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

Tag Archives: Taney Parish (Dublin)


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Birth of Mervyn Archdall, Antiquarian & Church of Ireland Clergyman

Mervyn Archdall, Irish antiquarian and clergyman of the Church of Ireland, is born on April 22, 1723, in Dublin, elder son among two sons and three daughters of William Archdall, goldsmith, and his wife Henrietta, a widow who is the daughter of Henry Gonne, curate of Finglas. His father is Dublin assay master from 1736 until his death in 1751, and is a member of the gentry family from Castle Archdale, County Fermanagh.

Archdall is educated by Dr. Keenane, and enters Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 1739. He graduates with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in 1744 and a Master of Arts (MA) in 1747, and is ordained in the Church of Ireland. He is curate of Howth from 1750 to 1753, and of Kilgobbin and Taney, also in Dublin, from 1753 to 1758, rector of Nathlash in the diocese of Cloyne from 1749 to 1758, and from 1756 domestic chaplain to Richard Pococke, Bishop of Ossory. In 1761 Pococke gives Archdall the livings of Agharney and Attanagh in Ossory which he holds until 1786, when he becomes rector of Slane in the Diocese of Meath. He is also prebendary of Cloneamary from 1762 to 1764 and of Mayne from 1764 to 1772, both in Ossory.

Archdall is interested, almost from his student days, in ancient history and antiquities, and for forty years he gathers material for a work similar to an earlier compilation, William Dugdale‘s Monasticon Anglicanum. He intends to publish two or more large folio volumes, but after Pococke’s death has no sponsor and has to pay for its publication himself causing him to cut back the scale of the project. Monasticon Hibernicum appears in 1786 as a quarto volume, though still of over 800 pages. Archdall attempts encyclopaedic coverage of the history of Ireland’s pre-reformation monasteries and abbeys. The work is ground-breaking and ambitious, though marred by mistakes and inadequacies. He receives help from friends, including scholars such as Pococke and Edward Ledwich, and with them and others is a founder member of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) in 1786.

In 1789, Archdall publishes his second important work, a new edition of The Peerage of Ireland by John Lodge. Lodge’s original work in four volumes is expanded by Archdall into seven octavos, adding a good deal of material from his own research to update the genealogies, as well as incorporating manuscript additions unpublished by the original author. These had been left in a cipher or in a private form of shorthand which could not be decoded by any contemporary expert in Dublin, and Archdall is just about to abandon the attempt to read them when his second wife works on it and discovers the key.

Archdall’s first wife, Sarah Colles or Collis, whom he marries in Dublin on July 30, 1747, is said to have been a relative of Thomas Prior, though she may also – or instead – have been connected in some way to Pococke. The bishop is known to have educated Christopher Colles (1739–1816), who becomes an important engineer and entrepreneur in the United States. They have two sons and a daughter, the elder son dying young. Sarah dies on May 28, 1782. Archdall marries his second wife, Abigail Young, on November 25, 1782.

Archdall’s works are still of interest to historians and genealogists, and surviving copies are valuable collectors’ items. In an apologia in his preface to the Peerage he notes, “I have left that inaccurate which could not be exact, and that imperfect which cannot be completed.” He dies suddenly on August 6, 1791, and is buried in Slane churchyard.

(From: “Archdall, Mervyn” by Linde Lunney, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Birth of Evie Hone, Painter & Stained Glass Artist

Eva Sydney Hone RHA, Irish painter and stained glass artist usually known as Evie, is born at Roebuck Grove, County Dublin, on April 22, 1894. She is considered to be an early pioneer of cubism, although her best known works are stained glass. Her most notable pieces are the East Window in the Chapel at Eton College, which depicts the Crucifixion, and My Four Green Fields, which is now in the Government Buildings in Dublin.

Hone is the youngest daughter of Joseph Hone, of the Hone family, and Eva Eleanor (née Robinson), daughter of Sir Henry Robinson and granddaughter of Arthur Annesley, 10th Viscount Valentia. Her mother dies two days after her birth. She is related to artists Nathaniel Hone and Nathaniel Hone the Younger.

Shortly before her twelfth birthday, Hone suffers from polio (infant paralysis), suffering a fall while helping to decorate the Taney parish church for Easter. Her resulting ill health leads to her seeking treatment in Harley Street, Marylebone, Central London. She is educated by a governess, continuing her education in Switzerland, and goes on tours to Spain and Italy before moving to London in 1913. Her three sisters all marry British Army officers, and all are widowed in World War I.

Hone studies at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London and then under Bernard Meninsky at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. She meets Mainie Jellett when both are studying under Walter Sickert at the Westminster Technical Institute. She works under André Lhote and Albert Gleizes in Paris before returning to become influential in the modern movement in Ireland and becoming one of the founders of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. She is considered an early pioneer of Cubism but in the 1930s turns to stained glass, which she studies with Wilhelmina Geddes.

Hone is extremely devout. She spends time in an Anglican Convent in 1925 at Truro in Cornwall and converts to Catholicism in 1937. This possibly influences her decision to begin working in stained glass. Initially, she works as a member of the An Túr Gloine stained glass co-operative before setting up a studio of her own in Rathfarnham.

Hone’s most important works are probably the East Window, depicting the Crucifixion, for the Chapel at Eton College, Windsor (1949–1952) and My Four Green Fields, now located in Government Buildings, Dublin. This latter work, commissioned for the Irish Government’s Pavilion, wins first prize for stained glass in the 1939 New York World’s Fair. It graces CIÉ‘s Head Office in O’Connell Street from 1960 to about 1983. The East Window of Eton College is commissioned following the destruction of the building after a bomb is dropped in 1940 on the school during World War II. She is commissioned to design the East Window in 1949, and the new window is inserted in 1952. This work is featured on an Irish postage stamp in 1969. From December 2005 to June 2006, an exhibition of her work is on display at the National Gallery of Ireland. Saint Mary’s church in Clonsilla also features her stained glass windows.

Despite ill health, Hone continues to produce a huge number of small stained glass panels as well as oils, watercolours, and gouache landscapes. In 1953, she is represented at the Contemporary Irish Art exhibition at Aberystwyth, Wales, and at the Tate gallery in London, receiving as well an honorary LLD from Trinity College Dublin (TCD). In 1954, she is elected an honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA).

Unmarried, Hone dies on March 13, 1955, while entering her parish church at Rathfarnham. She is survived by two of her sisters. Over 20,000 people visit a memorial exhibition of her work at University College Dublin (UCD), Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin, in 1958.

(Pictured: Portrait of Evie Hone by Hilda van Stockum)


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Birth of Henry Grattan Guinness, Evangelist & Author

henry-grattan-guinness

Henry Grattan Guinness, Irish Protestant Christian preacher, evangelist, and author, is born in Kingstown in Taney Parish, Dublin, on August 11, 1835. He is the great evangelist of the Evangelical awakening and preaches during the Ulster Revival of 1859 which draws thousands to hear him. He is responsible for training and sending hundreds of “faith missionaries” all over the world.

Guinness begins preaching in 1855. He offers to join the China Inland Mission founded by James Hudson Taylor in 1865 but takes Taylor’s advice to continue his work in London.

In September 1866, while in Keighley, Yorkshire, Guinness sees a notice advertising a series of lectures by the freethinker and communist Harriet Law. For a week he holds a series of meetings at the same time to try to counteract her influence. He is appalled at the “scoffing unbelief” of such speakers. With the help of Professor John Couch Adams, some astronomical tables, and examination of the scriptures, Guinness works out the prophetic chronology of the bible in terms of a series of “solilunar cycles.” This proves to him that he is living at the end of the sixth unsabbatic day of creation, 6,000 years from Adam, and that the “redemption Sabbath” will soon arrive. This revelation becomes the subject of many of his books and sermons.

In March 1873, Henry and his wife Fanny start the famous East London Missionary Training Institute, also known as Harley College, at Harley House in Bromley-by-Bow, East End of London with just six students. The renowned Dr. Thomas John Barnardo is co-director with Dr. Guinness and is greatly influenced by him. The school trains 1,330 missionaries for 30 societies of 30 denominations.

Harley College becomes so successful that it needs a larger home. In 1883, Elizabeth Hulme offers Guinness Cliff House near Calver, Derbyshire. Harley College is renamed Hulme Cliff College. Now known as Cliff College it continues to this day training and equipping Christians for mission and evangelism.

In 1873, Guinness founds the East London Institute for Home and Foreign Missions, the root of the Regions Beyond Missionary Union. In 1877, he founds the Livingstone Inland Mission. His son, Dr. Henry Grattan Guinness, founds the Congo-Balolo Mission in 1888 and co-founds the Congo Reform Association in 1904.

Guinness dies in Bath, Somerset, England, on June 21, 1910, at 75 years of age.