Marrinan becomes ill with infantile paralysis at the age of five, and as a result is tutored privately. He has no formal training in art but is largely influenced by his reading matter, particularly the American comic strips of Bud Fisher. The variety of facial expressions that Fisher can achieve, with only a pencil, intrigues and inspires him. Likewise, the images evoked by Celtic mythology and religious art also contributes to his visual language, and many hours are spent in the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery studying the paintings in their collection.
Marrinan exhibits with the Ulster Academy of Arts from an address at 524 Donegall Road, Belfast, entering “The Wee Gate, Earl Street, Belfast” (1931) and “The Painter’s Father” and the “Apache” (1934), which is judged “picture of the year.” He last exhibits with a landscape, “Connemara,” along with four other works in 1949.
Marrinan paints and sketches portraits of many notable Irish figures, among which is the charcoal drawing of northern Fenian Robert Johnston (1934; National Gallery of Ireland) and a sketch of the Donegal storyteller Niall Duffy (University College Dublin). His literary portraits include one of Brian Friel. He holds a one-man show in 1951 at 55a Donegall Place, Belfast, where he exhibits a bust of John McLaverty. He takes an interest in sculpture although painting and drawing remain his preferred form of expression. Important commissions are for a memorial portrait (completed 1952) of Éamonn Ceannt for Ceannt Barracks officers’ mess, Curragh Camp, County Kildare, and for a portrait of Vice-brigadier Peadar Clancy for Clancy Barracks, Dublin. He paints two memorial portraits of PresidentJohn F. Kennedy, one of which is in the Irish Club, London.
Marrinan is an honorary member of the Royal Ulster Academy and exhibits with them every year from 1950 onward, showing a portrait of Mrs. Padraig Marrinan in 1967 (no other details of his marriage are known). He is preparing for an exhibition to be held at the Irish Club, London, in 1974, but dies on October 25, 1973, at Tyrone County Hospital in Omagh. He is then living at James Street, Omagh.
(From: “Marrinan, Padraig H.” by Ruth Devine, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: “The River Lee, Cork City, Ireland” by Padraig Marrinan, oil on canvas)
The Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), a unionistpolitical party in Northern Ireland, is founded on December 7, 2007, by Jim Allister after he and others had resigned from the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in March of that year. In common with all other Northern Irish unionist parties, the TUV’s political programme has as its sine qua non the preservation of Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom. A founding precept of the party is that “nothing which is morally wrong can be politically right.”
Prior to the St. Andrews Agreement, the DUP presents itself as an “anti-Agreement” unionist party opposed to numerous aspects of the Good Friday Agreement, e.g., the release of paramilitary prisoners before the end of their jail sentences, and the participation of Sinn Féin in the Northern Ireland government without complete decommissioning of Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) weapons and cessation of all IRA activity. The TUV has been an exception among Northern Irish unionist parties in consistently opposing the presence of Sinn Féin in the Northern Ireland government. After Allister’s resignation from the DUP, he continues to occupy his European Parliament seat, sitting as an Independent MEP until the 2009 European Parliament election in the United Kingdom, when he is not re-elected.
In terms of electoral success and financial income, Traditional Unionist Voice is the third largest unionist party in Northern Ireland, behind the Democratic Unionist Party and the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). It is usually considered by political commentators to be a small party and characterised as being more hardline than other Northern Irish unionist parties.
Since 2011, the TUV has occupied one seat in the Northern Ireland Assembly. In 2024, they win their first seat in the United Kingdom House of Commons. The party also holds some seats on local councils in Northern Ireland. Its most prominent elected representative and best-known figure remains Jim Allister whose North Antrim constituency is the heartland of the party.
In March 2024, the party forms an electoral pact with Reform UK, stating that the two parties will stand mutually agreed candidates in Northern Ireland constituencies in the 2024 United Kingdom general election. In this election, the party wins its first Westminster Member of Parliament (MP), electing Jim Allister as MP for North Antrim.
An opinion poll, released by LucidTalk in August 2025, shows the TUV as the third most popular party for the first time, coming ahead of both the Alliance Party and Ulster Unionists, with 13%.
Hammond is the son of Leslie Hammond, a tram driver, and his wife Annie (née Lamont). His parents are not city people; his mother grew up near Ballybogy in the Ballymoney area of County Antrim, and his father, though from a family with roots in south County Londonderry, had lived in Ballymoney as a boy, and had been apprenticed to a blacksmith there. Both have a strong sense of their rural identity and maintain the Ulster Scots dialect of their childhood. They are never quite at home in the Belfast suburb of Cregagh, and in particular do not share the sectarian attitudes that are much more present in 1930s Belfast than they had been in north Antrim, one of the last strongholds of Presbyterian radicalism. Even as a boy, Hammond is interested in the old songs that his mother sang and realises that the traditions in which his parents had been nurtured are disappearing quickly in an increasingly urbanising and modernising world. When he encounters the work of Emyr Estyn Evans in the early 1940s, he is encouraged to document both rural tradition and the street life of the city, and he and a couple of friends, though still just teenagers, ride off on their bicycles to look for folklore in the hinterland of Belfast.
After primary school, Hammond wins a scholarship in 1941 to Methodist College Belfast, where he does well in examinations, and then goes to Stranmillis University College to train as a teacher. In his first job, in Harding Memorial primary school in east Belfast, he proves to be a popular, idealistic teacher, and is remembered by his pupils fifty years later as a fine singer and a teller of ghost stories, who had taken the class on memorable youth-hosteling trips to the Mourne Mountains. Youth hosteling and folklore collecting increases his awareness and understanding of the rich traditions of the whole community in the north of Ireland, and he is never constrained by political or religious barriers. His early career mirrors closely that of James Hawthorne, and their paths are to cross in later life.
Hammond is friendly with many others active in the cultural life of Northern Ireland and makes a name for himself as a song collector and eventually as an expert on all aspects of traditional singing. In 1956, he is awarded a scholarship to travel in the United States to meet the important pioneers of folk-music collecting and performance there. He records his first LP record of Ulster songs, I Am The Wee Falorie Man (1958), in the United States, and becomes friends with Pete Seeger, the Appalachian singer Jean Ritchie, with old blues singers, and notably with Liam Clancy, one of the three Clancy brothers who as a quartet with Tommy Makem are to popularise Irish folk music in the United States and elsewhere.
On returning to Belfast, Hammond takes a job in 1958 in Orangefield secondary school in the east of the city, where the highly regarded headmaster John Malone encourages new approaches to education. Among his pupils at Orangefield is George Ivan “Van” Morrison, who credits him with inspiring his interest in Irish traditional music. Hammond enjoys teaching but is increasingly drawn to folk-song performance and recording. He appears regularly on radio programmes of the BBC and Radio Éireann, and in 1964 joins the school’s department in BBC Northern Ireland. There, with colleagues like Sam Hanna Bell, James Hawthorne and others, he works on programmes such as Today and Yesterday in Northern Ireland, which for the first time introduces pupils (and many adults) to local history and to aspects of tradition. In 1968, with two friends, the poets Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, he puts on poetry and traditional music events in schools all over the province. The Arts Council funds the Room to Rhyme project, which is immensely influential and inspiring, and is still talked about many years later by those who attended as children.
Hammond is creatively involved with hundreds of hours of broadcasting, in television as well as radio, and eventually for adults as well as children. He writes scripts, produces documentary series such as Ulster in Focusand Explorations, and brings an artistic sensibility to filming, as well as working sympathetically with traditional singers and craftspeople. Dusty Bluebells, a sensitively made film of Belfast children’s street games, wins the prestigious Golden Harp award in 1972. After he leaves the BBC to work as a freelance, and founds Flying Fox Films in 1986, he continues making documentaries on many aspects of Ulster life and heritage. His film called Steel Chest, Nail in the Boot and the Barking Dog (1986), about working in the Belfast shipyards, also wins a Golden Harp award. A companion book of the same name is published. Another book is Belfast, City of Song(1989), with Maurice Leyden. In 1979, he edits a volume of the songs of Thomas Moore. His documentary programmes include films about singers from Boho, County Fermanagh, and about the big houses of the gentry in Ireland. The Magic Fiddle (1991/2) examines the role of the instrument in the folk music of Ireland, Scandinavia, Canada, and the American south, while Another Kind of Freedom (1993) is about the experiences of a former Orangefield pupil, the Beirut hostage Brian Keenan. He also produces and directs the films Something to Write Home About (1998), Where Are You Now? (1999), and Bogland (1999), all of which explore Seamus Heaney’s home region and experiences.
The first poem in Heaney’s collection Wintering Out (1972) is entitled “For David Hammond and Michael Longley.” Their lifelong friendship leads to several other creative collaborations. In particular, after a distressing evening in 1972 when Hammond, affected by the despair and terror unleashed by Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombing of his city, is for once unable to sing, Heaney meditates on the experience in an essay and in an important poem, “The singer’s house” (subsequently included in his 1979 Field Work collection). The poem urges the singer to keep singing, to defend the values of art and friendship in a hostile time. Hammond collaborates with Dónal Lunny and other traditional musicians to bring out an LP also called The Singer’s House(1978), which includes Heaney’s poem on the album sleeve, and features some of the songs that he had made famous, such as “My Aunt Jane” and “Bonny Woodgreen,” from his vast repertoire of songs from Ulster. The album is reissued in 1980.
In 1995, Hammond is one of Heaney’s personal guests at the award of his Nobel prize in Stockholm, characteristically wearing his usual, mustard-yellow, cattle-dealer boots with evening dress. On another formal occasion, when he is awarded an honorary doctorate by Dublin City University in November 2003, he surprises the audience by standing up in his academic robes to sing “My Lagan love,” instead of giving an address. His unique, light mellow voice is an ideal vehicle for the traditional ballads which he knows so well. He records a number of records in the 1960s, including Belfast Street Songs, and publishes the book Songs of Belfast (1978). He also encourages traditional musicians like Arty McGlynn, and collaborates with them on various recording projects. He is well known for live and often impromptu performances at festivals and venues in Ireland and the United States. He also performs at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
Hammond is also a notable collaborator with poets and dramatists, especially in the important Field Day Theatre Company project, of which he is a director, along with Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Seamus Deane, Thomas Kilroy, and the project’s founders, Brian Friel and Stephen Rea. He supports the Field Day search for a “fifth province,” where history and community and culture can intersect, believing that to speak unthinkingly of “two traditions” is to perpetuate superficial political divisions. As he says in an interview in The Irish Times on July 4, 1998, songs can “take you out of yourself” and become bridges to unite people.
Hammond receives many honours. In 1994, he receives the Estyn Evans award for his contribution to mutual understanding, and his work is featured in several major events in his honour: in the University of North Florida (1999), in the Celtic Film Festival in Belfast (2003), and in Belfast’s Linen Hall Library (2005). A Time to Dream, a film about his life and work, is broadcast on BBC Northern Ireland in December 2008.
Hammond dies in hospital in Belfast, after a long illness, on August 25, 2008, survived by his wife Eileen (née Hambleton), whom he marries on July 19, 1954, and by their son and three daughters. His funeral in St. Finnian’s Church is a major cultural event, where friends sing, play and speak in his honour.
In Seamus Heaney’s last collection of poetry, Human Chain (2010), he includes a poignant farewell to Hammond. The poet imagines (or perhaps dreams) of another visit to the singer’s house, but this time “The door was open, and the house was dark.”
(From: “Hammond, David Andrew (‘Davy’)” by Linde Lunney, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, December 2014)
Moore is the eldest son of Queen Victoria‘s honorary physician in Ireland, Dr. William Moore of Rosnashane, Ballymoney, and Sidney Blanche Fuller. His ancestors came to Ulster during the Plantation of Ulster, settling at Ballymoney, at which time they were Quakers. The Moore Lodge estate is inherited from a relative. The family owns several other houses: Moore’s Grove and Moore’s Fort. He goes on to become a Deputy Lieutenant for County Antrim and a Justice of the Peace.
In 1903, Moore is one of the first landowners of Ireland to sell off their estates under the land acts. By the early 1920s he owns a Belfastpied-à-terre called “Glassnabreedon,” in the village of Whitehouse, four miles north of Belfast. This house is once owned by the son of Nicholas Grimshaw, Ireland’s first cotton pioneer.
Moore becomes a member of the General Synod of the Church of Ireland and is a founder member of the Ulster Council. He is a passionate Orangeman: his vehemence in defending Ulster’s right to oppose Irish Home Rule is said to alarm even those who share his views. Speaking in England on March 10, 1913, he makes his feelings clear on the possibility of Irish Home Rule: “I have no doubt, if Home Rule is carried, its baptism in Ireland will be a baptism in blood.” He shows little respect for English politicians, and has nothing but contempt for Southern Unionists. The eventual political settlement in 1921 meets with his approval.
Moore dies at his home, Moore Lodge, in Ballymoney on November 28, 1944, less than a week after his 80th birthday. He is buried in the family burial ground, “Lamb’s Fold,” two days later.
Babington is called to the Irish Bar in 1900. He briefly lectures in Equity at King’s Inns, and it is during this time, in 1910, that he re-arranges and re-writes R.E. Osborne’s Jurisdiction and Practice of County Courts in Ireland in Equity and Probate Matters. He takes silk in 1917.
In 1947, Babington chairs the Babington Agricultural Enquiry Committee, named in his honour, which is established in 1943 to examine agriculture in Northern Ireland. The committee’s first recommendation under Babington’s leadership is that Northern Ireland should direct all its energies to the production of livestock and livestock products and to their efficient processing and marketing.
Babington retires from the judiciary in 1949, taking up the chairmanship of the Northern Ireland Transport Tribunal, which exists until 1967, established under the Ulster Transport Act – promoting a car-centred transport policy – and which is largely responsible for the closure of the Belfast and County Down Railway. He endorses the closure on financial grounds and is at cross purposes with his co-chair, Dr. James Beddy, who advises against the closure, citing the disruption of life in the border region between the north and the south as his primary reason in addition to financial grounds.
Babington also chairs a government inquiry into the licensing of clubs, the proceeds of which results in new regulatory legislation at Stormont. While Attorney General, he is a proponent of renaming Northern Ireland as “Ulster.”
Babington is critical of the newly proposed Irish constitution, in which the name of the Irish state is changed to “Ireland,” laying claim to jurisdiction over Northern Ireland.
Michael McDunphy, Secretary to the President of Ireland, then Douglas Hyde, recalls Ernest Alton‘s correspondence with Babington on the question of Irish unity, in which Alton and Babington are revealed to be at cross purposes. The discussion is used as an example by Brian Murphy, in Forgotten Patriot: Douglas Hyde and the Foundation of the Irish Presidency, as an example of the office of the Irish President becoming embroiled in an initiative involving Trinity College Dublin and a senior Northern Ireland legal figure, namely Babington.
Babington writes to Alton, then Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, expressing his view that, as Murphy summarises, “… Severance between the two parts of Ireland could not continue, that it was the duty of all Irishmen to work for early unification and that in his opinion Trinity College was a very appropriate place in which the first move should be made.” When Alton arrives to meet with Hyde, it emerges, after conversing with Hyde’s secretary McDunphy, that he and Babington are at cross purposes. “It soon became clear that the united Ireland contemplated by Mr. [sic] Justice Babington of the Northern Ireland Judiciary was one within the framework of the British Commonwealth of Nations, involving recognition of the King of England as the Supreme Head, or as Dr. Alton put it, the symbol of unity of the whole system,” writes McDunphy.
Babington is a keen golfer. He is an international golfer from 1903 to 1913, during which he is runner-up in the Irish Amateur Golf Championships in 1909 and one of the Irish representatives at an international match in 1913. The Babington Room in the Royal Portrush Golf Club is named after him, as is the 18th hole on the course as a result of the key role he plays in shaping its history.
Babington dies at the age of 94 on April 10, 1972 at his home, Creevagh, Portrush, County Antrim.
Norman Derek Mahon, Irish poet, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on November 23, 1941, but lives in a number of cities around the world. At his death it is noted that his “influence in the Irish poetry community, literary world and society at large, and his legacy, is immense.” President of IrelandMichael D. Higgins says of Mahon, “he shared with his northern peers the capacity to link the classical and the contemporary but he brought also an edge that was unsparing of cruelty and wickedness.”
At Inst Mahon encounters fellow students who share his interest in literature and poetry. The school produces a magazine in which he produces some of his early poems. According to the critic Hugh Haughton, his early poems are highly fluent and extraordinary for a person so young. His parents cannot see the point of poetry, but he sets out to prove them wrong after he wins his school’s Forrest Reid Memorial Prize for the poem ”The power that gives the water breath.”
At times expressing anti-establishment values, Mahon describes himself as an “aesthete” with a penchant “for left-wingery […] to which, perhaps naively, I adhere.”
In March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, RTÉ News ends its evening broadcast with Mahon reading his poem Everything Is Going to Be All Right.
Mahon dies in Cork, County Cork, on October 1, 2020, after a short illness, aged 78. He is survived by his partner, Sarah Iremonger, and his three children, Rory, Katy, and Maisie. His papers are held at Emory University.
Mahon features on the Irish Leaving Certificate course with ten of his poems (Grandfather, Day Trip to Donegal, Ecclesiastes, After the Titanic, As It Should Be, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, Rathlin, The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush, Kinsale and Antarctica)
Craig, known as Jim, grows up in an Ulster Protestant family on the Shankill Road. In the early 1970s, he, a former boxer, is sent to the HM Prison Maze for a criminal offence unrelated to paramilitary activities. While serving his sentence at the Maze he joins the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), and is asked by the organisation’s commander at the time, Charles Harding Smith, to take control of the UDA prisoners inside, on account of his reputation as a “hard man.”
After his release in 1976, Craig sets up a large protection racket and becomes the UDA’s chief fundraiser. By 1985, he has managed to blackmail and extort money from a number of construction firms, building sites, as well as pubs, clubs, and shops in Belfast and elsewhere in Northern Ireland, whose intimidated owners pay protection money out of fear of Craig and his associates. It is alleged that the UDA receives hundreds of thousands of pounds, some of which also find their way inside Craig’s pockets as part of his “commission.” He is acquitted on a firearm charge and Ulster Freedom Fighters (a cover name for the UDA) membership on March 18, 1982. In 1985, he is brought to court after a number of businessmen decide to testify against him, with the condition that their identities remained hidden. The case falls apart when Craig’s defence argues that his client’s rights were violated by the concealment of the witnesses’ identities.
Craig allegedly is involved in the double killing of a Catholic man and a Protestant man on the Shankill Road in 1977. The men, both colleagues, had entered a loyalist club and were later stabbed, shot and put into a car which was set on fire. By this time the UDA West Belfast Brigade no longer wants him in their ranks, as they claim they can no longer “afford him.” Craig, who is ordered to leave the Shankill Road, goes on to join forces with John McMichael’sSouth Belfast Brigade. In addition to being the principal fundraiser, he also sits on the UDA’s Inner Council. He usually travels in the company of his bodyguard, Artie Fee, a UDA member from the Shankill Road.
The rival Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) carries out an investigation after it is rumoured Craig has been involved in the death of UVF major William Marchant, who is gunned down by Provisional Irish Republican Army gunmen from a passing car on the Shankill Road on April 28, 1987. Marchant is the third high-ranking UVF man to be killed by the IRA during the 1980s. Although their inquiries reveal that Craig had quarrelled with Marchant as well as Lenny Murphy and John Bingham prior to their killings, the UVF feel that there is not enough evidence to warrant an attack on such a powerful UDA figure as Craig.
In December 1987, when UDA South Belfast brigadier John McMichael is blown up by an IRA booby-trap car bomb outside his home in Lisburn‘s Hilden estate, it is believed that Craig had organised his death with the IRA. Allegedly Craig fears McMichael is about to expose his racketeering business, thus putting an end to his lucrative operation. McMichael reportedly sets up an inquiry and discovers that Craig is spending money on a lavish scale, going on holidays at least twice a year and indulging in a “champagne lifestyle.” At the same time, it is suggested that Craig has made certain deals with Irish republican paramilitary groups, dividing up the rackets in west Belfast, and he would be doing the IRA a favour by helping them to eliminate a high-profile loyalist such as McMichael. Craig has established links with republicans during his time in prison, and the profitable deals and exchanges of information between them ensures he will most likely not be a target for IRA assassination.
Craig is named as an extortionist in Central Television’s 1987 programme The Cook Report. He plans to sue the programme’s producers for libel. In January 1988, Jack Kielty (father of future television presenter Patrick Kielty), a building contractor from County Down who had promised to testify as a key witness against Craig, is murdered by the UDA. This killing is attributed to Craig, although it is never proven.
Craig is shot dead by two gunmen from the UDA in “The Castle Inn” (later called “The Bunch of Grapes”), a pub in Beersbridge Road, east Belfast on October 15, 1988, where he has been lured in the belief that there is to be a UDA meeting. He is playing pool in the pub at the time of his fatal shooting by the two men, both of whom are wearing boilersuits and ski masks and carrying automatic weapons. Upon spotting Craig they open fire, spraying the room with gunfire. Craig dies instantly. A bystander pensioner is also murdered in the attack, and four other bystanders are wounded by stray bullets. The UDA claims the killing is carried out due to Craig’s “treason” and involvement in John McMichael’s murder as they know he had provided the IRA with information to successfully carry out the assassination. They apologise for the unintentional death of the pensioner. Craig is not given a paramilitary funeral, and none of the UDA’s command attend it.
The gunmen, who are wearing workmen’s overalls, escape in a car afterward, killing Ken Campbell, a caretaker, as they leave. The people with whom Bradford had been meeting, most of them elderly, dive under tables for cover, and dozens of teenagers dancing nearby break into hysterical tears, but there are no injuries.
The killing is part of an escalation of IRA violence, both in London and in Northern Ireland, after the collapse of the prison hunger strike the previous month. The previous night an IRA bomb damages the London home of Britain’s Attorney General for Northern Ireland, Michael Havers. The home is empty and no one is seriously injured.
Bradford, a 40-year-old Methodist minister who is married and has a 6-year-old daughter, is shot several times, according to witnesses, and he dies almost immediately. His brother, Roy, who lives near the scene of the killing, in South Belfast, is at his side within moments. “But he was unconscious when I reached him, and he only lived for about a minute,” Roy Bradford says. News of the killing arouses fears of a Protestant reaction that could lead to serious civil unrest in Northern Ireland.
John “Jack” Hermon, the Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, issues an appeal to both the Protestant majority and the Roman Catholics to show “good sense and restraint.” He says security is being tightened in the province as a precautionary measure. He orders a wide-ranging search for the gunmen, who number at least three and possibly four, a point upon which the witnesses differ.
Bradford, who has been in Parliament since 1974, is an outspoken critic of the Irish nationalist guerrillas. He repeatedly calls for the reimposition of capital punishment in the province and for other strong deterrent measures.
With the Rev. Ian Paisley, another hard-line Member of Parliament, Bradford had planned to visit the United States In early 1982 to counteract the publicity of the IRA, which depends heavily on the money it receives from its American sympathizers. “There is a need for Americans to recognize that Ulster is not an occupied country,” Bradford says the previous month, “and that our political history is one of which we can be proud.”
The IRA, in a statement claiming responsibility for the killing, calls Bradford “one of the key people responsible for winding up the loyalistparamilitarysectarian machine in the North.” All twelve of Northern Ireland’s Members of Parliament – ten Protestants and two Catholics – are considered likely targets in the sectarian struggle that has claimed 2,100 lives in the province since 1969.
Lyons is a lecturer in history at the University of Hull and then at Trinity College Dublin. He becomes the founding Professor of Modern History at the University of Kent in 1964, serving also as Master of Eliot College from 1969 to 1972.
Lyons principal works include Ireland Since the Famine, the standard university textbook for Irish history from the mid-19th to late-20th century, which The Times calls “the definitive work of modern Irish history” and a biography of Charles Stewart Parnell.
Lyons is critical of Cecil Woodham-Smith‘s much-acclaimed history of the Great Irish Famine and has generally been considered among the “revisionist” historians who reconsiders the role of the British state in events like the Famine.
Lyons marries Jennifer Ann Stuart McAlister in 1954, and has two sons, one of whom, Nicholas, is a former Lord Mayor of London.
On September 15, 1983, Lyons is nominated, unopposed, as chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). But less than a week later he is dead, succumbing in Dublin on September 21 to acute pancreatitis, which had struck him in mid-August. He had begun to write the first draft of his W. B. Yeats biography (having accumulated a great archive of material) only a few weeks before. His ashes are buried beside Trinity College chapel.
Henry is born in Belfast on January 15, 1902, the daughter of the tea merchant George Adams Henry. She attends Mount Pottinger National School, and Victoria College, before expanding her studies at night classes at the Belfast School of Art.
Henry completes an apprenticeship at Clokey Stained Glass Studios founded by Walter Francis Clokey where she is to work for over fifty years designing stained glass windows. Her appointment in the autumn of 1919 comes by a chance visit to Victoria College by the firm’s owner who is seeking a suitable apprentice. She retires from the firm at Easter 1972.
Henry exhibits at the Belfast Art Society for the first time in 1928. She exhibits four works, all landscapes in oil, and then a further two works in the following year. In 1931, she shows a further two works with the successor to the Belfast Art Society, the Ulster Academy of Arts. In 1932, she shows A Derbyshire Village, described by one critic as “a delightful English rural scene.” Between 1931 and 1942 she shows with more than twenty paintings at the Ulster Academy of Arts, exhibiting at each annual show in that time.
Henry has a keen interest in photography from an early age and wins various awards for her photographs. In 1934, she wins the August prize from the Photographic Dealers’ Association for a shot of a child playing with toys in the bath, having received a consolation prize of five shillings in September of the previous year for a shot of a traditional market scene in Boulogne. She goes on to write a regular column for Amateur Photographer throughout the 1930s.
In January 1935, Henry is appointed leader of a local sketching group by the Youth Hostel Association. In December 1935, she is commended for a sketch called River Pool, submitted to a competition judged by James Humbert Craig on behalf of the Youth Hostel Association, presented alongside Port Muckin a show with the sketching group. Maurice Canning Wilks contributes Skernaghan Point, Brown’s Bay to the same show.
The Robinson and Cleaver Art Gallery stages a display of works from Four Ulster Artists in 1936 consisting of paintings from Henry, her sister Marjorie, Theo Gracey and F. H. Hummel. She contributes Green Boat, which she had presented earlier in the year to the Ulster Academy of Arts, and includes Off the Scilly Isles among pictures from Brittany and Bavaria. The reviewer in Belfast’s News Letter refers to her style as “Post-Impressionism.”
In 1937, Henry is elected an Associate of the Ulster Academy of Arts and presents three watercolours to the institution the following year. The exhibition is opened by Oliver St. John Gogarty with participants such as John Luke, Maurice Wilks, James Humbert Craig, Rosamund Praeger and Colin Middleton, who shows three Surrealist works including Angelus.
The Royal Hibernian Academy displays two small works, Flight, 1941 and Lakeside, among an unusually large contingent of Ulster artists in the annual exhibition in the spring of 1942. The Ulster Academy of Arts is united in their commitment to raise funds for the bomb damaged Ulster Hospital for Children and Women in their Spring Exhibition of 1942. Henry displays a sense of humour in her use of black-out paint, roadblocks and air raid shelters in one of the watercolours on show.
Henry is a regular exhibitor with the Water Colour Society of Ireland, and contributes more than one hundred works to their exhibitions between 1943 and 1986.
Henry joins Violet McAdoo in a joint exhibition at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery in 1944. McAdoo presents with watercolours, however, Henry also presents oils. The paintings are primarily of landscapes but included a number urban scenes.
In 1945, Henry and her sister Margaret join Arthur and George Campbell, Colin Middleton, Gladys and Max Maccabe, Thomas Carr, Maurice Wilks, James McIntyre and others, in the only official exhibition from the Ulster branch of the Artists’ International Association sponsored by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (NI) at the Belfast Museum.
The MacGaffin Gallery at Pottinger’s Entry is the venue for a group exhibition of experimental and modernist works with Nevill Johnson, Aaron McAfee and the MacCabes in 1946, where Henry exhibits seven paintings. Quayside is one of three pictures that she presents at the Ulster Academy in 1946. She also shows it with the Water Colour Society of Ireland in the following year and at CEMA’s Some Ulster Paintings exhibition in that same year.
In 1946, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and Art (CEMA) purchases a painting by Henry, in addition to works by other contemporary Ulster artists. Twenty-four of the works from the CEMA collection, including her painting, are later presented at their Donegall Place gallery in 1954.
Henry debuts at the 1948 Irish Exhibition of Living Art with one painting and returns in each of the subsequent ten years with a total of 20 paintings. She is also elected as an Honorary Academician of the Ulster Academy of Arts in 1948.
Henry displays one work, Harbour, Northern Ireland, with Violet McAdoo at the 88th exhibition of the Society of Women Artists at the Royal Institute Galleries in London during the summer of 1949. Just a few months later her work is back in London for the United Society of Artists annual exhibition where she shows Gossip and Shell and Sail.
Henry is awarded a travel scholarship from the Soroptomists of Belgium in 1957, which enables her to study stained glass in the country. She is the President of Soroptomist Club of Belfast from 1960 to 1961, where she had been a member since its foundation in 1932.
Upon her return from Belgium, CEMA stages a solo exhibition with thirty-five of Henry’s oils and watercolours at their Belfast gallery. The exhibition is arranged at short notice when another is unexpectedly cancelled. Writer Nesca Robb opens the exhibition where it is claimed a new painting technique, “monopainting,” is revealed, described as paint drawn through a gauze over glass. The exhibition includes a ‘Breton’ series, Kerry Tangle, Ship Pattern, Barrack Shapes, Lough Shapes, and Backs. In addition, she displays In the Park, an oil previously seen at the Royal Ulster Academy in 1955 and at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1956, and a second oil, City Lunch Hour, exhibited at the Royal Ulster Academy in 1956.
The Ulster Society of Women Artists is founded in 1957 by Gladys Maccabe with the support of Henry and a number of others at a time when no arts societies are accepting female artists into their ranks. The main objective is to ensure the development of quality art and women artists in Ulster. The organisation begins with ten invited artists. Henry exhibits with the society throughout her life.
Henry receives a mention in the local press referring to her exhibits in the Royal Ulster Academy show of 1959 with Kenneth Jamison comparing her work with that of Deborah Brown, “Olive Henry is more decadent by instinct, a fine formaliser. Her pictures Man and Ropes and Riviera Port, well defined and carefully abstracted, contrast in form with Deborah Brown’s freer Oil Over Tempra,[sic] 1959.”
A group exhibition in 1964 at the New Gallery in Belfast includes work from Henry alongside Neil Shawcross, Max Maccabe, Kathleen Bell, Richard Croft and Helen Ross. Among other works she shows Easter and Long Garden.
In 1981, the Ulster Society of Womens Artists elects Henry as President. A retrospective of her studio works is hosted by the Shambles Gallery in Hillsborough, County Down in 1986, some thirty years since her last solo exhibition. Henry shows at the Royal Ulster Academy Annual Exhibition in 1987 for the last time.
Henry dies on November 8, 1989, at Crawfordsburn, County Down. Her paintings are held in the collections of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, Ulster Museum, Irish Linen Centre & Lisburn Museum, and the Royal Ulster Academy of Arts Diploma Collection.
(Pictured: “The Gardener,” watercolour by Olive Henry)
seamus dubhghaill 