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The Execution of William Joyce

William Brooke Joyce, an American-born fascist and Nazi propaganda broadcaster during World War II, is hanged in Wandsworth Prison by Albert Pierrepoint on January 3, 1946, making him the last person to be executed for treason in the United Kingdom.

Joyce is born on April 24, 1906, in Brooklyn, New York, 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 Anglican Anglo-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 per cent 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 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)


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Birth of John Neill, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin

John Robert Winder Neill, the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin until the end of January 2011, is born on December 17, 1945.

The fourth generation of his family to become a clergyman, Neill is educated at the Avoca School, Blackrock, Dublin, and Sandford Park School, Ranelagh, Dublin. He attends Trinity College Dublin studying Hebrew and oriental languages winning a scholarship in 1965 and graduating in 1966. He is awarded an MA degree at Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1972.

Ordained in 1969 for the curacy of St. Paul’s Glenageary, Dublin, Neill is the fourth generation of his family to enter the ministry. He is Bishop of Tuam, Killala and Achonry from 1986 to 1997 before his consecration as Bishop of Cashel and Ossory in 1997.

At the Lambeth Conference in 1988, Neill proposes all the approved resolutions in respect of Women in the Episcopate and is chairman of the Church of Ireland General Synod Committee on Ordination of Women (1988–91). He serves on many central committees of the Church of Ireland covering issues such as liturgical reform, education, communications, ministry, Christian unity and synodical structures.

Neill serves as President of the Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland (1990-94) and as President of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland (1999-2002) and is co-founder and chairman of the Church of Ireland/Methodist Church Joint Theological Working Party.

On August 29, 2002, the Church of Ireland announces that the Right Reverend John Neill, Bishop of Cashel and Ossory, is to succeed the Most Reverend Dr. Walton Empey as Archbishop of Dublin. The announcement is made at a meeting of the Church of Ireland Episcopal Electoral College in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.

Neill and his wife Betty have three sons, The Reverend Canon Stephen Neill, Rector of Celbridge, Andrew Neill, a member of Garda Síochána, and Peter Neill, a photographer.


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Death of Philip Twysden, Lord Bishop of Raphoe

Philip Twysden, Anglican clergyman who serves in the Church of Ireland as Lord Bishop of Raphoe from 1747 to 1752, dies bankrupt on November 2, 1752, after having been shot while allegedly masquerading as a highwayman. The circumstances of his death later become the subject of scandalous rumour.

Twysden is born in Kent, in the South East England region, on September 7, 1713, the third son of Sir William Twysden, 5th Baronet of Roydon Hall, East Peckham, Kent, by his wife (and distant cousin) Jane Twisden.

Twysden studies at University College, Oxford, from 1732. He is awarded a Master of Arts degree, and the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law in 1745.

Twysden marries twice: firstly, to Mary Purcell, who dies in 1743, and secondly to Frances Carter, daughter of The Rt Hon. Thomas Carter, Master of the Rolls in Ireland. After Twysden’s death, she marries her cousin, General James Johnston.

By his second wife, Twysden has two children: Mary, who dies in infancy, and a posthumous daughter named Frances (1753–1821). Frances, later Countess of Jersey, is one of the many mistresses of King George IV when he is Prince of Wales.

Twysden is ordained a priest in the Church of England. He is instituted in 1738 as rector of Eard and in 1745, for a short time, serves as the rector of Eastling in Kent. He accompanies Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, to Dublin as his chaplain, upon the Earl’s appointment as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

Twysden is nominated to the Bishopric of Raphoe in Ulster on March 3, 1746, and is consecrated by the Archbishop of Dublin, assisted by the bishops of Derry and Clonfert, at St. Michan’s Church, Dublin, on March 29, 1747.

Twysden dies on November 2, 1752, at home in Jermyn Street, St. James’s, London. However, according to ecclesiastical historian and author Henry Cotton, he dies at Roydon Hall, East Peckham, his father’s country house. He is buried in the south chancel of St. Michael’s Church, East Peckham, under a plain stone with no inscription.

A story grows up that, having been made bankrupt, Twysden is shot while attempting to rob a stagecoach. The location of his alleged attempted career as a highwayman is either Hounslow Heath (west of London) or Wrotham Heath in Kent.

(Pictured: The Cathedral of St Eunan, Raphoe, the episcopal seat of the pre-Reformation and Church of Ireland bishops of Raphoe)


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Birth of Archaeologist Etienne Andrew Rynne

Etienne Andrew Rynne, archaeologist, is born on September 11, 1932, at 20 Upper Pembroke Street, Dublin.

Rynne is one of six children (five boys and a girl) of Dr. Michael Rynne, a civil servant and diplomat, and Nathalie Rynne (née Fournier), from Auvergne, France. He has a twin brother, Michael, and is a nephew of the writer and broadcaster Stephen Rynne. He receives his early education in a number of institutions in Ireland and abroad, including Terenure College in Dublin, Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, Coláiste na Rinne in County Waterford and École des Roches in Normandy. He then attends University College Dublin (UCD), where he graduates BA in archaeology and French (1953) and MA in archaeology (1955). He wins the prestigious National University of Ireland (NUI) travelling studentship for his thesis on Iron Age weapons.

After spending a year on the continent, Rynne returns to Ireland in 1957 to join the antiquities division of the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) in Kildare Street. One of his first assignments is to participate in the excavations at the Hill of Tara, previously headed by his old mentor at UCD, the recently deceased Professor Seán P. Ó Ríordáin. Already an expert on the Iron Age, he expands his expertise to cover Irish Celtic and early Christian art. He becomes an influential figure at the museum, remaining until 1967 and gaining much valuable experience in archaeological research, cataloguing and display, and is once described as the “true master of the Kildare Street crypt.” Intimately acquainted with the museum’s early Christian artefacts, he is particularly drawn to the eighth-century Ardagh chalice, on which he compiles extensive research notes relating to its dismantling and conservation. Although he is recognised as a leading authority on the chalice, his workload at the NMI and various academic commitments, not least his thirty-five years as editor of the North Munster Antiquarian Journal (NMAJ), prevent publication of his great work on the treasure.

During Rynne’s time at the NMI, he develops a close friendship with its director, Dr. Anthony T. Lucas, and on April 1, 1967 marries his daughter Aideen in the Church of the Miraculous Medal, Clonskeagh, Dublin. That year, he leaves the museum to take up a lectureship in archaeology at University College Galway (UCG), remaining there for thirty-one years until his retirement as professor of Celtic archaeology in 1998. During his professorship, he introduces many innovative changes at UCG, placing great emphasis on the value of well-planned field trips to historical monuments and archaeological sites around Connacht and north Clare, including Poulnabrone in his beloved Burren and Dún Aonghasa on Inishmore, which in 1991 he is first to suggest was built for ceremonial rather than defensive purposes. He often ventures further afield to sites such as the Jorvik Viking Centre, York, and the West Kennet Long Barrow in Wiltshire. Many local expeditions include small excavations, which he continues to conduct on behalf of the NMI.

Despite his heavy workload, Rynne writes close to one hundred academic papers in local and international journals, his expansive subject matter including not only archaeology but also folklore and Irish War of Independence history, the latter interest stemming from his father’s involvement in the formation of the Irish state (1917–23). His editorial tenure at the NMAJ includes the publication in 1975 and 1978 of dedicated issues on Edward MacLysaght and John Hunt respectively, and he is editor of Figures from the Past (1987), the Festschrift for Helen Maybury Roe. He also uses the national press to express his sometimes-eccentric views on various subjects, such as Irish neutrality, the American justice system and running the M3 motorway through Tara. A highly engaging and entertaining speaker, he thrives in front of an audience, be it a small group of students standing in a muddy field or an official address to the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, of which he serves as president from 1985 to 1989. His lectures are marked by his erudite and characteristically passionate delivery, complete with subtle intonation, and he is as comfortable speaking French as he is English or Irish.

Rynne’s legacy cannot be fairly assessed without reference to his largely unpopular stance in the Wood Quay controversy of the late 1970s. When Dublin’s original Viking settlement at Wood Quay is unearthed by archaeologists, he sides with the NMI, which, under the directorship of Joseph Raftery, decides to excavate only a small section of the site before handing it over to developers. This results in the destruction of much unexcavated archaeology. The NMI’s decision results in serious damage to its reputation, with Rynne one of the few archaeologists publicly supporting its unpopular stance. His loyalty to the NMI administration, which includes his father-in-law Lucas, alienates many fellow archaeologists, and is described by Patrick Wallace, then director of excavations at Wood Quay and among the many scholars who campaign to save the site, as “excessive, unnecessary and so unquestioning that it led to his being on the … wrong side during the Wood Quay court case.”

Rynne’s contribution to the history and heritage of his adopted province of Connacht and city of Galway is, however, widely acknowledged as immense. Once settled in UCG, he makes his home in the medieval town of Athenry, where he engages enthusiastically with the local community via lectures, walks and talks on the town’s famous walls and castle. Although Dublin-born, he becomes firmly entrenched in Galway’s colourful past and is instrumental in the founding of the city’s first municipal museum in Comerford House, adjacent to the Spanish Arch, in 1971. Drawing on his considerable NMI experience, he acts as honorary curator for the Galway museum for over a decade, before its move to the present purpose-built building in 2007. Ever willing to disseminate the story of Galway’s past beyond the twin towers of its university, to its citizens and the wider public, he compiles the Tourist Trail of Old Galway (1977). This signposted walking tour of Galway communicates the city’s importance in the medieval world, not only from an Irish, but also from a European and global perspective, and represents an enduring legacy to the self-styled promoter and protector of the city’s heritage.

Elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) in 1966, Rynne is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (1975), and president of both the Cambrian Society of Wales (1999) and the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society (1989–94). Although diagnosed with heart disease in 1991, he remains active long after his retirement in 1998, continuing to publish papers on aspects of Irish archaeology up to his death.

In the summer of 2012 Rynne suffers a stroke and dies at the age of 79 on June 22, 2012, at University Hospital Galway. He is survived by Aideen, his wife of forty-five years, and their four sons and one daughter. A fifth son pre-deceases him. He is buried in the New Cemetery, Athenry.

(From: “Rynne, Etienne Andrew” by Frank Cullen, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, June 2018)


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Death of Arthur Hill, 2nd Marquess of Downshire

Arthur Hill, 2nd Marquess of Downshire PC, FRS, British peer and MP styled Viscount Fairford until 1789 and Earl of Hillsborough from 1789 to 1793, dies by suicide on September 7, 1801.

Hill is born on March 3, 1753, the eldest son of Wills Hill, 1st Earl of Hillsborough (later Marquess of Downshire). He matriculates at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1771, and receives his MA in 1773.

Hill sits as a Tory for the rotten borough of Lostwithiel from 1774 to 1780, and then for Malmesbury until 1784. He also represents County Down in the Irish House of Commons from 1776 until succeeding to the peerage in 1793.

Hill enjoys a number of civil and military appointments in both England and Ireland during this period. He is commissioned a captain in the Hertfordshire Militia on March 22, 1775, and a lieutenant colonel in the regiment on May 4, 1787, resigning his commission on June 4, 1794. Appointed the deputy governor of County Down on August 6, 1779, he is picked as High Sheriff of Down in 1785. He is chosen a Fellow of the Royal Society on January 22, 1790, and a deputy lieutenant of Berkshire on May 12, 1792.

Upon the death of his father on October 7, 1793, Hill succeeds him as Marquess of Downshire, in the Peerage of Ireland, as well as in his other subsidiary titles, including that of Earl of Hillsborough in the Peerage of Great Britain. He also succeeds his father as Hereditary Constable of Hillsborough Fort, and as Custos Rotulorum of County Down (October 16) and Governor of Down (October 17). On November 7, he is appointed to the Privy Council of Ireland.

Hill vigorously exerts himself against the Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800 and is punished by the Government for his opposition by being dismissed from the Governorship of Down and the colonelcy of the Downshire Militia and struck off the roll of the Privy Council on February 12, 1800.

On June 29, 1786, Hill marries Mary Sandys, by whom he has seven children:

Hill’s last son, Lord George Hill, is born posthumously, as he dies by suicide on September 7, 1801. His widow, Mary, feels his early death is in part due to his humiliation by the Government, and thereafter is a bitter enemy to Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh. She is the heiress of her uncle, Edwin Sandys, 2nd Baron Sandys, and to the estates of her grandfather, William Trumbull, including Easthampstead Park. In 1802, after Hill’s death, she is created Baroness Sandys, with a special remainder to her younger sons and their male heirs in succession and then to her eldest son and his male heirs.

Hill also has a son, William Arthur Dore-Hill, born in 1778, with his mistress Sarah Dore (who later marries William Garrow).


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Death of Annie Horniman, Theatre Patron & Manager

Annie Elizabeth Fredericka Horniman CH, English theatre patron and manager, dies on August 6, 1937, while visiting friends in Shere, Surrey, England. She establishes the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and founds the first regional repertory theatre company in Britain at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester. She encourages the work of new writers and playwrights, including W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and members of what become known as the Manchester School of dramatists.

Horniman is born at Surrey Mount, Forest Hill, London, on October 3, 1860, the elder child of Frederick John Horniman and his first wife Rebekah (née Emslie). Her father is a tea merchant and the founder of the Horniman Museum. Her grandfather is John Horniman who founds the family tea business of Horniman and Company. She and her younger brother Emslie are educated privately at their home. Her father is opposed to the theatre, which he considers sinful, but their German governess takes her and Emslie secretly to a performance of The Merchant of Venice at The Crystal Palace when she is fourteen years old.

Horniman’s father allows her to enter the Slade School of Fine Art in 1882. Here she discovers that her talent in art is limited but she develops other interests, particularly in the theatre and opera. She takes great pleasure in Richard Wagner‘s Der Ring des Nibelungen and in Henrik Ibsen‘s plays. She cycles in London and twice over the Alps, smokes in public and explores alternative religions. The “lonely rich girl” has become “an independent-minded woman.” In 1890 she joins the occult society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where she remains a member until disagreements with its leaders lead to her resignation in 1903. During this time she meets and becomes a friend of W. B. Yeats, acting as his amanuensis for some years. Their friendship endures. Frank O’Connor recalls that on the day Yeats hears of her death, he spends the entire evening speaking of his memories of her.

Horniman’s first venture into the theatre is in 1894 and is made possible by a legacy from her grandfather. She anonymously supports her friend Florence Farr in a season of new plays at the Royal Avenue Theatre, London. This includes a new play by Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire, and the première of George Bernard Shaw’s play Arms and the Man. In 1903 Yeats persuades her to go to Dublin to back productions by the Irish National Theatre Society. Here she discovers her skill as a theatre administrator. She purchases a property and develops it into the Abbey Theatre, which opens in December 1904. Although she moves back to live in England, she continues to support the theatre financially until 1910. Meanwhile, in Manchester she purchases and renovates the Gaiety Theatre in 1908 and develops it into the first regional repertory theatre in Britain.

At the Gaiety, Horniman appoints Ben Iden Payne as the director and employs actors on 40-week contracts, alternating their work between large and small parts. The plays produced include classics such as Euripides and Shakespeare, and she introduces works by contemporary playwrights such as Ibsen and Shaw. She also encourages local writers who form what becomes known as the Manchester School of dramatists, the leading members of which are Harold Brighouse, Stanley Houghton and Allan Monkhouse. The Gaiety company undertakes tours of the United States and Canada in 1912 and 1913. Horniman becomes a well-known public figure in Manchester, lecturing on subjects which include women’s suffrage and her views about the theatre. In 1910 she is awarded the honorary degree of MA by the University of Manchester. During World War I the Gaiety continues to stage plays but financial difficulties lead to the disbandment of the permanent company in 1917, following which productions in the theatre are by visiting companies. In 1921 she sells the theatre to a cinema company.

As a result of her tea connection, Horniman is known as “Hornibags.” She holds court at the Midland Hotel, wearing exotic clothing and openly smoking cigarettes, which is considered scandalous at the time. She introduces Manchester to what is called at the time “the play of ideas.” The theatre critic James Agate notes that her high-minded theatrical ventures have “an air of gloomy strenuousness” about them.

Horniman moves to London where she keeps a flat in Portman Square. In 1933 she is made a Companion of Honour. She and Algernon Blackwood might be the only past or present members of an occult society to receive a United Kingdom honour.

Horniman dies, unmarried, on August 6, 1937, while visiting friends in Shere, Surrey. Her estate amounts to a little over £50,000. The Annie Horniman Papers are held in the John Rylands Research Institute and Library at the University of Manchester. Her portrait, painted by John Butler Yeats in 1904, hangs in the public area of the Abbey Theatre.


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Birth of Henry Armstrong, Northern Irish Barrister & Politician

Henry Bruce Wright Armstrong, Northern Irish barrister and politician, Ulster Unionist Party Member of Parliament (MP) for Mid Armagh from June 1921 until 1922, is born on July 27, 1844, at Hull House in Sholden, a small village adjacent to the seaside town of Deal, Kent, South East England.

Armstrong is the second surviving son of William Jones Wright Armstrong of County Armagh and Frances Elizabeth, widow of Sir Michael McCreagh, and daughter of Major Christopher Wilson. He is educated at The Royal School, Armagh and Trinity College, Cambridge, gaining a BA (2nd Class Law Tripos) in 1867 and an MA in 1870. Admitted at the Inner Temple in 1866, he is called to the Bar in 1868.

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 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 House of Commons of the United Kingdom for Mid Armagh in a by-election in 1921, 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 25 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.

Armstrong dies at the age of 99 on December 4, 1943, at his home in Dean’s Hill, County Armagh.


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Birth of Edward Flanagan, Founder of Boys Town

Edward Joseph Flanagan, Irish-born priest of the Catholic Church in the United States, is born on July 13, 1886, in the townland of Leabeg, County Roscommon, near the village of Ballymoe, County Galway. He founds the orphanage known as Boys Town located in Boys Town, Douglas County, Nebraska, which now also serves as a center for troubled youth.

Flanagan is born to John and Honoria Flanagan. He attends Summerhill College, Sligo.

In 1904, Flanagan emigrates to the United States and becomes a U.S. citizen in 1919. He attends Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where he receives a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1906 and a Master of Arts degree in 1908. He studies at Saint Joseph’s Seminary in Dunwoodie, Yonkers, New York. He continues his studies in Italy and at the University of Innsbruck in Austria where he is ordained a priest on July 26, 1912. His first parish is in O’Neill, Nebraska, where from 1912 he serves as an assistant pastor at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. He then moves to Omaha, Nebraska, to serve as an assistant pastor at St. Patrick’s Church and later at St. Philomena’s Church.

In 1917, Flanagan founds a home for homeless boys in Omaha. Bishop Jeremiah James Harty of the Diocese of Omaha has misgivings but endorses Flanagan’s experiment. Because the downtown facilities are inadequate, he establishes Boys Town, ten miles west of Omaha in 1921. Under his direction, Boys Town grows to be a large community with its own boy-mayor, schools, chapel, post office, cottages, gymnasium, and other facilities where boys between the ages of 10 and 16 can receive an education and learn a trade.

Boys Town, a 1938 film starring Spencer Tracy based on Flanagan’s life, wins Tracy an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance. Mickey Rooney also stars as one of the residents. Tracy spends his entire Oscar acceptance speech talking about Flanagan. Without confirming it with Tracy, an overzealous MGM publicity representative announces incorrectly that Tracy is donating his Oscar to Flanagan. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hastily strikes another inscription so Tracy keeps his statuette and Boys Town gets one as well. A sequel also starring Tracy and Rooney, Men of Boys Town, is released in 1941.

Flanagan himself appears in a separate 1938 MGM short, The City of Little Men, promoting Boys Town and giving a tour of its facilities. The actor Stephen McNally plays Flanagan in a 1957 episode of the ABC religion anthology series, Crossroads.

Flanagan receives many awards for his work with the delinquent and homeless boys. Pope Pius XI names him a Domestic Prelate with the title Right Reverend Monsignor in 1937. He serves on several committees and boards dealing with the welfare of children and is the author of articles on child welfare. Internationally known, he travels to the Republic of Ireland in 1946, where he is appalled by the children’s institutions there, calling them “a national disgrace.” When his observations are published after returning to Omaha, instead of improving the horrid conditions, vicious attacks are leveled against him in the Irish print media and the Oireachtas. He is invited by General Douglas MacArthur to Japan and Korea in 1947 to advise on child welfare, as well as to Austria and Germany in 1948. While in Berlin, Germany, he dies of a heart attack on May 15, 1948. He is interred at Dowd Memorial Chapel of the Immaculate Conception Parish in Boys Town, Nebraska.

In 1986, the United States Postal Service issues a 4¢ Great Americans series postage stamp honoring Flanagan. He is a member of the Nebraska Hall of Fame.

On February 25, 2012, the Catholic Archdiocese of Omaha, Nebraska opens the canonization process of Flanagan. At a March 17, 2012 prayer service at Boys Town’s Immaculate Conception Church, he is given the title “Servant of God,” the first of three titles bestowed before canonization as a Catholic saint. The investigation is completed in June 2015 and the results forwarded to the Vatican. If the Vatican approves the local findings, Flanagan will be declared venerable. The next steps will be beatification and canonization.

There is a portrait statue dedicated to Fr. Edward J. Flanagan in Ballymoe, County Galway.


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Death of Mary Hayden, Campaigner for Women’s Causes

Mary Teresa Hayden, Irish historian, Irish language activist and campaigner for women’s causes, dies at her residence in Rathmines, Dublin, on July 12, 1942.

Hayden is born on May 19, 1862, in Merrion Square, Dublin, the only daughter of Thomas Hayden, physician and later vice-president of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and Mary Anne Hayden (née Ryan). Mary Hayden is educated initially at the Dominican College, Eccles Street, Dublin, and then at Alexandra College at Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin. She attends the Royal University of Ireland (RUI) where she graduates with a BA in 1885 and an MA in 1887 in Modern Languages.

She meets the Robertson commission in 1901 on behalf of St. Mary’s Dominican convent, Eccles Street, Dublin, where, as well as presenting the results of a questionnaire survey of women graduates, compiles in conjunction with Agnes O’Farrelly and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, she argues for the right of women to receive education on the same terms as men and in the same colleges, and to be employed by the universities on identical conditions (which is not realised until the Irish Universities Act of 1908). Along with Sheehy-Skeffington, she is a key figure in the formation of the Irish Association of Women Graduates in 1902, which concerns itself with various questions regarding women graduates’ employment in government departments, hospitals, and schools, as well as attempting to influence public policy in relation to sex discrimination.

A campaigner for gender equality and noted as a public speaker, Hayden is a prominent member of the Dublin Women’s Suffrage Association. She is a member of the Gaelic League and friends with Patrick Pearse. However, she opposes violence and disapproves of the 1916 Easter Rising.

After the passage of the Irish Universities Act in 1908, Hayden is appointed a member of both the senate of the National University of Ireland (NUI) and the governing body of the new University College Dublin (UCD), the first woman to hold such positions. In November 1909 she is appointed a lecturer in history, and in July 1911 first professor of modern Irish history at UCD, a position she holds until her retirement in 1938.

In 1915, along with Mary Louise Gwynn, Hayden founds the Irish Catholic Women’s Suffrage Association, and is also active in the Irish Women’s Franchise League, which mix campaigning for the vote with a variety of intellectual pursuits. She also becomes involved in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She is more moderate a nationalist than contemporary feminists such as Constance Markievicz and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and supports the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) rather than Sinn Féin.

Hayden’s last major public campaign, at the age of 75, is in the lead-up to the referendum on the 1937 Constitution of Ireland, in opposition to articles 40, 41, and 45 concerning the status of women. Reversing her lifelong non-party-political stance, she helps to form the Women’s Social and Progressive League as a political party committed to opposing the constitution and any regressive consequences it would entail.

Hayden receives an honorary doctorate from the NUI in 1935, three years before her retirement. A dedicated cyclist and swimmer, she is fluent in Irish, Greek, and Hindustani, and after retirement devotes her efforts to improving the welfare of Dublin children through her newly formed social club. She dies on July 12, 1942, at her residence in Rathmines, Dublin. Her unpublished diaries are deposited in the NLI.

A biography of Hayden, Mary Hayden: Irish Historian and Feminist, by Joyce Padbury is published by Arlen House in 2020.


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Birth of John Lighton Synge, Mathematician & Physicist

John Lighton Synge FRSC FRS, mathematician and physicist, whose seven-decade career includes significant periods in Ireland, Canada, and the United States, is born in Dublin on March 23, 1897. He is a prolific author and influential mentor and is credited with the introduction of a new geometrical approach to the theory of relativity.

Synge is born into a prominent Church of Ireland family. His uncle, John Millington Synge, is a famous playwright. He is more distantly related to the winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Richard Laurence Millington Synge. He is a great-great-great-grandson of the mathematician and bishop Hugh Hamilton.

Synge attends St. Andrew’s College, Dublin and in 1915 enters Trinity College Dublin (TCD). He is elected a Foundation Scholar his first year, which is unusual as it is normally won by more advanced students. While an undergraduate at TCD, he spots a non-trivial error in Analytical Dynamics of Particles and Rigid Bodies, a textbook by E. T. Whittaker, who had recently taught there, and notifies Whittaker of the error. In 1919 he is awarded a BA in Mathematics and Experimental Physics, and also a gold medal for outstanding merit. In 1922 he is awarded an MA, and in 1926 a Sc.D., the latter upon submission of his published papers up to then.

In 1918, Synge marries Elizabeth Eleanor Mabel Allen. She is also a student at TCD, first of mathematics, then of history, but family finances forced her to leave without graduating. Their daughters Margaret (Pegeen), Cathleen and Isabel are born in 1921, 1923 and 1930 respectively. The middle girl grows up to become the distinguished Canadian mathematician Cathleen Synge Morawetz.

Synge is appointed to the position of lecturer at Trinity College, and then accepts a position at the University of Toronto in 1920, where he is an assistant professor of mathematics until 1925. There he attends lectures by Ludwik Silberstein on the theory of relativity, stimulating him to contribute “A system of space-time co-ordinates,” a letter in Nature in 1921.

Synge returns to Trinity College Dublin, in 1925, where he is elected to a fellowship and is appointed the University Professor of Natural Philosophy (later to be known as “physics”). He is a member of the American Mathematical Society and the London Mathematical Society. He is treasurer of the Royal Irish Academy in 1929. He goes back to Toronto in 1930, where he is appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics and becomes Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics. In 1940, he supervises three Chinese students, Guo Yonghuai, Qian Weichang and Chia-Chiao Lin, who later become leading applied mathematicians in China and the United States.

Synge spends some of 1939 at Princeton University, and in 1941, he is a visiting professor at Brown University. In 1943 he is appointed as Chairman of the Mathematics Department of Ohio State University. Three years later he becomes Head of the Mathematics Department of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where John Nash, Jr. is one of his students. He spends a short time as a ballistic mathematician in the United States Air Force between 1944 and 1945.

Synge returns to Ireland in 1948, accepting the position of Senior Professor in the School of Theoretical Physics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. This school had been set up in 1940, and had several outstanding members, including Erwin Schrödinger, a contributor to quantum mechanics, who is also a Senior Professor.

Synge makes outstanding contributions to different fields of work including classical mechanics, general mechanics and geometrical optics, gas dynamics, hydrodynamics, elasticity, electrical networks, mathematical methods, differential geometry, and Albert Einstein‘s theory of relativity. He studies an extensive range of mathematical physics problems, but his best-known work revolves around using geometrical methods in general relativity.

Synge is one of the first physicists to seriously study the interior of a black hole, and his early work is cited by both Martin David Kruskal and George Szekeres in their independent discoveries of the true structure of the Schwarzschild black hole. Synge’s later derivation of the Szekeres-Kruskal metric solution, which is motivated by a desire to avoid “using ‘bad’ coordinates to obtain ‘good’ coordinates,” has been generally under-appreciated in the literature, but is adopted by Chandrasekhar in his black hole monograph.

In pure mathematics, Synge is perhaps best known for Synge’s theorem, which concerns the topology of closed orientable Riemannian manifold of positive sectional curvature. When such a space is even-dimensional and orientable, the theorem says it must be simply connected. In odd dimensions, it instead says that such a space is necessarily orientable.

Synge also creates the game of Vish in which players compete to find circularity (vicious circles) in dictionary definitions.

Synge retires in 1972. He receives many honours for his works. He is elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1943. He is elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 1943 is the first recipient of the society’s Henry Marshall Tory Medal, as one of the first mathematicians working in Canada to be internationally recognised for his research in mathematics. In 1954 he is elected an honorary fellow of Trinity College Dublin. He is president of the Royal Irish Academy from 1961 until 1964. The Royal Society of Canada establishes the John L. Synge Award in his honour in 1986.

Synge dies on March 30, 1995, in Dublin, exactly one week after his ninety-eighth birthday.