Christened as William O’Brien, Ó Briain is born at 10 Church Street, North Wall, Dublin, on September 16, 1888, the seventh child of Arthur O’Brien, clerk, and Mary O’Brien (née Christie), who is from County Meath. He takes an interest in the Irish language from an early age and begins learning Irish by himself from a grammar book, as it is not encouraged by his teachers at the Christian Brothers’ O’Connell School nor spoken by his parents. While still at the O’Connell School, he starts using the Irish version of his name. He also attends meetings of the Gaelic League, then attends University College Dublin (UCD) on a scholarship, where he studies French, English and Irish, receiving a BA (1909) and an MA (1910).
UCD decides to start awarding one annual scholarship for overseas travel in 1911, and Ó Briain wins the first one, using it to visit Germany and study under Kuno Meyer and Rudolf Thurneysen. After three years, he returns home, where he rejoins the Gaelic League and begins teaching French at UCD. He also joins the Irish Volunteers then, the following year, Seán T. O’Kelly convinces him to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB).
Around this time, Ó Briain joins Sinn Féin, and he stands unsuccessfully for the party in Mid Armagh at the 1918 United Kingdom general election in Ireland, taking 5,689 votes. His campaign leads, indirectly, to his arrest and three months in jail in Belfast. In 1920, following his release, he is appointed a judge in the then-illegal republican court system in Galway, and visits both France and Italy to try to source weapons for the Irish Republican Army (IRA). In November 1920, he is arrested in the UCG dining room by Black and Tans, and is imprisoned for thirteen months, first in Galway and then in the Curragh camp in County Kildare, thereby missing the conclusion of the Irish War of Independence. By the time he is released, the Anglo-Irish Treaty has been signed. He supports the treaty and takes no further part in militant activity.
In the newly independent Ireland, Ó Briain remains a professor at Galway. He also stands in the 1925 Seanad election, although he is not successful. He is the founding secretary of the Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe theatre, also acting in many of its productions, and spends much time translating works from English and the Romance languages into Irish. He stands to become president of UCG in 1945, but is not elected, and in the 1940s and 1950s is best known for his many appearances on television and radio.
From his retirement in 1959, Ó Briain lives in Dublin. In 1974, the National University of Ireland (NUI) confers an honorary doctorate on him. He dies on August 12, 1974, at St. Gabriel’s Hospital, Cabinteely, County Dublin. His funeral to Glasnevin Cemetery is almost a state occasion, with a huge attendance of public figures, and a military firing party at the graveside, where the oration is given by Micheál Mac Líammóir and a lesson is read by Siobhán McKenna. For days after his death, the newspapers carry tributes to his many-sided career and personality. On the one hundredth anniversary of his birth, Proinsias Mac Aonghusa and Art Ó Beoláin write commemorative articles in Feasta.
On September 1, 1921, Ó Briain marries Helen Lawlor, of Dublin, who dies two years before him. The couple’s only child is Eibhlín Ní Bhriain, who is a journalist for The Irish Times and other periodicals.
Cairnes is born on December 26, 1823, at Castlebellingham, County Louth, the son of William Elliott Cairnes (1787–1863) of Stameen, near Drogheda, and Marianne Woolsey, whose mother is the sister of Sir William Bellingham, 1st Baronet of Castlebellingham. William decides upon a business career, against the wishes of his mother, Catherine Moore of Moore Hall, Killinchy, and becomes a partner in the Woolsey Brewery at Castlebellingham. In 1825, he starts on his own account in Drogheda, making the Drogheda Brewery an unqualified success. He is remembered for his great business capacity and for the deep interest he takes in charity.
After leaving school, Cairnes spends some years in the counting house of his father at Drogheda. His tastes, however, lay altogether in the direction of study, and he is permitted to enter Trinity College Dublin, where he takes the degree of BA in 1848, and six years later that of MA. After passing through the curriculum of Arts, he engages in the study of Law and is called to the Irish bar. But he lacks a desire to pursue the legal profession, and over some ensuing years, he devotes himself to writing in various publications about social and economic questions and treatises that relate to Ireland. He focuses mostly on political economy, which he studies thoroughly.
While residing in Dublin, Cairnes makes the acquaintance of the Archbishop of DublinRichard Whately, who conceives a very high respect for Cairnes’ character and abilities. In 1856, a vacancy occurs in the chair of political economy at Dublin, founded by Whately, and Cairnes receives the appointment. In accordance with the regulations of the foundation, the lectures of his first year’s course are published. The book appears in 1857 with the title Character and Logical Method of Political Economy. It follows up on and expands John Stuart Mill‘s treatment in the Essays on some Unsettled Questions in Political Economy and forms an admirable introduction to the study of economics as a science. In it the author’s peculiar powers of thought and expression are displayed to the best advantage. Logical exactness, precision of language, and firm grasp of the true nature of economic facts, are the qualities characteristic of this as of all his other works. If the book had done nothing more, it would still have conferred inestimable benefit on political economists by its clear exposition of the true nature and meaning of the ambiguous term law. To the view of the province and method of political economy expounded in this early work the author always remains true, and several of his later essays, such as those on Political Economy and Land, Political Economy and Laissez-Faire, are but reiterations of the same doctrine. His next contribution to economical science is a series of articles on the gold question, published partly in Fraser’s Magazine, in which the probable consequences of the increased supply of gold attendant on the Australian and Californian gold discoveries are analysed with great skill and ability. And a critical article on Michel Chevalier‘s work, On the Probable Fall in the Value of Gold, appears in the Edinburgh Review for July 1860.
In 1861, Cairnes is appointed to the professorship of jurisprudence and political economy in Queens College Galway, and in the following year he publishes his admirable work The Slave Power, one of the finest specimens of applied economic philosophy. The inherent disadvantages of the employment of slave labour are exposed with great fullness and ability, and the conclusions arrived at have taken their place among the recognised doctrines of political economy. The opinions expressed by Cairnes as to the probable issue of American Civil War are largely verified by the actual course of events, and the appearance of the book has a marked influence on the attitude taken by serious political thinkers in England towards the Confederate States of America.
During the remainder of his residence at Galway, Cairnes publishes nothing beyond some fragments and pamphlets, mainly upon Irish questions. The most valuable of these papers are the series devoted to the consideration of university education. His health, at no time very good, is still further weakened in 1865 by a fall from his horse. He is ever afterwards incapacitated from active exertion and is constantly liable to have his work interfered with by attacks of illness.
In 1866, Cairnes is appointed professor of political economy in University College, London. He is compelled to spend the session 1868–1869 in Italy, but on his return continues to lecture until 1872. During his last session he conducts a mixed class, ladies being admitted to his lectures. His health soon renders it impossible for him to discharge his public duties. He resigns his post in 1872 and retires with the honorary title of professor emeritus of political economy. In 1873 his own university confers on him the degree of LL.D.
Cairnes dies at the age of 51 at Blackheath, London, England, on July 8, 1875.
Gwynn is educated at St. Columba’s College, Dublin, and Trinity College Dublin. In 1896 he heads the list of Foundation Scholars in Classics at TCD. In 1898 he graduates Bachelor of Arts, gaining a “first of firsts” with gold medals in Classics and Modern Literature.
In 1900, along with his brother Edward Gwynn and others, Gwynn founds the Social Services (Tenements) Company to provide housing for poor families in Dublin. He subsequently spends many periods working with the poor in Dublin’s slums. He is instrumental in founding the Trinity Mission, which serves slum dwellers in Belfast, and is for many years actively involved in the Dublin University Fukien Mission (later the Dublin University Far Eastern Mission), eventually becoming its chairman and president.
He is ordained deacon in 1906, achieving full priesthood two years later. He is the only one of Rev. John Gwynn’s sons to be ordained, and he never serves in a parish. That same year, he proceeds to MA and is elected a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin.
In 1907 Gwynn is appointed Lecturer in Divinity and Tutor. He remains Lecturer in Divinity until 1919 and continues as Tutor until 1937. He is appointed Chaplain of TCD in 1911, retaining that post until 1919.
In January 1909 he is appointed Acting Warden of his old school, St. Columba’s College, which is facing a major financial crisis. He keeps the institution afloat until a new warden is appointed.
Horrified by the brutality of the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) toward strikers during the lockout in 1913, Gwynn becomes a prominent advocate of the workers’ cause and joins the Industrial Peace Committee. On November 12, 1913, when the committee is barred from holding its meeting at the Mansion House, he invites the members to his college rooms at No. 40, New Square. It is this meeting that leads to the foundation of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA). In their history of Trinity College McDowell and Webb observe, “Gwynn’s support for the ‘army’ concept was based simply on the idea that military-style discipline would keep unemployed men fit and give them self-respect. ‘Sancta simplicitas!'”
In 1914 Gwynn marries Dr. Eileen Gertrude Glenn, a rector’s daughter from Pomeroy, County Tyrone. They have six children.
In 1916 Gwynn is appointed Professor of Biblical Greek, a post he holds for forty years (1916-56). During those four decades, he holds a number of other, often overlapping, academic appointments at the university, including Professor of Hebrew (1920-37), Registrar (1941), Vice-Provost (1941-43), Senior Lecturer (1944-50), and Senior Tutor (1950-56). In 1937 he is co-opted to Senior Fellowship. He is made an honorary fellow in 1958.
When the Dublin University Fabian Society is formed. Gwynn becomes one of its vice-presidents.
Like several of his brothers, Gwynn is a fine cricket player, in his youth captaining both his school XI and the Dublin University XI. A right-handed batsman and right-arm slow bowler, he plays once for the Ireland cricket team in 1901. He also plays four first-class matches for Dublin University in 1895. He retains a lifelong interest in the sport, and John V. Luce portrays him as President of the Dublin University Cricket Club, with his “tall rangy figure … a familiar sight at matches in College Park.”
Gwynn is tall and athletic, but in later life suffers from deafness. To aid his hearing he carries a large ear trumpet with him and this, together with his height and glowing white hair, makes him an impressive and instantly recognizable figure around Trinity College. In character, he is patient, kind and wise, but at the same time resolute and tough. His nephew-in-law, the late Archbishop of Armagh, George Simms, remarks that his “gentle humility inspired trust and drew confidences, his stubborn integrity brought surprises for those who mistook charity for easy-going indifference,” and spoke of his “Athanasian courage.”
Gwynn dies in Dublin at the age of 85 on June 25, 1962. He is buried in Whitechurch churchyard.
Joyce is the eldest of three sons of Michael Joyce, an Irish Catholic from a family of tenant farmers in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, and his wife, Gertrude (née Brooke), who although born in Shaw and Crompton, Lancashire, is from a well-off AnglicanAnglo-Irish family of physicians associated with County Roscommon. The Joyces return to Ireland in 1909. William, a precocious child, attends Coláiste Iognáid SJ, a Jesuit school in County Galway, from 1915 to 1921. At the age of fourteen, he abandons Catholicism for Anglicanism, apparently after being told that all non-Catholics, including his mother, would be damned. In adult life he is nominally anglican, though his adherence to Christianity is tenuous.
The Joyces are unionists and teach their children fervent imperialism. During the Irish War of Independence, Joyce openly associates with the Black and Tans and acts as a scout for them. An acquaintance claims that his views are so extreme even loyalists dislike him. On December 9, 1921, he flees to England to join the Worcestershire Regiment and is followed to England in 1923 by the rest of the family. When he enlists, he claims to be eighteen, but after he contracts rheumatic fever, his age is discovered, and he is discharged in March 1922. For a time, he studies mathematics and chemistry at Battersea Polytechnic Institute as a pre-medical student (1922–23), but he leaves of his own accord, with a reputation for laziness and violent political views. His studies in English and history at Birkbeck College are more successful. He is a brilliant linguist and mathematician and graduates BA with first-class honours in 1927. He publishes an academic article on philology and considers progressing to an MA. He later falsely claims that his research had been plagiarised by a Jewish academic. In 1932, he enrolls at King’s College, London, for a Ph.D. in educational psychology.
Joyce is disturbed by the difference between depressed post-war Britain and the imperial ideal that he had imbibed in Galway and is mocked for his outspoken patriotism and obvious Irishness. He identifies strongly with Thomas Carlyle, an earlier angry anti-liberal from the provinces. His life is marked by repeated episodes of hero worship, followed by disillusion and bitter denunciation. In 1923, he joins the British Fascists, an organisation that has a significant Irish loyalist membership, and in 1924 he allies himself with a militant splinter group, the National Fascists. Most British fascists see themselves as Tory auxiliaries, and they often provide a security presence at conservative meetings. On October 22, 1924, while stewarding a meeting addressed by a Jewish conservative candidate, he has his face slashed and is left with a prominent scar across his right cheek. He joins the Conservative Party in 1928 and is active in the Chelsea constituency until 1930, when he is forced out because of his eccentricities and sexual misbehaviour. On April 30, 1927, he marries Hazel Kathleen Barr. They have two daughters but separate in 1935, largely because of his infidelities, heavy drinking, and temper. The marriage is dissolved in 1937.
In November 1933, Joyce abandons his Ph.D. studies to work for Sir Oswald Mosley‘s British Union of Fascists (BUF). By early 1934 he has become its paid publicity director, traveling throughout Britain to organise meetings. He is a powerful, rabble-rousing speaker, driven by an instinctive awareness that vitriolic verbal abuse gives speaker and audience a sense of power and solidarity. MI5 sees him as a compelling, though deranged, personality. On February 8, 1937, he marries Margaret Cairns White, a BUF activist from Lancashire, with whom he had cohabited since 1936.
Joyce leads a BUF faction that favours a recruitment strategy based on uncompromising ideological assertion. This is challenged by populists who prioritise marches and displays and hold that indoctrination should follow membership. In February 1937, he is BUF candidate for the London County Council in Shoreditch. The party wins 14 percent of the vote. In March 1937, he, along with many full-time BUF staff, are sacked when the BUF cuts expenses. But his dismissal also reflects Mosley’s awareness that his obsessive rhetoric repels “respectable” recruits and that he is no longer a biddable, slavish admirer of “the Leader.” He later falsely claims near-exclusive credit for the BUF’s escalating antisemitism, a view that Mosley eventually finds it convenient to adopt in order to evade his own responsibility.
In April 1937, Joyce founds the National Socialist League, helped by a wealthy patron. He supports himself as a private tutor, refusing to take Jewish pupils. He is active in various antisemitic and pro-Nazi groups such as the Right Club and engages in “peace” campaigns based on the view that British interests lay with Germany against Russia. Political marginalisation intensifies his admiration for Nazi Germany and hero worship of Adolf Hitler. By the time of the Munich crisis in 1938, he has decided that if war comes, he will go to Germany, though he also considers moving to Ireland. He renews his British passport for one-year terms in August 1938 and August 1939.
On August 26, 1939, Joyce and his wife leave London for Berlin. He is allegedly tipped off about his impending arrest and internment by an MI5 officer, to whom he had supplied information on communists. His siblings, whom he recruited into his fascist organisations, are variously penalised for his activities. At a loose end in Berlin, he is persuaded by a British associate to become a radio announcer with the English-language service of the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (RRG). He makes his first broadcast on September 6, 1939, and receives a contract in October. He finds in radio an outlet for his forceful style and delight in saying the unsayable, and in the early years of the war takes an exultant pride in recounting Nazi victories. His performances are admired by Joseph Goebbels, whom Joyce, to his regret, never meets. On September 26, 1940, he acquires German citizenship.
The novel experience of hearing the enemy in one’s own living room attracts wide audiences in Britain. Joyce’s practice of naming newly captured prisoners of war in his broadcasts is also a compelling motive for listening. In fact, he tries to recruit British prisoners of war as collaborators. The name “Lord Haw-Haw,” invented by the Daily Express radio critic in September 1939, initially applies to several English-language broadcasters but in time becomes associated with Joyce. He is initially a figure of fun, imitated by comedians, but there are sinister undercurrents of terrifying omnipotence, intensified by his sneering, gloating delivery and his delighted deployment of the “big lie” technique. It is widely believed that British-based fifth columnists supply him with information, that he predicts air raids, and shows minute local knowledge. In time, fear and his growing notoriety feed popular hatred of him in Britain, though his anti-British taunts allegedly win appreciative Irish audiences. He exults that he is daily committing treason and rendering himself liable to the death penalty.
In 1940, Joyce publishes a commissioned self-justifying propaganda work, Twilight over England. His representation of himself echoes that of Hitler in Mein Kampf – the provincial patriot, whose martial sacrifices are betrayed by corrupt elites, learning through poverty the hollowness of bourgeois patriotism and the need to synthesise socialism with nationalism. He shares with his hero a paranoid belief in his own ability to create an alternative reality through language and obstinacy. He dreams of becoming the English Führer.
In Berlin, the Joyces’ marriage comes under increasing strain, marked by drunken rows, domestic violence, and infidelity on both sides, though they retain a fierce mutual fascination. They divorce on August 12, 1941, but remarry on February 11, 1942, while continuing their previous behaviour. As the Axis powers begin to fail, his broadcasts become more defensive, focusing on the Soviet threat. On October 14, 1944, he is awarded the German War Merit Cross, first class. On October 22, he is sworn into the Volkssturm (territorial army) and begins drilling. The Joyces are evacuated from Berlin in March 1945, initially to Apen near the Dutch border and then to Hamburg, where he makes a last, drunken, defiant broadcast on April 30, 1945, the day of Hitler’s death. After an unsuccessful attempt to escape to Sweden, the Joyces hide at Flensburg near the Danish border. On May 28, 1945, he is shot and captured while gathering firewood.
Joyce is brought back to Britain on June 16 after Parliament passed legislation simplifying treason trial procedures. At his September 17-20 trial, he proves his American citizenship, but the court holds that his illegally acquired British passport incurred duties of allegiance. His appeals are rejected by the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords. His fate is influenced by British public opinion, and possibly by a desire to avoid antagonising the Soviet Union. In his death cell he blames the defeat of national socialism on German limitations. He also fantasises that he could have saved Hitler from his incompetent subordinates.
Joyce is hanged by Albert Pierrepoint at Wandsworth Prison on January 3, 1946. Unlike most of his fellow Nazis, he proclaims to the end his allegiance to national socialism and hatred of Jews. He corresponds cheerfully with Margaret, joking evasively about the death camps and expressing a belief that his spirit will survive, watch over her, and continue his work. To neo-Nazis he becomes a martyr. Even among those to whom his activities had been repellent, a significant body of opinion holds he should not have been condemned on a questionable and innovative technicality. The historian A. J. P. Taylor maintains that Joyce was executed for making a false declaration to obtain a passport, a misdemeanour that normally incurs a £2 fine.
In 1976, Joyce is reinterred in Galway as it is feared that a grave in England might become a fascist shrine. Thomas Kilroy‘s play Double Cross (1986) juxtaposes Joyce and Brendan Bracken as Irishmen who reinvented themselves through fantasies of Britishness. The BBC Sound Archive has recordings of some of Joyce’s broadcasts and transcripts of others, collected during the war as evidence for a future treason trial.
(From: “Joyce, William Brooke (‘Lord Haw-Haw’)” by Patrick Maume, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
MacFarland is the elder son of John MacFarland, draper, and his second wife Margaret Jane, daughter of Rev. William Henry, a famous Covenanting Church minister. Both parents are devout Presbyterians, well educated, with strong intellectual interests.
MacFarland teaches at Repton School in Derbyshire from 1876 to 1880. A decade later, his younger brother Robert, also a Queen’s Belfast and Cambridge mathematics graduate, also teaches at Repton.
The emissaries of the provisional council of Ormond College in the University of Melbourne are impressed with MacFarland. He negotiates a salary of £600 plus the profit from “farming” the college. On March 18, 1881, he becomes the first master of Ormond College, passing the opening-day ordeal in the presence of 440 Presbyterian grandees, clergy and their ladies.
On Sir John Madden‘s death in 1918, MacFarland becomes chancellor of the university and is knighted in 1919. He presides over a period of considerable expansion, working closely with Sir John Monash, vice-chancellor from 1923, and Sir James Barrett.
MacFarland is immensely and properly proud of his careful financial management, but the erstwhile reformers are hardly tender enough in balancing economy with humanity. The professors become increasingly restive about the limited responsibility for academic matters and allocation of resources council allows them. When the issues come to a head in 1928, MacFarland’s prestige is too much for the professoriate who have great respect for his administrative capacity, humanity and reasonableness. Even in his eighties he does not retire as chancellor, probably wisely concluding that his likely successor, Barrett, will prove to be too divisive.
MacFarland’s reputation as a business manager leads to his directorship from about 1905 of the National Mutual Life Association, serving as chairman from 1928, and of the Trustees Executors and Agency Company. From 1913 he represents the Trustees Executors on the Felton Bequests Committee. He is also the popular chairman from its foundation in 1908 of the Alexandra Club Co. as the members of the leading female social club prefer men to control their finances.
In his younger days MacFarland is a vigorous cyclist and walker in the Australian Alps, Tasmania and New Zealand. By the age of 40 he is spending a month each summer trout-fishing in the South Island of New Zealand. He is also a regular golfer at Royal Melbourne and belongs to the Melbourne Club.
“Few men in any community, and almost no man in this community, can have won such universal esteem. No evil was ever spoken of him or could be thought of in connection with him; before him evil quailed. The greatest disciple of the greatest of the Greeks called his dead master ‘our friend whom we may truly call the wisest, and the justest, and the best of all men we have ever known’. And many of us can sincerely say that of John Henry MacFarland.”
(From: “Sir John Henry MacFarland (1851-1935)” by Geoffrey Serle, Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://www.adb.anu.edu.au, 1986)
His birth into the politically influential Beresford family affords him a degree of opportunity, and he is made a vice-regal chaplain in 1766. Brother of George de la Poer Beresford, 1st Marquess of Waterford, he marries Elizabeth Fitzgibbon, sister of John FitzGibbon, 1st Earl of Clare, on June 16, 1763. They had three sons and five daughters. These connections, however, do not automatically result in his being promoted to bishop, despite reaching episcopal age in 1773, and he spends several years as a well-beneficed rector of Urney in the Diocese of Derry. The Beresford family complains that he has been overlooked for several episcopal vacancies in the 1770s and it is not until 1780 that he is created Doctor of Divinity and consecrated Bishop of Dromore on April 8, 1780. At Dromore he erects a handsome new episcopal residence. On May 21, 1782, he is transferred to the diocese of Ossory and, as bishop there, takes his seat in the Irish parliament and exercises influence over the ecclesiastical borough of St. Canice.
The death of Primate Richard Robinson in 1794 is the stimulus for a reorganisation within the Church of Ireland hierarchy, and Beresford is one of the candidates rumoured to succeed him. However, his familial ties disadvantage him, because the government does not want to favour one Irish “party” over another. He is instead appointed to the vacant archbishopric of Tuam on October 10, 1794. An influential and senior position within the church, it is worth £5,000 per annum, which is more than Archbishop Charles Agar receives for the archbishopric of Cashel and provides him with extensive patronage.
In the late 1790s Beresford regularly attends parliament, particularly in the crucial session of 1799 as the Acts of Union is debated and shares his brother John’s view that a union is the best means of securing the Protestant interest in Ireland.
In the years following the union Beresford gains a temporal peerage, becoming 1st Baron Decies on December 22, 1812. He is an amiable, kind and loquacious individual, and is patron to artists, including Gilbert Stuart, who produces a portrait of him as Bishop of Ossory. His long years of service within the established church also makes him very wealthy, worth £250,000 at the time of his death.
Beresford dies on September 6, 1819, at Tuam, County Galway, and is succeeded in the barony by his eldest surviving son John on September 8, 1819. His eldest son Marcus had died in 1803. His youngest daughter Louisa, widow of Thomas Hope, marries, by special license, her cousin William Carr Beresford on November 29, 1832. Through Louisa he is a grandfather of British MP and patron of the arts, Henry Thomas Hope.
(From: “Beresford, William” by Martin McElroy, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009, revised June 2024)
Brewster is the son of William Bagenal Brewster, of Ballinulta, County Wicklow, by his wife Mary, daughter of Thomas Bates. He receives his earlier education at Kilkenny College, then proceeds to Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 1812, taking his B.A. degree in 1817, and long after, in 1847, his M.A. degree.
Brewster is very active in almost all branches of his profession after his resignation, and his reputation as an advocate may be gathered from the pages of the Irish Law and Equity Reports, and in the later series of the Irish Common Law Reports, the Irish Chancery Reports, and the Irish Jurist, in all of which his name very frequently appears. Among the most important cases in which he takes part are the Mountgarrett case in 1854, involving a peerage and an estate of £10,000 a year, the Carden abduction case in July of the same year, the Yelverton case in 1861, the Egmont will case in 1863, the Marquess of Donegall‘s ejectment action and lastly, the great will cause of Fitzgerald v. Fitzgerald, in which Brewster’s statement for the plaintiff is said to be one of his most successful efforts.
On Edward Smith-Stanley becoming prime minister, Brewster succeeds Francis Blackburne as Lord Justice of Appeal in Ireland in July 1866, and Lord Chancellor of Ireland the following March. As Lord Chancellor, he sits in his court for the last time on December 17, 1868, when Benjamin Disraeli‘s government resigns. He then retires from public life.
There are only three or four judgments delivered by him in print, either in the Court of Appeal or the Court of Chancery (Ireland). His judicial manner is quiet, but with what is called “a touch of serviceable fierceness” which keeps order in Court. He is highly regarded by his colleagues. Even the bitter-tongued Jonathan Christian, who despises most of his fellow judges, defers to Brewster.
Brewster dies at his residence, 26 Merrion Square South, Dublin, on July 26, 1874, and is buried in the family vault at Tullow, County Carlow, on July 30. By his marriage in 1819 with Mary Ann, daughter of Robert Gray of Upton House, County Carlow, who dies in Dublin on November 24, 1862, he has issue one son, Colonel William Bagenal Brewster, and one daughter, Elizabeth Mary, wife of Mr. Henry French, both of whom die in the lifetime of their father. His estates are inherited by Elizabeth’s son, Robert French-Brewster, who adopts his grandfather’s surname. A nephew, Edward Brewster, studies under Abraham Brewster and becomes a lawyer and politician in New South Wales. Edward’s brother, John Grey Brewster, also emigrates to Australia, where he becomes a prosperous grazier and company director, retiring to England in later years where he dies in 1897.
(Pictured: Right Honourable Abraham Brewster photographed by Thomas Cranfield, 1861)
Known principally for his contribution to Ulster politics at local level, Armstrong serves as JP and is appointed High Sheriff of Armagh for 1875 and High Sheriff of Longford for 1894. He is a County Councillor for Armagh from 1899 to 1920, and a Member of the Irish Convention in 1917–18. Vice-Lieutenant of County Armagh in 1920, he is a Senator of Queen’s University Belfast from 1920 to 1937.
Armstrong is returned unopposed to the Imperial House of Commons for Mid-Armagh in the 1921 Mid Armagh by-election, at the advanced age of 76, becoming one of the oldest first-time MPs whose birth date is recorded. Certainly, he immediately becomes the oldest member of the current House of Commons. He is a Senator of Northern Ireland from 1921 to 1937, and Lord Lieutenant of Armagh from 1924 to 1939. For twenty-five years he is a member of the Representative Body of the Church of Ireland. He is Chairman of the County Armagh Education Committee from 1925 to 1931, and President of the Association of Education Committees of Northern Ireland. In 1932, he is made a Privy Councillor for Northern Ireland, and in 1938 he serves as a Justice for the Government of Northern Ireland in the absence of the Governor.
In his later years, Armstrong provides financial support for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe.
In 1883, Armstrong marries Margaret Leader, daughter of William Leader of Rosnalea, County Cork. They have five sons and three daughters, of whom C. W. Armstrong also becomes a politician.
Armstrong dies at his home in Dean’s Hill, Armagh, on December 4, 1943, at the age of 99 years.
Ware is born on November 16, 1594, in Castle Street, Dublin, eldest surviving son among ten children of Sir James Ware, auditor general, and his wife Mary Bryden, sister of Sir Ambrose Briden of Maidstone, Kent, England, whose house provides Ware’s base in England. His father, a Yorkshireman, comes to Ireland in the train of Lord Deputy of Ireland Sir William FitzWilliam in 1588 and builds up a substantial landed estate. He enters Trinity College Dublin (TCD), where his father is the college auditor, as a fellow commoner in 1605 and is presented a silver standing bowl in 1609. His association with the college continues, as he particularly remembers the philosophy lectures of Anthony Martin, who becomes a fellow in 1611. He takes his MA on January 8, 1628, but by then he has already launched on his future course. His father procures him the reversion of his office in 1613, and by 1620 he already owns the Annals of Ulster and is taking notes from the Black Book of Christ Church. In 1621, he marries Elizabeth Newman, daughter of Jacob Newman, one of the six clerks in chancery. Newman becomes clerk of the rolls in 1629, which apparently facilitates Ware’s assiduous research in the Irish public records.
From Ware’s numerous surviving notebooks, it is possible to follow his scholarly tracks over the rest of his life. He is particularly concerned to trace the succession of the Irish bishops. The first fruits appear in print in 1626, Archiepiscoporum Cassiliensium et Tuamensium . . . adjicitur historia coenobiorum Cisterciensium Hiberniae, followed in 1628 by De presulibus Lageniae . . ., the whole to be rounded off in 1665 with De presulibus Hiberniae. . . . However, he has wide interests in Irish history and in 1633 edits Edmund Spenser‘s A View of the Present State of Irelande and the Irish histories of Edmund Campion, Meredith Hanmer, and Henry of Marlborough. The first Irish biographical dictionary follows in 1639, De scriptoribus Hiberniae. Both publications are dedicated to the viceroy, Thomas Wentworth. In public life he is a supporter, first of Wentworth, later of James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond, rather than a leader, and always a stout royalist. He is knighted in 1630 and following his father’s death in 1632 he succeeds as auditor general. He is elected member of parliament for Dublin University in 1634, 1640, and 1661, but is not admitted to the Privy Council of Ireland until 1640.
Shortly after the outbreak of rebellion in October 1641, Ware is in England, and in London at the time of the passing of the Adventurers’ Act 1640, presumably on the council’s business. During Ormond’s prolonged negotiations with the confederates, he is sent to advise the king at Oxford in November 1645. While there he works in the Bodleian Library and is incorporated into the university as a Doctor of Civil Law. On his way back to Ireland in January 1646, he is captured at sea by a parliament ship and held prisoner in the Tower of London until October 1646.
When Ormond is arranging the surrender of Dublin to the parliament in the summer of 1647, Ware is sent to London as one of the hostages for his performance of the terms. Back in Dublin he has been replaced as auditor general but is able to carry on his work on the public records. In 1648 he publishes the catalogue of his manuscript library. As a leading royalist he is unwelcome to those governing the city for the parliament and is sent into exile in France on April 7, 1649, with his eldest son, also James, who already holds the reversion of the auditor generalship and eventually succeeds his father. He is allowed to live in London from October 1650, and from 1653, when hostilities end in Ireland, he is allowed brief visits there, perhaps taking up residence again in 1658.
Ware’s years in London are spent in the library of Archbishop of ArmaghJames Ussher, then in Lincoln’s Inn, and in the Royal, Cotton, Carew, and Dodsworth libraries. He publishes his De Hibernia et antiquitatibus ejus disquisitiones in 1654, lamenting the inaccessibility of his notes, then in Dublin. The second edition, published in 1658, also includes the annals of Henry VII. His Opuscula Sancto Patricio . . . adscripta . . . appears in 1656. In it he remarks that his knowledge of the Irish language is not expert enough for an edition of the ‘Lorica’. According to Roderick O’Flaherty, Ware can read and understand but not speak Irish. For the older language he employs Irish scholars, Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh being the last and most learned. The 1660 Stuart Restoration sees him back as auditor general and one of the commissioners for the Irish land settlement. He publishes annals of Henry VIII in 1662, and in 1664 annals for 1485–1558.
Ware dies in his house in Castle Street on December 1, 1666, and is buried in the family vault in St. Werburgh’s Church, Dublin. He has numerous friends among the scholars of the day, including Irish Franciscans, across the sectarian divide. While clergy lists are still partly dependent on his work, his notebooks and manuscripts remain of first importance for the study of medieval Ireland. Of his ten children, two boys and two girls survive him. His wife dies on June 9, 1651. The engraving by George Vertue prefixed to Harris’ edition of Ware’s Works is claimed to be based on a portrait in the possession of the family.
(From: “Ware, Sir James” by William O’Sullivan, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Thompson is the youngest child of the social historians and peace activists E. P. Thompson and Dorothy Towers. She has lived in Ireland since 1981 and many of her books are set there. She trains racehorses in the UK and United States and travels extensively in India before settling in 1984 in Inagh, County Clare, in the west of Ireland with her partner Conor Minogue. They have two daughters, Cliodhna and Dearbhla. She is an accomplished fiddler with an interest in Irish traditional music, which is reflected in The New Policeman (2005).
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