seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Tag Archives: Northumberland (England)


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Death of Wilhelmina Geddes, Stained Glass Artist

Wilhelmina Geddes, Irish stained glass artist who is an important figure within the Irish Arts and Crafts movement and also the twentieth-century British stained glass revival, dies in London, England, on August 10, 1955. Her notable works include windows at St. Bartholomew’s Anglican Church (Ottawa, Canada), St. Peter’s Church (Lampeter, Wales), and the King Albert Memorial Window, St. Martin’s Cathedral (Ypres, Belgium).

Geddes is born on her maternal grandparent’s farm at Drumreilly Cottage in Leitrim, County Leitrim, on May 25, 1887. She is the eldest of four children, three girls and a boy, of William Geddes and his wife Eliza Jane Stafford. The family, who migrates to Ireland from Scotland, has mainly been farmers. Her father, a Methodist, who is born near his father’s farm at Tandragee, County Armagh, emigrates to the United States as a young man, working as a labourer for the railway construction business. This serves a useful purpose as he had worked as a site engineer at the Cavan, Leitrim and Roscommon Railway Company. When she is still an infant her parents move to their native home in Belfast, so her father can set up in business as a building contractor.

Geddes begins drawing subjects from life and nature from the age of four. She learns first how to draw from the school mistress in Ayrshire, where her father occasionally goes shooting. She begins her studies at Methodist College Belfast along with her three younger sisters. She later moves to the Belfast School of Art. She is encouraged by Rosamond Praeger, a sculptor from County Down, to continue with her studies. She is accepted as a student to study at the Belfast School of Art, Ulster University. This is where she adapts and improves her style and is introduced to a professional standard of art work.

While still studying at the Belfast School of Art, Geddes takes part in the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland‘s fourth exhibition. For this exhibition, she contributes a glowingly coloured illustration of the book Cinderella Dressing the Ugly Sister (Dublin City Gallery), which she had created. It is at this exhibition that her work is spotted by Sarah Purser, a well established painter seeking newly trained students to introduce to stained glass artistry. Purser, who goes on to be her lifelong mentor, invites the young Geddes to join her in Dublin, working under the established stained glass artist William Orpen.

Geddes contributes a watercolour illustration of a Ballad Seller with the Belfast Art Society in 1907. She is elected as an Associate of the Belfast Art Society’s successor, the Ulster Academy of Arts, in 1933 before promotion to Honorary Academician in 1935. She shows five illustrations in the 1911 Oireachtas Exhibition. It is some twenty-one years before she returns to the Oireachtas when she exhibits three cartoons and three sketches for stained glass in 1932.

Geddes joins Purser at the acclaimed stained glass workshop called An Túr Gloine in 1910. The workshop is held in Dublin’s Metropolitan School of Art. It is here that she discovers her passion for the craftsmanship of stained glass artistry and creates her most important works.

During her early years at An Túr Gloine, Geddes’s originality shines, and important commissions come from St. Ann’s Church, Dawson Street, Dublin and the Presbyterian church in Rathgar. Dogged by illness, she returns to Belfast before 1916 and lives between there and Dublin until moving in 1925, as she has long wanted, to work in London at The Glass House, Fulham. While working at The Glass House, she instructs the Irish painter and stained glass artist Evie Hone.

Geddes’s work is considered pioneering and represents a rejection of the Late Victorian approach. She creates a new view of men in stained glass windows, portraying them with close-shaven crew cuts. The muscularity and tension of her portraiture is matched by the radical design of her constructions. Ambitious large-scale projects, as at the cathedral in Ypres, are equalled by the drama of smaller-scale work at Wallasey (Lancashire) and Wallsend (Northumberland), or war memorial windows in obscure country churches.

Despite the hardships of living in London during World War II, poverty, and ill health, Geddes designs seventeen full-scale stained glass masterpieces, sixteen of which she completes.

Geddes dies on August 10, 1955 in London of a pulmonary embolism. She is buried in Carnmoney Cemetery, County Antrim, along with her mother and sister Ethel. Even after moving to London, she claims that her native identity never wavered as she says she was always “a Belfast woman.”


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Death of Sir Charles Algernon Parsons, Anglo-Irish Engineer & Scientist

Sir Charles Algernon Parsons, Anglo-Irish engineer and scientist best known for his invention of the compound steam turbine, dies on February 11, 1931, on board the steamship Duchess of Richmond while on a cruise with his wife.

Parsons is born in London on June 13, 1854, the youngest among eleven children of the famous astronomer William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, of Parsonstown (now Birr), King’s County (now County Offaly) and Mary Parsons (née Field), a Yorkshire heiress. Only four sons survive to adulthood. He is strongly influenced by his father, who encourages him to use the workshops at the Birr Castle observatory, and he is tutored at home by some of the assistant astronomers before entering Trinity College Dublin in 1871. He transfers to St. John’s College, Cambridge, and upon graduation in 1877 as eleventh wrangler in a class of thirty-six studying mathematics, he takes the unusual step for the son of an earl, of becoming a premium apprentice at the Elswick Engine and Ordnance Works of Sir William George Armstrong at Newcastle upon Tyne. In the period following this he develops a unique high-speed steam engine, and a torpedo which is powered by a gas turbine. He joins Clarke Chapman at Gateshead as a partner in 1884. In a matter of months he files patents for the world’s first effective steam turbine. These embody many novelties, but the key feature is an electricity generator rated at 6 kW and designed to run, directly coupled, at the astonishing speed of 18,000 rpm.

Parsons is not satisfied that his partners’ efforts to promote turbine development are sufficiently aggressive, and in 1889 he leaves to establish his own company, C. A. Parsons & Company, at Heaton near Newcastle upon Tyne. The price of this impetuous action is the loss of access to his original patents. He quickly establishes alternative designs and by 1892 he has built a turbo-alternator with an output of 100 kW for the Cambridge Electricity Company. Exhausting to a condenser, it has a steam consumption comparable with the best steam engines. Even his 1884 patents envisage applying turbines to marine propulsion, but it is 1893 before he can embark on the design of a suitable demonstration boat of 40 tons. By using careful tests on models, he perfects the hull shape and predicts the power requirements. At this time he recovers his 1884 patents and even wins the very rare prize of an extension for five years, which is a measure of the perceived national importance of his invention.

A syndicate is formed to raise the capital necessary to build Parsons’s turbine-powered vessel Turbinia. At the Spithead Fleet Review in 1897 she speeds among the ships of the world’s navies at 34.5 knots. In 1905 the Royal Navy decides to adopt turbines for its future warships. This example is followed by navies worldwide, from the United States to Japan. Builders of mercantile vessels follow quickly and the turbines of the Cunard liner RMS Mauretania (1906), each developing 26,000 kW, are the largest in existence at the time. The Mauretania holds the Blue Riband for the speediest Atlantic crossing until 1929, a fact that keeps Parsons’s name before the public.

The firm of C. A. Parsons (1889), which builds turbines for use on land, is privately owned, but the Parsons Marine Steam Turbine Company (1897) is a public company. Parsons also earns income from over 300 patents through the Parsons Foreign Patents Co. (1899). He readily licenses others to use his patents but he avoides costly litigation, the ruin of many inventors.

Parsons inherits an interest in optical instruments from his father. In 1890 he develops a cost-effective method for manufacturing searchlight mirrors, using sheets of plate glass and an iron mold heated in a gas furnace. During World War I he supplies most of the national requirements. In 1921 he acquires the optical instrument manufacturers Ross Ltd. and the Derby Crown Glass Company, makers of optical quality glass. In 1925 the firm of Howard Grubb, which makes large optical telescopes, is rescued from insolvency by Parsons. He believes that it is of national importance to maintain the industrial capacity to make optical equipment. Not all of his projects are commercially profitable, as for example his acoustic amplifier, dubbed the “Auxetophone,” or his attempts at synthesising diamonds, which absorbs much time and effort. In the development of his many inventions, he displays great tenacity in the face of reverses and always employs a meticulously scientific approach.

The supply of power on a large scale is revolutionised by the steam turbine. During the twenty years following the building of his first turbogenerator, Parsons remains at the forefront of promoting, building, and selling ever larger and more efficient turbines. He is not only a scientific engineer and inventor, but also a successful manufacturer and businessman. Modest and retiring in manner, his chief weakness lay in a lack of skill in managing interpersonal relationships, though this is compensated to a large extent by his integrity and loyalty. He seeks out the ablest men to run his businesses, among them several Fellows of the Royal Society (FRS). He is elected FRS himself in 1898 and is knighted in 1911. In 1927 he becomes the first engineer to be awarded the Order of Merit for his outstanding contributions to society. He is honoured by many universities and institutions in Europe and the United States.

Parsons marries Katharine Bethell, a Yorkshire woman, in 1883. They have one daughter and a son who dies on active service in 1918. He keeps a residence in London and in Northumbria.

Parsons dies on February 11, 1931, on board the steamship Duchess of Richmond while on a cruise with his wife. The cause of death is given as neuritis. A memorial service is held at Westminster Abbey on March 3, 1931. He is buried in the parish church of St. Bartholomew’s in Kirkwhelpington in Northumberland. His estate is valued at £1,214,355 gross.

A portrait of Parsons, painted by Maurice Codner, hangs in the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, London. There is also a portrait by Sir William Orpen in the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, and a portrait by Walter Stoneman in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

(From: “Parsons, Sir Charles Algernon” by W. Garrett Scaife, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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UK Foot-and-Mouth Disease Outbreak

banbury-foot-and-mouth-notice

On February 21, 2001, Ireland’s multi-billion-pound livestock industry goes on full alert for signs of foot-and-mouth disease after the first outbreak in the United Kingdom in twenty years is confirmed in pigs. This epizootic sees 2,026 cases of the disease in farms across most of the British countryside. Over 6 million cows and sheep are killed in an attempt to halt the disease. By the time the disease is halted in October 2001, the crisis is estimated to have cost the United Kingdom £8bn (US$16bn).

The first case of the disease to be detected is at Cheale Meats abattoir in Little Warley, Essex on February 19, 2001, on pigs from Buckinghamshire and the Isle of Wight. Over the next four days, several more cases are announced in Essex. On February 23, a case is confirmed in Heddon-on-the-Wall, Northumberland, from where the pig in the first case had come. This farm is later confirmed as the source of the outbreak and the owner, Bobby Waugh of Pallion, is convicted of failing to inform the authorities of a notifiable disease, and later of feeding his pigs “untreated waste.”

Several cases of foot-and-mouth are reported in Ireland and mainland Europe, following unknowing transportation of infected animals from the UK. The cases spark fears of a continent-wide pandemic, but these fears prove unfounded.

Ireland suffers one case in a flock of sheep in Jenkinstown, County Louth in March 2001. A cull of healthy livestock around the farm is ordered. Irish special forces snipe wild animals such as deer capable of bearing the disease in the area.

The outbreak greatly affects the Irish food and tourism industry. The 2001 Saint Patrick’s Day festival is cancelled, but later rescheduled two months later in May. Severe precautionary measures are put into place throughout Ireland since the outbreak of the disease in the UK, with most public events and gatherings cancelled, controls on farm access, and measures such as disinfectant mats at railway stations, public buildings and university campuses. The 2001 Oireachtas Rince naa Cruinne, or Irish Dance World Championships, is cancelled as a result of these measures. Causeway 2001, an Irish Scouting Jamboree is also cancelled. Three matches involving the Ireland national rugby union team in the 2001 Six Nations Championship are postponed until the autumn.