Sir John Lavery, Irish painter best known for his portraits and wartime depictions, dies of natural causes at the age of 84 in Kilmoganny, County Kilkenny, on January 10, 1941.
Like William Orpen, Lavery is appointed an official artist in World War I. Ill-health, however, prevents him from travelling to the Western Front. A serious car crash during a Zeppelin bombing raid also keeps him from fulfilling this role as war artist. He remains in Britain and mostly paints boats, aeroplanes, and airships. During the war years he is a close friend of H.H. Asquith‘s family and spends time with them at their Sutton Courtenay Thames-side residence, painting their portraits and idyllic pictures like Summer on the River (Hugh Lane Gallery).
After the war Lavery is knighted and in 1921 he is elected to the Royal Academy of Arts.
During this time, he and his wife, Hazel, are tangentially involved in the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. They give the use of their London home to the Irish negotiators during the negotiations leading to the Anglo-Irish Treaty. After Michael Collins is assassinated, Lavery paints Michael Collins, Love of Ireland, now in the Hugh Lane Gallery. In 1929, Lavery makes substantial donations of his work to both the Ulster Museum and the Hugh Lane Gallery and in the 1930s he returns to Ireland. He receives honorary degrees from the University of Dublin and Queen’s University Belfast. He is also made a free man of both Dublin and Belfast. A long-standing member of Glasgow Art Club, Lavery exhibits at the club’s annual exhibitions, including its exhibition in 1939 in which his The Lake at Ranelagh is included.
Julia Betterton Glover, Irish-born stage actress well known for her comic roles in the late 18th and 19th centuries, is born on January 8, 1779, in Newry, in what is now Northern Ireland.
“Betterton” is not her real name, despite her father`s promotion of the fiction. She is born Julianna Butterton, the daughter of the Newry`s theatre manager William Butterton. His venture fails and he decides there will be financial benefit to him if her name is changed to “Betterton,” claiming links to a famous actor and long dead Thomas Betterton. With this deception he and his family travel round the theatres and the young Julia is acclaimed as an infant acting prodigy in York, the West Country, Bath, and elsewhere.
In 1790, at age nine, she makes her debut in Scotland at the Dumfries Theatre Royal. In 1795 she goes to Bath and plays the parts of Juliet, Imogen, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, and Lydia Languish. She becomes well known, particularly praised for her comic role as Languish, and news of her success reaches London. A number of job offers are made, but they are declined by her father. He eventually accepts a lucrative offer, taking her salary for himself, for which she makes her London début in 1797 as Percy by Hannah More.
In 1800, her father sells her in marriage to Samuel Glover, the son of an industrial family from Birmingham, for £1, 000, although the money is never paid. Unhappily married, she has eight children, four of whom survive childhood. In 1820, she plays Hamlet at the Lyceum Theatre to critical acclaim. In 1822, she appears as Nurse in Romeo and Juliet at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Her daughter Phyllis plays Juliet. On February 8, 1837, her father, with whom she has had an unhappy relationship, dies.
One of her sons is Edmund Glover and another is William Howard Glover. In 1850, Glover announces her retirement from the stage. After two weeks confined to her bed, she appears at Drury Lane for her farewell benefit performance on July 12, 1850, as Mrs. Malaprop in The Rivals. She is noticeably ill and weak during her performance and is unable to stand to receive her applause at the end of the play. Instead, the curtain rises to reveal Glover seated, surrounded by the rest of the cast. She dies in London four days later on July 16, 1850. She is buried in St. George’s Churchyard Gardens in London.
Dáil Éireann votes to approve the Anglo-Irish Treaty on January 7, 1922, following a debate through late December 1921 and into January 1922. The vote is 64 in favour, 57 against, with the Ceann Comhairle and three others not voting. The Sinn Féin party splits into opposing sides in the aftermath of the Treaty vote, which leads to the Irish Civil War from June 1922 until May 1923. The treaty is signed in London on December 6, 1921.
Two elections take place in Ireland in 1921, as a result of the Government of Ireland Act 1920 to establish the House of Commons of Northern Ireland and the House of Commons of Southern Ireland. The election is used by the Irish Republic as the basis of membership of the Second Dáil. The general election to the Northern Ireland House of Commons occurs on May 24, 1921. Of 52 seats, forty are won by unionists, six by moderate Irish nationalists, and six by Sinn Féin. No actual polling takes place in the Southern Ireland constituencies, as all 128 candidates are returned unopposed. Given the backdrop of the increasingly violent War of Independence, any candidates opposed to Sinn Féin, and their supporters can expect to be harassed by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Supporters of the Irish Labour Party stand aside to allow the constitutional situation to run its course. Of these 128, 124 are won by Sinn Féin, and four by independent unionists representing the University of Dublin constituency. Only the Sinn Féin candidates recognise the Second Dáil and five of these have been elected in two constituencies, one in each part of Ireland, so the total number of members who assemble in the Second Dáil is 125.
During the Second Dáil, the government of the Irish Republic and the British government of David Lloyd George agree to hold peace negotiations. On September 14, 1921, the Dáil ratifies the appointment of Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins, Robert Barton, Eamonn Duggan, and George Gavan Duffy as envoys plenipotentiary for the peace conference in England. These envoys eventually sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty on December 6. After almost a month of acrimonious debate the treaty is formally ratified by Dáil Éireann on January 7, 1922.
To satisfy the requirements of the British constitution, the treaty also has to be ratified by the House of Commons of Southern Ireland. Thus, Irish nationalists end their boycott of the home rule parliament to attend the southern House of Commons as MPs. This they do alongside the four Unionist MPs who had refused to recognise the Dáil. In this way the treaty is ratified a second time in Dublin, this time unanimously as the anti-Treaty TDs refuse to attend.
Under the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty a provisional parliament, considered by nationalists to be the Third Dáil, is elected in the 1922 general election on June 16. Collins and Éamon de Valera agree a pact between the pro- and anti-Treaty wings of Sinn Féin, and this pact and the elections are endorsed by the Second Dáil. The new assembly is recognised both by nationalists and the British Government and so replaces both the Parliament of Southern Ireland and the Second Dáil with a single body. The anti-Treaty groups of IRA members, TDs, and their supporters are still bitterly opposed the settlement, despite the election result, and this leads to the Irish Civil War.
(Pictured: Second All-Ireland Dáil Éireann, elected in 1921)
Anna Maria Hall (nee Fielding), Irish novelist who often publishes as “Mrs. S. C. Hall,” is born in Dublin on January 6, 1800. She lives with her mother, a widow named Sarah Elizabeth Fielding, and stepfather, George Carr of Graigie, Wexford, until 1815. She goes to England with her mother in 1815, and on September 20, 1824, marries Samuel Carter Hall. Her mother lives with her in London until she dies.
Hall’s first recorded contribution to literature is an Irish sketch called “Master Ben,” which appears in The Spirit and Manners of the Age, January 1829. Other tales follow. Eventually they are collected into a volume entitled Sketches of Irish Character (1829), and henceforth she becomes “an author by profession.” The following year she issues a little volume for children, Chronicles of a School-Room, consisting of a series of simple tales.
In 1831, she publishes a second series of Sketches of Irish Character fully equal to the first, which is well received. The first of her nine novels, The Buccaneer (1832), is a story of the time of The Protectorate, and Oliver Cromwell is among the characters. To The New Monthly Magazine, which her husband is editing, she contributes Lights and Shadows of Irish Life, articles which are republished in three volumes in 1838. The principal tale in this collection, “The Groves of Blarney,” is dramatised with considerable success by the author with the object of supplying a character for Tyrone Power and runs for a whole season at the Adelphi Theatre in 1838. Hall also writes “The French Refugee,” produced at the St. James’s Theatre in 1836, where it runs ninety nights, and for the same theatre Mabel’s Curse, in which John Pritt Harley sustains the leading part.
Another of her dramas, of which she has neglected to keep a copy, is Who’s Who? which is in the possession of Tyrone Power when he is lost in the President in April 1841. In 1840, she issues what has been called the best of her novels, Marian, or a Young Maid’s Fortunes, in which her knowledge of Irish character is again displayed in a style equal to anything written by Maria Edgeworth. Her next work is a series of “Stories of the Irish Peasantry,” contributed to Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, and afterwards published in a collected form. In 1840 she aids her husband in a book chiefly composed by him, “Ireland, its Scenery, Characters, &c.” She edits the St. James’s Magazine from 1862 to 1863.
In the Art Journal, edited by her husband, she brings out Pilgrimages to English Shrines in 1849, and here the most beautiful of all her books, Midsummer Eve, a Fairy Tale of Love, first appears. One of her last works, Boons and Blessings (1875), dedicated to the Earl of Shaftesbury, is a collection of temperance tales, illustrated by the best artists.
Hall’s sketches of her native land bear a closer resemblance to the tales of Miss Mitford than to the Irish stories of John Banim or Gerald Griffin. They contain fine rural descriptions and are animated by a healthy tone of moral feeling and a vein of delicate humour. Her books are never popular in Ireland, as she sees in each party much to praise and much to blame, so that she fails to please either the Orange Order or the Roman Catholics.
On December 10, 1868, she is granted a civil list pension of £100 a year. She is instrumental in founding the Hospital for Consumption at Brompton, the Governesses’ Institute, the Home for Decayed Gentlewomen, and the Nightingale Fund. Her benevolence is of the most practical nature. She works for the temperance cause, for women’s rights, and for the friendless and fallen. She is a friend to street musicians, and a thorough believer in spiritualism, but this belief does not prevent her from remaining, as she ever was, a devout Christian. She dies at Devon Lodge, East Moulsey, January 30, 1881, and is buried in Addlestone churchyard on February 5.
Burke shows an early interest in drawing, displaying a love for depicting the people and land of Connemara. His career in the arts is initiated at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He exhibits at the Royal Academy and the Royal Hibernian Academy, where he is also Professor of Painting, from 1863 until his death. From 1870 to 1872 he resides in the Netherlands where he illustrates a handful of Dutch scenes. One of the earliest Irish artists to travel to Brittany, Burke exhibits fifteen Breton scenes at the Royal Hibernian Academy between 1876 and 1878. He paints further in his native Ireland, as well as Scotland and England. The 1880s bring Burke to Walberswick in Suffolk to an artist’s colony created by Philip Wilson Steer. A student of Burke, Walter Osborne, paints with him here.
Burke, overcome with grief by his brother Thomas’ murder during the Phoenix Park Murders in 1882, leaves the Royal Hibernian Academy and his position as Professor of Painting. He moves with the remaining members of his family first to England and then to Italy.
Two of Burke’s most famous paintings, Connemara Girl and A Connemara Landscape, hang at the National Gallery of Ireland. His work is relatively rare, mainly because the contents of his studio are destroyed during the fire that engulfs the Abbey Street buildings of the RHA in 1916. Furthermore, many of the paintings lay hidden in a cellar for over ninety years until their recent discovery.
MacGowan spends his early childhood in County Tipperary, before his family moves back to England when he is six years old. He lives in many parts of the southeast of England, including Brighton and London.
MacGowan’s father, Maurice, works for a department store. MacGowan’s mother, Therese, is a singer and traditional Irish dancer, and has worked as a model in Dublin. In 1971, after attending Holmewood House School at Langton Green, Tunbridge Wells, MacGowan earns a literature scholarship and is accepted into Westminster School. He is found in possession of drugs and is expelled in his second year.
MacGowan gets his first taste of fame in 1976 at a concert by British punk band The Clash, when his earlobe is damaged by Jane Crockford, later to be a member of Mo-dettes. A photographer snaps a picture of him covered in blood and it makes the papers, with the headline “Cannibalism at Clash Gig.” Shortly after this, he forms his own punk rock band, The Nipple Erectors, later renamed The Nips.
MacGowan draws upon his Irish heritage when founding The Pogues and changes his early “punk” voice for a more authentic sound with tutoring from his extended family. Many of his songs are influenced by Irish nationalism, Irish history, the experiences of the Irish in London and the United States, and London life in general.
Between 1985 and 1987, he co-writes “Fairytale of New York,” which he performs with Kirsty MacColl. In the coming years MacGowan and The Pogues release several albums.
After The Pogues throw MacGowan out for unprofessional behaviour, he forms a new band, Shane MacGowan & The Popes, recording two studio albums, a live album, three tracks on The Popes Outlaw Heaven (2010) and a live DVD, and touring internationally. From December 2003 until May 2005, Shane MacGowan & The Popes tour extensively in the UK, Ireland, and Europe.
The Pogues and MacGowan reform for a sell-out tour in 2001 and each year from 2004 to 2009 for further tours, including headline slots at GuilFest in England and the Azkena Rock Festival in Basque Country. In May 2005, he rejoins The Pogues permanently.
For many years MacGowan suffers from binge drinking and heroin use. In 2001, Sinéad O’Connor reports MacGowan to the police in London for drug possession in what she says is an attempt to discourage him from using heroin. Initially furious, MacGowan later expresses gratitude towards O’Connor and claims that the incident helped him kick his heroin habit.
MacGowan has long been known for having very bad teeth. He loses the last of his natural teeth around 2008. In 2015, he has 28 new dentures on a titanium frame fitted in a nine-hour procedure which is the subject of an hour-long television programme. Dr. Darragh Mulrooney, the dental surgeon who carries out the procedure, comments that MacGowan recorded most of his great works while he still had some teeth: “We’ve effectively re-tuned his instrument and that will be an ongoing process.”
In the summer of 2015, MacGowan falls as he is leaving a Dublin studio, fracturing his pelvis. He is seen in public on crutches by December 2015, and continues to experience difficulty with general mobility.
Clancy’s parents, Gilbert Clancy and Ellen Killeen, both sing and play concertina, and his father also plays the flute. Clancy’s father has been heavily influenced by local blind piper Garret Barry and passes much of Barry’s music on to his son.
Clancy starts playing the whistle at age five, and later takes up the flute. He first lays eyes on a set of pipes in 1936 when he sees Johnny Doran playing locally. He obtains his first set of pipes two years later. His influences include Leo Rowsome, Séamus Ennis, John Potts, and Andy Conroy. Clancy wins the Oireachtas competition in 1947. Unable to earn a living from music he emigrates to London where he works as a carpenter.
Returning to Milltown Malbay shortly after the death of his father in 1957, Clancy records some influential 78 rpm recordings for the Gael Linn label, among them the classic reel selection “The Old Bush/The Ravelled Hank of Yarn.” He develops a highly distinctive and individual style of piping. From 1957 until 1972 the Summer music sessions in the West Clare town become widely renowned, with Clancy as one of the main attractions. Pipe-making, reed-making, and all things connected with the instrument are explored and advanced by the Clancy influence. He gives many performances on both radio and television as well as live sessions in his local area.
He lives out the remainder of his life in Milltown Malbay. Clancy marries Dóirín Healy in 1962. He dies suddenly in a hospital in Galway on January 24, 1973, and is widely mourned among friends and musicians alike. He is buried in Ballard Cemetary just outside Miltown Malbay.
Later that year the Willie Clancy Summer School is established in his honour by his friends Junior Crehan, Martin Talty, Sean Reid, Paddy Malone, Paddy McMahon, Frankie McMahon, Jimmy Ward, JC Talty, Harry Hughes, Michael O Friel, Séamus Mac Mathúna, and Muiris Ó Rócháin. He is also the subject of a major television documentary “Cérbh É? Willie Clancy” on TG4, first broadcast in November 2009. In this programme, one of a series in which major figures in contemporary traditional music, profile and pay homage to a master of their craft from a bygone age, Peter Browne traces the life and legacy of Clancy.
A statue of Clancy is unveiled on November 9, 2013 on the Main Street in Miltown Malbay.
Eamonn Andrews, radio and television presenter considered to be Ireland’s first media superstar, is born in Synge Street, Dublin, on December 19, 1922.
Andrews is educated at Synge Street CBS and begans his career as a clerk in an insurance office. He is a keen amateur boxer and wins the Irish junior middleweight title in 1944.
In 1946, he becomes a full-time freelance sports commentator, working for Radio Éireann, Ireland’s national broadcaster. In 1950, he begins presenting programmes for the BBC, being particularly well known for boxing commentaries, and soon becomes one of television’s most popular presenters. He begins hosting the game show What’s My Line? in 1951.
Throughout the 1950s, he commentates on the major British heavyweight fights on the BBC Light Programme, with inter-round summaries by W. Barrington Dalby. On January 20, 1956, he reaches No. 18 in the UK Singles Chart with a “spoken narrative” recording named “The Shifting Whispering Sands (Parts 1 & 2),” which is produced by George Martin with musical backing by the Ron Goodwin Orchestra. The song later reappears on Kenny Everett‘s compilation album The World’s Worst Record Show, which is released in June 1978.
Between 1955 and 1964, Andrews presents the long-running Sports Report on BBC’s Light Programme, now Radio 2. In 1965, he leaves the BBC to join the ITV contractor ABC, where he pioneers the talk show format in the UK. He hosts a chat show on ITV, The Eamonn Andrews Show, for five years. He is known for coming up with off-the-cuff linkings that do not work such as, “Speaking of cheese sandwiches, have you come far?” This is parodied by the character Seamus Android on Round the Horne in the 1960s, performed by Bill Pertwee. In the 1960s he presents Thames Television‘s Today news magazine programme.
Andrews is probably best known as the presenter of the UK’s version of This Is Your Life, between its inception in 1955 and his death in 1987, when he is succeeded by Michael Aspel, who had also succeeded Andrews as host of Crackerjack more than two decades earlier. Andrews becomes the very first This Is Your Life subject on British television when he is surprised by the show’s creator, Ralph Edwards. Andrews also creates a long-running panel game called Whose Baby? that originally runs on the BBC and later on ITV. He is a regular presenter of the early Miss World pageants.
Andrews’ chairs the Radio Éireann Authority, now the RTÉ Board, between 1960 and 1964, overseeing the introduction of State television to Ireland and establishing the Irish State broadcaster as an independent semi-state body. About this time, he also acquires a number of business interests in Ireland, including recording studios and a dance hall.
After months of illness during 1987, originally caused by a virus contracted during an airline flight, but which is not recognised at the time, he dies from heart failure on November 5, 1987, at the age of 64, at Cromwell Hospital, London. He had recorded his last edition of This Is Your Life six days previously on October 30, 1987, surprising Crossroads actress Jane Rossington. After his death, the show, and two others that have yet to be broadcast, are postponed until, with his widow’s permission, they are broadcast in January 1988. His widow, Gráinne, whom he married in 1951, dies 18 months later. They had three adopted children.
Grace Evelyn Gifford Plunkett, Irish artist and cartoonist who is active in the Republican movement, dies suddenly in her apartment in South Richmond Street, Portobello, Dublin, on December 13, 1955.
Gifford is the second youngest of twelve children born to Frederick Gifford, a solicitor and Roman Catholic, and Isabella Julia Burton Gifford, a Protestant. She grows up in the fashionable suburb of Rathmines in Dublin. The boys are baptised as Catholics and the girls as Protestant, but effectively the children are all raised as Protestants. The girls attend Alexandra College in Earlsfort Terrace, and the boys attend the The High School in Harcourt St.
At the age of 16, Gifford enters the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, where she studies under the Irish artist William Orpen. Orpen regards Gifford as one of his most talented pupils. He often sketches her and eventually paints her as one of his subjects for a series on “Young Ireland.” Around this time, Gifford’s talent for caricature is discovered and developed. In 1907 she attends a course in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, London.
Gifford returns to Dublin in 1908 and, with great difficulty, attempts to earn a living as a caricaturist, publishing her cartoons in The Shanachie, Irish Life, Meadowstreet, and The Irish Review, which is edited from 1913 by Joseph Plunkett. She considers emigrating but gives up the idea. Later that year, she meets Plunkett for the first time at the opening of St. Edna’s School, a new bilingual school in Ranelagh, Dublin. Plunkett is a friend of her brother-in-law, another of the future leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, Thomas MacDonagh, who is married to Gifford’s sister Muriel.
Her growing interest in the Roman Catholic religion leads to the deepening of Gifford and Plunkett’s relationship. Plunkett proposes to her in 1915. She accepts and takes formal instruction in Catholic doctrine. She is received into the Catholic Church in April 1916. The couple plan to marry on Easter Sunday that year, in a double wedding with his sister and her fiancé.
After the Rising, her brother-in-law Thomas MacDonagh is executed by firing squad along with Patrick Pearse and Thomas Clarke on May 3. That same day, Gifford learns that Plunkett is to be shot at dawn. She purchases a ring in a jeweler’s shop in Dublin city centre and, with the help of a priest, persuades the military authorities to allow them to marry. She and Plunkett are married on the night of May 3, 1916, in the chapel of Kilmainham Gaol, a few short hours before he is executed.
Grace Plunkett decides to devote herself through her art to the promotion of Sinn Féin policies and resumes her commercial work to earn a living. She is elected to the Sinn Féin executive in 1917.
During the Irish Civil War, Plunkett is arrested with many others in February 1923 and interned at Kilmainham Gaol for three months. She is released in May 1923.
When the Civil War ends, Plunkett has no home of her own and little money. Like many Anti-Treaty Republicans, she is the target of social ostracism and has difficulty finding work. She moves from one rented apartment to another and eats in the city-centre restaurants. She befriends many people and has many admirers but has no wish to remarry. Her material circumstances improve in 1932 when she receives a Civil List pension from Éamon de Valera‘s Fianna Fáil government. She lives for many years in a flat in Nassau St. with a balcony overlooking the sports ground of Trinity College.
Plunkett’s in-laws refuse to honour her husband’s will, which leaves everything to his widow. Legally, the will is invalid because there is only one of the required two witnesses and also the marriage takes place after the will is made, automatically revoking it. She begins legal proceedings against her in-laws in 1934. The Count and Countess Plunkett settle out of court and Plunkett is paid £700, plus costs.
From the late 1940s onwards, Plunkett’s health declines. In 1950 she is brought to St. Vincent’s Hospital, then in the city centre. She convalesces in a nursing home, which she does not like because it restricts her freedom.
After her sudden death on December 13, 1955, Grace Gifford Plunkett’s body is removed to St. Kevin’s Church, Harrington Street, and among the attendees at her funeral is President Seán T. O’Kelly. She is buried with full military honours near the republican plot in Glasnevin Cemetery.
Grace Gifford Plunkett is the subject of “Grace,” a song written in 1985 by Frank and Seán O’Meara, which becomes popular in Ireland and elsewhere and has been recorded by many musicians.
Gerald Griffin, Irish novelist, poet, and playwright, born in Limerick on December 12, 1803.
Griffin is the twelfth of the fifteen surviving children in his family. His father, Patrick Griffin, is a brewery farmer, and his mother, Ellen Griffin, of the ancient Gaelic family of the O’Briens, is very cultivated and much interested in literature.
Griffin goes to London in 1823 and becomes a reporter for one of the daily papers. He later turns to writing fiction. One of his most famous works is The Collegians, a novel based on a trial he has reported on, that of John Scanlan, a ProtestantAnglo-Irish man who murdered Ellen Hanley, a young Irish Catholic girl. The novel is adapted to the stage as The Colleen Bawn, by Dion Boucicault.
In September 1838, Griffin informs his family of his intention of joining the Congregation of Christian Brothers. He enters the novitiate at North Richmond Street, Dublin, on September 8. He embarks on his new career with intense dedication, abandoning his literary work entirely. He is then admitted to the religious habit on the feast of St. Theresa and embarks on a two-year novitiate. His distaste for his earlier vocation is allayed to the extent that he is willing to undertake the composition of a few tales of a pious nature, but he is also desperately determined to avoid as much as possible the renewal of old contacts and the reopening of painful associations. Griffin burns most all of his unpublished manuscripts, preserving only a few poems and the tragedy, Gisippus.
Griffin dies at the North Monastery, Cork, from typhus fever on June 12, 1840. He is buried in the community’s graveyard on June 15.
Gerald Griffin has a street named after him in Limerick City and another in Cork City. Loughill/Ballyhahill GAA club in west Limerick plays under the name of Gerald Griffins.
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