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

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Birth of Bethel Solomons, Medical Doctor & Rugby Player

Bethel Albert Herbert Solomons, gynaecologist and international rugby player for the Ireland national rugby union team, is born into a prominent Jewish family, one of the oldest continuous Jewish families in Ireland, at 32 Waterloo Road, Dublin, on February 27, 1885. He is also a supporter of the 1916 Easter Rising.

The Solomons come to Ireland from England in 1824. Solomons is the son of Maurice Solomons (1832–1922), an optician whose practice is mentioned in James Joyce‘s Ulysses. His grandmother, Rosa Jacobs Solomons (1833–1926), is born in Hull in England. His elder brother Edwin (1879–1964) is a stockbroker and prominent member of the Dublin Jewish community. His sister Estella Solomons (1882–1968) is a leading artist, and a member of Cumann na mBan during the 1916 Easter Rising. She marries poet and publisher Seumas O’Sullivan. His younger sister Sophie is a trained opera singer.

Solomons attends St. Andrew’s College, Dublin, where he is very interested in rugby. He earns ten international rugby caps for Ireland between 1908 and 1910. He studies medicine at Trinity College, Dublin, becomes a medical doctor, and is Master of the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin from 1926 to 1933, surprising those who felt that a Jew would never hold the post. When his term ends in 1933, his name is intimately linked with that of the hospital when James Joyce writes in Finnegans Wake, “in my bethel of Solyman’s I accouched my rotundaties.” He serves as president of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI) in the late 1940s and practices from No. 30 Lower Baggot Street.

In a biography of Solomons he is described as “World famous obstetrician & gynaecologist, Rugby international, horseman, leader of Liberal Jewry & of Irish literary & artistic renaissance.”

Following a brief courtship, Solomons marries Gertrude Levy, who had studied with his sister Sophie at the Royal Academy of Music, London, in the liberal synagogue in London in 1916. His second son, Dr. Michael Solomons (1919–2007), is a distinguished gynaecologist, a pioneer of family planning in Ireland, and a veteran of the bitter and divisive 1983 constitutional amendment campaign.

Solomons is a friend of the founder of Sinn Féin and TD, Arthur Griffith. He contributes to the purchase of a house for Griffith. He is a founding member and the first president of the Liberal Synagogue in Dublin. He establishes a dispensary for Jewish women with Ada Shillman. In retirement he is inspector of qualifying examinations and visitor of medical schools in midwifery for the general medical council. A volume of memoirs is published in 1956. He is an art collector, including the works of Jean Cooke.

Solomons dies on September 11, 1965, at his home, Laughton Beg, Rochestown Avenue, Dún Laoghaire. The Bethel Solomons medal is awarded annually to an outstanding student in midwifery at the hospital.


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Birth of Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, First Honorary Citizen of Ireland

Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, mining engineer, philanthropist, art collector, and the first honorary citizen of Ireland (1957), is born in New York, New York, United States on February 7, 1875 on the site of what is now Rockefeller Center. He plays an important role in the development of copper deposits in Central Africa.

Beatty is the youngest of three sons born to Hetty and John Beatty, a banker and stockbroker. After studying engineering at the Columbia School of Mines and Princeton University, he helps to develop porphyry copper ores in the United States, first as a consulting engineer and later as a director on the boards of several copper-mining firms. In 1913 he relinquishes his mining interests in the United States and settles in Great Britain, becoming a naturalized British subject in 1933. In 1921 he forms a prospecting company that initiates the development of the Copperbelt region of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). For this, he becomes known as the “King of Copper.”

An early family anecdote recalls that, as a young boy, Beatty catches the collection bug, bidding at auction for mining samples. In 1931 an announcement in London‘s The Times casts him as a great collector. Between 1939 and 1949 he acquires over 140 nineteenth-century paintings to display in the Picture Gallery of his London home. These are now part of the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland.

Beatty supports the war effort, contributing a large amount of raw materials to the Allies. He receives a belated knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II in the 1954 Birthday Honours list for his contribution to the wartime effort. By the late 1940s, however, he has become disillusioned with Britain. Political deviations from his free-market values, coupled with increased foreign exchange restrictions impacted both his personal and collecting interests in Britain.

In 1950, at the age of 75, Beattys over the reins of Selection Trust to his son Chester Jr. and relocates to Dublin. He purchases a large townhouse for himself on Ailesbury Road, in the Ballsbridge area of Dublin and a site on Shrewsbury Road for the construction of the Chester Beatty Library, which houses the collection, opening on August 8, 1953. The library is moved to its current location at Dublin Castle in 2000.

Beatty spends the remainder of his life between Dublin and the south of France. He is made a Freeman of the City of Dublin in 1954 and is the first person granted honorary citizenship of Ireland in 1957. He continues to collect in the 1950s and 1960s, acquiring important Ethiopian manuscripts and Japanese printed material during that period.

Beatty dies in Monte Carlo in Monaco on January 19, 1968. His Irish estate is valued at £7 million. He is accorded a state funeral by the Irish government, the first private citizen in Irish history to receive such an honour. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.


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Birth of John Miller Andrews, 2nd Prime Minister of Northern Ireland

john-miller-andrewsJohn Miller Andrews, the second Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, is born in Comber, County Down on July 17, 1871. He is the eldest child in the family of four sons and one daughter of Thomas Andrews, flax spinner, and his wife Eliza Pirrie, a sister of William Pirrie, 1st Viscount Pirrie, chairman of Harland and Wolff. He is named after his maternal great-uncle, John Miller of Comber (1795–1883).

Andrews is educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. In business, Andrews is a landowner, a director of his family linen-bleaching company and of the Belfast Ropeworks. His younger brother, Thomas Andrews, who dies in the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic, served as managing director of the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. Another brother, Sir James Andrews, 1st Baronet, was Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland.

In 1902 Andrews marries Jessie, eldest daughter of Bolton stockbroker Joseph Ormrod at Rivington Unitarian Chapel, Rivington, near Chorley, Lancashire, England. They have one son and two daughters. His younger brother, Sir James, marries Jessie’s sister.

Andrews is elected as a member of parliament in the House of Commons of Northern Ireland, sitting from 1921 until 1953 (for Down from 1921–29 and for Mid Down from 1929–1953). He is a founder member of the Ulster Unionist Labour Association, which he chairs, and is Minister of Labour from 1921 to 1937. He is Minister of Finance from 1937 to 1940, succeeding to the position on the death of Hugh MacDowell Pollock. Upon the death of James Craig, 1st Viscount Craigavon in 1940, he becomes leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and the second Prime Minister of Northern Ireland.

In April 1943 backbench dissent forces Andrews from office. He is replaced as Prime Minister by Basil Brooke, 1st Viscount Brookeborough. He remains, however, the recognised leader of the UUP for a further three years. Five years later he becomes the Grand Master of the Orange Order. From 1949, he is the last parliamentary survivor of the original 1921 Northern Ireland Parliament, and as such is recognised as the Father of the House. He is the only Prime Minister of Northern Ireland not to have been granted a peerage. His predecessor and successor receive hereditary viscountcies, and later prime ministers are granted life peerages.

Throughout his life Andrews is deeply involved in the Orange Order. He holds the positions of Grand Master of County Down from 1941 and Grand Master of Ireland (1948–1954). In 1949 he is appointed Imperial Grand Master of the Grand Orange Council of the World.

Andrews is a committed and active member of the Non-subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland. He regularly attends Sunday worship, in the church built on land donated by his great-grandfather, James Andrews, in his hometown Comber. He serves on the Comber Congregational Committee from 1896 until his death on August 5, 1956, holding the position of Chairman from 1935 onwards. He is buried in the small graveyard adjoining the church.


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First Horse-Drawn Coach Service in Ireland

charles-bianconiCharles Bianconi, Italo-Irish entrepreneur, opens his first horse-drawn coach service, between Clonmel and Cahir, County Tipperary, a distance of 10 miles, on July 6, 1815.

Born Carlo Bianconi, in Tregolo, Costa Masnaga, Italy on September 24, 1786, he moves from an area poised to fall to Napoleon and travels to Ireland via England in 1802, just four years after the Irish Rebellion of 1798. At the time, British fear of continental invasion results in an acute sense of insecurity and additional restrictions on the admission of foreigners. He is christened Carlo but anglicises his name to Charles when he arrives in Ireland in 1802.

At the age of 16, Bianconi works as an engraver and printseller in Dublin, near Essex Street, under his sponsor, Andrea Faroni. In 1806 he sets up an engraving and print shop in Carrick-on-Suir, moving to Clonmel in 1815.

Bianconi eventually becomes famous for his innovations in transport and is twice elected mayor of Clonmel. He is the founder of public transportation in Ireland, at a time preceding railways. He establishes regular horse-drawn carriage services on various routes beginning in 1815. These are known as “Bianconi coaches” and the first service, Clonmel to Cahir, which takes five to eight hours by boat, takes only two hours by Bianconi’s carriage. Travel on a coach costs one penny farthing a mile.

Bianconi’s carriage services continue into the 1850s and later, by which time there are a number of railway services in the country. The Bianconi coaches continue to be well-patronised, by offering connections from various termini, one of the first and few examples of an integrated transport system in Ireland. By 1865 Bianconi’s annual income is about £35,000.

Bianconi also establishes a series of inns, the Bianconi Inns, some of which still exist; in Piltown, County Kilkenny and Killorglin, County Kerry.

In 1832 Bianconi marries Eliza Hayes, the daughter of a wealthy Dublin stockbroker. They have three children. Bianconi dies on September 22, 1875 at Longfield House, Boherlahan, County Tipperary.

Having donated land to the parish of Boherlahan for the construction of a parish church, Bianconi wishes to be buried on the Church grounds. He, and his family, are buried in a side chapel, separate from the parish church in Boherlahan, approximately 5 miles from Cashel, County Tipperary.