Abraham Colles, Professor of Anatomy, Surgery and Physiology at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) and the President of RCSI in 1802 and 1830, is born in Millmount, County Kilkenny, on July 23, 1773. A prestigious Colles Medal & Travelling Fellowship in Surgery is awarded competitively annually to an Irish surgical trainee embarking on higher specialist training abroad before returning to establish practice in Ireland.
Descended from a Worcestershire family, some of whom had sat in Parliament, Colles is born to William Colles and Mary Anne Bates of Woodbroak, County Wexford. The family lives near Millmount, a townland near Kilkenny, County Kilkenny, where his father owns and manages his inheritance which is the extensive Black Quarry that produces the famous Kilkenny black marble. His father dies when he is 6 years old, but his mother takes over the management of the quarry and manages to give her children a good education. While at Kilkenny College, a flood destroys a local physician’s house. He finds an anatomy book belonging to the doctor in a field and returns it to him. Sensing the young man’s interest in medicine, the physician lets him keep the book.
Following his return to Dublin, in 1799, Colles is elected to the staff at Dr. Steevens’ Hospital where he serves for the next 42 years. In October 1803, he is appointed Surgeon to Cork-street Fever Hospital, and subsequently becomes Consulting Surgeon to the Rotunda Hospital, City of Dublin Hospital, and Victoria Lying-in Hospital. He is a well-regarded surgeon and is elected as president of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) in 1802 at the age of 28 years, subsequently also serving as president in 1830. In 1804, he is appointed Professor of Anatomy, Physiology, and Surgery at RCSI.
In 1811, Colles writes an important treatise on surgical anatomy and some terms he introduces have survived in surgical nomenclature until today. He is remembered as a skillful surgeon and for his 1814 paper On the Fracture of the Carpal Extremity of the Radius. This injury continues to be known as Colles’ fracture. This paper, describing distal radial fractures, is far ahead of its time, being published decades before X-rays come into use. He also describes the membranous layer of subcutaneous tissue of the perineum, which comes to be known as Colles’ fascia. He also extensively studies the inguinal ligament, which is sometimes called Colles’ ligament. He is regarded as the first surgeon to successfully ligate the subclavian artery.
In 1837, Colles writes “Practical observations on the venereal disease, and on the use of mercury” in which he introduces the hypothesis of maternal immunity of a syphilitic infant when the mother has not shown signs of the disease. His principal textbook is the two-volume Lectures on the theory and practice of surgery. His writings are important, though not voluminous. Some of his papers are collected and edited by his son, William Colles, and published in the Dublin Journal of Medical Science. Selections from the works of Abraham Colles, chiefly relative to the venereal disease and the use of mercury, comprise Volume XOII. of the Library of the New Sydenham Society, published in 1881. They are edited and annotated by one of the most distinguished Fellows of the RCSI, Robert McDonnell. His Lectures on Surgery are edited by Simon M’Coy and published in 1850. In tribute to his distinguished career, he is awarded a baronetcy in 1839, which he refuses.
Upon Colles’s retirement as Professor of Surgery, the Members of RCSI pass a resolution which includes “We have also to assure you that it is the unanimous feeling of the College, that the exemplary and efficient manner in which you have filled this chair for thirty-two years, has been a principal cause of the success and consequent high character of the School of Surgery in this country.”
In 1807, Colles marries Sophia Cope. His son William follows in his footsteps, being elected to the Chair of Anatomy in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 1863. Another of his sons, Henry, marries Elizabeth Mayne, a niece of Robert James Graves. His grandson is the eminent music critic and lexicographerH. C. Colles. His granddaughter Frances marries the judge Lord Ashbourne, and her sister Anna marries his colleague Sir Edmund Thomas Bewley.
Abraham is born on April 5, 1869, in Rathgar, County Dublin. She works to improve conditions for industrial workers and is also involved in women’s health and education. She is one of the first people to be appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1917.
Abraham is educated at home. Following her father’s death in 1887, she decides to move to London in search of employment. In London she becomes secretary to Emilia, Lady Dilke, who is a leader of the Women’s Trade Union League, an organisation of which she becomes treasurer. She supports the London Dock Strike of 1889 and helps organise laundresses.
In 1891, Abraham is appointed to the Royal Commission on Labour, set up to investigate the poor conditions faced by industrial workers, as one of four women assistant commissioners.
H. H. Asquith decides to appoint women factory inspectors in 1893, and Abraham is one of his first choices, soon superintending a team of five women inspectors. In this position, she is known for her good humour which helps relations with factory managers. In 1895, she joins the Departmental Committee on Dangerous Trades. She writes a book on factory legislation in 1896, The Laws Relating to Factories and Workshops, Including Laundries and Docks.
In 1896, Abraham marries Harold Tennant, brother-in-law of and parliamentary secretary to Asquith, and chairman of the Departmental Committee on Dangerous Trades. She resigns in 1897 shortly before the birth of her first son, to devote herself to her family. She goes on to have five children. Her eldest son, Henry, is killed in battle in 1917 during World War I.
Despite her new family life, Tennant does not give up her work entirely, remaining on the Committee on Dangerous Trades. In 1899, she becomes chairman of the Industrial Law Indemnity Fund, which provides compensation to victimised workers. She is on the Royal Commission on Divorce in 1909 and is a founder and treasurer of the Central Committee for Women’s Employment.
During World War I, Tennant takes on more work. She works initially for the War Office as welfare advisor, then briefly in the Women’s Department of the National Service Department, before moving to the Ministry of Munitions. After the war, she reduces her workload, but still serves on committees on maternal mortality and maternal health. She is also a governor of Bedford College in London, an institution founded for the education of women that is part of the University of London. From 1941 she is closely involved in campaigning for the Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund.
Tennant and her husband purchase and rebuild a country house, Great Maytham, at Rolvenden, Kent, a property whose old walled garden had earlier been the inspiration for The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. She develops expertise as a gardener, becoming prominent in the Royal Horticultural Society. After her husband’s death in 1935, she moves to a smaller house named Cornhill at Great Maytham, where she dies July 11, 1946. Some of her correspondence is in the British Library, London.
George Johnstone StoneyFRS, Irish physicist, dies on July 5, 1911, at Notting Hill, London, England. He is most famous for introducing the term “electron” as the “fundamental unit quantity of electricity.” He introduces the concept, though not the word, as early as 1874, initially naming it “electrine,” and the word itself comes in 1891. He publishes around 75 scientific papers during his lifetime.
Stoney is born on February 15, 1826, at Oakley Park, near Birr, County Offaly, in the Irish Midlands, the son of George Stoney and Anne (née Bindon Blood). His only brother is Bindon Blood Stoney, who becomes chief engineer of the Dublin Port and Docks Board. The Stoney family is an old-established Anglo-Irish family. During the time of the famine (1845–52), when land prices plummet, the family property is sold to support his widowed mother and family. He attends Trinity College Dublin (TCD), graduating with a BA degree in 1848. From 1848 to 1852 he works as an astronomy assistant to William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, at Birr Castle, County Offaly, where Parsons had built the world’s largest telescope, the 72-inch Leviathan of Parsonstown. Simultaneously he continues to study physics and mathematics and is awarded an MA by TCD in 1852.
From 1852 to 1857, Stoney is professor of physics at Queen’s College Galway. From 1857 to 1882, he is employed as Secretary of the Queen’s University of Ireland, an administrative job based in Dublin. In the early 1880s, he moves to the post of superintendent of Civil Service Examinations in Ireland, a post he holds until his retirement in 1893. He continues his independent scientific research throughout his decades of non-scientific employment duties in Dublin. He also serves for decades as honorary secretary and then vice-president of the Royal Dublin Society (RDS), a scientific society modeled after the Royal Society of London and, after his move to London in 1893, he serves on the council of that society as well. Additionally, he intermittently serves on scientific review committees of the British Association for the Advancement of Science from the early 1860s.
Stoney publishes seventy-five scientific papers in a variety of journals, but chiefly in the journals of the Royal Dublin Society. He makes significant contributions to cosmic physics and to the theory of gases. He estimates the number of molecules in a cubic millimeter of gas, at room temperature and pressure, from data obtained from the kinetic theory of gases. His most important scientific work is the conception and calculation of the magnitude of the “atom of electricity.” In 1891, he proposes the term “electron” to describe the fundamental unit of electrical charge, and his contributions to research in this area lays the foundations for the eventual discovery of the particle by J. J. Thomson in 1897.
Stoney proposes the first system of natural units in 1881. He realizes that a fixed amount of charge is transferred per chemical bond affected during electrolysis, the elementary chargee, which can serve as a unit of charge, and that combined with other known universal constants, namely the speed of lightc and the Newtonian constant of gravitationG, a complete system of units can be derived. He shows how to derive units of mass, length, time and electric charge as base units. Due to the form in which Coulomb’s law is expressed, the constant 4πε0 is implicitly included, ε0 being the vacuum permittivity.
Like Stoney, Max Planck independently derives a system of natural units (of similar scale) some decades after him, using different constants of nature.
Hermann Weyl makes a notable attempt to construct a unified theory by associating a gravitational unit of charge with the Stoney length. Weyl’s theory leads to significant mathematical innovations, but his theory is generally thought to lack physical significance.
Stoney marries his cousin, Margaret Sophia Stoney, by whom he has had two sons and three daughters. One of his sons, George Gerald Stoney FRS, is a scientist. His daughter Florence StoneyOBE is a radiologist while his daughter Edith is considered to be the first woman medical physicist. His most scientifically notable relative is his nephew, the Dublin-based physicist George Francis FitzGerald. He is second cousin of the grandfather of Ethel Sara Turing, mother of Alan Turing.
After moving to London, Stoney lives first at Hornsey Rise, north London, before moving to 30 Chepstow Crescent, Notting Hill, west London. In his later years illness confines him to a single floor of the house, which is filled with books, papers, and scientific instruments, often self-made. He dies at his home on July 5, 1911. His cremated ashes are buried in St. Nahi’s Church, Dundrum, Dublin.
Daly is born in Limerick on October 18, 1845. His father works in James Harvey & Son’s Timber Yard. At the age of sixteen, he joins his father working as a lath splitter. At eighteen he is sworn in as a member of the IRB, also known as the Fenians, and becomes fully involved in Republican activities. When he is refused absolution in confession because he admits to being a Fenian, he decides that from then on, his loyalty will no longer be to “faith and Fatherland” but to “God and Fatherland.”
On November 22, 1866, Daly and his brother Edward are arrested at their family home having been betrayed by an informer, for running a munitions factory in the Pennywell district close to their home. He is released on bail in February 1867 toughened and more dedicated by the experience.
On March 5, 1867, the ill-prepared Fenian Rising takes place. Daly takes charge of the Limerick detachment of the IRB. Limerick is one of the few areas where the Fenians are able to make some show of force, however weak. Through lack of numbers, they fail to make a significant impact on the vastly superior forces arrayed against them. Moving out of the city, he moves his men into the country and joins up with other Fenians in an attack on the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) barracks at Kilmallock. The attack is repelled, and Daly disperse his men.
After this Daly flees the country by stowing away first on a boat, the Hollywood, to England, and from London then on board the Cornelius Grenfel to the United States.
Life in America for working class immigrants is particularly tough and Daly’s first job on leaving the ship is digging a cellar. He then obtains work in a white lead factory and works for a while as a mason’s helper before getting a reasonably good job as a brakeman on a tram system. He is to recall these experiences in his Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism.
In 1869, Daly return to Ireland and takes up his old job in the timber yard, and also his Republican activities. He begins to help reorganise the IRB and takes part in a number of agitations to keep the IRB agenda in the public view. He becomes a leading voice in the Amnesty Association to help in the release of those Fenians still in jail.
In November 1869, a major tenants’ right meeting takes place in the city. The IRB objects to the meeting because the issue of the prisoners is not on the agenda. In what comes to be known as “The Battle of the Markets,” the IRB charges the platform and succeeds in dismantling it. Though the organisers of the meeting attempt to hold some form of gathering, Daly and the IRB refuse to relent. It is Daly’s opinion that “it was one of the greatest moral victories ever achieved.” The issue of the political prisoners is to keep him occupied for much of the 1870s. In 1876, he is again arrested for disturbing another home rule gathering, though on being brought before the court he is acquitted.
During the Land War Daly is a member of the Supreme Council of the IRB and becomes organiser for Connacht and Ulster.
In the summer of 1883, Daly moved to Birmingham, England, and settles in the home of James Egan, an old friend from Limerick and a generally inactive IRB man. E.G. Jenkinson, head of Special Branch, is informed that Daly is on his way to Britain from the United States. He has been asked by the Supreme Council to deliver the graveside oration at the funeral of Charles J. Kickham while in the United States. When he arrives, a plain-clothes detective is assigned to follow him at all times. As a result of this, Special Branch are alerted to the importance of John Torley in Glasgow, Robert Johnston in Belfast and Mark Ryan in London of the IRB.
Jenkinson uses agent provocateurs in his attempts to convict Republicans. One such recruit is a publican and local IRB man named Dan O’Neill. Both Jenkinson and a Major Nicholas Gosselin persuade O’Neill to betray Daly. O’Neill then asks Daly to deliver sealed cases to some associates in London, and on April 11, he is arrested as he is about to board the train for London, and explosives are found in the case he is carrying. The police then raid the home of James Egan where explosives are “allegedly found buried” in Egan’s garden in addition to some documents.
In Chatham prison Daly becomes friends with Tom Clarke, who would later marry his niece Kathleen and who was a leader of the 1916 Easter Rising. While in prison he claims that he is being poisoned with belladonna which causes an investigation by a commission of inquiry in 1890. It is admitted by prison officials as an error by a warder. A series of articles in the Daily Chronicle in 1894 analyse prison methods. Daly gives an interview to the Chronicle which appears on September 12, 1896.
Daly is elected three times as Mayor of Limerick City, from 1899 to 1901. He jointly finances with Patrick McCartan the IRB newspaper Irish Freedom in 1910.
Daly dies on June 30, 1916, at his home, 15 Barrington Street, Limerick. He never marries. A tall, energetic, and gregarious man, he is a simple but often effective propagandist for the separatist cause.
In 1928, Madge Daly, a niece of Daly, presents the Daly cup to William P. Clifford, the then-chairman of the Limerick GAA county board. Since then, the Daly cup is presented to the winners of the Limerick Senior Hurling Championship.
(Pictured: Irish Republican and Fenian John Daly in the ceremonial garb of the Mayor of Limerick, circa 1900)
Flanagan is born to Patrick and Elizabeth (née Mulligan) Flanagan, who are strongly nationalist and republican, and support the Republican Anti-Treaty during the Irish Civil War, both serving as Lord Mayor of Sligo. Her paternal family, originally from County Fermanagh, are driven out by anti‐Catholicpogroms and resettle in Sligo, where her parents manage a retail business. She is good friends with fellow Irish actresses Joan O’Hara and Paddy Croft. She spends much of the early 1950s touring with Anew McMaster, where she meets Harold Pinter at the Gate’s Pinter Festival.
In 1997, Flanagan wins the Barclays Theatre Awards for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her role in Jennifer Johnston‘s The Desert Lullaby: A Play in Two Acts, at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast. The Barclays Theatre Awards are for outstanding regional theatre (including opera and dance) in the United Kingdom.
A resident of Glen Rock, New Jersey, Flanagan dies at The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, New Jersey, on June 28, 2003, one day before her 78th birthday, of heart failure following a battle with lung cancer. She is survived by her husband, George Vogel (whom she married in 1958), a sister, Maura McNally, and her daughters Melissa Brown and Jane Holtzen.
Adebari arrives in Dublin with his wife and two children in 2000. After he converts from Islam to Christianity, he flees Nigeria in 2000, and makes a claim for asylum on the grounds of religious persecution. His application is rejected because of a lack of evidence that he had personally suffered persecution. He does however gain automatic residency when his wife gives birth to a son in Ireland shortly after their arrival.
Adebari and his family settle in County Laois. He completes his master’s degree in intercultural studies at Dublin City University (DCU) and sets up a firm called Optimum Point Consultancy.
In 2004, Adebari is elected as a town councilor in local elections. On June 27, 2007, at the age of 43, he is elected mayor of the 9-member Portlaoise Town Council, by a vote of six to three and with support from Fine Gael, Sinn Féin and an Independent councilor. At a meeting attended by officials from the Nigerian, South African, and the United States embassies, the new mayor is quoted as saying his election is proof that “Ireland is not just a country of a thousand welcomes, but it is a country of equal opportunity.” In the 2009 local elections he is re-elected to the town council and also to Laois County Council for the Portlaoise electoral area.
In 2007, Adebari denies claims that he was a train operator in London who worked out of the Queen’s Park station on the Bakerloo line. Multiple London Underground employees, including Paddy Clarke, a retired tube driver from County Louth, state that Adebari worked as a train driver in London during the late 1990s before moving to Ireland. Clarke states, “at the very least fifty drivers and six or more managers will remember him. His photograph and signature are on file with London Underground’s personnel office which were used in the issue of his free travel-pass and identity card.” Adebari asserts he traveled to Ireland directly from Nigeria via Paris, and never worked or lived in London at any time.
Stoney is born into an old-established Anglo-Irish scientific family at 40 Wellington Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin, on January 6, 1869. The daughter of George Johnstone Stoney, FRS, an eminent physicist who coins the term “electron” in 1891 as the “fundamental unit quantity of electricity,” and his wife and cousin, Margaret Sophia Stoney. One of her two brothers, George Gerald, is an engineer and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). One of her two sisters, Florence Stoney, is a radiologist and receives an OBE. Her cousin is the Dublin-based physicist George Francis FitzGerald FRS (1851–1901), and her uncle Bindon Blood Stoney FRS is Engineer of Dublin Port, renowned for building a number of the main Dublin bridges and developing the Quayside.
Stoney demonstrates considerable mathematical talent and gains a scholarship at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she achieves a First in the Part I Tripos examination in 1893. However, she is not awarded a University of Cambridge degree as women are excluded from graduation until 1948. During her time at Newnham, she is in charge of the College telescope. She is later awarded a BA and an MA from Trinity College Dublin, after they accept women in 1904.
Following the 1876 Medical Act, it is illegal for academic institutions to prevent access to medical education based on gender. The first medical school for women in Britain is established in 1874 by Dr. Sophia Jex-Blake in anticipation of this law. The London School of Medicine for Women quickly becomes part of the University of London, with clinical teaching at the Royal Free Hospital. Stoney’s sister Florence is a student at the school, graduates in medicine with honours in 1895 (MB BS) and obtains her MD in 1898. Meanwhile, Stoney gains an appointment as a physics lecturer at the school in 1899. Her first tasks are to set up a physics laboratory and design the physics course. The laboratory is planned for 20 students, and the course content is pure physics, as required by university regulations. It includes mechanics, magnetism, electricity, optics, sound, heat and energy. In her obituary in The Lancet, an ex-student of hers notes: “Her lectures on physics mostly developed into informal talks, during which Miss Stoney, usually in a blue pinafore, scratched on a blackboard with coloured chalks, turning anxiously at intervals to ask ‘Have you taken my point?’. She was perhaps too good a mathematician … to understand the difficulties of the average medical student, but experience had taught her how distressing these could be”.
In 1901, the Royal Free Hospital appoints Florence into a new part-time position of medical electrician. The following April, the two sisters open a new x-ray service in the electrical department. During their time at the Royal Free Hospital, the two sisters actively support the women’s suffrage movement, though oppose the direct violent action with which it is later associated.
During her time at the school, Stoney also plays a central role in the British Federation of University Women (BFUW). She is elected treasurer, in her absence, at the first executive meeting on October 9, 1909, a position she holds until the end of May 1915. She becomes increasingly engaged with the political lobbying of the Federation. At the executive meeting on October 19, 1912, she proposes the names of two members for a subcommittee to secure the passing into law of a bill to enable women to become barristers, solicitors or parliamentary agents. The legislation is eventually enacted after the war within the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919.
Stoney resigns her post at the school in March 1915 and it is recorded that “with due regret and most unwillingly a change is desirable in the physics lectureship.” She is offered £300 on tendering her resignation.
Both Stoney and Florence offer their services to the British Red Cross at the War Office in London, to provide a radiological service to support the troops in Europe, on the day Britain declares war. Their offer is refused, because they are women. Florence sets up her own unit with the Women’s Imperial Service League and spends the next 6 months in Europe. Stoney organises supplies from London where she also serves on the League’s committee. Florence returns to London at the time Stoney resigns from the London School of Medicine for Women. She contacts the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH), an organisation formed in 1914 to give medical support in the field of battle and financed by the women’s suffrage movement. The organisation has gained agreement to set up a new 250-bed tented hospital at Domaine de Chanteloup, Sainte-Savine, near Troyes (France), funded by the Cambridge women’s colleges of Girton and Newnham and it becomes her role to plan and operate the x-ray facilities. She establishes stereoscopy to localise bullets and shrapnel and introduces the use of x-rays in the diagnosis of gas gangrene, interstitial gas being a mandate for immediate amputation to give any chance of survival.
The hospital is near the front line and, in her own words, by September 1915, “the town had been evacuated, the station had been mined, and we heard the heavy guns ever going at nighttime.” The unit is entirely female, except for two part-time male drivers, and her technical assistant, Mr. Mallett.
They are assigned to the Corps Expéditionnaire d’Orient and ordered to move to Serbia. After boarding the steamship Mossoul in Marseille, they reach Salonika (known as Thessaloniki in modern Greece) on November 3, where they take the night train north to Ghevgheli (now Gevgelija in modern North Macedonia), on the Serbian side of the Greek border. They set up a hospital in an unused silk factory where they treat 100 patients with injuries ranging from frostbite to severe lung and head wounds. Following defeats at the hands of Bulgarian forces, Stoney and her staff retreat to Salonika by December 6, 1916. Eleven days later, they have re-established the hospital on a drained low swamp by the sea, and by New Year’s Day 1917 she has the lights on and the x-rays working. Despite the lack of equipment and resources, she establishes an electrotherapy department and various equipments for the muscular rehabilitation of the soldiers in their care. She also assists with problems on two British hospital ships, on which the x-ray systems have been damaged during a storm and gives support to the SWH unit in Ostrovo (now Arnissa on Lake Vegoritida formerly lake Ostrovo in Northern Greece), which arrives during September 1916. She has a break for sick leave in December 1917 and returns the following summer. She applies for an appointment as an army camp radiologist in Salonika, but her demand is blocked by the War Office.
In October 1917, Stoney returns to France to lead the x-ray departments at the SWH hospitals of Royaumont and Villers-Cotterêts. In March 1918, she has to supervise a camp closure and retreat for the third time, when Villers-Cotterêts is overrun by the German troops. During the final months of the war the fighting intensifies and there is a steep increase in workload. In the month of June alone the x-ray workload peaks at over 1,300, partly because of an increased use of fluoroscopy.
On returning to England, Stoney takes a post as lecturer in physics in the Household and Social Science department at King’s College for Women which she holds until retirement in 1925. After leaving King’s she moves to Bournemouth, where she lives with her sister Florence, who is suffering from spinal cancer, dying in 1932.
During her retirement, Stoney resumes her work with the BFUW for which she had acted as the first treasurer before the war. She becomes one of the earliest (and oldest) members of the Women’s Engineering Society and plays an active part in the organisation until shortly before her death. She travels widely and, in 1934, she speaks to the Australian Federation of University Women on the subject of women in engineering, highlighting the contribution made by women workers during the war. In 1936, she establishes the Johnstone and Florence Stoney Studentship in the BFUW, for “research in biological, geological, meteorological or radiological science undertaken preferably in Australia, New Zealand or South Africa.” The studentship is now administered by Newnham College, Cambridge, and supports clinical medical students going abroad for their elective period. The declaration of Trust is dated February 11, 1942 and the Johnstone And Florence Stoney Studentship Fund Charity is registered on March 25, 1976.
Stoney dies on June 25, 1938, at age 69, and obituaries are printed in both the scientific and medical press – Nature, The Lancet, The Woman Engineer and national newspapers in England, The Times and Australia.
Stoney is remembered for her considerable bravery and resourcefulness in the face of extreme danger, and her imagination in contributing to clinical care under the most difficult conditions of war. As a strong advocate of education for women, she enables young graduate women to spend time on research overseas and another to enable physicists to enter medical school thanks to the fund she created. Through her work and engagements, she is remembered as a pioneer of medical physics.
(Pictured: Edith Anne Stoney during her time in Cambridge in the early 1890s)
Kitchener is the second son of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Horatio Kitchener and his first wife, Frances Anne (née Chevallier), daughter of clergyman John Chevallier. Col. Kitchener resigns his commission in 1849 and purchases Ballygoghlan House estate near Tarbert, County Kerry, in early 1850 under the provisions of the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849. Ballygoghlan House is in a state of disrepair, however, and the family lives in Gunsborough Villa until the end of 1850. In 1857, Col. Kitchener purchases Crotta House, near Kilflynn, County Kerry, and the Kitcheners divide their time between the two residences. While innovative and successful in his agricultural methods, Col. Kitchener is harsh towards his tenants and, after carrying out many evictions, becomes extremely unpopular in the area. He is a rigid disciplinarian and occasionally punishes his son severely.
Although Kitchener attends Ballylongford village school, his education is largely neglected. When examined by his cousin Francis Elliot Kitchener, fellow of Trinity College Dublin (TCD), he is found to have only the most rudimentary knowledge of grammar and arithmetic. Education by private tutors follows. In 1864, his father sells his Irish estates and moves to Switzerland for the sake of his wife’s health. After further private tuition, he passes into the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, in 1868, and is commissioned into the Royal Engineers in December 1870.
Kitchener begins his career on survey missions and carries out such work in Palestine (1874–78) and Cyprus (1878–82). He then enters the Egyptian Army and takes part in the Sudan campaign of 1883–85, organised to relieve Genral Charles George Gordon. Subsequent appointments include governor of Suakin (1886–88), adjutant-general of the Egyptian Army (1888–92), and Sirdar (Commander-in-Chief) of the Egyptian Army (1892–96). After the Dongola Expedition in 1896, he is promoted to major-general. He commands the Khartoum Expedition of 1898, defeating Mahdist forces at Atbara and Omdurman, and is raised to the peerage.
At the outbreak of the Second Boer War in 1899, he is appointed chief of staff to Frederick Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts, and assumes total command, with the rank of lieutenant-general, in 1900. While acting as commander-in-chief in South Africa he reorganises the British forces and, using new tactics, manages finally to defeat the Boers. He is severely criticised in the world press for the conditions in the concentration camps where Boer families are confined, but is made a viscount, promoted to general, and awarded £50,000 by parliament at the end of the war.
Kitchener serves as commander-in-chief in India beginning in 1902, is promoted to Field Marshal in 1909, and is a member of the Committee of Imperial Defence (1910) and consul-general in Egypt (1911–14). At the outbreak of World War I he is made Secretary of State for War and begins to reorganise the British Army, an immense achievement, raising 1,700,000 men in service battalions by May 1915, creating an army of volunteers to reinforce the depleted regular army in Belgium and France. An archconservative, he totally opposes Home Rule for Ireland, and initially blocks plans by John Redmond for the formation of a southern Irish division from members of the National Volunteers. Convinced that an all-Irish brigade or division would be a security risk, he rejects Redmond’s suggestions in a meeting of August 1915 and originally proposes dispersing Irish recruits through the numerous regiments in the army. Impressed by Redmond’s persistence, and impelled by the recruiting crisis of late 1915, he finally reverses his decision and sanctions the establishment of the 16th (Irish) Division.
On June 5, 1916, Kitchener is making his way to Russia on HMS Hampshire to attend negotiations with Tsar Nicholas II when in bad weather the ship strikes a German mine 1.5 miles (2.4 km) west of Orkney, Scotland, and sinks. He is among 737 who perish. He is the highest-ranking British officer to die in action in the entire war.
Although he only spends his early years in Kerry, Kitchener occasionally returns to Ireland. While on leave in June 1910 he goes on a tour of County Kerry, visiting places connected to his childhood. There are numerous portraits and memorials to him in England, including a marble effigy by W. Reid Dick in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and a statue by John Tweed in Horse Guards Parade, London. There is a commemorative bible in the Church of Ireland church at Kilflynn, County Kerry, where he regularly attended Sunday service as a boy. There are some Kitchener letters in the John Redmond papers in the National Library of Ireland.
(From: “Kitchener, Horatio Herbert” by David Murphy, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
As Governor-General of India, Wellesley uses military force and diplomacy to strengthen and expand British authority. East India Company forces defeat and kill Tipu Sultan, Indian Muslim ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore (present-day Mysuru) and sympathizer for Revolutionary France, in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War (1799), and he then restores the Hindu dynasty there that had been deposed by Tipu’s father, Hyder Ali. He annexes much territory after his brother Arthur and General Gerard Lake defeat the Maratha Confederacy of states in the Deccan Plateau (peninsular India). In addition, he forces the Oudh State to surrender numerous important cities to the British, and he contracts with other states a series of “subsidiary alliances” by which all parties recognize British preponderance. He receives a barony in the British peerage in 1797 at the time of his appointment as governor-general, and in 1799 he is awarded a marquessate in the Irish peerage for his victory in the Mysore War.
When Wellesley is faced with an invasion by Zaman Shah Durrani, ruler (1793–1800) of Kabul (Afghanistan), he utilizes his envoy, Captain John Malcolm, to induce Fatḥ-Alī Shah Qajar of Qajar Iran to restrain Zaman Shah Durrani and to give British political and commercial interests preference over the French. On receiving a British government order to restore to France its former possessions in India, he refuses to comply. His policy is vindicated when the Treaty of Amiens (1802) is violated, and Great Britain resumes war against Napoleonic France.
Wellesley’s annexations and the vast military expenditure that he had authorized alarms the court of directors of the East India Company. In 1805, he is recalled, and soon afterward he is threatened with impeachment, although two years later he refuses an offer of the foreign secretaryship. In 1809, he goes to Spain to make diplomatic arrangements for the Peninsular War against France and later that year becomes foreign secretary under Prime MinisterSpencer Perceval. In that office he antagonizes his colleagues, who consider him an indolent megalomaniac and welcome his resignation in February 1812. Unlike most of them, however, he had urged a stronger war effort in Spain and had advocated political rights for British Roman Catholics. After Perceval’s assassination on May 11, 1812, he attempts unsuccessfully to form a government at the request of the prince regent (the future King George IV).
As Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Wellesley disappoints the anti-Catholic George IV, and he is about to be removed when his brother, Arthur, is appointed prime minister in January 1828. He then resigns because his brother is opposed to Roman Catholic emancipation, although the duke is constrained to accept that policy as a political necessity in 1829. His second term as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1833–34) ends with the fall of Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey’s reform government. When the Whig Party returns to power in April 1835, he is not sent back to Ireland, and in his rage, he threatens to shoot the prime minister, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne. He wants to be created Duke of Hindustan so that his rank will equal that of his brother.
Wellesley dies at the age of 82 on September 26, 1842, at Knightsbridge, London. He is buried in Eton College Chapel, at his old school. He and Arthur, after a long estrangement, had been once more on friendly terms for some years. Arthur weeps at the funeral and says that he knows of no honour greater than being Lord Wellesley’s brother.
Wellesley’s library is sold at auction in London by R. H. Evans on January 17, 1843 (and three following days); a copy of the catalogue, annotated with prices and buyers’ names, is held at Cambridge University Library.
Wellesley has several children, including three sons, but none are legitimate. The marquessate thus becomes extinct upon his death. The earldom of Mornington goes to his next surviving brother, William Wellesley-Pole.
(From: “Richard Colley Wellesley, Marquess Wellesley, British statesman,” written and fact-checked by the Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com, April 2024 | Pictured: “Richard Colley Wellesley, Marquess of Wellesley (1760-1842),” oil on canvas portrait by Thomas Lawrence, 1812-13)
Boycott is born on March 12, 1832, at Burgh St. Peter, Norfolk, England, eldest surviving son of William Boycatt (1798–1877), rector of Wheatacrebury, Norfolk, and Elizabeth Georgiana Boycatt (née Beevor). The family name is changed to Boycott by his father in 1862. Educated at a boarding school in Blackheath, London, and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, he is commissioned ensign in the 39th (Dorsetshire) Regiment of Foot on February 15, 1850, and serves briefly in Ireland. He sells his commission on December 17, 1852, having attained the rank of captain, marries Annie Dunne of Queen’s County (County Laois) in 1852, and leases a farm in south County Tipperary.
In 1855, Boycott leaves for Achill Island, County Mayo, where he sub-leases 2,000 acres and acts as land agent for a friend, Murray McGregor Blacker, a local magistrate. He settles initially near Keem Strand but after some years builds a fine house near Dooagh overlooking Clew Bay. He clashes with local landowners and agents and is regularly involved in litigation. Twice summonsed unsuccessfully for assault (1856, 1859), he is involved (1859–60) in a bitter dispute with a land agent over salvage rights for shipwrecks, one of the few lucrative activities on the island. Achill’s remoteness and the difficulties of wresting a living from its harsh environment adds a roughness to the island’s social relations and probably aggravates Boycott’s tendency to high-handedness.
In 1873, Boycott inherits money and moves to mainland County Mayo, leasing Lough Mask House near Ballinrobe and its surrounding 300 acres. He also becomes agent for John Crichton, 3rd Earl Erne‘s neighbouring estate of 1,500 acres, home to thirty-eight tenant farmers paying rents of £500 a year, of which he receives 10 per cent as agent. He also serves as a magistrate and is unpopular because of his brusque and authoritarian manner, and for denying locals such traditional indulgences as collecting wood from the Lough Mask estate or taking short cuts across his farm. In April 1879, he purchases the 95-acre Kildarra estate between Claremorris and Ballinlough and an adjoining wood for £1,125, taking out a mortgage of £600 which stretches his finances.
Boycott is no brutal tyrant, but he is aloof, stubborn, and pugnacious, and believes that the Irish peasantry is prone to idleness and require firm handling. Such qualities and beliefs are unremarkable enough, but in the peculiar circumstances of the land war in County Mayo, they are enough to catapult this rather ordinary man to worldwide notoriety.
In autumn 1879, concerted land agitation begins in County Mayo, and on August 1, 1879, Boycott receives a notice threatening his life unless he reduces rents. He ignores it and evicts three tenants, which embitter relations on the estate. Lough Mask House is placed under Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) surveillance beginning in November 1879. In August 1880, his farm labourers, encouraged by the Irish National Land League, strike successfully for a wage increase from 7s. –11s. to 9s. –15s. Since the harvest is poor, Lord Erne allows a 10 per cent rent abatement. But in September 1880, when Boycott demands the rent, most tenants seek a 25 per cent abatement. Lord Erne refuses, and on September 22, Boycott attempts to serve processes against eleven defaulters. Servers and police are attacked by an angry crowd of local women and forced to take refuge in Boycott’s house. Almost immediately he is subjected to the ostracism against land grabbers advocated by Charles Stewart Parnell in his September 19 speech at Ennis, County Clare. This weapon proves as devastating against an English land agent as an Irish land-grabber. His servants leave him, labourers refuse to work his land, his walls and fences are destroyed, and local traders refuse to do business with him. He is jeered on the roads, is hissed and hustled by hostile crowds in Ballinrobe, and requires police protection.
The campaign against Boycott is largely orchestrated by Fr. John O’Malley, a local parish priest and president of the Neale branch of the Irish National Land League. It is probably O’Malley who coins the term “boycott” as an alternative to the word “ostracise,” which he believes would mean little to the local peasantry. Propagated by O’Malley’s friend, the American journalist, James Redpath, it is adopted by advocates and opponents alike.
On October 22, 1880, before his story breaks on the world, Boycott gives evidence of his treatment to the Bessborough Commission in Galway. He publicises his plight in an October 18, 1880, letter to The Times, and in a long interview with The Daily News on October 24, which is reprinted in Irish unionist newspapers and arouses considerable sympathy for him. Although he rarely uses his former military rank, he becomes universally known as “Captain Boycott,” since it suits both sides to portray him as someone of social standing. Letters of support appear in unionist papers and the Belfast News Letter sets up a “Boycott Relief Fund” and proposes a relief expedition, portraying Boycott as a peaceable English gentleman unjustly subjected to intimidation.
The prospect of hundreds of armed loyalists descending on County Mayo alarms the government, who announced on November 8 that they will provide protection for a small group of labourers to harvest Boycott’s crops. On November 12, fifty-seven loyalists from counties Cavan and Monaghan, “the Boycott Relief Expedition,” arrive at Lough Mask with an escort of almost a thousand troops. After harvesting Boycott’s crops, they leave on November 26. The entire operation costs £10,000 – about thirty times the value of the crops. Although the expedition passes off largely without incident, it focuses international media attention on the affair and establishes the word “boycott” in English and several other languages as a standard term for communal ostracism.
On November 27, Boycott and his wife go to the Hammam hotel, Dublin, where he receives death threats. On December 1, he travels to London and then to the United States (March–May 1881) to see Murray McGregor Blacker, the friend from his time on Achill Island who has since settled in Virginia. In an interview with the New York Herald, he criticises the liberal government’s weakness toward the Land League and claims that the Irish land question is an intractable problem that can only be solved in the long term by emigration and industrialisation.
Boycott returns to Lough Mask on September 19, 1881, and at an auction in Westport is mobbed and burned in effigy. This, however, is the last outburst of hostility against him, and as the land agitation wanes so does his unpopularity. Although unsuccessful in efforts to win compensation from the government, he receives a public subscription of £2,000. He remains in County Mayo as Lord Erne’s agent until February 1886, when he obtains the post of land agent for Sir Hugh Adair in Flixton, Suffolk, but he keeps the small Kildarra estate, where he continues to holiday. On December 12, 1888, he gives evidence of his treatment to the parliamentary commission on “Parnellism and crime.”
After suffering from ill-health for some years, Boycott dies at Flixton on June 19, 1897, and is buried in the churchyard of Burgh St. Peter. A British-made film, Captain Boycott (1947), stars Cecil Parker in the title role.
seamus dubhghaill 