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Birth of Colin Middleton, Northern Irish Artist & Surrealist

Colin Middleton MBE, Northern Irish landscape artist, figure painter, and surrealist, is born on January 29, 1910, in Victoria Gardens in north Belfast. Hus prolific output in an eclectic variety of modernist styles is characterised by an intense inner vision, augmented by his lifelong interest in documenting the lives of ordinary people. He has been described as “Ireland’s greatest surrealist.”

Middleton is the only child of damask designer Charles Middleton. He attends the nearby Belfast Royal Academy until 1927 and then continues his studies with night classes at Belfast School of Art where he trains in design under the Cornish artist Newton Penprase. However, he finds the college too traditional in outlook, as his first influence, his father, had been a follower of European Modernism, particularly the Impressionists.

Middleton shows his first works with the Ulster Academy of Arts in 1931, where he exhibits frequently until the late nineteen-forties. He first comes to public attention with the inclusion of his works in the groundbreaking inaugural exhibition of the Ulster Unit at Locksley Hall, Belfast, in December 1933. The Ulster Unit is a short-lived grouping of Ulster artists who take their inspiration from Paul Nash’s Unit One formed earlier in the same year. Just two years thereafter in the same year, he marries Maye McLain, also an artist and a domestic science teacher, who unfortunately dies four years later. He is also a poet and writer, whom along with his wife, is an active member of the Northern Drama League in the 1930s, with whom he designs sets. After the death of his first wife he destroys all of his early paintings and enters a period of seclusion at his mother’s home outside Belfast. He becomes a follower of Vincent van Gogh and James Ensor after viewing exhibitions in London and Belgium respectively. On his return to Ulster he begins to experiment with styles derived from European Modernism, the antithesis to traditional academism. Throughout the 1930s he is also a keen follower of Paul Nash, Tristam Hillier and Edward Wadsworth. After exposure to the works of Salvador Dalí, he declares himself “the only surrealist painter working in Ireland.”

Middleton’s work first appears at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1938 where he shows intermittently until the final year of his life. He participates in an exhibition at 36 Arthur Street, Belfast, with the Czech artist Otakar Gregor, Joan Loewenthal and Sidney Smith in aid of the war effort at the end of 1940. He completes three paintings immediately after the Belfast Blitz and the trauma of the events prevent him from working for six months before his work is included in a portfolio of lithographs published by the Ulster Academy in December 1941 to raise money for rebuilding the Ulster Children’s and Women’s Hospital which had been destroyed in the Blitz earlier in the year.

Middleton’s first solo exhibition is given by the Belfast Municipal Museum and Art Gallery in 1943. It is the first exhibition staged at the gallery when it re-opens after the Belfast Blitz. At the time it is the largest one-person show the gallery has staged comprising one hundred fifteen works and it is also the first solo exhibition accorded to a local contemporary artist by the gallery. In an interview with Patrick Murphy in 1980, he says that the paintings represent “a first endeavour to harmonize the seemingly opposed and conflicting tendencies in human nature.” Dickon Hall says of this period that “Middleton’s painting is dominated by the female form; it is only rarely that men appear in his work. In part these women reflect his experience of Belfast and the difficult conditions that so many lived through.” This can be seen in the three female figures of The Poet’s Garden (1943), and even more so in The Conspirators (1942), both of which are featured in the 1943 exhibition. “The female form, pictorially and symbolically, becomes the landscape and the life force.”

The Belfast exhibition is followed by his first one-man show at the Grafton Galleries, Dublin, in 1944. In the following year he debuts at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art where he returns on a number of occasions, particularly in the periods 1949–55 and 1963–71. In 1945, he is married for the second time, to Kate Giddens, after both are named co-respondents at the Belfast High Court a few months earlier, in civil servant Lionel P. Barr’s application for a decree nisi. The suit is undefended and the couple has costs awarded against them. In the same year Middleton returns to the Belfast Museum for a solo exhibition arranged by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts. He is a founding member of the Northern Ireland branch of the Artists’ International Association, who show at the Belfast Municipal Gallery in spring 1945. Other members include Joan Loewenthal, Kathleen Crozier, Pat Hicking, Trude Neu, Sidney Smith, Nevill Johnston, George Campbell and Gerard Dillon.

Middleton’s work is displayed in New York‘s Associated American Artists gallery in 1947 with a selection of works chosen by Dublin art critic Theodore Goodman that includes paintings by his Northern contemporaries Daniel O’Neill, George Campbell, Gerard Dillon and Patrick Scott. He also retires from the family business that year to devote his time to painting, having worked at the business since his father’s death in 1933. He then takes his wife and child to live and work on John Middleton Murry’s Suffolk commune for a short period, before returning to Belfast in 1948. Their life in Suffolk is not a success as the family suffers from ill health, but the experience of working the land is to prove a profound influence on his future work.

In 1949, Middleton shows his first works at the Oireachtas na Gaeilge, where he returns periodically until 1977. Upon their return from Suffolk, his wife sends Victor Waddington photos of his work whereupon Waddington comes to represent him for a period of five years, until the Waddington Galleries face financial hardship in 1958. It is Waddington’s patronage that enables the Middleton family to live and work in Ardglass, County Down, for four years from 1949, which Middleton later describes as the happiest time of his life. When his works are displayed at Victor Waddington’s Dublin gallery in that same year, it acts as a springboard that opens Middleton’s work to an international audience. Group exhibitions in Boston and London follow in 1950 and 1951 respectively.

Middleton’s first solo show at London’s Tooth Gallery takes place in 1952, where his work had been shown in the previous year.

In 1953, Middleton moves to Bangor, County Down, where he designs for Marjery Mason‘s The Repertory Theatre. He later designs sets for the Circle Theatre and the Lyric Theatre, including the sets for a series of W. B. Yeats’s plays in 1970, and Seán O’Casey‘s Red Roses for Me in 1972, both at the latter. In 1952, he exhibits alongside Daniel O’Neill, Nevill Johnson, Gerard Dillon and Thurloe Connolly at the Tooth Galleries in London. He begins his career as an art teacher by the invitation of James Warwick who offers him a one year part-time post at the Belfast College of Art in 1954. That year he shows forty-two works at the Belfast Municipal Gallery under the auspices of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts. In the following year he delivers full-time classes at the Coleraine Technical School, before becoming head of art at Friends’ School, Lisburn in 1961 where he remains until 1970. He lives on Plantation Avenue in Lisburn for nine years next door to fellow artist and pedagogue Dennis Osborne, who presents a portrait of Middleton at the annual exhibition of the Royal Ulster Academy in 1965.

A poet and musician, Middleton also produces murals, mosaics and posters. One such mural is commissioned for a house in Ballymena designed by the architect Noel Campbell in an international modernist style in 1951, and other works include a mosaic for a school in Lisburn, and a mural in a health clinic. He shows in many group shows throughout the fifties including the Royal Academy of Arts in 1955, in addition to more solo exhibitions at the Waddington Galleries in 1955, and his first showing at the Richie Hendricks Gallery in 1958. Of the Waddington exhibition The Dublin Magazine writes: “Apart from the brilliance of his paint, he has one rare quality in his inexhaustible capacity for wonder.”

Middleton shows in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland‘s gallery in 1965 with additional works at the Bell Gallery and his Bruges Series is shown at Alice Berger Hammerschlag’s New Gallery upon his return from a Belgian trip in 1966. The Arts Council of Northern Ireland suffers an extensive fire at their storage facility in south Belfast in autumn 1967 which decimates their collection of contemporary art and theatre costumes. Losses include several of Middleton’s paintings, in addition to the works of many other leading Ulster artists such as William Conor and T. P. Flanagan. He Is among the prizewinners at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s 4th Open Painting Exhibition in 1968. In the same year, John Hewitt curatea a joint exhibition of his paintings with T. P. Flanagan at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry.

The Arts Council hosts a joint retrospective of Middleton’s work in co-operation with the Scottish Arts Council in 1970. A major retrospective is to follow at the Ulster Museum and the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin in 1976. Comprising almost three hundred exhibits, the show is accompanied by a monograph written by Middleton’s lifelong friend, the patron and poet John Hewitt. Hewitt later bequeaths his art collection, including several of Middleton’s paintings to the Ulster Museum.

The Royal Mail uses Middleton’s painting of Slieve na Brock in the Mourne Mountains to commemorate the Ulster ’71 exhibition in a series of postage stamps that also feature the work of Thomas Carr and T. P. Flanagan. In 1972, Middleton tours extensively with his wife visiting Australia for two months and shows his works from the trip at the McClelland International Galleries on Belfast’s Lisburn Road the following year. In 1973 he also visits Barcelona and later shows a series of surrealist works inspired by the two trips at the Tom Caldwell Gallery in Belfast.

Middleton lives the last twelve years of his life in Bangor, County Down.

Middleton dies of leukemia in Belfast City Hospital on December 23, 1983. He is survived by his wife Kate, their daughter and a step-daughter. His son predeceases him by a year. Christie’s of London is entrusted with the sale of his studio works in 1985. The works are displayed before auction in both Dublin and Belfast during August 1985. In 2005, the Ulster History Circle unveils a commemorative blue plaque at his former home on Victoria Road in Bangor.

In the 1970s, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland commissions a documentary film portrait of Middleton entitled Trace of a Thorn, which is written and narrated by the Belfast poet Michael Longley. Hus works can be seen in many private and public collections including the Ulster Museum, Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, National Gallery of Ireland, National Gallery of Victoria, Herbert Art Gallery and University of Oxford.

In September 2023, eighty years since the ground-breaking exhibition Middleton held at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery, now the Ulster Museum, and forty years after his death, the Ulster Museum holds a new exhibition of his works, celebrating his association with Belfast, the city of which he says, “I belong here as I never belonged anywhere else in the country.” This exhibition brings together works held in the public collection with those from private lenders to provide a full picture of the artist’s talent and life.

Middleton wins the Royal Dublin Society‘s Taylor Scholarship worth £50 in 1932, and two further awards of £10 in 1933. In 1935, he is elected associate of the Ulster Academy, inducted alongside Helen Brett, Kathleen Bridle, Patrick Marrinan, Maurice Wilks, Romeo Toogood and William St. John Glenn, and in 1948 he becomes an elected Academician at the same.

In 1968, Middleton is appointed MBE in the Queen’s birthday honours list, and in 1969 he is elected an associate at the Royal Hibernian Academy with full membership conferred just a year later. He is awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from Queen’s University Belfast in 1972. The Arts Council of Northern Ireland grants him a substantial subsistence award in 1970 which covers two years enabling him to retire from teaching to concentrate on painting full-time. In the same year, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland also commissions him to paint a portrait of their director, Kenneth Jamison.


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Death of William Congreve, Playwright & Poet

William Congreve, English playwright, satirist and poet, dies at his home in Surrey Street, London, on January 19, 1729.

Congreve is born on January 24, 1670, at Bardsley, West Yorkshire, England, the son of William Congreve, an army officer, and Mary Browning of Doncaster. In 1674, his father gains a commission as lieutenant in the army in Ireland, and moves with his family to the garrison port of Youghal, County Cork, where they remain until 1678. After a brief period at Carrickfergus, they move in 1681 to Kilkenny, where his father is assigned to the Duke of Ormond‘s regiment. This service entitles Congreve to a free education at the renowned Kilkenny College, where Jonathan Swift is also a student, and where he receives an excellent schooling in classics. He forms a lasting friendship with another pupil, Joseph Kelly, a lawyer and MP for Doneraile (1705–13), with whom he later maintains a lengthy correspondence. In April 1686, he enters Trinity College Dublin (TCD) as a classical scholar and, again like Swift, is taught by St. George Ashe. It seems likely that his degree is disrupted by the political upheaval of 1688 as the college is forced to close in 1689 and his BA is not recorded.

At this point, Congreve leaves Ireland and spends the spring and summer of 1689 with relatives in Staffordshire. He subsequently moves to London, and in March 1691 enters the Middle Temple. He is not assiduous in his legal studies, preferring to socialise with intellectuals and writers, notably John Dryden, to pursue literary projects. In 1692, under the pseudonym “Cleophil,” he published Incognita, or, Love and Duty Reconciled, a romantic novella reputedly written while he is a student in Dublin. He also contributes some verse to Charles Gildon‘s Miscellany (1692), as well as two translations from Homer and three odes to Dryden’s Examen poeticum (1693). Dryden evidently thinks highly of the young writer, and with his advice and approbation Congreve’s first play, The Old Batchelor, is recommended by the Irish playwright Thomas Southerne to Thomas Davenant, manager of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. A fast-paced and witty comedy, concerning amorous appetites, The Old Batchelor is accepted and opens on March 9, 1693, to popular acclaim, enjoying an unusually long run of fourteen nights. Among the cast are Thomas Doggett, still relatively unknown, as Fondlewife, and a young English actress and singer, Anne Bracegirdle as Amarinta, with whom Congreve falls in love and begins a prolonged relationship. The play is dedicated to his friend Charles Boyle, eldest son of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Burlington, whose estates Congreve’s father had begun to manage in 1690.

After this early success, Congreve is dismayed by the poor reception of his next play, a domestic comedy with dark undertones entitled The Double Dealer, which is staged in December 1693 and criticised as immoral and unflattering in its representation of women. Its popularity improves somewhat when Mary II, Queen of England, soon after its undistinguished debut, commands a performance. When the queen dies the following year, Congreve eulogises her in The Mourning Muse of Alexis, a Pastoral. Regarded by contemporaries as his finest literary work, it is rewarded by a gift of £100 from King William III. Production of his next play is delayed by the revolt of the Drury Lane actors against the management of Christopher Rich. Congreve supports the actors and their petition to the Lord Chamberlain to reopen the theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. When their request is granted, the renovated theatre opens on April 30, 1695, with Congreve’s enduring romantic comedy Love for Love, and the playwright being made a shareholder in the new company. A characteristically witty and well-plotted comedy, the production of Love for Love is particularly notable for Doggett’s sparkling performance as Sailor Ben. Congreve’s dramatic success also brings political advancement, as he receives his first government appointment as commissioner for hackney coaches.

Congreve returns to Ireland for most of 1696, where, with Southerne, he receives an MA from TCD, and probably visits his parents, then living at Lismore Castle, County Waterford. He also begins work on a tragedy entitled The Mourning Bride, which becomes an instant hit at Lincoln’s Inn Fields when it is first performed in February 1697 and running for thirteen nights. Despite his considerable success and popularity, he is deeply disconcerted by Jeremy Collier‘s aggressively anti-theatrical pamphlet, Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), which targets John Vanbrugh, Dryden, and Congreve. He is stung into a response, publishing Amendments of Mr. Collier’s False and Imperfect Citations (1698), which eloquently defends his dramatic methodology, but is rendered less effective by an emotional and ill-judged tone. His theatrical acumen seems to be at odds with the times, for in the dedication to his next play, The Way of the World, he observes that “little of it was prepar’d for that general taste which seems now to be predominant in the pallats of our audience.” Nevertheless, he is still bitterly disappointed by the disparaging response to its first performance on March 12, 1700. Dryden, however, realises the merit of the play, which is now recognised as Congreve’s masterpiece and a landmark in the dramatic tradition of the comedy of manners.

Disheartened, Congreve abandons play-writing, but he maintains his theatrical connections and embarks upon several collateral projects, producing a libretto for The Judgement of Paris (1701), and collaborating with Vanbrugh and the poet William Walsh on a translation of Molière‘s Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, staged as Squire Trelooby at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre in 1704. Less successfully, he makes an ill-advised investment with Vanbrugh in a new theatre and opera house in the Haymarket, from which he withdraws with financial losses in 1705. His opera libretto Semele, written for the opening of the new theatre, is not performed until 1744, when it is scored by George Frideric Handel, though John Eccles writes a score in 1707 which remains unperformed until 1972. In the early 1700s his relationship with Anne Bracegirdle falters, though they remain lifelong friends.

In 1710, Congreve publishes The Works of Mr. William Congreve in three volumes. He continues throughout his life to write poetry, ballads, essays, and other miscellaneous pieces. He remains active and influential in literary and theatrical circles, often assisting young writers such as Charles Hopkins, son of Ezekiel Hopkins, Bishop of Derry, and Alexander Pope, who dedicates to him The Iliad (1715). Financially, however, he becomes increasingly dependent upon various minor government posts. He belongs for many years to the celebrated Kit-Cat Club, alongside such prominent writers, wits, and whigs as Richard Boyle, 2nd Earl of Cork, Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, Walsh, and Vanbrugh. Through the good offices of his friend Jonathan Swift, he retains his government position as Commissioner of Wines during the Tory administration of 1710–14. His party loyalty is rewarded in 1714 when he receives a lucrative government appointment as Secretary of the island of Jamaica. His personal life also improves around this time, as a friendship with Lady Henrietta Godolphin develops into a love affair that lasts for the rest of his life. They have one daughter, Mary (1723–64).

Congreve suffers for much of his life from gout and failing eyesight. These afflictions worsen with age, though friends remark that his cheerful temper survived unaffected. He is involved in a coach accident in September 1728, and dies January 19, 1729, at his home in Surrey Street, likely from a related injury. He names Francis Godolphin, 2nd Earl of Godolphin, his lover’s husband, as his executor, and bequeaths almost his entire estate to Henrietta, thereby discreetly leaving his property to his daughter. He is buried in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey, on January 26.

Letters and manuscripts of Congreve are held in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, the British Library, London, and the National Archives of Scotland. Several likenesses are in the National Portrait Gallery, London, including the portrait in oils shown above by Sir Godfrey Kneller (1709).

(From: “Congreve, William” by Sinéad Sturgeon, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009; Pictured: Portrait of William Congreve (1709) by Sir Godfrey Kneller)


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Birth of Derek Mahon, Northern Irish Poet

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 Ireland Michael 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.”

Mahon is the only child of Ulster Protestant working class parents. His father and grandfather work at Harland and Wolff while his mother works at a local flax mill. During his childhood, he claims he is something of a solitary dreamer, comfortable with his own company yet aware of the world around him. Interested in literature from an early age, he attends Skegoneill Primary School and then the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, known locally as Inst.

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.”

Mahon pursues third level studies at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in French, English, and Philosophy and where he edits Icarus, and forms many friendships with writers such as Michael Longley, Eavan Boland and Brendan Kennelly. He starts to mature as a poet. He leaves TCD in 1965 to take up studies at the Sorbonne in Paris.

After leaving the Sorbonne in 1966, Mahon works his way through Canada and the United States. In 1968, while spending a year teaching English at Belfast High School, he publishes his first collection of poems, Night Crossing (1968, Oxford University Press). He later teaches in a school in Dublin and works in London as a freelance journalist. He lives in Kinsale, County Cork. On March 23, 2007, he is awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. He wins the Poetry Now Award in 2006 for his collection, Harbour Lights, and again in 2009 for his Life on Earth collection.

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)


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Birth of Liam Ó Muirthile, Poet, Writer & Journalist

Liam Ó Muirthile, prominent Irish language poet and journalist who also writes plays and novels, is born in Cork, County Cork, on November 15, 1950. He originally comes to the fore as a member of a group of poets from University College Cork (UCC) who collaborate in the journal Innti in the late 1960s.

Ó Muirthile is educated at cork, taking a BA in Irish and French at UCC. His Irish is acquired at school and from sojourns in the Gaeltacht of West Kerry. He is a member of a group of poets at UCC in the late 1960s who choose Irish as a creative medium and are closely associated with the modernist poetry journal Innti, founded by fellow poet Michael Davitt. They are influenced by the work of Cork poet Seán Ó Ríordáin, by the musician and composer Seán Ó Riada, and by popular American culture.

Greg Delanty, writing for Poetry International, claims that a fundamental achievement of Ó Muirthile and other members of the Innti group was to adapt the language to a contemporary urban landscape in a way that reflected the counterculture of the sixties.

Ó Muirthile has been described as a poet of immense formal and musical mastery who reads deeply into the classical and neo-classical poetry of the Irish language. He studies French literature as a student and this influences his work. He translates poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, François Villon, Jacques Prévert and Anne Hébert.

Ó Muirthile’s first collection of poetry is Tine Chnámh (1984). This receives the Irish American Cultural Institute’s literary award and an Oireachtas prize for poetry. He subsequently publishes a number of other collections. In 1996, he receives the Butler Award for his novel Ar Bhruach na Laoi. Several plays by him have been staged. From 1989 to 2003 he writes a weekly column, “An Peann Coitianta,” for The Irish Times. Poems by him have been translated into English, German, French, Italian, Hungarian and Romanian.

Two of Ó Muirthile‘s poems, Meachán Rudaí and Áthas, have been put to music by the Irish/American group The Gloaming and featured on their third studio album The Gloaming 3.

Ó Muirthile dies peacefully in St. Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, on May 18, 2018. A Requiem Mass is held in Holy Family Church, Kill of the Grange, County Dublin, on May 21. This is followed with prayers and music in St. Gobnait’s Church, Cúil Aodha, County Cork, which precedes his burial in Reilig Ghobnatan, Ballyvourney.


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Birth of Anna Manahan, Stage, Film & Television Actress

Anna Maria Manahan, Irish stage, film and television actress, is born on October 18, 1924, in County Waterford in what is at the time the Irish Free State (now the Republic of Ireland).

Manahan receives two Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play nominations for her performances in the 1968 production of Lovers and the 1998 production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, the latter for which she wins at the 52nd Tony Awards.

Manahan is also nominated for two Drama Desk Awards, a Laurence Olivier Award, and an Outer Critics Circle Award in a career that spans more than 60 years. She interprets the works of, among others, Seán O’Casey, John B. Keane, John Millington Synge, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Martin McDonagh, Christy Brown, and Brian Friel.

Manahan’s career begins when, as a young woman, she is recruited by the legendary Irish impresarios and theatrical directors Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards. She later marries stage director Colm O’Kelly, who dies not long afterward of polio, which he contracts after swimming in the Nile during a theatre tour of Egypt. They have no children and she never remarries. She is known professionally by her maiden name. In 1946 she appears in a production by Irish playwright Teresa Deevy, The Wild Goose, where she plays the part of Eileen Connolly. This is performed by Equity Productions in the Theatre Royal, Waterford.

In 1957, Manahan plays Serafina in the first Irish production of Tennessee Williams‘s The Rose Tattoo and achieves unexpected notoriety when she and several other members of the cast are arrested for the possession of a condom on stage.

Manahan plays a minor role in the Irish cult soap opera The Riordans (1960s), and as Mrs. Mary Kenefick in the TV comedy Me Mammy (1970s). She also plays the lead in the Irish comedy series, Leave It To Mrs O’Brien (1980s) and Mrs. Cadogan in The Irish R.M. (1980s). Most recently she plays Ursula in Fair City, for which her niece, Michele Manahan (daughter of Michael Manahan), is a writer.

Manahan has an extensive theatre portfolio having played at theatres throughout Ireland including the Abbey Theatre, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, the United States and Australia. She wins the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her role as Mag in Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane on Broadway. She previously receives a Tony nomination in 1969 for Brian Friel’s Lovers.

The Irish playwright John B. Keane writes the play Big Maggie specifically for Manahan. In 2001 she stars in Keane’s The Matchmaker with veteran Irish actor Des Keogh. In 2005 she stars in Sisters, a new play by Declan Hassett that is also written for her and for which she is nominated for a Drama Desk Award in the category of Outstanding Solo Performance. The production tours Ireland and is staged at the International Festival of World Theatre in Colorado and also plays at the 59E59 Theater in New York City in 2006.

Manahan appears in films starring, among others, Laurence Olivier, Peter Cushing, Kenneth More, Christopher Walken, Maggie Smith, Albert Finney and Brenda Fricker, and with John Gielgud in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1977).

Manahan receives the Gold Medal of the Éire Society of Boston in 1984 and thus joins the company of past recipients such as John F. Kennedy, and film makers John Ford and John Huston. She receives an honorary doctorate in letters from the University of Limerick in 2003. She is granted the freedom of the city of Waterford in 2002 in recognition of her life’s achievement in the arts. She thus becomes the 28th Freeman of Waterford since Isaac Butt in 1877.

In 2004 Manahan starts to play the role of Ursula in Fair City. All About Anna (2005), a documentary on her life and work is made by Charlie Mc Carthy/Icebox Films for RTÉ Television. In 2008, she becomes the first ever patron of the Active Retirement Ireland organization.

Manahan dies of multiple organ failure on March 8, 2009 in Waterford. She had suffered from a longterm illness.

Her funeral is held on March 11, officiated by her “longtime friend” the psychoanalyst, poet, and priest Bernard Kennedy. “As the final curtain falls, the lights dim, the auditorium becomes silent, we remember her” he says. Describing her as a woman of faith (who “sought to bring the word of God alive”), he says she had brought everyone together to be present at “her last great exit from this great stage of life,” saying her life’s work had drawn people from all over the world. “Anna believed in the empty tomb of the Resurrection and she believed the empty tomb could be filled by hearing the word take the place of the emptiness,” he says. “She knew the bedsits which preceded the Tony nomination.”

Manahan is buried in Ballygunner Cemetery, Knockboy, County Waterford.


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Birth of Sam Hanna Bell, Novelist, Playwright & Broadcaster

Sam Hanna Bell, Scottish-born Northern Irish novelist, short story writer, playwright, and broadcaster, is born in Glasgow to Ulster Scots parents on October 16, 1909.

Following the sudden death of his father in 1918, Bell is brought at the age of seven to live near Raffery in the Strangford Lough area of County Down. He lives with his mother and two brothers in a cottage with no electricity or running water. This is the setting of his acclaimed novel of Ulster rural life, December Bride (1951). He moves to Belfast in 1921, where he works at a variety of manual jobs before securing a post with the BBC in 1945. He is a co-founder of the left-leaning literary journal, Lagan, in 1943.

Bel’s first collection of short stories, Summer Loanen and Other Stories, is published in 1943. His novels include December Bride (1951), The Hollow Ball (1961), A Man Flourishing (1973) and Across the Narrow Sea (1987).

Bell is recruited to the BBC in 1946, along with fellow writer, W. R. Rodgers, by poet and radio producer, Louis MacNeice. Some of his work as a radio producer is highly innovative. This is Northern Ireland, An Ulster Journey (1949) is a classic radio feature incorporating actuality, poetry, music and narration. In later work, Bell incorporates the voices of “ordinary people” in his attempt to paint a picture of Ulster as rooted in the lives and traditions of its people. His collaboration with W. R. Rodgers, The Return Room (1955), is one of the most important post-war Irish radio features and shows the influence of Dylan Thomas on Rodgers, the poet.

In the 1940s, along with his BBC colleague John Boyd, the essayist (and anti-Partition activist) Denis Ireland, actors Joseph Tomelty and J. G. Devlin, poets John Hewitt and Robert Greacen, and the Rev. Arthur Agnew, Bell is one of an intellectual set, “the club of ten” Linen Hall Library members that meets weekly next to the library in Campbell’s cafe.

In 1977, Bell is honoured with an MBE in recognition of his contribution to the cultural life of Northern Ireland.

December Bride is made into an acclaimed film in 1990. Reviewing the film, The Irish Times columnist and literary critic Fintan O’Toole says it is “not just a remarkable artistic achievement, but also a remarkable political one…restoring a richness and complexity to a history that has been deliberately narrowed.” In April 1999, December Bride is selected by award-winning novelist and critic Colm Tóibín and publisher, writer and critic Dame Carmen Callil, for inclusion in The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950 (Picador).

Bell dies on February 9, 1990, at 190 King’s Road, Knock, Belfast, aged 80, shortly before the premiere of the film of December Bride. On October 15, 2009, the eve of what would have been Bell’s centenary, a blue plaque is unveiled by Northern Ireland Minister of Culture, Arts and Leisure Nelson McCausland on the Belfast house where Bell had written December Bride. Such plaques are erected to commemorate and honour notable people.


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Death of Oliver St. John Gogarty, Poet, Author, Athlete & Politician

Oliver Joseph St. John Gogarty, Irish poet, author, otolaryngologist, athlete, politician, and well-known conversationalist, dies in New York City on September 22, 1957. He serves as the inspiration for Buck Mulligan in James Joyce‘s novel Ulysses.

Gogarty is born on August 17, 1878, in Rutland Square, Dublin. In 1887, his father dies of a burst appendix, and he is sent to Mungret College, a boarding school near Limerick. He is unhappy in his new school, and the following year he transfers to Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, England, which he likes little better, later referring to it as “a religious jail.” He returns to Ireland in 1896 and boards at Clongowes Wood College while studying for examinations with the Royal University of Ireland. In 1898, he switches to the medical school at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), having failed eight of his ten examinations at the Royal.

A serious interest in poetry and literature begins to manifest itself during his years at TCD. In 1900, he makes the acquaintance of W. B. Yeats and George Moore and begins to frequent Dublin literary circles. In 1904 and 1905 he publishes several short poems in the London publication The Venture and in John Eglinton‘s journal Dana. His name also appears in print as the renegade priest Fr. Oliver Gogarty in George Moore’s 1905 novel The Lake.

In 1905, Gogarty becomes one of the founding members of Arthur Griffith‘s Sinn Féin, a non-violent political movement with a plan for Irish autonomy modeled after the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy.

In July 1907, his first son, Oliver Duane Odysseus Gogarty, is born, and in autumn of that year he leaves for Vienna to finish the practical phase of his medical training. Returning to Dublin in 1908, he secures a post at Richmond Hospital, and shortly afterward purchases a house in Ely Place opposite George Moore. Three years later, he joins the staff of the Meath Hospital and remains there for the remainder of his medical career.

As a Sinn Féiner during the Irish War of Independence, Gogarty participates in a variety of anti-Black and Tan schemes, allowing his home to be used as a safe house and transporting disguised Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteers in his car. Following the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, he sides with the pro-Treaty government and is made a Free State Senator. He remains a senator until the abolition of the Seanad in 1936, during which time he identifies with none of the existing political parties and votes according to his own whims.

Gogarty maintains close friendships with many of the Dublin literati and continues to write poetry in the midst of his political and professional duties. He also tries his hand at playwriting, producing a slum drama in 1917 under the pseudonym “Alpha and Omega,” and two comedies in 1919 under the pseudonym “Gideon Ouseley,” all three of which are performed at the Abbey Theatre. He devotes less energy to his medical practice and more to his writing during the twenties and thirties.

With the onset of World War II, Gogarty attempts to enlist in the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) as a doctor. He is denied on grounds of age. He then departs in September 1939 for an extended lecture tour in the United States, leaving his wife to manage Renvyle House, which has since been rebuilt as a hotel. When his return to Ireland is delayed by the war, he applies for American citizenship and eventually decides to reside permanently in the United States. Though he regularly sends letters, funds, and care-packages to his family and returns home for occasional holiday visits, he never again lives in Ireland for any extended length of time.

Gogarty suffers from heart complaints during the last few years of his life, and in September 1957 he collapses in the street on his way to dinner. He dies on September 22, 1957. His body is flown home to Ireland and buried in Cartron Church, Moyard, near Renvyle, County Galway.

(Pictured: 1911 portrait of Oliver St. John Gogarty painted by Sir William Orpen, currently housed at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland)


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Birth of Kevin Izod O’Doherty, Politician & Young Irelander

Kevin Izod O’Doherty, an Irish Australian politician who, as a Young Irelander, is transported to Tasmania in 1849, is born in Dublin on September 7, 1823, although other sources including the Dictionary of Australasian Biography indicate he is born in June 1824. He is first elected to the Legislative Assembly of Queensland in 1867. In 1885, he returns to Europe briefly serving as an Irish Home Rule MP at Westminster before returning in 1886 as a private citizen to Brisbane.

O’Doherty receives a good education and studies medicine, but before he is qualified, joins the Young Ireland party and in June 1848, together with Thomas Antisell and Richard D’Alton Williams, establish The Irish Tribune. Only five editions are issued, the first being on June 10, 1848. On July 10, 1848, when the fifth edition is issued, O’Doherty is arrested and charged with treason felony. At the first and second trials the juries disagree, but at the third trial, he is found guilty and sentenced to transportation for ten years.

O’Doherty arrives in Tasmania in November 1849, is at once released on parole to reside at Oatlands, and his professional services are utilised at St. Mary’s Hospital, Hobart. The other Irish prisoners nickname him “St. Kevin.”  In 1854 he receives a pardon with the condition that he must not reside in Great Britain or Ireland. He goes to Paris and carries on his medical studies, making one secret visit to Ireland to marry Mary Eva Kelly, to whom he is affianced before leaving Ireland. He receives an unconditional pardon in 1856, and completes his studies in Dublin, graduating FRCS in 1857. He practises in Dublin successfully, and in 1862 goes to Brisbane, Australia, and becomes well known as one of its leading physicians.

O’Doherty is elected a member of the Legislative Assembly of Queensland in 1867, in 1872 is responsible for a health act being passed, and is also one of the early opponents of the trafficking of Kanakas. In 1885, he resigns as he intends to settle in Europe.

In Ireland, O’Doherty is cordially welcomed, and is returned unopposed as Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) MP for North Meath to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in the November 1885 United Kingdom general election. However, finding the climate does not suit him, he does not seek re-election in 1886 and returns to Brisbane in that year. He attempts to take up his medical practice again but is not successful. He dies in poor circumstances in Brisbane on July 15, 1905.

O’Doherty’s wife and a daughter survive him. A fund is raised by public subscription to provide for his widow, a poet, who in her early days is well known as the author of Irish patriotic verse in The Nation under the soubriqet “Eva.” In Australia, she occasionally contributes to Queensland journals, and one of her poems is included in A Book of Queensland Verse. She dies at Brisbane on May 21, 1910.


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Death of Teresa Brayton, Irish Republican & Poet

Teresa Brayton, an Irish republican and poet who uses the pen name T. B. Kilbrook, dies in Kilbrook, a small village near Kilcock, County Kildare, on August 19, 1943.

Brayton is born Teresa Coca Boulanger in Kilbrook, the youngest daughter and fifth child of Hugh Boylan and Elizabeth Boylan (née Downes). Her family are long-time nationalists, with her great grandfather previously leading a battalion of pikesmen at the Battle of Prosperous.

Brayton later becomes a notable member of Irish national parties, the United Irish League and Cumann na mBan. She is described as “a patriot, but never in the vulgar sense a politician” in The Irish Times. She is closely associated with leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, and writes poems in honour of Irish patriots including Charles Stewart Parnell, Roger Casement and Patrick Pearse.

Brayton is educated from the age of 5 in Newtown National School. She writes her first poem at the age of twelve, and soon after wins her first literary award. Later on, she trains to be a teacher, and then becomes an assistant teacher to her older sister Elizabeth in the same school she received her education.

Brayton’s father is a tenant farmer, and from a young age she witnesses the effects of the land wars in Ireland. She is a supporter of Parnell, the Irish National Land League and the Irish Home Rule movement. Her work is largely influenced by her family history and Irish nationalism.

In September 1895, Brayton emigrates to the United States at the age of 27. She first lives in Boston, Chicago, and later moves to New York City. She meets Richard H. Brayton, a French-Canadian who works as an executive in the Municipal Revenue Department, who she then marries. She looks after their home and focuses on her career as a freelance journalist. She lives in the United States for 40 years and becomes well known in Irish American circles as a prominent figure in the Celtic Fellowship. It was in the United States that her reputation is established.

In the 1880s, Brayton begins her career as a poet, writing poetry for both national and provincial Irish newspapers, including Young Ireland and the King’s County Chronicle. She uses the pseudonym “T. B. Kilbrook” while contributing to these papers.

Brayton continues writing under the pseudonym until moving to the United States, where she becomes an acclaimed writer and continues to contribute to papers including the Boston newspaper The Pilot, New York Monitor and Rosary Magazine. Her target audience is the Irish immigrant population of the United States. After establishing herself she releases her poetry in collections including Songs of Dawn (1913) and The Flame of Ireland (1926).

Brayton makes return trips to Ireland regularly and develops a relationship with nationalist peers, and the leaders of the Easter Rising. Upon returning to the United States, she becomes an activist for the Irish Republic and participates in organising the distribution of information to the Irish population through pamphlets and public speaking. Her contribution is acknowledged by Constance Markievicz. Her patriotism to Ireland admit her to the Celtic Fellowship in America, where she shares her poetry at events.

Brayton’s best-known poem is “The Old Bog Road,” which is later set to music by Madeline King O’Farrelly. It has since been recorded and released by many Irish musicians including Finbar Furey, Daniel O’Donnell and Eileen Donaghy, among many others. Many more of her best-known ballads include, The Cuckoo’s Call, By the Old Fireside and Takin’ Tea in Reilly’s.

Brayton makes her permanent return to Ireland at the age of 64 following the death of her husband in 1932 and continues her career as a journalist writing for Irish newspapers and publishes religious poetry in the volume Christmas Verses in 1934. A short story called The New Lodger written by Brayton is published by the Catholic Trust Society in 1933. She dedicates much of her work to the exiled Irish living in the United States, incorporating themes of nostalgia, the familiarity of home and religion throughout her poetry.

Initially upon moving back to Ireland, she lives for a few years with her sister in Bray, County Wicklow. She then moves to Waterloo Avenue, North Strand, County Dublin. Here, she witnesses the bombing of the North Strand on May 31, 1941 during World War II. Shortly after the bombing, she eventually settles back in Kilbrook, where she was born, and lives there for the rest of her life. She spends a brief period of time in the Edenderry Hospital before her death. During her stay there she becomes a good friend with Padraig O’Kennedy, the “Leinster Leader,” who is able to reveal to her something that is linked to a family member of his. A copy of her The Old Bog Road which had been set to music and autographed by her while she was living in the United States. She had it sent to O’Kennedy’s eldest son and on it she wrote the words: “To the boy who sings the Old Bog Road so sweetly.”

Two years after her return to Kilbrook, on August 19, 1943, Brayton dies in the same room where her mother had given birth to her over 75 years previously. She is buried at the Cloncurry cemetery in County Kildare. Her funeral is attended by many, including the then Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera.

From the vivid imagery she speaks of in her poetry, Brayton, both a poet and a novelist, is described by some as “the poet of the homes of Ireland.” Such scenes include the vivid imagery of the fireside chats, the sound of her latch lifting as neighbours in to visit at night from her poem “The Old Boreen” and about her home cooking and work from “When the Leaves Begin to Fall.” Such images can be compared to most Irish households and can depict a vivid picture to those reading her poetry.

Brayton’s poetry leaves a lasting sense of Irish beauty and community. This can be seen in such poems as “A Christmas Blessing” where she speaks of “taking and giving in friendship” during Christmas. Since her passing she has continued to keep an audience from overseas from Boston and New York primarily, this as a result of the reminder her poems give to Irish exiles of Irish traditions and music which was close to them. While her poems are more often serious, some portray an almost comical undertone tone. In an article in The Irish Times, her poetry is also said to have a racy feel to them.


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Death of Joan O’Hara, Stage, Film & Television Actress

Joan O’Hara, Irish stage, film and television actress, dies in Dublin on July 23, 2007. She is one of Ireland’s most popular actresses and is, at the time of her death, recognisable to television viewers as Eunice Dunstan, a gossip in Fair City on RTÉ One.

O’Hara is born in Rosses Point, County Sligo, on October 10, 1930, the daughter of Major John Charles O’Hara, an officer in the British Corps of Royal Engineers and his wife, Mai (née Kirwan). One of her sisters, Mary (born 1935), is a soprano/harpist. Her brother Dermot (born 1934) now lives with his family in Canada. She attends the same Ursuline convent school as fellow actress and friend Pauline Flanagan.

O’Hara lives most of her life in Monkstown, Dublin, with a stay in London, with her husband, the poet and architect Francis J. Barry. The couple has four children: Siubhan, Jane, Guy, and Sebastian, an author/playwright, whose works include The Steward of Christendom, and the Booker-shortlisted novels A Long Long Way and The Secret Scripture. She is also a year-round sea-swimmer.

O’Hara is a member of the renowned Abbey Players and performs in many plays in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, including those by Seán O’Casey, Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats. She appears as Maurya in the 1988 film The Dawning. She appears in a number of other films, including Ron Howard‘s Far and Away, Da, Footfalls, Home is the Hero and just before her death, How About You. In this her final film, she stars with Vanessa Redgrave and her friend Brenda Fricker. The strength of her performance and bravery in carrying it out is acknowledged by the cast and crew in a standing ovation.

More recently, O’Hara is best known for appearing in the popular Irish television soap opera Fair City, broadcast on RTÉ One. She joins the soap in 1994, portraying the character Eunice Dunstan until her death in 2007. Thus, she is described as both one of Ireland’s most popular actresses and as one of the finest actors of her generation on her death. She admires in particular Samuel Beckett, Federico García Lorca and Ingmar Bergman. While she takes a no-nonsense approach to her craft, famously giving the advice that when in doubt, one should relate to the fireplace, she is educated at the Abbey School of Acting and has a deep appreciation and knowledge of theoretical approaches to acting and is an admirer of the European and American avant-garde. As actor Alan Stanford says after her death, “She had the most amazing energy. She was in the truest sense one of the last of the greats.”

Joan O’Hara Barry (she keeps her maiden name as her stage name) dies in Dublin on July 23, 2007, of complications from heart disease, aged 76. Her death is announced on RTÉ News the following day.