seamus dubhghaill

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Birth of Jake Burns, Frontman of Stiff Little Fingers

John “Jake” Burns, singer and guitarist best known as the frontman of Stiff Little Fingers, is born on February 21, 1958, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He also records with Jake Burns and the Big Wheel, 3 Men + Black, and as a solo artist.

Burns grows up in Joanmount in Ballysillan. His mother is a seamstress, and his father is a machinist in a textile machinery factory/steel foundry, where he is a shop steward, and his socialist views are an influence on his son. Prior to punk, Burns’s musical influences include Rory Gallagher, Dr. Feelgood, Graham Parker, and Bob Marley.

Burns starts off his career at Belfast Boys’ Model School with a rock covers band, Highway Star, which consists of Burns, Gordon Blair, Henry Cluney, and Brian Faloon. Blair subsequently leaves the group to join Rudi, and Ali McMordie joins at about the time the band discovers punk.

The band is briefly named the Fast, but as there is already a group of that name, they change it to Stiff Little Fingers, taken from the song of the same name that had appeared on Pure Mania, the 1977 album by the Vibrators. Apart from a five-year gap from 1983 to 1987, Stiff Little Fingers has been active since 1977 to the present day and have released ten studio albums.

In 1981, Burns makes his acting debut in an episode of the BBC‘s Play for Today series entitled Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain, written by Belfast-born poet and playwright Stewart Parker, which also features the rest of Stiff Little Fingers effectively playing themselves as “The Band.”

After the breakup of Stiff Little Fingers in 1983, Burns forms Jake Burns and the Big Wheel. The band consists of Burns on vocals and guitar, Steve Grantley on drums, Sean Martin on bass guitar, and Pete Saunders on keyboards. Big Wheel records a total of three singles, “On Fortune Street,” “She Grew Up” and “Breathless.” A compilation album, also called On Fortune Street, is released in 2002 after the band’s demise.

In 1987, Burns disbands Big Wheel, and Stiff Little Fingers reforms, because they are “skint and wanted to make a bit of cash to get back to Ireland for Christmas.”

From about 2001 to 2005, Burns is involved in a side project with Pauline Black of the Selecter, called 3 Men and Black. This involves Black touring with three male artists from the late 1970s and early 1980s doing acoustic versions of songs they are famous for and talking a little about how they came to write the songs. The lineup for the concerts is fairly fluid, and includes such people as Bruce Foxton, Jean-Jacques Burnel, Eric Faulkner and Nick Welsh.

On March 27, 2006, Burns releases a solo album titled Drinkin’ Again.

In 2009, Burns forms a Chicago punk rock supergroup called the Nefarious Fat Cats to raise money for local charities. Notable members include John Haggerty (Pegboy, Naked Raygun), Joe Haggerty (Pegboy), Joe Principe (Rise Against), Scott Lucas (Local H), Herb Rosen (Beer Nuts, Right of the Accused) and Mark DeRosa (Dummy). Burns also contributes guitar and vocals on a track of the Black Sheep Band charity record for Children’s Memorial Hospital, A Chicago Punk Rock Collaboration for the Kids, Vol 1.

In 2016, Burns joins an acoustic “supergroup” formed by Kirk Brandon of Spear of Destiny, called Dead Men Walking which also includes David Ruffy and John “Segs” Jennings, both of Ruts DC.

Burns lives in London for over ten years from 1978 after Stiff Little Fingers relocates there. His first wife lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, and after their marriage, he moves to Newcastle, where he lives for 16 years, becoming a supporter of Newcastle United F.C. He is also an avid supporter of the Northern Ireland national football team.

Burns’s second wife, Shirley, is American and they have lived in Chicago since 2004. Burns eventually becomes a U.S. citizen, partially so he can help vote out Donald Trump.

(Pictured: Jake Burns, performing with Stiff Little Fingers in 2019)


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Death of Pearse Hutchinson, Poet, Broadcaster & Translator

Pearse Hutchinson, Irish poet, broadcaster and translator, dies of pneumonia in Dublin on January 14, 2012.

Hutchinson is born in Glasgow, Scotland, on February 16, 1927. His father, Harry Hutchinson, a Scottish printer whose own father had left Dublin to find work in Scotland, is Sinn Féin treasurer in Glasgow and is interned in Frongoch internment camp in 1919–21. His mother, Cathleen Sara, is born in Cowcaddens, Glasgow, of emigrant parents from County Donegal. She is a friend of Constance Markievicz. In response to a letter from Cathleen, Éamon de Valera finds work in Dublin for Harry as a clerk in the Labour Exchange, and later he holds a post in Stationery Office.

Hutchinson is five years old when the family moves to Dublin and is the last to be enrolled in St. Enda’s School before it closes. He then goes to school at Synge Street CBS where he learns Irish and Latin. One of his close friends there is the poet and literary critic John Jordan. In 1948 he attends University College Dublin (UCD) where he spends a year and a half, learning Spanish and Italian.

Having published some poems in The Bell in 1945, Hutchinson’s poetic development is greatly influenced by a 1950 holiday in Spain and Portugal. A short stop en route at Vigo brings him into contact for the first time with the culture of Galicia. Later, in Andalusia, he is entranced by the landscape and by the works of the Spanish poets Federico García Lorca, Emilio Prados and Luis Cernuda.

In 1951 Hutchinson leaves Ireland again, determined to live in Spain. Unable to get work in Madrid, as he had hoped, he travels instead to Geneva, where he gets a job as a translator with the International Labour Organization, which brings him into contact with Catalan exiles, speaking a language then largely suppressed in Spain. An invitation by a Dutch friend leads to a visit to the Netherlands, in preparation for which he teaches himself the Dutch language.

Hutchinson returns to Ireland in 1953 and becomes interested in the Irish language poetry of writers such as Piaras Feiritéar and Aonghus Fionn Ó Dálaigh and publishes a number of poems in Irish in the magazine Comhar in 1954. The same year he travels again to Spain, this time to Barcelona, where he learns the Catalan and Galician languages, and gets to know Catalan poets such as Salvador Espriu and Carles Riba. With the British poet P. J. Kavanagh, he organises a reading of Catalan poetry in the British Institute.

Hutchinson goes home to Ireland in 1957 but returns to Barcelona in 1961 and continues to support Catalan poets. An invitation by the publisher Joan Gili to translate some poems by Josep Carner leads to the publication of his first book, a collection of thirty of Carner’s poems in Catalan and English, in 1962. A project to publish his translation of Espriu’s La Pell de brau (The Bull-skin), falls through some years later. Some of the poems from this project are included in the collection Done into English.

In 1963, Hutchinson’s first collection of original poems in English, Tongue Without Hands, is published by Dolmen Press in Ireland. In 1967, having spent nearly ten years altogether in Spain, he returns to Ireland, making a living as a poet and journalist writing in both Irish and English. In 1968, a collection of poems in Irish, Faoistin Bhacach (A Lame Confession), is published. Expansions, a collection in English, follows in 1969. Friend Songs (1970) is a new collection of translations, this time of medieval poems originally written in Galician-Portuguese. In 1972 Watching the Morning Grow, a new collection of original poems in English, comes out, followed in 1975 by another, The Frost Is All Over.

In October 1971, Hutchinson takes up the Gregory Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Leeds, on the recommendation of Professor A. Norman Jeffares. There is some controversy around the appointment following accusations, later retracted, that Jeffares had been guilty of bias in the selection because of their joint Irish heritage. He holds tenure at the University for three years, and during that time contributes to the University’s influential poetry magazine Poetry & Audience.

From 1977 to 1978 Hutchinsonn compiles and presents Oró Domhnaigh, a weekly radio programme of Irish poetry, music and folklore for Ireland’s national network, RTÉ. He also contributes a weekly column on the Irish language to the station’s magazine RTÉ Guide for over ten years. A collaboration with Melita Cataldi of Old Irish lyrics into Italian is published in 1981. Another collection in English, Climbing the Light (1985), which also includes translations from Irish, Italian and Galician, is followed in 1989 by his last Irish collection, Le Cead na Gréine (By Leave of the Sun). The Soul that Kissed the Body (1990) is a selection of his Irish poems translated into English. His most recent English collection is Barnsley Main Seam (1995). His Collected Poems is published in 2002 to mark his 75th birthday. This is followed in 2003 by Done into English, a selection of many of the translated works he produced over the years.

A co-editor and founder of the literary journal Cyphers, Hutchinson receives the Butler Award for Irish writing in 1969. He is a member of Aosdána, the state-supported association of artists, from which he receives a cnuas (stipend) to allow him to continue writing. He describes this as “a miracle and a godsend” as he is fifty-four when invited to become a member and is at the end of his tether. A two-day symposium of events is held at Trinity College Dublin, to celebrate his 80th birthday in 2007, with readings from his works by writers including Macdara Woods, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paul Durcan and Sujata Bhatt. His most recent collection, At Least for a While (2008), is shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award.

Hutchinson lives in Rathgar, Dublin, and dies of pneumonia in Dublin on January 14, 2012. His extensive archive is in the library of Maynooth University. Its opening on May 24, 2015, is accompanied by the inauguration of an annual Pearse Hutchinson seminar and the launch of a collection of unpublished Hutchinson poems, Listening to Bach.

Some critics argue that Hutchinson’s concern with simplicity and Ireland’s place in the comparative history of human oppression too often deteriorates into banality, didacticism, and regurgitation of sentimental revivalist tropes. Even these, however, acknowledge his occasional greatness, while his champions argue that his achievement has not yet been fully recognised and absorbed.


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Birth of Tom McGurk, Journalist, Radio Presenter & Sportscaster

Tom McGurk (Irish: Tomás Mag Oirc), Irish poet, journalist, radio presenter and sportscaster, is born on December 20, 1946, in Cookstown, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. He attends Portadown College and studies English and Philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). He is involved in the Civil Rights demonstrations while at Queen’s.

McGurk first joins RTÉ in 1972, as a news reporter, moving on to present Last House and First House on television. In 1972 he wins a Jacob’s Award for his RTÉ Radio documentaries on Ireland’s islands. For 20 years he is the presenter of RTÉ Sport‘s rugby coverage, most notable of the Six Nations Championship and Internationals with the panel of George Hook and Brent Pope. He also spends time in the 1980s and 1990s in the UK, working for BBC Radio 4‘s Start of the Week as a presenter on the regional ITV station for the North West of England, Granada Television. On his return to Ireland, he presents the Sunday Show on RTE Radio 1. He also guest presents Tonight with Vincent Browne, on TV3. He presents a drive-time radio show on 4FM when it launches in 2009.

Until 2019, McGurk is a columnist with The Sunday Business Post. He then writes for The Currency until 2020.

McGurk writes the script for the TV film Dear Sarah based on the letters from Sarah Conlon, campaigning for the release of her husband (Giuseppe Conlon), son (Gerry Conlon) and sister Anne Maguire, caught up in the Guildford Four miscarriage of justice.

Among his poems is “Big Ned” about a farmer from Brockagh, County Tyrone.

While working for 4FM, the Director of the National Women’s Council of Ireland, Susan McKay, speaks out against an “uncouth and objectionable” interview McGurk conducts with her. The National Women’s Council has since refrained from giving interviews to 4FM.

From 1983 to 1996 McGurk is married to the broadcaster Miriam O’Callaghan, with whom he has four daughters. In 2003 he marries PR consultant Caroline Kennedy.

On December 5, 2017, the Irish Revenue Commissioners list of tax defaulters reveal that McGurk had made a settlement of €76,000 with the Revenue for the underpayment of income tax.


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Death of Character Actor Liam Redmond

Liam Redmond, Irish character actor known for his stage, film and television roles, dies in Dublin on October 28, 1989, following a lengthy illness.

Redmond is born in Limerick, County Limerick, on July 27, 1913, one of four children born to cabinet-maker Thomas and Eileen Redmond. Educated at the Christian Brothers schools in Dublin, he later attends University College Dublin (UCD) and initially reads medicine before moving into drama.

While Director of the Dramatic Society, Redmond meets and marries the society’s secretary, Barbara MacDonagh, sister of Donagh MacDonagh and daughter of 1916 Easter Rising leader Thomas MacDonagh and Muriel Gifford. They have four children.

Redmond is invited to join the Abbey Theatre in 1935 as a producer by William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet. Yeats writes his play Death of Cú Chulainn for Redmond to star as Cú Chulainn, hero of one of Ireland’s foundational myths.

Redmond makes his acting debut at the Abbey Theatre in 1935 in Seán O’Casey‘s The Silver Tassie. His first stage appearance is in 1939 in New York City in The White Steed. After returning to Britain at the outbreak of World War II he is a regular on the London stage. He is one of the founders of the Writers’, Artists’, Actors’ and Musicians’ Association (WAAMA), a precursor of the Irish Actors’ Equity Association. His insistence that “part-time professionals” – usually civil servants who act on the side – should be paid a higher rate than professional actors for both rehearsal time and performance, effectively wiping out this class, raising the wages and fees of working actors.

Redmond stars in Broadway, among other plays starring in Paul Vincent Carroll‘s The White Steed in 1939, playing Canon McCooey in The Wayward Saint in 1955, winning the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for his performance, and starring in 1968 in Joe Orton‘s Loot and Brian Friel‘s The Loves of Cass Maguire.

Redmond works in television and film throughout the 1950s to the 1980s and is regularly seen in television series such as The Avengers, Daniel Boone, The Saint and Z-Cars. He is often called upon as a character actor in various military, religious and judicial roles in films such as I See a Dark Stranger (1946), Captain Boycott (1947), High Treason (1951), The Cruel Sea (1953), The Playboy of the Western World (1962), Kid Galahad (1962), The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1964), Tobruk (1967), The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966) and Barry Lyndon (1975). His performance as the kindly occult expert in the cult horror film Night of the Demon (1957) is a favourite of fans of the film.

Redmond retires to Dublin and dies at age 76, after a long period of ill health, on October 28, 1989. His wife Barbara predeceases him in 1987.


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Birth of Georgie Hyde-Lees Yeats, Wife of Poet W. B. Yeats

Georgie Hyde-Lees Yeats, the wife of the poet William Butler Yeats, is born Bertha Hyde-Lees in Fleet, Hart District, Hampshire, England, on October 16, 1892.

Hyde-Lees is the daughter of militia captain (William) Gilbert Hyde-Lees (1865–1909), of the Manchester Regiment, and Edith “Nelly” Ellen (1868–1942), daughter of barrister and manufacturer Montagu Woodmass, JP. Her father is regarded by her mother’s family as “a most undesirable character, but ‘rolling in money,'” having taken up the life of a “gentleman alcoholic” on resigning his commission after receiving an inheritance from his wealthy uncle Harold Lees, of Pickhill Hall, near Wrexham, then part of Denbighshire. He is “attractive, reckless, witty, and… musical,” and fond of pranks. She has an elder brother, Harold (1890–1963), who becomes a clergyman, with “rigid moral standards” and “a less than joyous existence,” his only indulgence being “a fine collection of drawings and etchings.” When she is only a few years old, her parents’ marriage fails due to her father’s alcoholism. Her father has enough income to support his family, allowing Georgie and her mother to spend “a good deal of their time” travelling in Europe, but his wife is in the awkward social position of being a “married woman without a husband.” The family lives a vaguely bohemian and nomadic lifestyle, travelling frequently to country homes and spending long periods visiting relatives.

Hyde-Lees attends a number of schools in Knightsbridge, London art schools, studies languages and classics, and piano. She becomes a close friend of Dorothy Shakespear, who is fond of Georgie and shares many of her interests despite being six years her senior. After the death of her father in 1909 at the age of 44, her mother marries Dorothy’s uncle, Henry Tucker, Olivia Shakespear‘s brother, and they move to Kensington.

Hyde-Lee’s mother often brings young musicians and artists she has recently met to Olivia Shakespear’s salon, many of whom become well-known modernists, including Ezra Pound, Walter Rummel, and Frederic Manning. She continues to make the rounds of country estates with her mother and Olivia and Dorothy Shakespear. It is in their company in 1910 or 1911, as a seventeen-year-old, that one morning she meets W. B. Yeats at the British Museum and again that afternoon during tea at the Shakespears.

Seven years later, when Hyde-Lees is 25 and Yeats is 52, he asks her to marry him. Only a few weeks earlier, Iseult Gonne, the daughter of Maud Gonne whom Yeats had loved for many years, had rejected his marriage proposal. She and Yeats marry just three weeks later, on October 20, 1917, in a public register office, witnessed by her mother and Ezra Pound. During the honeymoon, while Yeats is still brooding about Iseult’s rejection, she begins the automatic writing which fascinates him. Yeats writes about her psychography days later in what is to be A Vision (1925), and it holds the marriage together for many years. Within a year of marriage, Yeats declares her name of Georgie to be insufferable, and henceforth calls her George.

The couple has two children, Anne and Michael. Hyde-Lees Yeats dies on August 23, 1968, in Rathmines, County Dublin. She is buried at Drumcliff Churchyard, Drumcliff, County Sligo.


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Death of Con Leventhal, Lecturer, Essayist & Critic

A.J. Con Leventhal, Irish lecturer, essayist, and critic, dies in Paris on October 3, 1979, following a battle with cancer.

Leventhal is born Abraham Jacob Leventhal in Lower Clanbrassil Street, Dublin, on May 9, 1896. His parents are Moses (Maurice) Leventhal and Rosa (née Levenberg). His father is a draper, and his mother is a poet. She is a Zionist, who is a founding member of the Women’s Zionist Society. He lives in the “Little Jerusalem” area of Dublin, the area around the South Circular Road, in his youth. He attends Wesley College, Dublin, and then Trinity College Dublin (TCD) to study modern languages. He edits the TCD student magazine in 1918. It is in TCD that he acquires the nickname “Con,” an allusion to his father’s job as a “Continental” agent. He joins the first Zionist commission and travels to Palestine after World War I and helps to found the newspaper Palestine Weekly. He is then invited to join the Jewish National Fund‘s London office and begins working on the Zionist Review. He returns to Dublin to complete his degree in 1920, and in 1921 travels to Paris where he meets James Joyce.

Leventhal marries Gertrude Zlotover in October 1922. He works with his father-in-law, Joseph Zlotover, at the family furniture business on Mary Street for a time. After, he starts a number of unsuccessful businesses of his own, including the Irish Book Shop on Dawson Street from 1924 to 1925. It is possibly his business failures that inspire the idea of the TCD Students Appointment Association, which would give students pragmatic business skills. TCD accepts this proposal and employes him as the first administrator.

Leventhal completes a PhD in contemporary French literature, and in 1932 is appointed to the staff of the French department at TCD. He replaces his friend Samuel Beckett. During his time in TCD, he is an assistant editor to Hermathena, to which he also contributes his translations of French poetry. He is associated with a number of progressive cultural movements in Dublin of the 1920s and 1930s. He is a regular attendee at meetings held to promote Jewish culture and nationalism and lectures this group on Joyce. Through his interest in Joyce, he becomes an associate of Seumas O’Sullivan, and The Dublin Magazine. When the printers refuse to set his review of Ulysses in 1923 for The Dublin Magazine, he is moved to found his own magazine, The Klaxon, in response to the censorship. The only issue of the magazine publishes a shortened version of the review under the pseudonym “Lawrence K. Emery.” He is also associated with Francis Stuart‘s Tomorrow magazine. He is also interested in drama and is a member of the avant-garde Dublin Drama League, occasionally performing with them. Among his close friends are Daisy Bannard Cogley, Micheál Mac Liammóir, and Lennox Robinson. From 1943 to 1958 his column, “Dramatic commentary”, is published in The Dublin Magazine. He is also published in The Irish Times, The Irish Press, The Listener, Westminster Weekly, Financial Times, and International Herald Tribune. He is a regular contributor to Radio Éireann and BBC broadcasts.

Leventhal begins a long-term relationship with Ethna MacCarthy, marrying her after the death of his first wife in 1956. She dies in 1959. He retires from TCD in 1963 and moves to Paris, where he becomes Beckett’s literary assistant. He lives on Boulevard du Montparnasse with his partner Marion Leigh.

Leventhal dies of cancer in Paris on October 3, 1979. There are two known portraits of Leventhal, one by John Russell (1920) and a second by Avigdor Arikha. The Leventhal Scholarship at TCD is founded in his memory. TCD and the Harry Ransom Center hold papers relating to Leventhal.


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Death of Joseph M. Scriven, Irish-Born Canadian Poet

Joseph Medlicott Scriven, an Irish-born Canadian poet best known as the writer of the poem which becomes the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” drowns on August 10, 1886, in Bewdley, Northumberland County, Ontario, Canada.

Scriven is born on September 10, 1819, of prosperous parents in Banbridge, County Down. He graduates with a degree from Trinity College Dublin in 1842. His fiancée accidentally drowns in 1843, the night before they are to be married. In 1844, at the age of 25, he leaves his native country and migrates to Canada, settling in Woodstock, Ontario. He leaves his country feeling a spiritual calling to serve the Lord in his Plymouth Brethren faith. He remains in Canada only briefly after becoming ill but returns for good in 1847.

For two or three years Scriven conducts a private school at Brantford. In 1855, while staying with James Sackville in Bewdley, Ontario, north of Port Hope, he receives news from Ireland of his mother being terribly ill. He writes a poem to comfort his mother called “Pray Without Ceasing.” It is later set to music and renamed by Charles Crozat Converse, becoming the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Scriven does not have any intentions nor dream that his poem would be published in the newspaper and later become a favorite hymn among the millions of Christians around the world.

About 1857, Scriven moves near to Port Hope, Ontario. Here he again falls in love and is due to be married, but in August 1860 his fiancée becomes ill with pneumonia and dies. He then devotes the rest of his life to tutoring, preaching and helping others.

In 1869, Scriven publishes a collection of 115 hymns entitled Hymns and other verses which does not include “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

Scriven drowns at age 66 on August 10, 1886. At the time of his death, he is very ill with fever and has been brought to a friend’s home to recover. It is a very hot night, and he goes outside possibly to cool down or to get a drink of cold water from the spring. His friend reports, “We left him about midnight. I withdrew to an adjoining room to watch and pray. You may imagine my surprise and dismay when upon visiting his room I found it empty. All search failed to find a trace of the missing man, until a little after noon his body was discovered in the nearby river, lifeless and cold in death.” To this day, no one knows for certain if his death is an accident or a suicide. He is buried next to his second fiancée in her family cemetery, Pengelley Family Cemetery, at Pengelly Landing, Peterborough County, Ontario, Canada.

A tall obelisk is built upon his grave with the words from the song and the following inscription:

“This monument was erected to the memory of Joseph M. Scriven, B.A., by lovers of his hymn, which is engraved hereon, and is his best memorial. Born at Seapatrick, Co. Down, Ireland, 10 Sept. 1819, emigrated to Canada 1844. Entered into rest at Bewdley, Rice Lake, 10 August 1886, and buried here. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.“

A plaque can be found on the Port Hope-Peterborough Highway with the following inscription:

“Four miles north, in the family Pengelley Cemetery, lies the philanthropist and author of this great masterpiece, written at Port Hope, 1857. The composer of the music, Charles C. Converse, was a well-educated versatile and successful Christian, whose talents ranged from law to professional music. Under the pen name of Karl Reden, he wrote numerous scholarly articles on many subjects. Though he was an excellent musician and composer with many of his works performed by the leading American orchestras and choirs of his day, his life is best remembered for this simple music so well suited to Scriven’s text.“

Lukas Media LLC releases the full-length documentary Friends in Jesus, The stories and Hymns of Cecil Frances Alexander and Joseph Scriven in 2011. The 45-minute documentary movie details the life of Scriven and his influence on popular hymns.


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Birth of Edward Maturin, Novelist & Poet

Edward Maturin, novelist and poet, is born in Dublin on June 18, 1812. He is naturalised as an American and works as a professor of Greek. His fiction and poetry generally deal with historical themes, while his work as a Gothic novelist often has an Irish background.

The Maturin family is descended from a Huguenot clergyman who fled to Ireland after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Edward’s father, Reverend Charles Robert Maturin, is curate of St. Peter’s Church, Dublin, and well known as a preacher, as well as a poet and Gothic novelist. Born the second son, Edward enters Trinity College Dublin at the age of fifteen and graduates at twenty. Immediately afterward he emigrates to the United States in 1832 with letters of introduction from the poet Thomas Moore and other Irish writers. Having studied law under Charles O’Conor, he is called to the bar but later becomes professor of Greek at South Carolina College and applies for American naturalisation in 1837. He marries Harriet Lord Gailiard in 1842 and has three children by her. In 1848, he returns to New York, where for upward of thirty years he fills professorships in Greek, Latin and belles-lettres. His mastery of Greek is such that he is selected in 1850 by the American Bible Union as one of their revisers and works on the gospel of St. Mark.

All of Maturin’s work is written in the United States and for the most part concentrates on historical themes or Irish fantasy. His first book contains the interconnected stories of Sejanus and Other Roman Tales (1839) and is dedicated to Washington Irving. They concern incidents during the reigns of the Roman emperors from Tiberius to Nero. Self-consciously literary, the dialogue is written in an imitation of Shakespearean English. This is followed by the two-volume romance, Montezuma, the Last of the Aztecs (1845) and then two works on Spanish themes. The long series of “Spanish Ballads” that originally appears in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review during 1845 are eventually collected with his other poems in Lyrics of Spain and Erin (1850). They are followed by the romance Benjamin, the Jew of Grenada (1847), a story of the fall of the Moslem empire in Spain.

After his move to New York, Maturin’s prose work becomes more Gothic. It includes The Irish Chieftain, or The Isles of Life and Death (1848) which is later to be dismissed as “a wild story without foundation in history … melodramatic, sentimental, extravagant,” and the two-volume Eva, or the Isles of Life and Death (1848). His later Bianca, a tale of Erin and Italy (1852) is set in more modern times but is equally condemned as “an outlandish story, full of murders, characters – mostly illegitimate – with terrible secrets, a duel between brothers, banshees, mysterious lady-prophetesses, fee-faw-fum.” A final offering is his four-act play Viola (1858).

Maturin dies in New York City on May 25, 1881.

(Pictured: “Montezuma: The Last of the Aztecs” by Edward Maturin, Paine & Burgess, New York, 1845)


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Death of Stephen Lucius Gywnn, Writer & Politician

Stephen Lucius Gwynn, Irish journalist, biographer, author, poet and Protestant Nationalist politician, dies on June 11, 1950, at Terenure, Dublin. As a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) he represents Galway Borough as its Member of Parliament from 1906 to 1918. He serves as a British Army officer in France during World War I and is a prominent proponent of Irish involvement in the Allied war effort. He founds the Irish Centre Party in 1919, but his moderate nationalism is eclipsed by the growing popularity of Sinn Féin.

Gwynn is born in St. Columba’s College in Rathfarnham, County Dublin, where his father John Gwynn (1827–1917), a biblical scholar and Church of Ireland clergyman, is warden. His mother, Lucy Josephine (1840–1907), is the daughter of the Irish nationalist William Smith O’Brien. He is the eldest of ten children (eight brothers and two sisters). Shortly after his birth the family moves to Ramelton in County Donegal to the parish where his father has been appointed parson. He later becomes Regius Professor of Divinity at Trinity College Dublin (TCD).

Gwynn spends his early childhood in rural County Donegal, which is to shape his later view of Ireland. He attends Brasenose College, Oxford, where, as scholar, in 1884 he is awarded first-class honours in classical moderations and in 1886 literae humaniores. During term holidays he returns to Dublin, where he meets several of the political and literary figures of the day.

After graduating, Gwynn spends ten years from 1886 tutoring as a schoolmaster, for a time in France, which creates a lifelong interest in French culture, as expressed in his Praise of France (1927). By 1896 he has developed an interest in writing, becoming a writer and journalist in London focused on English themes, until he comes into contact with the emerging Irish literary revival, when he serves as secretary of the Irish Literary Society.

This is the beginning of a long and prolific career as a writer covering a wide range of literary genres, from poetry and biographical subjects to general historical works. The eighteenth century is Gwynn’s particular specialism. He writes numerous books on travel and on the topography of his own homeland, as well as on his other interests: wine, eighteenth-century painting and fishing.

Gwynn returns to Ireland in 1904 when he enters politics. In the 1906 Galway Borough by-election he wins a seat for Galway Borough, which he represents as a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party until 1918. During this period, he is active in the Gaelic League and is one of the few Irish MPs to have close links to the Irish literary revival. Along with Joseph Maunsel Hone and George Roberts he founds the Dublin publishing house of Maunsel and Company. He is opposed to the demand for the Irish language to be a compulsory subject for matriculation. He supports the campaign which wins the establishment of a Catholic university when he serves on the Irish University Royal Commission in 1908. During the debate on the third Home Rule Bill, and at the request of his party leader John Redmond, he writes The case for Home Rule (1911) and is in charge of much of the party’s official publicity and its replies to criticism from Sinn Féin.

On the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Gwynn strongly supports Redmond’s encouragement of Irish nationalists and the Irish National Volunteers to support the Allied and British war effort by enlisting in Irish regiments of the Irish Divisions, especially as a means to ensure the implementation of the suspended Home Rule Act at the end of an expectedly short war. Now over fifty, he enlists in January 1915 with the 7th Leinster Regiment in the 16th (Irish) Division. In July he is commissioned as a captain in the 6th (Service) Battalion, Connaught Rangers and serves with them on the Western Front at Messines, the Somme and elsewhere.

Gwynn is one of five Irish Nationalist MPs who enlist and serve in the army, the others being John L. Esmonde, Willie Redmond, William Redmond and D. D. Sheehan, as well as former MP Tom Kettle. Together with Kettle and William Redmond, he undertakes a recruitment drive for the Irish divisions, co-operating with Kettle on a collection of ballads called Battle Songs for the Irish Brigade (1915). He is made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in July 1915. In 1916, he is appointed to the Dardanelles Commission.

Recalled to Ireland in late 1917 to participate in the Irish Convention chaired by Sir Horace Plunkett, Gwynn sides with the Redmondite faction of the Irish Party in supporting a compromise with the southern unionists in an attempt to reach consensus on a Home Rule settlement which would avoid partition. On the death of Redmond in March 1918, he takes over as leader of the moderate nationalists in the Convention. He opposes the threat of compulsory military service during the Conscription Crisis of 1918, though as a member of the Irish Recruiting Council he continues to support voluntary recruitment, encountering intense opposition led by Sinn Féin.

Gwynn forms the Irish Centre Party in 1919 and stands unsuccessfully as an Independent Nationalist for Dublin University in the 1918 Irish general election. The party merges with Plunkett’s Irish Dominion League to press for a settlement by consent on the basis of dominion status, but Gwynn subsequently breaks with Plunkett due to his willingness to accept partition as a temporary compromise. The polarities which divide Ireland during the Irish War of Independence and Irish Civil War increasingly sideline his brand of moderate cultural nationalism. Although he supports the newly emergent nation, he equally condemns some of the excesses, such as the burning of houses belonging to Free State senators.

Gwynn’s personal life also becomes complicated at this stage and around 1920. He has a romantic association with married artist Grace Henry who is perhaps the best-known female artist in Ireland at the time. During this period, he and Grace travel in France and Italy and at various stages in his life she painted portraits of him including a very distinguished looking one of him in his late 60s or early 70s. Their relationship contributes significantly to the separation of Henry from her artist husband Paul Henry in 1930.

During the 1920s, Gwynn also devotes himself to writing, covering political events as Irish correspondent to The Observer and The Times. Later in his career, he writes some substantial works, and together with his son Denis Gwynn (The Life of John Redmond, 1932) does much to shape the retrospective image and self-justification of John Redmond. In the mid-1930s he authors three books with a connecting theme of fishing with the artist Roy Beddington serving as illustrator: The Happy Fisherman (1936), From River to River (1937), and Two in a Valley (1938).

Gwynn is awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the National University of Ireland in 1940, and a Litt.D. by the University of Dublin in 1945. The Irish Academy of Letters awards him the Gregory Medal in April 1950. In his literary writings he stands for a humanism and tolerance, which qualities, due to political upheavals, were relatively rare in the Ireland of his day.

Gwynn dies on June 11, 1950, at his home in Terenure, Dublin, and is buried at Tallaght Cemetery, south County Dublin.

Gwynn marries his cousin Mary Louisa (d. 1941), daughter of Rev. James Gwynn. She later converts to Catholicism. They have three sons and two daughters who are brought up in her religion, of whom Aubrey (1892–1983) becomes a Jesuit priest and professor of medieval history at University College Dublin (UCD). Their second son, Denis Rolleston (1893–1971), is professor of modern Irish history at University College Cork (UCC).

Gwynn’s brother Edward John (1868–1941) becomes provost of Trinity College and another brother Robert Malcolm becomes its senior dean. His sister Lucy Gwynn is the first woman registrar of Trinity. A third brother, Charles, has a successful career in the British Army and retires as a Major General. Younger brothers Lucius and Jack are noted cricketers.


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Death of Joseph Brenan, Poet, Journalist & Author

Joseph Brenan (also Brennan), poet, journalist and author, and leading member of the Young Irelanders and Irish Confederation, dies on May 27, 1857, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Brenan is born in Cork, County Cork, on November 17, 1828. He begins to write verse at an early age and is one of the genuine poets of the Young Ireland movement. His earlier poems are published under the initials “J. B., Cork,” or “J. B—n,” and some of his American verses under the pseudonym “Gondalez.” He is also an able prose writer.

Brenan is an active member of the Cork Historical Society, and is one of the editors of the Cork Magazine, which appears in November 1847, and continues to be published until the end of 1848, when the journal ceases publication. Some of its contributors, who include Frazer, Martin MacDermott, Fitz James O’Brien, Mulchinock and Mary Savage, later either end up in jail or in exile.

In January 1848, John Mitchel visits Cork and, according to Michael Cavanagh, who publishes a sketch of Brenan’s life in Young Ireland, Dublin, in June and July 1885, Brenan for the first time “beheld the man he most admired on earth, and with whose future destiny, whether for weal or woe, he felt his own was bound up. Never had the archenemy of England a more faithful or earnest follower.”

Brenan contributes to the Mitchel’s United Irishman and sells his rifle to obtain train fare so he can take up his residence in Dublin, the headquarters of the revolutionary movement. He later publishes articles in John Martin‘s The Irish Felon urging the Confederate Clubs members, many of whom have arms, to be in readiness for action. “The sooner you realise the fact,” he writes in a letter addressed to the Members of the Provincial Confederate Clubs, “that the Confederation was got up for the purpose of doing something, the better for us all. Just think what it undertook to do. It undertook to defeat the strongest Government and to liberate the most degraded country that ever existed. It undertook to give – to a province—to strike the chains off millions of slaves and, if necessary, to wash out the iron moulds in blood.”

In another letter to “the Young Men of Ireland” on July 22, 1848, he writes, “On you I principally rely. You realise that you are very ‘rash,’ rather inclined to be ‘violent,’ and have exceedingly little prudence to spare. Brothers, let your watchword be ‘Now or never—now and forever’ rashly.”

Brenan is associated with John Savage and John O’Mahony while Savage is operating on the slopes of the Comeragh Mountains. He is arrested and kept in prison for seven months alternately in Newgate Prison, Carrickfergus and Kilmainham Gaols. During his confinement he writes some fine poems, according to T. F. O’Sullivan, one, entitled Yearnings, evidently addressed to Mary Savage, sister of John.

After his release without trial in March 1849, Brenan becomes editor of the Irishman which had been started in Dublin by Bernard Fulham, and for six months attempts to rekindle the insurrectionary flame in the country. He is implicated in the attack on the Cappoquin police barracks on September 16, 1848, and in October escapes to the United States.

In America Brenan becomes associated with a number of journals, including Horace Greeley‘s New-York Tribune, Devin Reilly’s People, The Enquirer of Newark, New Jersey, and the New Orleans Delta in which he writes a series of papers under the pen-name Ben Fox. On August 27, 1851, he marries Mary Savage, in her parents’ house, on Thirteenth Street, New York.

Brenan writes some articles and poems for John Mitchel’s Irish Citizen in 1854. He is an enthusiastic supporter of the Southern cause and founds the New Orleans Times.

Brenan dies on May 27, 1857, at the early age of twenty-nine and is buried in the old French cemetery of New Orleans. During the last year of his life, he is almost totally blind. He is attended in his last illness by Dr. Dalton Williams. There are seven children of his and Mary’s marriage, only one of whom, Florence, survives their parents. She possesses her father’s literary ability but devotes her life to religion as a member of the Mercy Order.

Brenan’s best-known poem, “Come to Me, Dearest,” is addressed to Mary Savage before their marriage. The love story of Brenan and Mary is told in the sketch by Ellen Mary Patrick Downing, afterwards Sister Mary Alphonsus.