seamus dubhghaill

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

Tag Archives: Pseudonym


by Leave a comment

Birth of Uinseann MacEoin, Architect & Republican Campaigner

Uinseann Ó Rathaille MacEoin, Irish architect, journalist, republican campaigner and historian, is born in Pomeroy, County Tyrone, on July 4, 1920.

MacEoin is born Vincent O’Rahilly McGuone to Malachy McGuone, owner of the Central Hotel in Pomeroy and a wine and spirit merchant, and Catherine (née Fox). He has three siblings. Both of his parents are nationalists, and name all their children after leaders of the Easter Rising in 1916. Under the First Dáil in 1918, his father is appointed a judge. This results in him being interned on the prison ship Argenta on Larne Lough from 1922 to 1923. The family moves to Dublin after his release. His father dies in 1933, which leads to his wife running a workingmen’s café in East Essex Street. The family later lives on Marlborough Road, Donnybrook.

MacEoin attends boarding school at Blackrock College and is then articled to the architectural practice of Vincent Kelly in Merrion Square. As an active republican, he lives in a house on Northumberland Road from late 1939 to May 1940 where he helps in the production and distribution of an Irish Republican Army (IRA) weekly newspaper, War News. The IRA is banned by the Irish government in 1936, and its bombing campaign in Britain in 1939 is viewed by the government as a threat to Irish neutrality. MacEoin is among a group of republicans arrested in June 1940 and imprisoned in Arbour Hill Prison for a year. Once released, he is rearrested and interned at the Curragh for three years. He is sentenced to 3-months imprisonment in October 1943 for possession of incriminating documents. He is also charged with possession of ammunition, but testifies he was given the rounds against his will and never appears to have engaged in any violence. During his internment, he is taught the Irish language by Máirtín Ó Cadhain and is exposed to the socialist views of his fellow inmates. It is at this time that he adopts the Irish form of his name, Uinseann MacEoin.

While imprisoned in the 1940s, MacEoin continues his studies by correspondence and qualifies as an architect in 1945 at University College Dublin (UCD). His designs for a memorial garden in 1946 to those who died during the Irish War of Independence are commended. In 1959, he designs the site in Ballyseedy, County Kerry, for a monument by Yann Goulet commemorating those killed in the Irish Civil War and members of the IRA from Kerry who died. In 1948, he qualifies in town planning and takes up a position with Michael Scott‘s architectural practice. He works for a short time with Dublin Corporation, with their housing department, before establishing his own practice in 1955.

During the 1950s, MacEoin is a contributing editor on interior design in Hugh McLaughlin‘s magazine Creation, becoming editor of Irish Architect and Contractor in 1955. He enters into a partnership with Aidan Kelly in 1969 as MacEoin Kelly and Associates. In the early 1970s, he designs a shopping and housing development outside Dundalk, called Ard Easmuinn. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he continues as an influential architectural journalist, founding and editing Build from 1965 to 1969, and later Plan. His company, Pomeroy Press, publishes Plan along with other serials such as Stream and Field. He writes a large proportion of the copy in these periodicals, much under his own name, but he also uses pseudonyms, in particular in Plan as “Michael O’Brien.” He writes about his strong views on social housing, national infrastructure, and foreign and slum landlords, often libelously.

Despite his republican and socialist views, MacEoin is a staunch advocate for the preservation of Georgian Dublin, and campaigns for their preservation. On this topic, he writes letters to newspapers, takes part in television and radio discussions, writes comment pieces and editorials, speaks at public hearings, and takes part in direct protests such as sit-ins in buildings including those on Baggot Street, Pembroke Street, Hume Street, and Molesworth Street. He is also an active member of the Irish Georgian Society, and he campaigns actively against the road widening schemes in Dublin the 1970s and 1980s.

MacEoin and his wife purchase five Georgian houses on Mountjoy Square and three on Henrietta Street in the 1960s, all almost derelict. They refurbish them and lease them out, under the company name Luke Gardiner Ltd. He renames the 5 Henrietta Street property James Bryson House. His architectural practice moves into one of the Mountjoy Square houses. Along with fellow campaigners, Mariga Guinness and Deirdre Kelly, this demonstrates that these buildings can be salvaged and are not the dangerous structures other architects and developers claim them to be. He also purchases and saves Heath House, near Portlaoise, County Laois, living there toward the end of his life. He offers free conservation and architectural advice to community groups and is a volunteer on the renovation works on projects including Tailors’ Hall.

MacEoin remains politically active, joining Clann na Poblachta, the Wolfe Tone Societies (WTS), the Dublin Civic Group, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement. To what extent he is involved in republican or IRA activities after 1945 is not clear. However, in March 1963, he is called a witness to a case in Scotland involving a Glasgow bookmaker by the name of Samuel Docherty and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Docherty claims the bank owes him £50,000. MacEoin testifies that in February 1962 he had travelled with £50,000 in cash from Dublin to lodge to Docherty’s account in the Royal Bank of Scotland in Belfast, as a loan. When asked about the origin of this large sum of money, he states it was supplied by another person but does not divulge that person’s name. This immediately triggers the court’s suspicions, and the judge warns MacEoin he will be contempt of court if he does not name the supplier of the money. He is placed in police custody for the day, and eventually he agrees to give the name in writing in confidence to the judge. The judge ultimately rules that Docherty is guilty of attempted fraud and perjury and that MacEoin’s involvement reeks of criminality. However, no further action is ever brought forward against Docherty or MacEoin.

In Sinn Féin‘s 1971 Éire Nua social and economic programme, MacEoin writes the chapter on “Planning,” and attends meetings in Monaghan in the early 1970s on the Dáil Uladh, a parliament for the 9-county Ulster province. In 1981, during the republican hunger strikes, one of his Mountyjoy Square houses is used as the national headquarters of the National H-Block Committee. Following the 1986 Sinn Féin split, he supports Republican Sinn Féin. He is a founding member of the Constitutional Rights Campaign in 1987, a group which aims to protect the rights of Irish citizens in the European Economic Community (EEC), having campaigned against Ireland joining the EEC in the early 1970s. In 1978, he is sentenced to two weeks in Mountjoy Prison for non-payment of a fine issued for not having a television licence. He had refused to buy one to protest the lack of Irish language programming.

As an environmentalist, MacEoin opposes private car ownership, and advocates for cycleways and the redevelopment of the railway lines. He writes about the “greenhouse effect” as early as 1969. As a hill walker and mountaineer, he claims to be the first Irishman to register successful climbs of all 284 Scottish peaks, known as the Munros, in 1987. He also climbs in the Alps and the Pyrenees.

MacEoin writes three books on his memories, and those of his former comrades: Survivors (1980), on the lives of leading Irish republicans, Harry (1986), a part biography part autobiography of Harry White, and The IRA in the twilight years 1923–48 (1997). He also publishes a novel, Sybil: a tale of innocence (1992) with his publishing house, Argenta, under the name Eoin O’Rahilly. He also interviews and records dozens of Republicans as part of his research for his books. These recordings are later converted into a digital oral history archive held in trust by the Irish Defence Forces.

MacEoin marries Margaret Russell in 1956 in Navan, County Meath. They have a daughter and two sons.

MacEoin dies in a nursing home in Shankill, Dublin, on December 21, 2007. His estate at the time of his death is valued at over €3 million. His son, Nuada, takes over his father’s architectural practice.


by Leave a comment

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.


by Leave a comment

Death of George William Russell, Writer, Critic & Poet

George William Russell, Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, painter and Irish nationalist, dies of cancer in Bournemouth, England, on July 17, 1935.

Russell is born on April 10, 1867, in Lurgan, County Armagh, in what is now Northern Ireland. He writes with the pseudonym Æ (often written AE or A.E.). He is also a writer on mysticism, and a central figure in the group of devotees of theosophy which meets in Dublin for many years. He takes his pseudonym from a proofreader’s query about his earlier pseudonym, “AEon.”

Russell is the second son of Thomas Russell and Mary Armstrong. His father, the son of a small farmer, becomes an employee of Thomas Bell and Co., a prosperous firm of linen drapers. The family relocates to Dublin, where his father has a new offer of employment, when he is eleven years old.

Russell is educated at Rathmines School and the Metropolitan School of Art, where he begins a lifelong, if sometimes contentious, friendship with W. B. Yeats. In the 1880s, he lives at the Theosophical Society lodge at 3 Upper Ely Place, sharing rooms with Hamilton Malcolm Magee, the brother of William Kirkpatrick Magee.

Following his time at the Metropolitan School of Art, Russell becomes an accounts clerk in a drapery store but leaves in 1897 to organize agricultural cooperatives. Eventually he becomes editor of the periodicals Irish Homestead (1905–23) and The Irish Statesman (1923–30). In 1894 he publishes the first of many books of verse, Homeward: Songs by the Way, which establishes him in what is known as the Irish Literary Revival. His first volume of Collected Poems appears in 1913 and a second in 1926. He maintains a lifelong interest in theosophy, the origins of religion, and mystical experience. Candle of Vision: Autobiography of a Mystic (1918) is the best guide to his religious beliefs.

At the turn of the 20th century, Russell is considered by many to be the equal of Yeats, but he does not continue to grow and develop as Yeats does. He is prolific and versatile, but many critics find his poetry facile, vague, and monotonous, with “rather too much of the Celtic Twilight” in it.

Russell designs the famous Starry Plough flag for the Irish Citizen Army, which is unveiled on April 5, 1914, and flown during the Easter Rising in April 1916.

Russell, who had become increasingly unhappy in the Irish Free State which, according to Yeats, he called “a country given over to the Devil,” moves to England soon after his wife’s death in 1932. Despite his failing health he goes on a final lecture tour in the United States but returns home utterly exhausted. He dies of cancer in Bournemouth, England, on July 17, 1935. His body is brought back to Ireland, and he is interred in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Dublin.


by Leave a comment

Birth of Kathleen Cox, Artist, Sculptor & Mystic

Kathleen Cox, Irish artist, sculptor, and mystic, is born Christina Mary Kathleen Cox in Wo-Sung, China, on July 2, 1904. Cox is considered a pioneer of contemporary Irish pottery.

Cox is the eldest daughter of Dr. R. H. Cox, originally from Dundalk, County Louth, and the port health officer in Shanghai. He is also an amateur geologist and models in clay. In his retirement, he invents a periscope later used during World War I by the Royal Navy. The years living in China leave an impression on the young Cox, visually and culturally. The family returns to Ireland in 1911, first moving to Listowel, County Kerry, and later to Howth, County Dublin. She attends Alexandra College, and later the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1921. While there she studies sculpture under Oliver Sheppard and is considered one of his most talented students, winning the Royal Dublin Society Taylor prize for modelling in 1925, 1926, and 1927. The money from these prizes allows Cox to travel to Paris in 1929.

Cox exhibits in 1924 at the Tailteann exhibitions, and in 1925 submits textile designs to the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland. She establishes a pottery studio at 7 Schoolhouse Lane, Dublin, with college friend Stella Rayner in 1929. The studio has the first electric kiln in Ireland. The first exhibited piece by Cox shown by the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) is in 1930, with a pair of Madonna bookends, and portrait masks of the daughter of Dermod O’Brien, Brigid O’Brien, and writer Norris Davidson. Davidson is a friend and neighbour, who commissions her to design the poster for his 1929 film, Suicide. She exhibits with the RHA from 1931 to 1933, and the Tailteann 1932, while also holding exhibitions in her studio. During this period Hilda Roberts paints her portrait, Strange Spirit. Kathleen Cox in her studio. The theme of womanhood is prominent in her work, including in the sign of her studio.

In 1932, Cox begins producing a line of more commercial figurines, drawing influence from the Royal Doulton Burslem factory, where she works for a time. One such figurine is The Lavender Man (pictured), modelled on Michael Clifford, a Dublin street trader. In the mid 1930s, she develops a frustration with her work and with her lack of impact on the wider world. In attending the Chinese exhibition in London in 1935, it is confirmed to her that pottery should be practical rather than ornamental. It spurs her to destroy all her moulds and sell her kiln upon her return to Dublin.

Cox marries Alan Palmer in 1937, the couple has two daughters and relocate to England. Palmer is a conscientious objector during World War II, with the couple running a farm at Meopham, Kent, returning to London after the war.

Cox dies in early September 1972 in London. Some of her work is held in the collections of the National Museum of Ireland and with four works featured in the exhibition Not Just Pots: Contemporary Irish Ceramics of the 21st Century.

It is during the 1920s that Cox begins to question mainstream religion and becomes a vegetarian. Finding that her personal philosophy is similar to that of theosophy, she joins the movement and speaks at meetings. She is heavily influenced by the founder of the Order of the Great Companions, the Rev. William Hayes, who is living in Dublin in the 1930s. She writes and illustrates a children’s book on world religions, A story of stories, which she publishes under the pseudonym C.M. Kay in 1970.


by Leave a comment

Birth of Patrick Campbell, 3rd Baron Glenavy

Patrick Gordon Campbell, 3rd Baron Glenavy, Irish journalist, humorist and television personality, is born in Dublin on June 6, 1913. He writes sixteen books, including Life in Thin Slices, Rough Husbandry, and How to Become a Scratch Golfer.

Campbell is the first son of Charles Campbell, 2nd Baron Glenavy, and Beatrice, Lady Glenavy (the artist Beatrice Elvery). He is educated Crawley’s preparatory school (St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin), Castle Park preparatory school (Dalkey), Rossall School (Lancashire), and, briefly, Pembroke College, Oxford. He leaves Oxford without completing his degree. In 1935, he is taken on by The Irish Times by R. M. “Bertie” Smyllie and reports on “Courts Day by Day.” During World War II, he serves as a chief petty officer in the Irish Marine Service. After the war he re-joins The Irish Times, using the pseudonym “Quidnunc,” and is given charge of the column “Irishman’s Diary.” He has a weekly column for the Irish edition of the Sunday Dispatch before working on the paper in London from 1947 to 1949. He is assistant editor of Lilliput from 1947 to 1953. His writings also appear in The Sunday Times.

Campbell’s books, mostly collections of humorous pieces that were originally published in newspapers and magazines, include A Long Drink of Cold Water (1949), A Short Trot with a Cultured Mind (1950), An Irishman’s Diary (1950), Life in Thin Slices (1951), Patrick Campbell’s Omnibus (1954), Come Here Till I Tell You (1960), Constantly in Pursuit (1962), How to Become a Scratch Golfer (1963), Brewing Up in the Basement (1963), Rough Husbandry (1965), The P-P-Penguin Patrick Campbell (1965), All Ways on Sundays (1966), A Bunch of New Roses (1967), an autobiography My Life and Easy Times (1967), The Coarse of Events (1968), Gullible Travels (1969), The High Speed Gasworks (1970), Waving All Excuses (1971), Patrick Campbell’s Golfing Book (1972), Fat Tuesday Tails (1972), 35 Years on the Job (1973), and The Campbell Companion (1987). Many of his books are illustrated by Quentin Blake.

Campbell is married three times, first in 1941 to Sylvia Alfreda Willoughby Lee, whom he divorces in 1947. He then marries Chery Louise Munro in 1947. The two divorce in 1966, the year he marries Vivienne Orme.

Campbell speaks with a stammer, but nevertheless delights television audiences with his wit, notably as a regular team captain on the long-running show Call My Bluff, opposite his longtime friend, Frank Muir. Muir notes that “When he was locked solid by a troublesome initial letter he would show his frustration by banging his knee and muttering ‘Come along! Come along!'” Some of his funniest short stories describe incidents involving his stammer. He stands six feet five inches tall, and several of his funniest pieces deal with the problems faced by a man of his build in merely finding shoes or clothes that fit him. He also makes regular appearances in That Was The Week That Was.

Campbell lives for many years in the South of France, commuting to England for his television work and continuing to produce his weekly column in The Sunday Times, which he drops in 1978.

In 1972 a period of illness leads to the discovery that Campbell had suffered an undetected heart attack some years previously and has a permanent heart weakness. An attack of viral pneumonia in 1980 exacerbates this condition, and he dies suddenly on November 9, 1980 while talking to a nurse at University College Hospital, London. He is succeeded as the 4th and last Lord Glenavy by his novelist brother Michael.


by Leave a comment

Birth of Novelist Pamela Hinkson

Pamela Hinkson, novelist, is born on November 19, 1900, in Ealing, London, England, the only daughter among five children of Katharine Tynan Hinkson, novelist and poet, and Henry Albert Hinkson, a novelist, barrister, and classical scholar.

Married in 1893, Hinkson’s parents initially settle in England, where he studies law and is called to the Inner Temple in 1902. After suffering the loss of their first two sons in infancy, they have two more sons in addition to their daughter, Pamela. During this time her mother earns the main family income, and it is likely that she determines their return to Ireland in 1911. The Hinksons initially settle in Dalkey, County Dublin, before moving to a house called Clarebeg in Shankill. When Henry Hinkson is appointed resident magistrate for south Mayo (Castlebar) in October 1914, the family moves to Claremorris, County Mayo.

Hinkson is educated privately in England and on the Continent, and in Ireland attends a local convent day-school. She is exposed to her mother’s literary milieu which includes prominent writers of the Irish revival, including George William Russell, James Stephens, and Padraic Colum. Her mother’s memoir, The Years of the Shadow (1919), recalls Pamela’s developing talent for writing poetry and her predilection for war themes, as evidenced by The Blind Soldier, one of her first published poems. By the time she turns her hand to short stories, her earnings from writing enable her to buy the latest fashions.

Two key events that consumed Hinkson’s life and later spark her creativity are World War I and the Easter Rising. H. G. Wells describes in the foreword to his war novel Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916) a conversation he had with her when she was 12, recalling how she had boldly set him straight on the “Irish question.” Her parents send her away to boarding school in County Wicklow in the hope that she will be distracted from her gloomy preoccupations, which are accentuated by the absence of her brothers, serving in the British Army. After the war she is deeply concerned by the redundancy experienced by demobilised and often maimed soldiers and contributes to the welfare work of the Irish servicemen’s Shamrock Club in London. These issues inform two early novels, The Victors (1925) and Harvest (1926), both written in the guise of an ex-serviceman under the pseudonym “Peter Deane.” By masking her identity, she avoids the possibility of her works being discredited because of her gender and lack of first-hand experience of war. Subsequently she writes under her own name for thirty years.

In contrast to her close relationship with her mother, Hinkson deeply dislikes her father. With the exception of her beloved brother Giles A. Hinckson, a correspondent for The Times in Buenos Aires and Santiago, she never meets a man who matches her high ideals. Though briefly engaged to be married, she is ultimately disillusioned by all men, dismissing them as she had her father. After his death early in 1919, she and her mother are left in financial difficulties, and have to resort to friends and boarding houses for accommodation. Without the financial means to embark on a university degree, she remains at her mother’s side. Though she continues to write, she leads a somewhat stifled life. From 1922 onwards they spend several years on the Continent.

Hinkson’s first novel, The End of All Dreams (1923), addresses the decline of the “big house” amid the revolutionary upheavals of recent Irish history, a theme to which she returns in later works, such as The Deeply Rooted (1935) and her last book, The Lonely Bride (1951). During the 1920s she writes much girls’ school fiction, while her novel Wind from the West (1930) is informed by a period spent in France, where she works as a governess. Her transcription of the memoirs of Lady Fingall (Elizabeth Burke-Plunkett), published under the title Seventy Years Young (1937), illustrates the decline of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. Informed by war and the Irish troubles, her novels characteristically are solemn, and reflect her ambivalent relationship with Ireland. Inspired by the Irish landscape, but never an ardent supporter of Irish independence, she maintains an abiding attachment to England.

The death of Hinkson’s mother in 1931 is a devastating blow that triggers her most forceful and first truly successful novel, The Ladies’ Road (1932). Documenting the lives of the Irish and English ascendancies before, during, and after World War I, this novel, without being explicitly autobiographical, contains many motifs that resonate with her own life story. When published in the United States in 1946 it proves a massive success, selling 100,000 copies in the Penguin Books edition, a rare feat for a World War I novel appearing immediately after World War II. Other notable works are The Light on Ireland (1935) and her sketches of Irish life, Irish Gold (1939), written while she lodges with friends near Lough Derg, County Tipperary.

Hinkson’s visit to India in the late 1930s as a guest of the viceroy, which she recounts in Indian Harvest (1941), results in her appointment to the Ministry of Information in London (1939–45). She lectures on India in the United States during World War II, and also lectures to British troops and local audiences in Germany (1946–47), broadcasts on radio, and contributes to The Observer, The Spectator, New Statesman, The Manchester Guardian, and Time and Tide. Her novel Golden Rose (1944), written in London during The Blitz, romanticises the British colonial presence in India. Forthright in the expression of her numerous strongly held opinions, she argues ardently and controversially for women’s rights, animal welfare, and retention of Northern Ireland in the UK. Devout in her Catholicism, she is none the less critical of certain Catholic precepts.

Hinkson returns to Ireland in 1959 where she suffers poor health for twenty years until her death in Dublin on May 26, 1982.

(From: “Hinkson, Pamela” by Jessica March, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie)


by Leave a comment

Birth of Charlotte O’Conor Eccles, Writer, Translator & Journalist

Charlotte O’Conor Eccles, Irish writer, translator and journalist, is born in County Roscommon on November 1, 1863. She spends her working life in London. Aliens of the West (1904) is said to be among “the best modern books of short stories on Ireland yet written.”

Eccles is the fourth daughter of Alexander O’Conor Eccles of Ballingard House, the founder of a home-rule newspaper, The Roscommon Messenger. She attends a Catholic grammar school, Upton Hall School FCJ, near Birkenhead and convents in Paris and Germany.

Eccles later lives in London with her mother and sister where, after a number of setbacks, she becomes a journalist in the London office of the New York Herald. She goes on to become a staff member of the Daily Chronicle and the Star. She comments in an article in the June 1893 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine on “the immense difficulty a woman finds in getting into an office in any recognised capacity,”

Eccles joins the agricultural reformer Sir Horace Plunkett in writing and lecturing around Ireland for the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction. Another of her Blackwood’s Magazine articles, in December 1888, covers “Irish Housekeeping and Irish Customs in the Last Century.”

Her first novel, The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore (Jarrold & Sons, 1897), is published in 1897 under the male pseudonym Hal Godfrey: “This hilarious novel tells of a middle-aged woman who drinks too much of an elixir of youth, causing pandemonium in the…boarding-house where she lives with her sister.” She also contributes to a number of periodicals, including the Irish Monthly, The Pall Mall Magazine, the American Ecclesiastical Review and The Windsor Magazine.

Eccles’s other books include Aliens of the West (Cassell, 1904) and The Matrimonial Lottery (Eveleigh Nash, 1906). An obituary in The Times describes Aliens of the West as “one of the best modern books of short stories on Ireland yet written.”

Eccles dies unmarried on June 14, 1911, at her home in St. John’s Wood, London, of cerebral thrombosis after a reported nervous breakdown.


by Leave a comment

Birth of Charles Maturin, Clergyman, Playwright & Novelist

Charles Robert Maturin, also known as C. R. Maturin, an Irish Protestant clergyman ordained in the Church of Ireland and a writer of Gothic plays and novels, is born in Dublin on September 25, 1780. His best-known work is the novel Melmoth the Wanderer.

Maturin is descended from Huguenots who found shelter in Ireland, one of whom is Gabriel Jacques Maturin who becomes Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, after Jonathan Swift in 1745. He attends Trinity College Dublin. Shortly after being ordained as curate of Loughrea, County Galway, in 1803, he moves back to Dublin as curate of St. Peter’s Church. He lives in York Street with his father William, a Post Office official, and his mother, Fedelia Watson. He marries the acclaimed singer Henrietta Kingsbury on October 7, 1804.

Maturin’s first three works are Gothic novels published under the pseudonym Dennis Jasper Murphy and are critical and commercial failures. They do, however, catch the attention of Sir Walter Scott, who recommends Maturin’s work to Lord Byron. With their help, his play Bertram is staged in 1816 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane for 22 nights, with Edmund Kean starring in the lead role as Bertram. Financial success, however, eludes Maturin, as the play’s run coincides with his father’s unemployment and another relative’s bankruptcy, both of them assisted by the fledgling writer. To make matters worse, Samuel Taylor Coleridge publicly denounces the play as dull and loathsome, and “melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind,” going nearly so far as to decry it as atheistic.

The Church of Ireland takes note of these and earlier criticisms and, having discovered the identity of Bertram‘s author after Maturin had shed his nom de plume to collect the profits from the play, subsequently bar his further clerical advancement. Forced to support his wife and four children by writing on his curate salary of £80-90 per annum, compared to the £1000 he made for Bertram, he switches back from playwright to novelist after a string of his plays meet with failure. He produces several novels in addition to Melmoth the Wanderer, including some on Irish subjects and The Albigenses, a historical novel which features werewolves. Various poems have also been ascribed to Maturin on dubious grounds and appear to be the work of others. The prize-winning “Lines on the Battle of Waterloo” is published in 1816 under the name of the university graduate John Shee. “The Universe” appears with Maturin’s name on the title page in 1821 but is now thought to be almost completely the work of James Wills.

The exaggerated effectiveness of Maturin’s preaching can be gauged from the two series of sermons that he publishes. On the occasion of the death of Princess Charlotte, he declares, “Life is full of death; the steps of the living cannot press the earth without disturbing the ashes of the dead – we walk upon our ancestors – the globe itself is one vast churchyard.” A contemporary account records that there had seldom been seen such crowds at St Peter’s. “Despite the severe weather, people of all persuasions flocked to the church and listened spellbound to this prince of preachers. In his obituary it is said that ‘did he leave no other monument whereon to rest his fame, these sermons alone would be sufficient.'”

Maturin dies in Dublin on October 30, 1824. A writer in the University Magazine later sums up his character as “eccentric almost to insanity and compounded of opposites – an insatiable reader of novels; an elegant preacher; an incessant dancer; a coxcomb in dress and manners.”

A sister of Maturin’s wife marries Charles Elgee, whose daughter, Jane Francesca, becomes the mother of Oscar Wilde. Thus, Charles Maturin is Oscar Wilde’s great-uncle by marriage. Wilde discards his own name and adopts the name of Maturin’s novel, Melmoth, during his exile in France.

Maturin’s eldest son, William Basil Kingsbury Maturin, follows him into the ministry, as do several of his grandsons. One of these, Basil W. Maturin, dies in the sinking of RMS Lusitania on May 7, 1915. The second son is Edward Maturin, who emigrates to the United States and becomes a novelist and poet there.


by Leave a comment

Birth of George William Russell, Writer, Poet & Nationalist

George William Russell, Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, painter and Irish nationalist, is born on April 10, 1867, in Lurgan, County Armagh, in what is now Northern Ireland. He writes with the pseudonym Æ (often written AE or A.E.). He is also a writer on mysticism, and a central figure in the group of devotees of theosophy which meets in Dublin for many years. He takes his pseudonym from a proofreader’s query about his earlier pseudonym, “AEon.”

Russell is the second son of Thomas Russell and Mary Armstrong. His father, the son of a small farmer, becomes an employee of Thomas Bell and Co., a prosperous firm of linen drapers. The family relocates to Dublin, where his father has a new offer of employment, when he is eleven years old.

Russell is educated at Rathmines School and the Metropolitan School of Art, where he begins a lifelong, if sometimes contentious, friendship with W. B. Yeats. In the 1880s, he lives at the Theosophical Society lodge at 3 Upper Ely Place, sharing rooms with Hamilton Malcolm Magee, the brother of William Kirkpatrick Magee.

Following his time at the Metropolitan School of Art, Russell becomes an accounts clerk in a drapery store but leaves in 1897 to organize agricultural cooperatives. Eventually he becomes editor of the periodicals Irish Homestead (1905–23) and The Irish Statesman (1923–30). In 1894 he publishes the first of many books of verse, Homeward: Songs by the Way, which establishes him in what is known as the Irish Literary Revival. His first volume of Collected Poems appears in 1913 and a second in 1926. He maintains a lifelong interest in theosophy, the origins of religion, and mystical experience. Candle of Vision: Autobiography of a Mystic (1918) is the best guide to his religious beliefs.

At the turn of the 20th century, Russell is considered by many to be the equal of Yeats, but he does not continue to grow and develop as Yeats does. He is prolific and versatile, but many critics find his poetry facile, vague, and monotonous, with “rather too much of the Celtic Twilight” in it.

Russell designs the famous Starry Plough flag for the Irish Citizen Army, which is unveiled on April 5, 1914, and flown during the Easter Rising in April 1916.

Russell, who had become increasingly unhappy in the Irish Free State which, according to Yeats, he called “a country given over to the Devil,” moves to England soon after his wife’s death in 1932. Despite his failing health he goes on a final lecture tour in the United States but returns home utterly exhausted. He dies of cancer in Bournemouth, England, on July 17, 1935. His body is brought back to Ireland, and he is interred in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Dublin.


by Leave a comment

Death of Brinsley MacNamara, Writer & Playwright

John Weldon (alternatively “A. E. Weldon”), Irish writer, playwright, and the registrar of the National Gallery of Ireland, dies in Dublin on February 4, 1963. He adopts the pseudonym ‘Brinsley MacNamara,’ the first name deriving from Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the second from a relative on his mother’s side, and uses it throughout his subsequent career as novelist and playwright.

Weldon is born on September 6, 1890, in Hiskinstown, Delvin, County Westmeath, the eldest son of James Weldon, a schoolteacher, originally of Ballinea, Mullingar, and Fanny Weldon (née Duncan). He attends his father’s school at Delvin until he is eighteen, and the relationship between father and son is to remain rather formal and strict.

Stimulated by the visiting fit-up theatrical companies and of news from Dublin of the Abbey Theatre, in September 1908 he takes the lead in a local staging of a political melodrama, Robert Emmet by Henry C. Mangan. The following summer he leaves for Dublin, ostensibly to become a civil servant but in fact to audition as an actor at the Abbey Theatre. His acting career with the Abbey Theatre begins in September 1910 with a role in R. J. Ryan’s The Casting-out of Martin Whelan.

MacNamara is the author of several novels, the most well-known of which is his first, The Valley of the Squinting Windows (1918), its title a byword for small-town hypocrisy and begrudgery. The work itself is an uneasy fusion of a satiric portrait of gossipy, prying women and dipsomaniacally drinking men with a naturalist tragedy in which the sins of the past repeat themselves in the lives of the younger characters. The novel’s frank treatment of sexual matters is eclipsed as a cause of offence by the unflattering portrayal of almost all the inhabitants of the fictional village called Garradrimna, a place that local people feel would be automatically identified as Delvin. In the ensuing controversy the novelist’s father, James Weldon (widely suspected of being the author), and his school are subject to boycott. His attempts to seek legal redress in 1923 are unsuccessful.

MacNamara continues to write for many years after this controversial first work, and locates most of his later fiction in Garradrimna, in the Irish Midlands. Among his plays are The Glorious Uncertainty (1923) and Look at the Heffernans! (1926). His work is part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris.

In 1925 McNamara is appointed registrar to the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, a position he holds until his retirement in 1960. In 1932 he becomes one of the first members of the Irish Academy of Letters, and in 1935 joins the board of directors of the Abbey Theatre.

MacNamara marries Helena Degidon, a schoolteacher, in 1920. His later years are dogged by increasing ill health and he dies at Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital, Dublin, on February 4, 1963.