journal dealing with the arts. He is a co-founder, along with Brian Boydell and Aloys Fleischmann, of the Music Association of Ireland (now “Friends of Classical Music”), set up in 1948 to promote art music as an integral part of the cultural life of Ireland. Later he becomes a member of Aosdána. He lives the last years of his life at Orthopaedic Hospital of Ireland, Clontarf, Dublin. He dies on September 8, 1985, at the age of 74 and is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.