Lyons is a lecturer in history at the University of Hull and then at Trinity College Dublin. He becomes the founding Professor of Modern History at the University of Kent in 1964, serving also as Master of Eliot College from 1969 to 1972.
Lyons principal works include Ireland Since the Famine, the standard university textbook for Irish history from the mid-19th to late-20th century, which The Times calls “the definitive work of modern Irish history” and a biography of Charles Stewart Parnell.
Lyons is critical of Cecil Woodham-Smith‘s much-acclaimed history of the Great Irish Famine and has generally been considered among the “revisionist” historians who reconsiders the role of the British state in events like the Famine.
Lyons marries Jennifer Ann Stuart McAlister in 1954, and has two sons, one of whom, Nicholas, is a former Lord Mayor of London.
On September 15, 1983, Lyons is nominated, unopposed, as chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). But less than a week later he is dead, succumbing in Dublin on September 21 to acute pancreatitis, which had struck him in mid-August. He had begun to write the first draft of his W. B. Yeats biography (having accumulated a great archive of material) only a few weeks before. His ashes are buried beside Trinity College chapel.
Whelan is awarded many prizes in the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) Taylor art competitions, including one in 1912 for a portrait of his sister Lena, entitled On the Moors, rendered in a strongly academic technique. In 1916, he wins the Taylor scholarship for the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) schools for his finest early work, The Doctor’s Visit, an adroitly executed composition of contrasting shadows and light. Typical of many of his genre interiors, the painting depicts a room in the family home, with relatives as models: Whelan’s mother sits by the bed watching over his ill cousin, while his sister, dressed in a Mater hospital nurse’s uniform, is in the background opening the door for the doctor. The subtly evoked atmosphere of restrained emotion foreshadowed a hallmark of his mature style.
Whelan exhibits annually at the RHA for forty-five years (1911–56), averaging six works per year. He is elected an RHA associate in 1920, becoming a full member in 1924. He participates in the Exposition d’art irlandais at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris in 1922. A visiting teacher at the RHA schools in 1924, he also teaches in the DMSA for a time. He has studios at 64 Dawson Street (1914–27) and 7 Lower Baggot Street (1931–56). Beginning in the 1910s, he receives regular commissions for portraits, constituting his primary source of income. Having become the family’s main breadwinner following his parents’ deaths in the 1920s, he concentrates most of his production on this lucrative activity, portraying numerous leading figures in the spheres of politics, academia, religion, society, medicine, and law.
Situated securely in the academic tradition, in most of his portraits Whelan favours a sombre, restricted palette, with the sitter placed, in grave demeanour, against a monotone background with few accessories. In a 1943 interview he asserts that twentieth-century portraiture suffers from the drabness of modern costume, for which the artist must compensate by careful rendition of the subject’s hands. He tends to depart from his prevailing portrait style when painting women, whom he characteristically depicts in meticulously observed interiors, a notable example being his portrait of Society hostess Gladys Maccabe (c.1946; NGI).
Whelan’s commercial concentration on portraiture notwithstanding, he expresses his true talent in genre compositions, especially kitchen interiors, in which he emulates the technique of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Two of the most accomplished of these depict his sister Frances in the basement kitchen of the family home: The Kitchen Window (1927; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork) demonstrates a particularly skillful use of light, while Interior of a Kitchen (1935) is notable for the dexterous handling of objects of varied shapes and textures. His genre works include both urban and rural scenes, with a distinctive interest in portraying occupations and other activities. Gypsy (1923), an Orpenesque composition of a shawled woman in a west-of-Ireland landscape with a caravan in the background, receives wide contemporary critical acclaim. Jer (c.1925), depicting a man seated by the fire in a cottage interior, is reproduced in J. Crampton Walker’s Irish Art and Landscape (1927). The Fiddler (c.1932), a naturalistic, sensitively characterised study, is first shown at an Ulster Academy exhibition at Stranmillis, Belfast. A Kerry Cobbler is reproduced in Twelve Irish Artists (1940), introduced by Thomas Bodkin, as among the works denoting the development of a distinctively Irish school of painting.
In 1929, Whelan designs the first Irish Free State commemorative stamp, a portrait of Daniel O’Connell for the centenary of Catholic emancipation. Commissioned by the Thomas Haverty trust to paint an incident from the life of Saint Patrick for the 1932 Eucharistic Congress, he executes The Baptism by St. Patrick of Ethna the Fair and Fedelmia the Ruddy, Daughters of the Ard Rí Laoghaire, a work highly conservative in style. He rapidly completes an oil study of the papal legate, Lorenzo Lauri, also for the Eucharistic Congress. He is represented in the art competitions at the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. His depiction of Saint Brigid, shown at the Academy of Christian Art exhibition (1940), becomes a familiar image owing to the wide circulation of reproductions.
Whelan’s political portraits are influential in creating a strong, assured image of the newly formed Irish state, and thus retain an historical significance. His posthumous portrait, The Late General Michael Collins, exhibited at the RHA in 1943 and now held in Leinster House, is an iconic, heroic image of the fallen leader. His portraits of Arthur Griffith and Kevin O’Higgins – commissioned posthumously, as is the Collins, by Fine Gael – also hang in Leinster House, while that of John A. Costello, exhibited at the RHA in 1949, is now held in the King’s Inns, Dublin. He paints two presidents, Douglas Hyde and Seán T. O’Kelly, both works currently in Áras an Uachtaráin. A portrait of Éamon de Valera, painted in 1955 when the sitter is Leader of the Opposition, is in Leinster House. In 1954, he designs a second commemorative stamp, picturing a reproduction of a portrait bust of John Henry Newman, to mark the centenary of the Catholic University of Ireland.
Whelan is elected an honorary academician of both the Ulster Academy of Arts (1931), and the Royal Ulster Academy (1950). He becomes a member of the United Arts Club in 1934. As a representative of the RHA, he sits on the board of governors of the National Gallery of Ireland for many years, and is on the advisory committee of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art. Unmarried, he resides until his death at the Eccles Street address, with two sisters who continue to manage the family hotel. He dies on November 6, 1956, from leukemia at the Mater private nursing home in Dublin. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.
(From: “Whelan, (Michael) Leo,” by Carmel Doyle, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Christian is considered one of the best Irish lawyers of his time, but as a judge, he regularly courts controversy. His bitter and sarcastic temper and open contempt for most of his colleagues leads to frequent clashes both in Court and in the Press. Though he is rebuked for misconduct several times by the House of Commons, no serious thought is given to removing him from office.
Christian’s early years at the Bar are not successful, and he admits to being near to despair at times about his prospects. His practice lays in the Court of Chancery, with procedures that are extremely complex and he finds at first almost unintelligible. Gradually he masters the intricacies of Chancery practice becoming a leader of the Bar, and took silk in 1841. It is said that his expertise in Chancery procedures leave even the Lord Chancellor himself quite unable to argue with him.
Christian is appointed Law Adviser to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, an influential post which involves assisting the Attorney-General and Solicitor-General in advising the Crown in 1850, but resigns after only a few months on the grounds that it interferes with his private practice. He is appointed Third Sergeant later the same year but resigns in 1855, allegedly because he is disappointed at not receiving further promotion. Promotion does in time come his way. He is appointed Solicitor-General the following year and a judge of the Court of Common Pleas in 1858. He is unusual in having no strong political loyalty; it is said that his political allegiance is known only to himself.
As a judge of the Court of Common Pleas, Christian gets on well with his colleagues, and any dissenting judgements he writes are short and courteous. It is after his appointment as a Lord Justice of Appeal in Chancery in 1867 that his behaviour begins to attract unfavourable comment, as he goes out of his way to court controversy on a wide variety of topics.
His criticisms of legal rulings and arguments are invariably delivered in the form of a personal attack. Such exchanges are frequently continued through the letters page of The Times. Conservative in politics, he objects to the appointment of Thomas O’Hagan as Lord Chancellor in December 1868, dismissing him as a liberal “political necessity.” He goes to great lengths to point out legal flaws in the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 187, to the great annoyance of the Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone. His final public diatribe comes in 1877 when he launches an attack on the quality of law reporting, dismissing the contents of the Irish Reports as “a mass of utterly worthless rubbish.” He is vilified in the legal press and is the subject of cartoons in Dublin satirical journals. Pleading deafness, he retires in December 1878.
A serious interest in poetry and literature begins to manifest itself during his years at TCD. In 1900, he makes the acquaintance of W. B. Yeats and George Moore and begins to frequent Dublin literary circles. In 1904 and 1905 he publishes several short poems in the London publication The Venture and in John Eglinton‘s journal Dana. His name also appears in print as the renegade priest Fr. Oliver Gogarty in George Moore’s 1905 novel The Lake.
In 1905, Gogarty becomes one of the founding members of Arthur Griffith‘s Sinn Féin, a non-violent political movement with a plan for Irish autonomy modeled after the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy.
In July 1907, his first son, Oliver Duane Odysseus Gogarty, is born, and in autumn of that year he leaves for Vienna to finish the practical phase of his medical training. Returning to Dublin in 1908, he secures a post at Richmond Hospital, and shortly afterward purchases a house in Ely Place opposite George Moore. Three years later, he joins the staff of the Meath Hospital and remains there for the remainder of his medical career.
Gogarty maintains close friendships with many of the Dublin literati and continues to write poetry in the midst of his political and professional duties. He also tries his hand at playwriting, producing a slum drama in 1917 under the pseudonym “Alpha and Omega,” and two comedies in 1919 under the pseudonym “Gideon Ouseley,” all three of which are performed at the Abbey Theatre. He devotes less energy to his medical practice and more to his writing during the twenties and thirties.
With the onset of World War II, Gogarty attempts to enlist in the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) as a doctor. He is denied on grounds of age. He then departs in September 1939 for an extended lecture tour in the United States, leaving his wife to manage Renvyle House, which has since been rebuilt as a hotel. When his return to Ireland is delayed by the war, he applies for American citizenship and eventually decides to reside permanently in the United States. Though he regularly sends letters, funds, and care-packages to his family and returns home for occasional holiday visits, he never again lives in Ireland for any extended length of time.
Gogarty suffers from heart complaints during the last few years of his life, and in September 1957 he collapses in the street on his way to dinner. He dies on September 22, 1957. His body is flown home to Ireland and buried in Cartron Church, Moyard, near Renvyle, County Galway.
(Pictured: 1911 portrait of Oliver St. John Gogarty painted by Sir William Orpen, currently housed at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland)
Smyllie is born on March 20, 1893, at Hill Street, Shettleston, Glasgow, Scotland. He is the eldest of four sons and one daughter of Robert Smyllie, a Presbyterian printer originally from Scotland who is working in Sligo, County Sligo, at the time, and Elisabeth Follis, originally from Cork, County Cork. His father marries in Sligo on July 20, 1892, and later becomes proprietor and editor of the unionistSligo Times. Smyllie attends Sligo Grammar School in 1906 and enrolls at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 1911.
After two years at TCD, Smyllie’s desire for adventure leads him to leave university in 1913. Working as a vacation tutor to an American boy in Germany at the start of World War I, he is detained in Ruhleben internment camp, near Berlin, during the war. As an internee, he is involved in drama productions with other internees. Following his release at the end of the war, he witnesses the German revolution of 1918–1919. During this period, he encounters revolutionary sailors from Kiel who temporarily make him a representative of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council, and he observes key events including the looting of the Kaiser’s Palace and violent clashes between rival factions in Berlin. It is also during this period that he secures a personal interview with David Lloyd George at the Paris Convention of 1919. This helps Smyllie gain a permanent position with TheIrish Times in 1920, where he quickly earns the confidence of editor John Healy. Together, they take part in secret but unsuccessful attempts to resolve the Irish War of Independence.
Smyllie contributes to the Irishman’s Diary column of the paper from 1927. In 1927, he publishes an exclusive report outlining a draft government including both Labour Party and Fianna FáilTDs, signaling the volatile politics of the early state years.
Smyllie’s knowledge of languages (particularly the German he had learned during his internment) led to numerous foreign assignments. His reports on the rise of National Socialism in 1930s Germany are notably prescient and instill in him a lasting antipathy towards the movement.
When Healy dies in 1934, Smyllie becomes editor of TheIrish Times and also takes on the role of Irish correspondent for The Times (London), a position that brings significant additional income. Under Healy’s leadership, The Irish Times shifted from representing the Anglo-Irish ascendancy to becoming an organ of liberal, southern unionism, and eventually becomes a critical legitimising force in the Irish Free State. Smyllie enthusiastically supports this change. He establishes a non-partisan profile and a modern Irish character for the erstwhile ascendancy paper. For example, he drops “Kingstown Harbour” for “Dún Laoghaire.” He also introduces the paper’s first-ever Irish-language columnist. He is assisted by Alec Newman and Lionel Fleming, recruits Patrick Campbell and enlists Flann O’Brien to write his thrice-weekly column “Cruiskeen Lawn” as Myles na gCopaleen. As editor, he introduces a more Bohemian and informal style, establishing a semi-permanent salon in Fleet Street’s Palace Bar. This becomes a hub for journalists and literary figures and a source of material for his weekly column, Nichevo.
One of Smyllie’s early political challenges as editor concerns the Spanish Civil War. At a time when Irish Catholic opinion is strongly pro-Franco, he ensures TheIrish Times coverage is balanced and fair, though advertiser pressure eventually forces the withdrawal of the paper’s young reporter, Lionel Fleming, from the conflict. His awareness of the looming European crisis earns him the Order of the White Lion of Czechoslovakia in 1939. However, during World War II, he clashes with Ireland’s censorship authorities, especially under Minister Frank Aiken. He challenges their views both publicly and privately, though his relationship with the editor of the Irish Independent, Frank Geary, is cold, reducing the effectiveness of their joint opposition to censorship.
During the 1943 Irish general election, Smyllie uses the paper to promote the idea of a national government that could represent Ireland with authority in the postwar world. He praises Fine Gael’s proposal for such a government and criticises Éamon de Valera for dismissing it as unrealistic. This leads to a public exchange between de Valera and Smyllie, with the latter defending The Irish Times’s role as a constructive voice for Ireland’s future rather than a partisan interest.
Following the war, Smyllie’s editorial stance shifts toward defending Ireland’s neutrality and diplomatic position. When Winston Churchill accuses de Valera of fraternising with Axis powers, Smyllie counters by revealing Ireland’s covert collaboration with the Allies, such as military and intelligence cooperation, despite official neutrality. In the same period, he continues to oppose censorship, particularly the frequent banning of Irish writers by the Censorship of Publications Board. This opposition features prominently in a controversy on TheIrish Times letters page in 1950, later published as the liberal ethic. The paper also adopts a critical stance toward the Catholic Church, notably during the 1951 resignation of Minister for HealthNoël Browne amid opposition from bishops and doctors to a national Mother and Child Scheme. His editorials suggest the Catholic Church is effectively the government of Ireland, though he maintains a cordial relationship with Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, who invites him annually for dinner.
Smyllie is also wary of American foreign policy, showing hostility particularly during the Korean War. American diplomats in Dublin allege that Smyllie is “pro-communist“. Despite growing readership among an educated Catholic middle class, TheIrish Times’s circulation in 1950 remains under 50,000, far below the Irish Independent and the Fianna Fáil-aligned The Irish Press.
In later years, Smyllie’s health declines, prompting a quieter lifestyle. He moves from his large house in Pembroke Park, Dublin, to Delgany, County Wicklow. As he does not drive, he becomes less present in the newspaper office in D’Olier Street, contributing to a decline in the paper’s dynamism. His health deteriorates further, resulting in frequent absences from his editorial duties, though he retains his position despite management attempts to limit his authority, especially over finances. He dies of heart failure on September 11, 1954.
In 1925, Smyllie marries Kathlyn Reid, eldest daughter of a County Meath landowner. They have no children.
Smyllie is an eccentric: he hits his tee shots with a nine iron, speaks in a curious mix of Latin phrases and everyday Dublin slang, and weighs 22 stone (308 lbs.; 140 kg) yet still cycles to work wearing a green sombrero.
She is born Helen Mary Sybil Staunton on December 21, 1892, in Herbert Street, Dublin, to Dorothy Eleanor Redington and Peter Maurice Staunton. Her father is a barrister who later becomes a solicitor. Though he moves to Aram Lodge, Castlerea, County Roscommon where he practises law, she grows up in Dublin and Howth, going to secondary school in Loreto Abbey, Rathfarnham, and later at Loreto Convent, St. Stephen’s Green. She goes on to study German and singing in Koblenz. She marries Albert le Brocquy on December 30, 1915, and settles in Dublin. They have three children, Louis, Noel and Melanie.
Le Brocquy becomes involved in various women’s movements, helping to organise the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in July 1926. She is involved with the League of Nations Association as well as helps to establish Irish Civil Rights, PEN International, and Amnesty International in Ireland. She is an active member of Old Dublin Society and for a time president of the Irish Women Writers’ Society. She acts with the Drama League appearing as Helen Staunton. She writes plays and dramatic pieces which are staged by the Drama League at the Abbey Theatre and broadcast by Radio Éireann.
Her writings and work are often historically investigative, finding W. B. Yeats’s birthplace and arguing that Jonathan Swift had a child by Vanessa. She is involved in the Swift Tercentenary celebrations with Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh. As a result of her work, including with Trinity College Dublin Library and representing the Library on the Royal Irish Academy’s National Committee for Anglo-Irish Literature, she is co-opted to the Cultural Committee of the Department of External Affairs and appointed a Trustee of the National Library of Ireland. She is an excellent organiser and fundraiser and is heavily responsible for securing money for the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in 1970. She also initiates the literary prize, the Book of the Year award.
Le Brocquy becomes ill with an undiagnosed illness and dies on September 4, 1973, at the Meath Hospital, Dublin.
He marries firstly Mary Halloran of Cloyne, County Cork, in 1845. She dies in 1901. In the year of his retirement, he remarries Florence Henrietta Gore, widow of Edward Croker. He has no children. James Joyce remarks in Ulysses that his second marriage at the age of 85 infuriates his nephew, who had been waiting patiently for years to inherit his money.
Despite his many years of service on the Bench, Chatterton does not seem to be highly regarded as a judge. On his retirement the Bar pays tribute to his good qualities but adds several qualifications: “there might have been on the Bench lawyers more profound, reasoners more acute…” In his first decade on the Bench, Chatterton has to endure the continual denigration of Jonathan Christian, the Lord Justice of Appeal in Chancery. Christian is notoriously bitter-tongued, and while he despises most of his colleagues, he seems to have a particular dislike of Chatterton. He regularly votes on appeal to overturn his judgments, and frequently adds personal insults. Nor does he confine his attacks to the courtroom: there is controversy in 1870 when remarks of Christian that Chatterton is “lazy, stupid, conceited and so incompetent that he ought to be pensioned off” find their way into The Irish Times. The hint about pensioning off Chatterton is not taken up, no doubt because he enjoys the confidence of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Thomas O’Hagan, 1st Baron O’Hagan, who is also on bad terms with Christian. In an appeal from Chatterton in 1873, the two appeal judges clash publicly, with O’Hagan reprimanding Christian for insulting a judge who is not there to defend himself.
Chatterton becomes involved in controversy in 1885, over the first attempt to rename Sackville Street to O’Connell Street. Dublin Corporation votes for the name change, but it arouses considerable objections from local residents, one of whom seeks an injunction. Chatterton grants the injunction on the ground that the corporation has exceeded its statutory powers. Rather unwisely, he also attacks the merits of the decision, accusing the Corporation of “sentimental notions.” The corporation is angered by both the decision and the criticisms: while it may have been a coincidence, the fact that Temple Street is briefly renamed Chatterton Street is interpreted by some as an insult to the judge, since the street is much frequented by prostitutes. The controversy is short-lived as the corporation is granted the necessary statutory powers in 1890, and the new name becomes official in 1924, by which time it has gained popular acceptance.
William George Digges La Touche, diplomat and banker, is born in Dublin on August 28, 1747, the third son of James Digges La Touche and his second wife, Martha (née Thwaites) of St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin. He is admitted to St. Paul’s School, London, on August 30, 1757. In 1764, he accompanies “Mr. Moore,” the British resident at Basra, to the Persian Gulf. La Touche acts as personal secretary to Moore for a number of years before succeeding him as British resident. Basra is then one of the key trading places for the East India Company, and both the British and Dutch governments have official representation there. La Touche obtains the respect of both Arabs and Europeans. At the siege of Basra in 1775, he gives refuge to prominent citizens of the city and their families. When Az Zubayr is captured by the Persians in the same year, La Touche allegedly ransoms all of the inhabitants at his own expense to save them from slavery.
While serving in the east for twenty years, La Touche collects illuminated Persian manuscripts, some of which come from the royal library at Shiraz. A number of these volumes are presented to Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 1786 and 1787. He returns to London around 1784 and marries Grace, daughter of John Puget, a wealthy London-based banker of Huguenot origins.
By 1786, he settles in Dublin and becomes a partner of the La Touche bank. In the years 1786, 1788, 1790, 1792, 1794, and 1796, he sits on the board of the Bank of Ireland. He is an active opponent of the Acts of Union and chairs a large meeting on the subject in 1798. Like other members of his family, he gives large sums to charity and is a governor of Dr. Steevens’ Hospital and the Lying-in Hospital, Dublin, and a director of the Grand Canal Company. He lives on St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, and at Sans Souci, a country estate that he purchases at Booterstown, Dublin.
La Touche dies in Dublin on November 6, 1803, leaving four sons. A small pastel portrait of him, and another of his wife Grace, probably by Hugh Douglas Hamilton is in the Bank of Ireland collection. Lye is known to have had his portrait painted in oils by Gilbert Stuart.
(From: “La Touche, William George Digges,” by Daniel Beaumont, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Born Leslie Yodaiken into a Russian–Jewish family in Portobello, Dublin, Daiken is the son of Samuel and Rosa Yodaiken. His father is a dealer in rubber and scrap metal, with premises in Dublin and Glasgow, and he is educated at two independent fee-paying schools, St. Andrew’s College and Wesley College, and then in 1930 he enters Trinity College Dublin. In his first year, one of his lecturers in French literature was Samuel Beckett. He is an active member of the Dublin University Socialist Society and a founding member of the college’s Gaelic Society.
In 1933, Daiken is present at the house of Charlotte Despard in Eccles Street, Dublin, also used as a Workers’ College, when it is attacked by a mob of Blueshirts. He leads the immediate defence of the building, which is saved on that occasion by the intervention of Irish Republican Army (IRA) men posing as the police.
In 1934, as Yodaiken, he graduates with a BA from Trinity in English and French Literature, with a Second Class degree. After graduating, Daiken works briefly as a schoolteacher in Dublin. In April 1935, his short story “Angela” is published in The New English Weekly under the pen name of Ned Kiernan. That year, he migrates to London.
Soon after his arrival in London, Daiken is one of the three founders of a duplicated publication called Irish Front, together with two other poets, Charles Donnelly and Ewart Milne.
In England, Daiken starts to shorten his surname from Yodaiken to Daiken, for his publications, but he does not make this change formally until doing so by deed poll in 1943.
In December 1935, The Irish Times reviews a production in Camden Town of Ireland Unfree, a stage version by Daiken of Patrick Pearse’s poem “The Rebel.” It states that “Mr. Daiken carries Pearse’s theme beyond his idealistic conclusion to the revolutionary viewpoint of the Irish workers.”
Daiken keeps up his links with leftist Irish writers and dissidents and edits the collection of working-class political verse Goodbye Twilight: songs of the struggle in Ireland (1936), illustrated by Harry Kernoff. The Irish Press describes this as “forty young poets with blazing eyes and clenched fists.” In another review, Louis MacNeice calls the book a “collection of proletarian poems – some communist, some Irish republican, and all written in a defiant spirit of opposition … a violent reaction against Yeats and all that he stood for.”
In 1939, Mairin Mitchell is highly critical of the Irish leftists, and in particular Daiken, for their views on the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and writes to Desmond Ryan in September, “Brian O’Neill, Bloomsbury, and Daiken will sing Russia right or wrong.”
In October 1939, at the time of the wartime National Registration Act, Daiken is living in a studio at Old Castle Wharf, Twickenham, and describes himself as “Script-writer and advertising copywriter.”
During World War II, Daiken enlists in the Corps of Signals of the Irish Army, a neutral force, and also works for Reuters as a correspondent on education. In 1944, he edits They Go, the Irish, a collection of essays, including one from Seán O’Casey. In 1945, a collection of his verse is published under the title Signatures of All Things. In the summer of that year, Samuel Beckett gives Daiken his unpublished novel Watt, in the hope that he can find a publisher for it, but he fails to do so. They continue to write to each other and meet in London and Paris in the 1950s. He also keeps up with another friend from Trinity, Con Leventhal.
After he becomes a father in 1945, Daiken’s main interest moves on from political activism to children’s games and toys, and by 1951 the basement of his London home has become a toy museum. He writes on the subject and makes television and radio programmes for the BBC about it. His film One potato, two potato, a compilation of children’s street rhymes, wins the Festival Mondial du Film prize in 1958. His radio play The Circular Road is about a Jewish-Irish child.
In the 1950s Daiken founds the National Toy Museum and Institute of Play, today part of the Toy Collection at Hove Museum of Creativity.
Daiken returns to Ireland many times as a visitor. In the early 1960s he completes a radio play about the Jewish community of Dublin in the 1920s, which is broadcast on RTÉ.
In October 1963, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, recruits Daiken as a lecturer in education, and not long before his death he makes a film called The Piano about teaching white and black children in a school in Africa. He dies on August 15, 1964, while spending the summer vacation at home in London, leaving an estate valued at £3,865. He is cremated. His widow survives him until 1981.
In a tribute to Daiken, his 1930s communist associate Brian O’Neill writes, “He was always busy, always with a half dozen irons in the fire, always trying to give a hand to some Irish writer who needed it.”
In the early 1990s, Katrina Goldstone interviews Daiken’s brother, Aubrey Yodaiken, and later reports: “I was left with a faint sense of melancholy, as my interviewee had become distressed speaking about his brother, Leslie Daiken, and recalling his irrepressible and exasperating personality, his many projects, half-started novels…”
Aubrey Yodaiken is distressed by the lack of appreciation of his brother’s many cultural efforts and by the fact that his “scattershot literary endeavours” seem to have come to naught.
The National Library of Ireland holds a collection of Daiken’s papers, in particular his publications and correspondence, presented to it in 1995 by his elder daughter, by then Melanie Cuming, and his younger brother, Aubrey Yodaiken. The papers are mostly in English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Hebrew, and Irish.
Discontented with James Chichester-Clark and Brian Faulkner who come to government after O’Neill’s 1969 fall from power, Boal resigns from the UUP in 1971 and joins Ian Paisley in establishing the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in order to provide dissident unionist opinion with a viable political alternative. He works as the first chairman and one of the first public representatives of the DUP and continues to sit in Stormont during the years of 1971–1972. He later resumes his practice as a barrister.
While Boal’s interest in federalism diminishes after the 1970s, the federalist Boal scheme of January 1974 is again put forward by liberal protestants such as John Robb as late as 2007. His friendship with Paisley finally breaks when the DUP agrees to enter government with Sinn Féin in 2007. He tells Paisley, who takes the breach very hard, that he had betrayed everything he ever advocated.
seamus dubhghaill 