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Birth of Journalist Eoghan Corry

eoghan-corry

Eoghan Corry, Irish journalist and author regarded as the most extensively traveled writer in Ireland, averaging over 30 countries a year, is born in Dublin on January 19, 1961.

Corry is the third of four children of Patrick Corry (1916–1971) from Kilmacduane, Cooraclare and Anne Corry (1929–2009) from Clahanmore, Milltown Malbay, both from County Clare. He grows up in Ardclough, Straffan, County Kildare.

Corry is educated at Scoil Mhuire, Clane, at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) and University College Dublin (UCD). His first published work, as a teenager, is poetry in English and the Irish language in literary magazines and the New Irish Writing section of The Irish Press.

He begins his journalistic career as a sportswriter with The Irish Times and Sunday Tribune where he wins several awards and becomes sports editor. Determined to pursue a career outside of sports journalism, he joins The Sunday Press as a feature writer in 1985 and becomes features editor of The Irish Press in 1986, bringing younger writers and a more contemporary, polemical and literary style to the paper. He revives the literary and travel sections of the paper and is an adjudicator of the Dublin Theatre Festival awards.

When The Irish Press closes in 1995, he becomes Features Editor of the short-lived Evening News, storylines the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) museum in Croke Park in 1998 and is founding editor of High Ball magazine. Since then, he has been a columnist, first with The Sunday Business Post and then with the Evening Herald and Irish Independent. As a journalism lecturer in the Dublin Institute of Technology he tells students that “journalism is about pissing people off.”

Since 2002 Corry has edited Ireland’s biggest circulation travel publication, Travel Extra. He has fronted travel shows broadcast in Ireland and the Middle East and is a regular commentator on travel affairs to Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) and TG4, and an occasional guest contributor to BBC Northern Ireland. He writes the ten-part series GAA@125, screened on Irish television station TG4 in 2009. He appears on Tonight with Vincent Browne from time to time to preview the next day’s newspapers.

Corry is awarded a lifetime “contribution to the industry” award at the Irish Travel Industry Awards in Dublin on January 22, 2016. He receives the Business Travel Journalist of the year award in London in October 2015. Previous awards include Irish sportswriter of the year, young journalist of the year, Seamus Kelly award, MacNamee award for coverage of Gaelic Games and is short listed for sports book of the year.


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Death of Actor Henry Wilfrid Brambell

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Henry Wilfrid Brambell, Irish film and television actor best known for his role in the British television series Steptoe and Son, dies of cancer in Westminster, London, on January 18, 1985.

Brambell is the youngest of three sons born to Henry Lytton Brambell, a cashier at the Guinness Brewery, and his wife, Edith Marks, a former opera singer. His first appearance is as a child, entertaining the wounded troops during World War I. Upon leaving school he works part-time as a reporter for The Irish Times and part-time as an actor at the Abbey Theatre before becoming a professional actor for the Gate Theatre. He also does repertory at Swansea, Bristol and Chesterfield. In World War II, he joins the British military forces entertainment organisation Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA).

His television career begins during the 1950s, when he is cast in small roles in three Nigel Kneale/Rudolph Cartier productions for BBC Television, The Quatermass Experiment (1953), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954), and Quatermass II (1955). All of these roles earn him a reputation for playing old men, though he is only in his forties at the time.

It is this ability to play old men that leads to his casting in his best remembered role, as Albert Steptoe, the irascible father in Steptoe and Son. This begins as a pilot on the BBC’s Comedy Playhouse, and its success leads to a full series being commissioned, running from 1962 to 1974 including a five-year hiatus. There are two feature film spin-offs, a stage show, and an American incarnation entitled Sanford and Son, some episodes of which are almost exact remakes of the original British scripts.

The success of Steptoe and Son makes Brambell a high-profile figure on British television, and earns him the supporting role of Paul McCartney‘s grandfather in The Beatles‘ first film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964). In 1965, Brambell tells the BBC that he does not want to do another series of Steptoe and Son and, in September that year, he goes to New York City to appear in the Broadway musical Kelly at the Broadhurst Theatre, however, it closes after just one performance.

Apart from his role as the older Steptoe, Brambell achieves recognition in many films. His performance in The Terence Davies Trilogy wins him critical acclaim, far greater than any achieved for Steptoe and Son. Although he appears throughout the full 94-minute piece, Brambell does not speak a single word.

After the final series of Steptoe and Son is made in 1974, Brambell has some guest roles in films and on television. He and Harry H. Corbett also undertake a tour of Australia in 1977 in a Steptoe and Son stage show.

Brambell dies of cancer in Westminster, London, on January 18, 1985, at the age of 72. He is cremated on January 25, 1985 at Streatham Park Cemetery, where his ashes are scattered.

(Pictured: Henry Wilfrid Brambell and John Lennon in The Beatles’ first motion picture, A Hard Day’s Night)


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Death of Actress Pauline Delaney

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Pauline Delaney, accomplished stage, TV and film actress who is best known for her role in Circle of Friends and Into The West, dies in London from complications caused by Parkinson’s disease on January 15, 2007.

Delany is born in Dublin on June 8, 1925. Her mother, a keen theatregoer, inspires her love of the stage, taking her on regular visits to the Abbey Theatre and the Gate Theatre. She learns her craft through evening classes at the Brendan Smith Academy in Dublin and later gives up her job as a trainee fashion buyer to tour with a production of Charlie’s Aunt, starring Leslie Phillips.

In the mid-1950s, she marries actor Norman Rodway, and they become members of the Globe company, together with Anna Manahan, Maureen Toal and Milo O’Shea, presenting new plays at a small Gas Company theatre in Dún Laoghaire. When financial problems force the Globe to close, she helps form Gemini Productions and stars in its 1960s Dublin Theatre Festival success, The Poker Session, by Hugh Leonard.

When the play transfers to London, Delany moves there. Her marriage to Rodway ends and she subsequently forms a relationship with Gerry Simpson, an Irish-born playwright. She is a familiar figure on the London stage, appearing in several productions, including The Hostage at the Royal Court, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg at the King’s Head Theatre and Cross Purpose at Hampstead Theatre.

Delany appears in several TV plays including The Dead, Shadow of a Gunman, Stephen D and The Seagull, as well as roles in The Bill, Casualty and Rumpole of the Bailey. Among her film credits are The Quare Fellow, Brannigan, Rooney and Nothing but the Best.


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Artist Derek Hill Awarded Honorary Irish Citizenship

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Arthur Derek Hill, English portrait and landscape painter and longtime resident in Ireland, is awarded honorary Irish citizenship by President Mary McAleese on January 13, 1999.

Hill is born at Southampton, Hampshire, on December 6, 1916, the son of a wealthy sugar trader. He first works as a theatre designer in Leningrad in the 1930s and later as an historian. In World War II he registers as a conscientious objector and works on a farm.

Hill’s long association with Ireland begins when he visits Glenveagh Castle in County Donegal to paint the portrait of the Irish American art collector Henry McIlhenny, whose grandfather had emigrated to the United States from the nearby village of Milford, and who subsequently made a fortune from his patent gas meter.

Hill begins to enjoy increased success as a portrait painter from the 1960s. His subjects include many notable composers, musicians, politicians and statesmen, such as broadcaster Gay Byrne, Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek and The Prince of Wales. He is also an enthusiastic art collector and traveller, with a wide range of friends such as Bryan Guinness and Isaiah Berlin. Greta Garbo visits Hill in the 1970s, a visit which forms inspiration for Frank McGuinness‘ 2010 play Greta Garbo Came to Donegal.

In 1981, he donates his home, St. Columb’s Rectory, near the village of Churchill, County Donegal, which he had owned since 1954, along with a considerable collection including work by Pablo Picasso, Edgar Degas, Georges Braque, Graham Sutherland, Anna Ticho and Jack Butler Yeats to the State.

An exhibition of his work and personal art collection can be seen at the House and associated Glebe Gallery at Churchill, near Letterkenny. Another collection of his work is held at Mottisfont Abbey. Many of his landscapes portray scenes from Tory Island, where he has a painting hut for years, and starts and then mentors the artists’ community there, teaching the local fishermen how to paint. This leads to the informal but busy “Tory School” of artists such as James Dixon and Anton Meenan, who find that they have the time to paint and use their wild surroundings as a dramatic subject.

Hill is made a CBE in 1997. A Retrospective exhibition is arranged for and by him at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1998. On January 13, 1999, he is made an honorary Irish citizen by the President of Ireland Mary McAleese.

Arthur Derek Hill dies at the age of 83 at a London hospital on July 30, 2000. He is buried in Hampshire in the South of England with his parents. Memorial services are held for him in Dublin at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, as well as St. James’s Church, Piccadilly, London, and his local Church in Trentagh, County Donegal.


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Birth of Actress Máire O’Neill

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Mary Agnes “Molly” Allgood, actress of stage and film under the stage name of Máire O’Neill, is born at 40 Middle Abbey Street in Dublin on January 12, 1885.

Allgood is one of eight children of compositor George and french polisher Margaret (née Harold) Allgood. Her father is sternly Protestant and against all music, dancing and entertainment, while her mother is a strict Catholic. After her father dies in 1896, she is placed in an orphanage. She is apprenticed to a dressmaker and her brother Tom becomes a Catholic priest.

Maud Gonne sets up Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland) in 1900 to educate women about Irish history, language and the arts, and Allgood and her sister Sara join the association’s drama classes around 1903. Their acting teacher, William “Willie” Fay, enrolls them in the National Theatre Society, later known as the Abbey Theatre. Allgood is part of the Abbey Theatre from 1906-1918 where she appears in many productions. In 1904 she is cast in a play by Irish playwright Teresa Deevy called Katie Roche where she plays the part of Margaret Drybone. There are 38 performances in this production.

In 1905 Allgood meets Irish playwright John Millington Synge, and they fall in love, a relationship regarded as scandalous because it crosses the class barriers of the time. In September 1907 he has surgery for the removal of troublesome neck glands, but a later tumour is found to be inoperable. They become engaged before his death in March 1909. Synge writes the plays The Playboy of the Western World and Deirdre of the Sorrows for Allgood.

In June 1911 Allgood marries G. H. Mair, drama critic of the Manchester Guardian, and later Assistant Secretary of the British Department of Information, Assistant Director of the League of Nations Secretariat in Geneva, and head of the League of Nations office in London, with whom she has two children. He dies suddenly on January 3, 1926. Six months later she marries Arthur Sinclair, an Abbey actor. They have two children, but the marriage ends in divorce.

Under her professional name Maire O’Neill, Allgood appears in films from 1930-53, including Alfred Hitchcock‘s film version of Seán O’Casey‘s play Juno and the Paycock (1930). She makes her American debut in New York City in 1914 in the play General John Regan at the Hudson Theatre.

Allgood dies at the age of 66 in Park Prewett Hospital, Basingstoke, England, on November 2, 1952, where she is receiving treatment after being badly burned in a fire at her London home.

Joseph O’Connor‘s 2010 novel, Ghost Light, is loosely based on Allgood’s relationship with Synge.


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Death of Actor Peter Caffrey

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Peter Caffrey, Irish actor best known for playing Padraig O’Kelly on Series 1-4 of Ballykissangel, dies in Shrewsbury, England, on January 1, 2008.

Caffrey is also well regarded for his role as a transvestite in the film Night Train, and for his role as an unlikely protagonist in I Went Down. He is also known for playing the role of the judge in the Irish comedy Father Ted on the episode A Song For Europe and for voicing a popular Christmas radio advertisement for Barry’s Tea in 1994.

Caffrey is born in Dublin on April 18, 1949. He studies at a seminary for two years before switching to an English degree. He works for a year as a primary school teacher, before becoming involved with Dublin’s Project Theatre. He appears in nearly thirty television and film roles, and also has a solid theatre career in both Dublin and London. After moving to London in 1983 he becomes a familiar face on UK television, with minor roles in Casualty, The Bill and Peak Practice. His success in Ballykissangel comes after overcoming oral cancer for which he is diagnosed in 1990, and, despite suffering a stroke in 2000 which leaves him paralysed on the right side, he manages to play a similarly afflicted character in the unreleased film Sweet Dancer in 2005.

Caffrey never fully recovers from the stroke and dies at the age of 58 on January 1, 2008, in Shrewsbury. His body is returned to Ireland for cremation in Mount Jerome Cemetery and Crematorium, Dublin, on January 8, 2008. Caffrey is survived by three sisters, Linda, Carol, and Sheila. His brother David pre-deceases him in July 2007.

Caffrey marries Brenda Banks in 1980 but the marriage ends in divorce in 1990.


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Constance Markievicz Elected to British House of Commons

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Constance Markievicz, while detained in Holloway Prison for her part in conscription activities, becomes the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom on December 28, 1918.

Markievicz, an Irish nationalist, who is elected for the Dublin St. Patrick’s constituency, refuses to take her seat in the House of Commons along with 72 other Sinn Féin MPs. Instead, her party, which wins the majority of Irish seats in Westminster, establishes the Dáil, a breakaway Dublin assembly, and triggers the Irish War of Independence.

Markievicz, who inherits the title of “countess” from her noble Polish husband, and 45 other MPs are in jail when the first meeting takes place on January 21, 1919. They are described in Gaelic as being “imprisoned by the foreign enemy” when their names are read out during roll call at the Mansion House.

The 27 MPs who attend the Dáil’s first session ratify the Proclamation of the Irish Republic of Easter 1916, which had not been adopted by an elected body but merely by the Easter rebels claiming to act in the name of the Irish people. They also claim there is an “existing state of war, between Ireland and England” in a Message to the Free Nations of the World.

When Markievicz is released in April 1919, she becomes Minister for Labour. Having also been part of the suffragette movement, her deep political convictions contrast deeply with Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor, the first woman to sit in the House of Commons. She believes Astor, a Tory who is elected in a 1919 Plymouth by-election after her husband is forced to give up the seat when he becomes a peer, is “out of touch.”

Her political views are also influenced by Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who is a regular visitor to the family home, Lissadell House in County Sligo. She becomes involved in the women’s suffrage movement after studying art in London, where she meets and marries Count Casimir Markievicz. In 1903, the couple, who has one son, settles in Dublin, where she becomes involved in nationalist politics. She joins both Sinn Féin and Inghinidhe na hÉireann.

Like Astor, Markievicz has an irrepressible personality and is in no mood to play coy and simply blend in. She comes to her first Sinn Féin meeting wearing a satin ball-gown and a diamond tiara after attending a function at Dublin Castle, the seat of British rule in Ireland.

Markievicz spends a year in the Dáil before walking out along with Éamon de Valera, the future dominant figure in Irish politics, after opposing the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The document, which grants southern Ireland independence but keeps the north as part of the UK, splits Sinn Féin and triggers the Irish War of Independence.

Following the conflict, which the Pro-Treaty forces win, Markievicz is elected again to the Dáil, but does not take her seat in protest. In 1927, she is elected for a third time as part of de Valera’s new party Fianna Fáil, which pledges to return to the Irish parliament. But before she can take her seat, she dies at age 59 on July 15, 1927, of complications related to appendicitis.


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Birth of Irish Writer Arthur Murphy

arthur-murphy

Arthur Murphy, Irish writer also known by the pseudonym Charles Ranger, is born at Cloonyquin, County Roscommon, on December 27, 1727, the son of Richard Murphy and Jane French.

Murphy studies at Saint-Omer in France, and is a gifted student of the Latin and Greek classics. He works as an actor in the theatre, becomes a barrister, a journalist and finally a playwright. He edits Gray’s Inn Journal between 1752 and 1754. As Henry Thrale‘s oldest and dearest friend, he introduces Samuel Johnson to the Thrales in January 1765. He is appointed Commissioner of Bankruptcy in 1803.

Murphy is known for his translations of Tacitus in 1753, which are still published as late as 1922. He also writes three biographies – Fielding‘s Works (1762), An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson (1792), and Life of David Garrick (1801).

An example of Murphy’s theatrical writings is The Citizen, a farce, first produced at Drury Lane in 1761. Philpot, a wealthy skinflint, has bargained with Sir Jasper Wilding for his son Young Philpot to marry Maria Wilding, and for his daughter Sally to marry Wilding’s son, for settlements and twenty thousand pounds paid to Sir Jasper. Young Philpot has lost a fortune, but borrows money from his father and embarks on an insurance fraud involving shipwrecked goods. Maria plans to marry Beaufort, who loves her. As Young Philpot tries to propose, she convinces him she is half-witted, and he spurns her. In the second act, Philpot senior is visiting Corinna, a lady of loose virtue, but hides under the table when his son calls upon her. He overhears as Young Philpot tells her how he has cajoled the money out of his father. Maria’s brother surprises them, and old Philpot is also discovered, to their mutual shame. In the final scene Sir Jasper with a lawyer obtains Philpot’s signature to the agreements, but meanwhile Maria, an educated girl, shows her strong character to Young Philpot and he again refuses to propose. Having signed away his rights old Philpot offers to marry her, but the lawyer reveals himself as Beaufort, and explains that he has swapped the deeds, so that Philpot has unwittingly signed his agreement for Maria to marry Beaufort.

Murphy is thought to have coined the legal term “wilful misconstruction” whilst representing the Donaldson v. Becket appeal to the House of Lords in 1774 against the perpetual possession of copyright.

Arthur Murphy dies at Knightsbridge, London, on June 18, 1805, and is buried at Hammersmith, London. A biography is written in 1811 by Dr. Jesse Foot. Nathaniel Dance-Holland paints Murphy’s portrait which is thought to now be in the Irish National Portrait Collection.

(Pictured: 1777 portrait of Arthur Murphy by Nathaniel Dance-Holland)


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Death of Author Violet Florence Martin

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Violet Florence Martin, Irish author, dies in Drishane, County Cork, on December 21, 1915. She is the co-author of a series of novels with her cousin Edith Somerville under the pen name of Martin Ross in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Martin is born at Ross House in Connemara, County Galway, the youngest of sixteen children of James Martin of Ross (1804–1872). The Martin family, a branch of the Martyn family – one of the Tribes of Galway – had settled at Ross by the early seventeenth century, having previously inhabited the town of Galway for some three hundred years. Her father is a Protestant, his grandfather having converted from the Catholic faith in order to retain the family estates under the Penal Laws. Nevertheless, each child of the family is secretly ‘baptised’ by the family servants.

Martin is a kinswoman of Richard Martin and her contemporary, Edward Martyn, two other notable members of the tribe. Her older brother, Robert Jasper Martin, is a noted songwriter and a well-regarded member of the Tory party in London. She shares a great-grandmother with the writer Maria Edgeworth, whose use of Irish vernacular speech she follows in her work.

Martin’s father manages to save both his estate and his tenants during the Great Famine boasting that not one of his people died during the disaster, but at the cost of bankruptcy. Following his death in 1872, the family moves to Dublin and only returns to Ross in 1888 following revelations of financial fraud of the estate by their agent.

Violet Martin and Edith Somerville are second cousins. They originally meet on January 17, 1886, at Castletownshend, after which they become lifelong companions and literary partners. They come to share a home in Drishane, County Cork. In 1889, Violet adopts the pseudonym Martin Ross, which comprises her surname and the name of her ancestral home. Thus, the authors are called Somerville and Ross. Their works include The Real Charlotte (1889), Some Reminiscences of an Irish R.M. and In the Vine Country.

Martin is a convinced Irish Unionist, in opposition to Somerville’s open nationalism. Both she and her brother Robert are well-regarded members of the literary circle in Irish unionism. However, unlike her brother, Martin is a convinced suffragette, becoming vice-president of the Munster Women’s Franchise League. While on friendly terms with the leading members of the Gaelic literary revival such as W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, she objects to their romantic version of Irish peasantry. She is on good terms with Edward Martyn, partner of Gregory and Yeats – and her kinsman – and shares his love of the Irish language and culture.

Martin is seriously injured in a riding accident in November 1898, from which she never fully recovers. This is a contributing factor to her death in Drishane, County Cork, on December 21, 1915. Edith Somerville continues to write under their joint literary names, claiming that they are still in contact. The two women leave thousands of letters and 116 volumes of diaries, detailing their lives, much of them yet unpublished. Edith dies at Castletownshend in October 1949, aged 91, and is buried alongside Violet Florence Martin at Saint Barrahane’s Church, Castletownsend, County Cork, Ireland.


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Birth of Irish Novelist Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary

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Irish novelist Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary is born in a hospital in Derry, County Londonderry, in what is now Northern Ireland, on December 7, 1888. Shortly after his birth the family moved to London.

Cary is born into an old Anglo-Irish family, and at age 16 he studies painting in Edinburgh and then in Paris. From 1909 to 1912 he is at Trinity College, Oxford, where he reads law. Having joined the colonial service in 1914, he serves in the Nigeria Regiment during World War I. He is wounded while fighting in Cameroon and returns to civil duty in Nigeria in 1917 as a district officer. West Africa becomes the locale of his early novels.

Resolved to become a writer, Cary settles in Oxford in 1920. Although that year he publishes ten short stories in The Saturday Evening Post, he decides he knows too little about philosophy, ethics, and history to continue writing in good conscience. Study occupies the next several years, and it is only in 1932 that his first novel, Aissa Saved, appears. The story of an African girl converted to Christianity but still retaining pagan elements in her faith, it is followed by three more African novels — An American Visitor (1933), The African Witch (1936), and Mister Johnson (1939) — and a novel about the decline of the British Empire, Castle Corner (1938). Childhood is the theme of his next two novels, his own in A House of Children (1941) and that of a cockney wartime evacuee in the country in Charley Is My Darling (1940).

Cary’s trilogy on art begins with the first-person narration of a woman, Sara Monday, in Herself Surprised (1941) and follows with that of two men in her life, the lawyer Tom Wilcher in To Be a Pilgrim (1942) and the artist Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth (1944), his best-known novel. Monday is portrayed as a warm-hearted, generous woman who is victimized both by the conservative upper-class Wilcher and by the talented but disreputable painter Jimson. The latter character is a social rebel and visionary artist whose humorous philosophy and picaresque adventures in The Horse’s Mouth helped make him one of the best-known characters in 20th-century fiction.

Similarly, Cary’s other trilogy is seen from the vantage of a politician’s wife in A Prisoner of Grace (1952), the politician himself in Except the Lord (1953), and the wife’s second husband in Not Honour More (1955).

In 1952, Cary has some muscle problems which are originally diagnosed as bursitis, but as more symptoms are noted over the next two years, the diagnosis is changed to that of motor neuron disease (known as Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) in North America), a wasting and gradual paralysis that is terminal. As his physical powers fail, Cary has to have a pen tied to his hand and his arm supported by a rope to write. Finally, he resorts to dictation until unable to speak, and then ceases writing for the first time since 1912. His last work, The Captive and the Free (1959), first volume of a projected trilogy on religion, is unfinished at his death on March 29, 1957. His short stories are collected in Spring Song (1960).