Following the sudden death of his father in 1918, Bell is brought at the age of seven to live near Raffery in the Strangford Lough area of County Down. He lives with his mother and two brothers in a cottage with no electricity or running water. This is the setting of his acclaimed novel of Ulster rural life, December Bride (1951). He moves to Belfast in 1921, where he works at a variety of manual jobs before securing a post with the BBC in 1945. He is a co-founder of the left-leaning literary journal, Lagan, in 1943.
Bel’s first collection of short stories, Summer Loanen and Other Stories, is published in 1943. His novels include December Bride (1951), The Hollow Ball (1961), A Man Flourishing (1973) and Across the Narrow Sea (1987).
Bell is recruited to the BBC in 1946, along with fellow writer, W. R. Rodgers, by poet and radio producer, Louis MacNeice. Some of his work as a radio producer is highly innovative. This is Northern Ireland, An Ulster Journey (1949) is a classic radio feature incorporating actuality, poetry, music and narration. In later work, Bell incorporates the voices of “ordinary people” in his attempt to paint a picture of Ulster as rooted in the lives and traditions of its people. His collaboration with W. R. Rodgers, The Return Room (1955), is one of the most important post-war Irish radio features and shows the influence of Dylan Thomas on Rodgers, the poet.
In 1977, Bell is honoured with an MBE in recognition of his contribution to the cultural life of Northern Ireland.
December Bride is made into an acclaimed film in 1990. Reviewing the film, The Irish Times columnist and literary critic Fintan O’Toole says it is “not just a remarkable artistic achievement, but also a remarkable political one…restoring a richness and complexity to a history that has been deliberately narrowed.” In April 1999, December Bride is selected by award-winning novelist and critic Colm Tóibín and publisher, writer and critic Dame Carmen Callil, for inclusion in The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950 (Picador).
Bell dies on February 9, 1990, at 190 King’s Road, Knock, Belfast, aged 80, shortly before the premiere of the film of December Bride. On October 15, 2009, the eve of what would have been Bell’s centenary, a blue plaque is unveiled by Northern Ireland Minister of Culture, Arts and Leisure Nelson McCausland on the Belfast house where Bell had written December Bride. Such plaques are erected to commemorate and honour notable people.
Born Leslie Yodaiken into a Russian–Jewish family in Portobello, Dublin, Daiken is the son of Samuel and Rosa Yodaiken. His father is a dealer in rubber and scrap metal, with premises in Dublin and Glasgow, and he is educated at two independent fee-paying schools, St. Andrew’s College and Wesley College, and then in 1930 he enters Trinity College Dublin. In his first year, one of his lecturers in French literature was Samuel Beckett. He is an active member of the Dublin University Socialist Society and a founding member of the college’s Gaelic Society.
In 1933, Daiken is present at the house of Charlotte Despard in Eccles Street, Dublin, also used as a Workers’ College, when it is attacked by a mob of Blueshirts. He leads the immediate defence of the building, which is saved on that occasion by the intervention of Irish Republican Army (IRA) men posing as the police.
In 1934, as Yodaiken, he graduates with a BA from Trinity in English and French Literature, with a Second Class degree. After graduating, Daiken works briefly as a schoolteacher in Dublin. In April 1935, his short story “Angela” is published in The New English Weekly under the pen name of Ned Kiernan. That year, he migrates to London.
Soon after his arrival in London, Daiken is one of the three founders of a duplicated publication called Irish Front, together with two other poets, Charles Donnelly and Ewart Milne.
In England, Daiken starts to shorten his surname from Yodaiken to Daiken, for his publications, but he does not make this change formally until doing so by deed poll in 1943.
In December 1935, The Irish Times reviews a production in Camden Town of Ireland Unfree, a stage version by Daiken of Patrick Pearse’s poem “The Rebel.” It states that “Mr. Daiken carries Pearse’s theme beyond his idealistic conclusion to the revolutionary viewpoint of the Irish workers.”
Daiken keeps up his links with leftist Irish writers and dissidents and edits the collection of working-class political verse Goodbye Twilight: songs of the struggle in Ireland (1936), illustrated by Harry Kernoff. The Irish Press describes this as “forty young poets with blazing eyes and clenched fists.” In another review, Louis MacNeice calls the book a “collection of proletarian poems – some communist, some Irish republican, and all written in a defiant spirit of opposition … a violent reaction against Yeats and all that he stood for.”
In 1939, Mairin Mitchell is highly critical of the Irish leftists, and in particular Daiken, for their views on the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and writes to Desmond Ryan in September, “Brian O’Neill, Bloomsbury, and Daiken will sing Russia right or wrong.”
In October 1939, at the time of the wartime National Registration Act, Daiken is living in a studio at Old Castle Wharf, Twickenham, and describes himself as “Script-writer and advertising copywriter.”
During World War II, Daiken enlists in the Corps of Signals of the Irish Army, a neutral force, and also works for Reuters as a correspondent on education. In 1944, he edits They Go, the Irish, a collection of essays, including one from Seán O’Casey. In 1945, a collection of his verse is published under the title Signatures of All Things. In the summer of that year, Samuel Beckett gives Daiken his unpublished novel Watt, in the hope that he can find a publisher for it, but he fails to do so. They continue to write to each other and meet in London and Paris in the 1950s. He also keeps up with another friend from Trinity, Con Leventhal.
After he becomes a father in 1945, Daiken’s main interest moves on from political activism to children’s games and toys, and by 1951 the basement of his London home has become a toy museum. He writes on the subject and makes television and radio programmes for the BBC about it. His film One potato, two potato, a compilation of children’s street rhymes, wins the Festival Mondial du Film prize in 1958. His radio play The Circular Road is about a Jewish-Irish child.
In the 1950s Daiken founds the National Toy Museum and Institute of Play, today part of the Toy Collection at Hove Museum of Creativity.
Daiken returns to Ireland many times as a visitor. In the early 1960s he completes a radio play about the Jewish community of Dublin in the 1920s, which is broadcast on RTÉ.
In October 1963, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, recruits Daiken as a lecturer in education, and not long before his death he makes a film called The Piano about teaching white and black children in a school in Africa. He dies on August 15, 1964, while spending the summer vacation at home in London, leaving an estate valued at £3,865. He is cremated. His widow survives him until 1981.
In a tribute to Daiken, his 1930s communist associate Brian O’Neill writes, “He was always busy, always with a half dozen irons in the fire, always trying to give a hand to some Irish writer who needed it.”
In the early 1990s, Katrina Goldstone interviews Daiken’s brother, Aubrey Yodaiken, and later reports: “I was left with a faint sense of melancholy, as my interviewee had become distressed speaking about his brother, Leslie Daiken, and recalling his irrepressible and exasperating personality, his many projects, half-started novels…”
Aubrey Yodaiken is distressed by the lack of appreciation of his brother’s many cultural efforts and by the fact that his “scattershot literary endeavours” seem to have come to naught.
The National Library of Ireland holds a collection of Daiken’s papers, in particular his publications and correspondence, presented to it in 1995 by his elder daughter, by then Melanie Cuming, and his younger brother, Aubrey Yodaiken. The papers are mostly in English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Hebrew, and Irish.
Dodds is the son of schoolteachers. His father Robert is from a Presbyterian family and dies of alcoholism when Dodds is seven years old. His mother Anne is of Anglo-Irish ancestry. When he is ten, he moves with his mother to Dublin, and he is educated at St. Andrew’s College, where his mother teaches, and at Campbell College in Belfast. He is expelled from the latter for “gross, studied, and sustained insolence.”
In 1912, Dodds wins a scholarship at University College, Oxford, to read classics, or Literae Humaniores, a two-part, four-year degree program consisting of five terms of study of Latin and Greek texts followed by seven terms of study of ancient history and ancient philosophy. His friends at Oxford include Aldous Huxley and T. S. Eliot. In 1916, he is asked to leave Oxford due to his support for the Easter Rising, but he returns the following year to take his final examinations in Literae Humaniores, and is awarded a first-class degree to match the first-class awarded him in 1914 in Honour Moderations, the preliminary stage of his degree. His first tutor at Oxford is Arthur Blackburne Poynton.
After graduation, Dodds returns to Dublin and meets W. B. Yeats and George William Russell. He teaches briefly at Kilkenny College and in 1919 is appointed as a lecturer in classics at the University of Reading, where in 1923 he marries a lecturer in English, Annie Edwards Powell. They have no children.
In 1924, Dodds is appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Birmingham, and comes to know W. H. Auden, whose father George, Professor of Public Medicine and an amateur classicist, is a colleague. He is also responsible for Louis MacNeice‘s appointment as a lecturer at Birmingham in 1930. He assists MacNeice with his translation of Aeschylus, Agamemnon (1936), and later becomes the poet’s literary executor. He publishes one volume of his own poems, Thirty-Two Poems, with a Note on Unprofessional Poetry (1929).
On his retirement in 1960, Dodds is made an Honorary Fellow of University College, Oxford, until his death on April 8, 1979. He dies in the village of Old Marston, northeast of Oxford.
Among Dodds’s works are The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), which charts the influence of irrational forces in Greek culture up to the time of Plato, and Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, a study of religious life in the period between Marcus Aurelius and Constantine I. He is also editor of three major classical texts for the Clarendon Press, Proclus: Elements of Theology, Euripides‘ The Bacchae and Plato’s Gorgias, all published with extensive commentaries, and a translation in the case of the first. His autobiography, Missing Persons, is published in 1977. He edits Louis MacNeice’s unfinished autobiography The Strings are False (1965) and MacNeice’s Collected Poems (1966).
Yeats spends her first three years between Ballylee, County Galway, and Oxford before her family moves to 82 Merrion Square, Dublin in 1922. She is very sick as a child and spends three years in two different hospitals, St. Margaret’s Hall, 50 Mespil Road, and Nightingale Hall, Morehampton Road, Dublin. She then goes to the Pension Henriette, a boarding school in Villars-sur-Bex, Switzerland from 1928–30. In 1923 her Aunt Elizabeth “Lolly” gives her brush drawing lessons which aid her in winning first prize in the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) National Art competition for children under eight years old in 1925 and 1926.
Yeats trains in the Royal Hibernian Academy school from 1933 to 1936 and works as a stage designer with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In 1936, at the age of 16, she is hired by the Abbey Theatre as assistant to Tanya Moiseiwitsch. She studies for four months at the School of Theatrical Design in Paris with Paul Colin in 1937. At 18, she begins her costume career on sets with Ria Mooney‘s company. At the Abbey, she designs the sets and costumes for revivals of W.B. Yeats’ plays The Resurrection and On Baile’s Strand (1938).
In 1938 Yeats designs the first production of W.B. Yeats’ play Purgatory. The designs for Purgatory are her most successful achievement. Purgatory is the last play that W.B Yeats sees on stage, and when it is performed it is a full house. When working on Purgatory, Hugh Hunt wants to have a moon on the back cloth of the production, but she refuses. “If she does not win, she is going to say that she doesn’t wish to have her name on the programme as a designer of the setting.” This could be the main reason why her name is not on many productions that she worked on. She also designs the first play of her uncle Jack Yeats to receive professional production, Harlequin’s Positions.
In 1939 Yeats is promoted to head of design at the Abbey until her departure in May 1941. In 1939 it is commented that her designs are “getting arty” and not in keeping with style of the Abbey. One of her last designs is her father’s last play, The Death of Cuchulain, for the Lyric Theatre on the Abbey stage in 1949. She designs and stage-manages for the Peacock Theatre, the Cork Opera House, the Olympia Theatre, the Gaiety Theatre, the Lyric Theatre, the Abbey Theatre and the Players Theatre.
Among the work Yeats is credited with in the Abbey Theatre, she also works on five productions in the Peacock Theatre with the Theatre Company: Alarm Among the Clerks (1937), The Phoenix (1937), Harlequin’s Positions (1939), The Wild Cat (1940), and Cavaliero (The Life of a Hawk) (1948).
Yeats chooses to move towards painting full-time beginning a brief study at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1941. She experiments with watercolour and wax. She has a touching naive expressionist style and is interested in representing domestic humanity. She designs many of the covers for the books of Irish language publisher Sáirséal agus Dill over a twenty-year period from 1958. She does illustrations for books by Denis Devlin, Thomas Kinsella and Louis MacNeice, and works with many young designers, such as Louis le Brocquy.
Yeats dies at the age of 82 on July 4, 2001, and is buried in Shanganagh Cemetery, south Dublin.
The Royal Hibernian Academy holds a retrospective of her work in 1995, as does the National Gallery of Ireland in 2002. She donates her collection of Jack B. Yeats’ sketch books to the National Gallery of Ireland, leading to the creation of the Yeats Museum within the Gallery. Her brother, Michael, in turn, donates her sketchbooks to the Museum.
(Pictured: “Coole Park,” oil on board by Anne Butler Yeats, Duke Street Gallery, Dublin)
Yeats is very sick as a child, spending three years in two different hospitals. She then goes to the Pension Henriette, a boarding school in Villars-sur-Bex, Switzerland from 1928–1930. In 1923 her Aunt Elizabeth “Lolly” gives her brush drawing lessons which aids her in winning first prize in the RDS National Art competition for children under eight years old in 1925 and 1926.
Yeats trains in the Royal Hibernian Academy school from 1933 to 1936 and works as a stage designer with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In 1936, at the age of 16, she is hired by the Abbey Theatre as assistant to Tanya Moiseiwitsch. She studies for four months at the School of Theatrical Design in Paris with Paul Colin in 1937. At 18, she begins her costume career on sets with Ria Mooney‘s company. At the Abbey, she designs the sets and costumes for revivals of W.B. Yeats’ plays The Resurrection and On Baile’s Strand (1938).
In 1938 Yeats designs the first production of W.B. Yeats’ play Purgatory, which is her most successful achievement. Purgatory is the last play that W.B Yeats sees on stage, and when it is performed it is a full house. When working on Purgatory, Hugh Hunt wants to have a moon on the back cloth of the production but Yeats refuses. “If she does not win, she is going to say that she doesn’t wish to have her name on the programme as a designer of the setting.” This could be the main reason why her name is not on many productions that she works on. She also designs the first play of her uncle Jack Yeats to receive professional production, Harlequin’s Positions.
In 1939 Yeats is promoted to head of design at the Abbey until her departure in May 1941. In 1939 it is commented that her designs are “getting arty” and not in keeping with the style of the Abbey. One of her last designs is her father’s last play, The Death of Cuchulain, for the Lyric Theatre on the Abbey stage, in 1949. She designs and stage-manages for the Peacock Theatre, the Cork Opera House, the Olympia Theatre, the Gaiety Theatre, the Austin Clarke Lyric Theatre, the Abbey Theatre and Players’ Theatre.
Among the work Yeats is credited with in the Abbey Theatre, she is also recorded as having worked on five productions in the Peacock Theatre with the Theatre Company: Alarm Among the Clerks (1937), The Phoenix (1937), Harlequin’s Positions (1939), The Wild Cat (1940), and Cavaliero (The Life of a Hawk) (1948).
Yeats chooses to move towards painting full-time beginning a brief study at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1941. She experiments with watercolour and wax. She has a touching naive expressionist style and is interested in representing domestic humanity. She designs many of the covers for the books of Irish-language publisher Sáirséal agus Dill over a twenty-year period from 1958. She does illustrations for books by Denis Devlin, Thomas Kinsella and Louis MacNeice, and works with many young designers, such as Louis le Brocquy.
The Royal Hibernian Academy holds a retrospective of her work in 1995, as does the National Gallery of Ireland in 2002. She donates her collection of Jack B. Yeats’ sketch books to the National Gallery of Ireland, leading to the creation of the Yeats Museum within the Gallery. Her brother, Michael, in turn, donates her sketchbooks to the Museum.
(Pictured: “Gossip & Scandal,” 1943 oil on canvas, by Anne Butler Yeats)
Louis MacNeice, British poet and playwright, is born in Belfast on September 12, 1907. He is a member, along with Wystan Hugh Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Stephen Spender, of a group whose low-keyed, unpoetic, socially committed, and topical verse is the “new poetry” of the 1930s. His body of work is widely appreciated by the public during his lifetime, due in part to his relaxed but socially and emotionally aware style.
MacNeice’s first book of poetry, Blind Fireworks, appears in 1929, followed by more than a dozen other volumes, such as Poems (1935), Autumn Journal (1939), Collected Poems, 1925–1948 (1949), and, posthumously, The Burning Perch (1963). An intellectual honesty, Celtic exuberance, and sardonic humour characterize his poetry, which combines a charming natural lyricism with the mundane patterns of colloquial speech. His most characteristic mood is that of the slightly detached, wryly observant, ironic and witty commentator. Among MacNeice’s prose works are Letters from Iceland (with W.H. Auden, 1937) and The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1941). He is also a skilled translator, particularly of Horace and Aeschylus (The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, 1936).
By the early 1960s, MacNeice is “living on alcohol,” and eating very little, but still writing. In August 1963 he goes caving in Yorkshire to gather sound effects for his final radio play, Persons from Porlock. Caught in a storm on the moors, he does not change out of his wet clothes until he is home in Hertfordshire. Bronchitis evolves into viral pneumonia and he is admitted to hospital in London on August, 27. He dies there on September 3, 1963 at the age of 55. He is buried in Carrowdore churchyard in County Down, alongside his mother.
MacNeice’s final book of poems, The Burning Perch, is published a few days after his funeral. His life-long friend from Oxford, W.H. Auden, who gives a reading at MacNeice’s memorial service, describes the poems of his last two years as “among his very best.”
Longley is renowned for the quiet beauty of his compact, meditative lyrics. Known for using classical allusions to cast provocative light on contemporary concerns, including Northern Ireland’s “Troubles,” his poetry is also marked by sharp observation of the natural world, deft use of technique, and deeply felt emotion. His debut volume, No Continuing City (1969), heralds the arrival of a new talent from a region which has already produced recognized talents like Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon. However, his early influences are English poets like Philip Larkin, Louis MacNeice, and the First World War poets, as well as masters from the classical tradition. The critic Langdon Hammer describes Longley’s poems as masterpieces of “lucidity, economy, sincerity…by means of meticulous, unpretentious technique.”
Longley’s work engages diverse subjects, including Homeric literature, the landscape of Carrigskeewaun, jazz, Walter Mitty, and the politics of Northern Ireland. On the public and political responsibilities of being a Northern Irish poet, he says, “Though the poet’s first duty must be to his imagination, he has other obligations, and not just as a citizen. He would be inhuman if he did not respond to tragic events in his own community, and a poor artist if he did not seek to endorse that response imaginatively.” Reviewing his Selected Poems (1993), critic Fran Brearton praises in particular Longley’s more political poems, noting his “use of a compassionate yet unsentimental voice, and an attention to detail which restores specificity at a point in history when it is most in danger of being lost in abstraction – numbers, dates, death-tolls counted beyond comprehension.”
seamus dubhghaill 