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Tag Archives: West End of London


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Birth of Dana Rosemary Scallon, Singer & Former European Parliament Member

Dana Rosemary Scallon, Irish singer, pantomime performer, and a former Member of the European Parliament known as Dana, is born on August 30, 1951 in Islington, London, England, where her Northern Irish family had relocated to find work. She wins the 1970 Eurovision Song Contest with “All Kinds of Everything,” a subsequent worldwide million-seller. She resides in Birmingham, Alabama, for much of the 1990s, hosting a Christian music and interview series on the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN).

Scallon is born Rosemary Brown, the fifth of seven children of a King’s Cross railway station porter and trumpet player originally from Derry, Northern Ireland. When she is five, the family moves back to Derry where she grows up in the Creggan housing estate and Bogside. She attends St. Eugene’s Primary School and then enrolls at Thornhill College. A singing talent from childhood, she wins several local contests while also participating in local choirs and taking piano, violin and ballet lessons.

In the early 1960s Scallon forms a trio with two of her sisters, often performing at charity concerts organized by their father. When one sister leaves, the remaining duo lands a summer-long booking at the Palladium and a recording contract with Decca Records. Her other sister, however, leaves to join her new husband, a United States airman, in America. Stricken with stage fright, Scallon the solo singer manages to win a folk competition at the Embassy Ballroom with her eyes shut. The contest’s sponsor, teacher and music promoter Tony Johnston, helps her complete her equivalency degree and records a demo that convinces Decca Records to sign her on as a solo artist. She releases a single in 1967 that brings some attention from local TV and radio.

Performing under her school nickname “Dana,” Scallon becomes a fixture in Dublin‘s cabaret and folk clubs. She is crowned “Queen of Cabaret” and feted with a parade and a reception at Clontarf Castle on the Saturday before Easter 1968.

At the suggestion of Decca Record’s local agent, Phil Mitton, Scallon auditions for the Irish National Song Contest, a preliminary for the 1969 Eurovision competition. She reaches the finals in Dublin, but comes in second.

RTÉ Television chief Tom McGrath invites Scallon back to compete the following year. She accepts even though she is preparing to retire from active performing to pursue teaching. The song, “All Kinds of Everything” by Derry Lindsay and Jackie Smith, is picked for her by McGrath and propels her to victory. She goes on to represent Ireland in the 1970 Eurovision contest, held in Amsterdam. She performs perched on a stool on stage and defeats England’s Mary Hopkin and Spain‘s Julio Iglesias to secure Ireland’s victory.

Scallon is given a hero’s welcome upon her return to Ireland, especially in Northern Ireland. “All Kinds of Everything” shoots to #1 on the Irish Singles Chart, as well as the UK Singles Chart. It is also successful in Australia, Austria, Germany, Israel, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland and Yugoslavia, on its way to passing 1 million sales. She quickly records an album, with orchestral accompaniment. Her follow-up single, “I Will Follow You,” fails to make much of a splash. Given the choice of giving up, she decides to fight for her recording career, and succeeds with Paul Ryan‘s “Who Put the Lights Out,” which spends eleven weeks on the UK charts.

In 1974 Scallon switches to GTO Records. Her first single on that label, “Please Tell Him That I Said Hello,” returns her to the top 10. Her 1975 holiday single “It’s Gonna be a Cold Cold Christmas” by Roger Greenaway and Geoff Stephens, reaches #4 and remains a classic. Now an established Irish singing star she appears in films and festivals and sells out a week of concerts at the London Palladium. She also maintains her “Queen of the Cabaret” reputation with regular appearances in top London clubs. The BBC gives her two shows of her own: a series called A Day with Dana in 1974 and four-part series of Wake Up Sunday in 1979. BBC Radio follows suit with a series of I Believe in Music in 1977.

Meanwhile, Scallon begins performing stage pantomime in a blockbuster production of Cinderella in Oxford. In September 1976, however, she is hospitalized with a non-malignant growth on her left vocal cord, requiring surgery. The single “Fairytale” is sustained in the charts with the publicity from her dire medical prognosis. The experience strengthens her religious faith. On October 5, 1978 she marries Damien Scallon, a hotel-owner from Newry, at St. Eugene’s Cathedral in Derry.

In 1979, recovered from her surgery, Scallon records a new album entitled The Girl is Back, which has modest success. Pope John Paul II‘s visit to Ireland that year inspires her to write a song based on his personal motto, “Totus Tuus,” which tops the Irish charts. Long associated with Christian causes and Sunday-morning programs, she and her husband look for opportunities to reach a broader market for Christian music, and find one in the United States. They attend the National Religious Broadcasters conference in Washington, D.C. in 1980 and secure a contract with Word Records.

Scallon’s first album of Christian songs, Totally Yours, is released on Word Records in 1981. She continues to record pop music, including the 1982 album Magic and the official 1982 FIFA World Cup song for the Northern Ireland team, “Yer Man.” She also continues her stage career, starring in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at Hull and later in London’s West End and Wolverhampton. She tours the United States in 1984, including appearances at Billy Graham‘s Boston crusades. She pens an autobiography in 1985. She performs “Totus Tuus” before a packed Superdome crowd during John Paul II’s visit to New Orleans in 1987.

Also in 1987, after one of her husband’s hotels is damaged for the seventh time by a terrorist bomb, he takes a job managing retreats for EWTN and moves the family to Alabama. They rent a house in the Cherokee Bend area of Mountain Brook and enroll their children at Saint Rose Academy. Scallon is welcomed to the network as well, hosting the Say Yes and We Are One Body programs. She leaves Word Records and signs with Heart Beat Records for her later Catholic albums. In 1993 she again performs for the Pope at a World Youth Day event in Denver, Colorado.

Scallon is naturalized as a dual citizen of the United States and Northern Ireland in 1997, and moves back there a year later because she has been drafted as an independent candidate for President of Ireland. She garners 15% of the popular vote, finishing third in the race won by Mary McAleese, ahead of the Labour Party candidate. Most of her votes come from rural districts where conservative values are more strongly held.

In 1999 Scallon wins a seat on the European Parliament, representing Connacht-Ulster on a family values and anti-abortion platform. During her five-year term she opposes the development of a European constitution. She also speaks out against a 2001 proposal to amend the Irish constitution to legalize the “morning-after pill” and intrauterine contraceptive devices. With the support of the mainstream parties, the amendment is put to a popular referendum, which fails in 2002. That same year she is defeated in a campaign to represent Galway West in the Dáil Éireann, the lower house of the Irish parliament. In 2004 she fails to hold her seat in the European Parliament and also does not secure a nomination for President.

Leaving politics behind, Scallon joins a weight-loss challenge on RTÉ’s The Afternoon Show in 2005. In 2006 she competes with Ronan McCormack on Celebrity Jigs ‘n’ Reels, finishing second on the popular dance contest.

That same year, Scallon and her husband launch their own music label, DS Music Productions, and release a compilation of songs deidcated to John Paul II’s memory. That is followed by Good Morning Jesus: Prayers and Songs for Children of All Ages, which is featured in a special series on EWTN. Heart Beat Records files a lawsuit against DS Music Productions for alleged copyright violations.

In 2007 Scallon appears as a guest judge for Young Star Search, a Belfast CityBeat radio contest. In 2009 she is brought on as a judge for The All Ireland Talent Show. That same year she returns to EWTN as host of Dana and Friends.


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Birth of Conor McPherson, Playwright, Screenwriter & Director

Conor McPherson, Irish playwright, screenwriter and director of stage and film, is born in Dublin on August 6, 1971. In recognition of his contribution to world theatre, he is awarded a doctorate of Literature, Honoris Causa, in June 2013 by the University College Dublin (UCD).

McPherson is educated at University College Dublin and begins writing his first plays there as a member of UCD Dramsoc, the college’s dramatic society, and goes on to found Fly by Night Theatre Company which produces several of his plays. He is considered one of the best contemporary Irish playwrights. His plays attract good reviews, and have been performed internationally (notably in the West End and on Broadway).

The Weir opens at the Royal Court Theatre before transferring to the West End and Broadway. It wins the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play for 1999.

McPherson’s 2001 play, Port Authority, tells of three interwoven lives. The play is first produced by the Gate Theatre of Dublin but premiers at the New Ambassadors Theatre in London in February 2001, before moving to the Gate Theatre in April of that year. The production is directed by McPherson himself. New York‘s Atlantic Theater Company stages a production of the play in the spring of 2008, starring Brian d’Arcy James, and Tony Award winners John Gallagher, Jr. and Jim Norton. The New York Times critic Ben Brantley says, “I found myself holding on to what these actors had to say as if I were a five-year-old at bedtime being introduced to The Arabian Nights.”

McPherson also directs his play, Dublin Carol, at the Atlantic Theater Company, New York, in 2003.

McPherson’s 2004 play Shining City opens at the Royal Court Theatre and prompts The Daily Telegraph to describe him as “the finest dramatist of his generation.” A meditation on regret, guilt and confusion, the play is set entirely within the Dublin offices of a psychiatrist who himself has psychological secrets. While much of the play takes the form of monologues delivered by a patient, the everyday stories and subtle poignancy and humour make it a riveting experience. It subsequently opens on Broadway in 2006 and is nominated for two Tony Awards, including Best Play.

In September 2006, to great critical acclaim, McPherson makes his Royal National Theatre debut as both author and director with The Seafarer at the Cottesloe Theatre, starring Karl Johnson and Jim Norton, with Ron Cook as their poker-playing, Mephistophelean guest. Norton wins an Olivier Award for his performance while McPherson is nominated for both the Olivier and Evening Standard Theatre Awards for Best Play. In October 2007 The Seafarer opens on Broadway, keeping with it most of its creative team, including McPherson as director and both Jim Norton and Conleth Hill in their respective roles, with David Morse taking over as Sharky, and Ciarán Hinds portraying Mr. Lockhart. The production on Broadway receives some positive reviews including such statements as “McPherson is quite possibly the finest playwright of his generation” from Ben Brantley at The New York Times and “Succinct, startling and eerie, and the funniest McPherson play to date” from The Observer. Norton’s performance as Richard Harkin in The Seafarer at the National Theatre wins the 2007 Best Supporting Actor Laurence Olivier Award, and he wins a Tony Award in 2008 for Best Featured Actor in a play.

McPherson writes and directs a stage adaptation of Daphne du Maurier‘s story The Birds, which opens in September 2009 at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.

In 2011 the Royal National Theatre premiers his play The Veil at the Lyttleton Theatre. Described by The Times as “a cracking fireside tale of haunting and decay,” it is set in 1822 and marks McPherson’s first foray into period drama. This vein continues with a striking new translation of August Strindberg‘s The Dance of Death premiering at the Trafalgar Studios in London at the end of 2012. His version is described as “a profoundly seminal work” by The Guardian which also managed, The Times says, to be “shockingly funny.”

The Donmar Warehouse mounts a season of McPherson’s work in 2013 with a revival of The Weir and the world premiere of The Night Alive. The Weir is hailed once again as “a modern classic” by The Daily Telegraph and “a contemporary classic” by The Guardian while The Night Alive is nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Play and described as “another triumph” by The Independent on Sunday and “a masterstroke” by Time Out.

The Night Alive transfers to the Atlantic Theatre New York, where it is awarded the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play 2014, and also receives Best Play nominations from the Drama Desk and Lucille Lortell Awards.

McPherson’s play Girl from the North Country, where the dramatic action is broken up by 20 songs by Bob Dylan, opens at London’s The Old Vic on July 26, 2017. The play is set in a hotel in 1934 in Duluth, Minnesota, the birthplace of Dylan. The project begins when Dylan’s office approaches McPherson and suggests creating a play using Dylan songs. The drama receives favorable reviews.

The film of his first screenplay, I Went Down, is critically acclaimed and a great commercial success. His first feature film as a director, Saltwater, wins the CICAE award for Best Film at the Berlin International Film Festival. His second feature film is The Actors, which he wrote and directed.

He is the director and co-writer of The Eclipse, a film which has its world premiere at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. It is picked up for distribution by Magnolia Pictures and is released in U.S. cinemas in the spring of 2010. The film subsequently wins the Melies D’Argent Award for Best European Film at the Sitges Film Festival in Spain, the world’s premier horror and fantasy genre festival. At The 2010 Irish Film and television Awards The Eclipse wins the awards for Best Film and Best Screenplay. Ciarán Hinds wins the Best Actor Award at the Tribeca Film Festival for his portrayal of Michael Farr.

In 2013, McPherson writes the last episode of Quirke. In 2020, he co-writes the feature film adaptation of the Artemis Fowl books by Eoin Colfer. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is released digitally worldwide on Disney+ on June 12, 2020.


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Birth of Composer Roger Doyle

Roger Doyle, composer best known for his electroacoustic work and for his piano music for theatre, is born in Malahide, County Dublin on July 17, 1949. As a teenager he is influenced by Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Pierre Henry and The Beatles.

Doyle studies piano from the age of nine. After leaving school he attends the Royal Irish Academy of Music for three years, studying composing, during which time he is awarded two composition scholarships. He also studies at the Institute of Sonology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and the Finnish Radio Experimental Music Studio on scholarships.

As a performer Doyle begins as a drummer with the groups Supply Demand and Curve and Jazz Therapy, playing free improvisatory and fusion music. He releases his first LP, Oizzo No, in 1975, and his second, Thalia, in 1978 on CBS Classics. Rapid Eye Movements (1981) is his third LP, and his attempt at a “masterpiece before the age of thirty.”

Doyle begins his magnum opus, Babel, in 1989, a 5-CD set that takes ten years to compose. Each track corresponds to a ‘room’ or place within an imagined giant tower city, a kind of aural virtual reality. It celebrates the multiplicity of musical language. One hundred three pieces of music are composed for it and he works with 48 collaborators. From 2002 to 2007 he works on the three-volume electronic work Passades. Twenty-seven albums of his music have been released. He has also composed scores for several films including Budawanny, Pigs and the documentary Atlantean by Bob Quinn.

In 2013 Doyle founds META Productions with opera director Eric Fraad, committed to exploring new forms of opera for the 21st century. Their first production is the electronic opera Heresy. Originally titled The Death by Fire of Giordano Bruno, a 40-minute ‘in development’ version is performed as part of a fully staged concert of his works at both the Kilkenny Arts Festival and in the Dublin Theatre Festival 2013. The two hour Heresy is presented as part of ‘Project 50’, a season of work celebrating 50 years of Project Arts Centre in November 2016. The opera is based on episodes from the life and works of Giordano Bruno. It is broadcast on RTÉ Lyric fm in September 2017 and released as a double album on Heresy records in 2018. Recent album releases are The Thousand Year Old Boy (2013), Time Machine (2015), Frail Things In Eternal Places (2016), and The Heresy Ostraca (2019).

Doyle founds the music theatre company Operating Theatre with Irish actress Olwen Fouéré. They produce many important site-specific productions, including Passades, Here Lies and Angel/Babel, all featuring his music as an equal partner in the theatrical environment. Operating Theatre performs in conventional and site-specific venues in Ireland, England, the Netherlands, France, Venezuela and the United States and releases several records. With Icontact Dance Company, he produces Tower of Babel – Delusional Architecture, featuring as much of Babel as he has composed by that point. This work is originally performed in a whole wing of the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1992. Arguably his most famous theatre work is the music he wrote and performs on piano onstage for the Steven Berkoff version of the Oscar Wilde play Salome which plays in Dublin‘s Gate Theatre, in London‘s West End and on three world tours. The Irish Times notes that “his name is revered in the realm of theatre.”

Doyle’s works Four Sketches and All the Rage are awarded second and first prizes in the Dublin Symphony Orchestra composition competition in 1970 and 1974 respectively. He has won the Programme Music Prize (1997) and the Magisterium Award (2007) at the Bourges International Electro-Acoustic Music Competition in Bourges, France. He also receives the Irish Arts Council‘s Marten Toonder Award in 2000 in recognition of his innovative work as a composer. He is a member of Aosdána, and has recently been made Adjunct Professor of Music at Trinity College Dublin.

President Michael D. Higgins confers the honour of Saoi on Doyle on August 16, 2019 by placing a gold torc around his neck. This is the highest honour of Aosdána that can be bestowed by fellow Aosdána members. No more than seven living members can be so honoured at one time. The Irish Times describes his album Chalant – Memento Mori as “a richly rewarding work that runs the full, glorious gamut of human emotion.” It is Album of the Week on March 30, 2012 in the same paper.


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Birth of Irish Painter Sir Frederic William Burton RHA

Irish painter Sir Frederic William Burton RHA is born in County Wicklow on April 8, 1816. The third son of Samuel Frederick Burton and his wife Hanna Mallett, he is taken by his parents to live in County Clare on the west coast of Ireland at the age of six. The old Burton seat is Clifden House, Corofin, County Clare, which is built around the middle of the eighteenth century. The artist’s grandparents were Major Edward William Burton, Clifden, who was High Sheriff of Clare in 1799, and his wife, Jane Blood of nearby Roxton, County Clare. In his youth he has strong sympathy with the Young Ireland movement.

Educated in Dublin, Burton is elected an associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy at the age of twenty-one and an academician two years later. In 1842 he begins to exhibit at the Royal Academy. A visit to Germany and Bavaria in 1842 is the first of a long series of trips to various parts of Europe, which give him a profound knowledge of the works of the Old Masters. From 1851 he spends seven years working as a painter in the service of Maximilian II of Bavaria.

Burton works with George Petrie on archaeological sketches and is on the council of the Royal Irish Academy and the Archaeological Society of Ireland. He is elected an associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours in 1855, and a full member in the following year. He resigns in 1870, and is reelected as an honorary member in 1886.

In 1874 Burton is appointed the third director of the National Gallery, London, in succession to Sir William Boxall RA. In June 1874, he obtains a special grant to acquire the art collection of Alexander Barker, which includes Piero della Francesca‘s Nativity and Sandro Botticelli‘s Venus and Mars. In 1876 a bequest of 94 paintings, mainly by Dutch artists but also including works by Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Dieric Bouts and Canaletto, is made by the British haberdasher Wynne Ellis. Also in this year an extension to the Gallery by Edward Middleton Barry is completed.

During the twenty years that Burton holds this post he is responsible for many important purchases, among them Leonardo da Vinci‘s Virgin of the Rocks, Raphael‘s Ansidei Madonna, Anthony van Dyck‘s Equestrian portrait of Charles I, Hans Holbein the Younger‘s Ambassadors, and the Admiral Pulido Pareja, by Diego Velázquez (this subsequently attributed to Velázquez’s assistant Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo). He also adds to the noted series of Early Italian pictures in the gallery. The number of acquisitions made to the collection during his period of office exceeds 500.

Burton’s best-known watercolours, The Aran Fisherman’s Drowned Child (1841) and The Meeting on Turret Stairs (1864) are in the National Gallery of Ireland. The Meeting on Turret Stairs is voted by the Irish public as Ireland’s favourite painting in 2012 from among ten works shortlisted by critics. A knighthood is conferred on him in 1884, and the degree of LL.D. of Dublin in 1889.

Burton dies in Kensington, West End of London on March 16, 1900 and is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Dublin.

(Pictured: “Sir Frederic William Burton,” painting by Henry Tanworth Wells (died 1903), given to the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1913)


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Oscar Wilde’s “Salomé” Opens in Paris

Oscar Wilde languishes in jail as his play Salomé opens in Paris on February 11, 1896. Salomé is a one act play based on the biblical tale of Salomé, stepdaughter of the tetrarch Herod Antipas, who asks for the head of Jokanaan (John the Baptist) on a platter as a reward for dancing the Dance of the Seven Veils. The original 1891 version of the play is in French. Three years later an English translation, with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, is published.

Rehearsals for the play’s debut on the London stage, for inclusion in Sarah Bernhardt‘s London season, begin in 1892, but are halted when the Lord Chamberlain‘s licensor of plays bans Salomé on the basis that it is illegal to depict Biblical characters on the stage. The play eventually premiers on February 11, 1896, while Wilde is in prison, in Paris at the Théâtre de la Comédie-Parisienne in a staging by Lugné-Poe‘s theatre group, the Théâtre de l’Œuvre.

In The Pall Mall Gazette of June 29, 1892 Wilde explains why he had written Salomé in French:

“I have one instrument that I know I can command, and that is the English language. There was another instrument to which I had listened all my life, and I wanted once to touch this new instrument to see whether I could make any beautiful thing out of it. […] Of course, there are modes of expression that a Frenchman of letters would not have used, but they give a certain relief or colour to the play. A great deal of the curious effect that Maeterlinck produces comes from the fact that he, a Flamand by grace, writes in an alien language. The same thing is true of Rossetti, who, though he wrote in English, was essentially Latin in temperament.”

A performance of the play is arranged by the New Stage Club at the Bijou Theatre in Archer Street, London, on May 10 and 13, 1905, starring Millicent Murby as Salomé and directed by Florence Farr. In June 1906 the play is presented privately with A Florentine Tragedy by the Literary Theatre Society at King’s Hall, Covent Garden. The Lord Chamberlain’s ban is not lifted for almost forty years. The first public performance of Salomé in England is produced by Nancy Price at the Savoy Theatre on October 5, 1931. She takes the role of Herodias herself and casts her daughter, Joan Maude, as Salomé.

In 1992 the play is performed on Broadway at the Circle in the Square Theatre, under the direction of Robert Allan Ackerman. Sheryl Lee stars as the title role alongside Al Pacino. The play costars Suzanne Bertish, Esai Morales and Arnold Vosloo.

Al Pacino says in an interview that a new production of the play where he will star as King Herod is to open in London’s West End in 2016.

In 2018 a production by Lazarus Theatre is performed at Greenwich Theatre. Directed by Ricky Dukes, the performance portrays Salomé as male.


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Edna O’Brien Receives the Irish PEN Award for Literature

Josephine Edna O’Brien, novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short story writer, receives a lifetime achievement award from the society for Irish writers, the Irish PEN Award for Literature, on February 2, 2001 in recognition of her work which spans 25 years. Philip Roth describes her as “the most gifted woman now writing in English,” while Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, cites her as “one of the great creative writers of her generation.”

O’Brien is born on December 15, 1930, the youngest child of farmer Michael O’Brien and Lena Cleary at Tuamgraney, County Clare, a place she would later describe as “fervid” and “enclosed.” Her father inherits a “thousand acres or more” and “a fortune from rich uncles,” but is a “profligate” hard-drinker who gambles away his inheritance, the land sold off or bartered to pay debts. From 1941 to 1946 she is educated by the Sisters of Mercy at the Convent of Mercy boarding school at Loughrea, County Galway – a circumstance that contributes to a “suffocating” childhood. In 1950, having studied at night at pharmaceutical college and worked in a Dublin pharmacy during the day, she is awarded a licence as a pharmacist. She reads such writers as Leo Tolstoy, William Makepeace Thackeray, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In Dublin, O’Brien purchases Introducing James Joyce, with an introduction written by T. S. Eliot, and says that when she learned that James Joyce‘s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was autobiographical, it made her realise where she might turn, should she want to write herself. “Unhappy houses are a very good incubation for stories”, she says. In London she starts work as a reader for Hutchinson, a publishing firm, where on the basis of her reports she is commissioned, for £50, to write a novel. She publishes her first book, The Country Girls, in 1960. This is the first part of a trilogy of novels (later collected as The Country Girls Trilogy), which includes The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). Shortly after their publication, these books are banned and in some cases burned in her native country due to their frank portrayals of the sex lives of their characters. She is accused of “corrupting the minds of young women.” She later says, “I felt no fame. I was married. I had young children. All I could hear out of Ireland from my mother and anonymous letters was bile and odium and outrage.”

In the 1960s, O’Brien is a patient of R. D. Laing. “I thought he might be able to help me. He couldn’t do that – he was too mad himself – but he opened doors,” she later says. Her novel A Pagan Place (1970) is about her repressive childhood. Her parents were vehemently against all things related to literature. Her mother strongly disapproved of her daughter’s career as a writer. Once when her mother found a Seán O’Casey book in her daughter’s possession, she tried to burn it.

O’Brien is a panel member for the first edition of BBC One‘s Question Time in 1979. In 2017 she becomes the sole surviving member.

In 1980, O’Brien writes a play, Virginia, about Virginia Woolf, and it is staged originally in June 1980 at the Stratford Festival, Ontario, Canada and subsequently in the West End of London at the Theatre Royal Haymarket with Maggie Smith and directed by Robin Phillips. It is staged at The Public Theater in New York City in 1985. Other works include a biography of James Joyce, published in 1999, and one of the poet Lord Byron, Byron in Love (2009). House of Splendid Isolation (1994), her novel about a terrorist who goes on the run and whose research involves visiting Irish republican Dominic McGlinchey who is later killed and whom she calls “a grave and reflective man,” marks a new phase in her writing career. Down by the River (1996) concerns an under-age rape victim who seeks an abortion in England, the “Miss X case.” In the Forest (2002) deals with the real-life case of Brendan O’Donnell, who abducts and murders a woman, her three-year-old son, and a priest, in rural Ireland.

In addition to the Irish PEN Award, O’Brien’s awards include The Yorkshire Post Book Award in 1970 for A Pagan Place, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1990 for Lantern Slides. In 2006, she is appointed adjunct professor of English Literature at University College Dublin.

In 2009, O’Brien is honoured with the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award during a special ceremony at the year’s Irish Book Awards in Dublin. Her collection Saints and Sinners wins the 2011 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, with judge Thomas McCarthy referring to her as “the Solzhenitsyn of Irish life.” RTÉ airs a documentary on her as part of its Arts strand in early 2012. For her contributions to literature, she is appointed an honorary Dame of the Order of the British Empire on April 10, 2018.

In 2019, O’Brien is awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature at a ceremony in London. The £40,000 prize, awarded every two years in recognition of a living writer’s lifetime achievement in literature, has been described as the “UK and Ireland Nobel in literature.” Judge David Park says, “In winning the David Cohen Prize, Edna O’Brien adds her name to a literary roll call of honour.”

(Pictured: Edna O’Brien speaking at the 2016 Hay Festival, photo by Andrew Lih and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)


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Birth of Garech Browne, Irish Arts & Music Patron

garech-domnagh-browneGarech Domnagh Browne, art collector and notable patron of Irish arts and traditional Irish music, is born in Chapelizod, Dublin on June 25, 1939. He is often known by the Irish designation of his name, Garech de Brún, or alternatively Garech a Brún, especially in Ireland.

Browne is the eldest of the three sons of Dominick Browne, 4th Baron Oranmore and Browne and his second wife, Oonagh Guinness, daughter of Arthur Ernest Guinness and wealthy heiress to the Guinness fortune. His father has the rare distinction of sitting in the House of Lords for 72 years, until his death at the age of 100 in August 2002, without ever speaking in a debate.

As both his parents are married three times, Browne has two stepmothers and two stepfathers, as well as a number of older half-siblings. His only full brother, Tara Browne, is a young London socialite whose death at the age of 21 in a car crash in London’s West End helps inspire John Lennon when writing the song “A Day in the Life” with Paul McCartney. Browne is educated at Institut Le Rosey, Switzerland. Although a member of the extended Guinness family, he takes no active part in its brewing business.

When in Ireland, Browne lives at Luggala, set deep in the Wicklow Mountains in County Wicklow. The house, which he inherited from his mother, has been variously described as a castle or hunting lodge of large proportions. He once states he would rather have not been born, calling it “frightful to bring anyone into this world.”

Browne is a leading proponent for the revival and preservation of traditional Irish music through his record label Claddagh Records which he founds with others in 1959. His former home, Woodtown Manor near Dublin, is for many years a welcoming place for Irish poets, writers and musicians. The folk-pop group Clannad makes many recordings of their music there.

Browne is instrumental in the formation of the traditional Irish folk group The Chieftains. In 1962, after setting up Claddagh Records, he asks his friend, the famed uileann piper Paddy Moloney, to form a group for a one-off album. Moloney responds with the first line-up for the band, which goes on to achieve international commercial success.

Browne is interviewed at length for the Grace Notes traditional music programme on RTÉ lyric fm on 18 March 2010. He is a friend and patron of British artist Francis Bacon and in January 2017 is featured in the BBC documentary Francis Bacon: A Brush with Violence.

Garech Browne dies at the age of 78 in London on March 10, 2018. In his will and testament, he bequeaths to the city of Galway the granite remains of a medieval “bow gate.” The location of this gate, which had otherwise gone unmentioned by Browne, remains a mystery for over a year following his death. It is discovered on the grounds of the Luggala estate in 2019. According to a Galway historian, the gate may have formed part of the city’s defences in the 17th century, and was later removed from the city by Browne’s father, when it was probably taken to the Browne family home at Castle MacGarrett, just outside Claremorris in County Mayo. The gate is one of a number of items left to the Irish State by Browne.


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Birth of Edna O’Brien, Novelist, Playwright & Poet

edna-o-brienEdna O’Brien, novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short story writer, is born in Tuamgraney, County Clare on December 15, 1930. Philip Roth describes her as “the most gifted woman now writing in English,” while the former President of Ireland Mary Robinson cites her as “one of the great creative writers of her generation.” Her works often revolve around the inner feelings of women, and their problems in relating to men, and to society as a whole.

O’Brien is the youngest child of “a strict, religious family.” From 1941 to 1946 she is educated by the Sisters of Mercy, a circumstance that contributes to a “suffocating” childhood. “I rebelled against the coercive and stifling religion into which I was born and bred. It was very frightening and all pervasive. I’m glad it has gone.” She is fond of a nun as she deeply misses her mum and tries to identify the nun with her mother.

In 1950, O’Brien is awarded a licence as a pharmacist. In Ireland, she reads such writers as Leo Tolstoy, William Makepeace Thackeray, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In 1954, she marries, against her parents’ wishes, the Irish writer Ernest Gébler and the couple moves to London. They have two sons but the marriage is dissolved in 1964. Gébler dies in 1998.

In London, O’Brien purchases Introducing James Joyce, with an introduction written by T. S. Eliot. When she learns that James Joyce‘s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is autobiographical, it makes her realise where she might turn, should she decide to write herself. In London she starts work as a reader for Hutchinson, where on the basis of her reports she is commissioned, for £50, to write a novel. Her first novel, The Country Girls (1960), is often credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland following World War II.

This novel is the first part of a trilogy of novels which includes The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). Shortly after their publication, these books are banned and, in some cases burned, in her native country due to their frank portrayals of the sex lives of their characters. Her novel A Pagan Place (1970) is about her repressive childhood. Her parents are vehemently against all things related to literature and her mother strongly disapproves of her daughter’s career as a writer.

O’Brien is a panel member for the first edition of the BBC‘s Question Time in 1979. In 2017, she becomes the sole surviving member.

In 1980, she writes a play, Virginia, about Virginia Woolf, and it is staged originally in June 1980 at the Stratford Festival, Ontario, Canada and subsequently in the West End of London at the Theatre Royal Haymarket with Maggie Smith and directed by Robin Phillips. It is staged at The Public Theater in New York City in 1985.

Other works include a biography of James Joyce, published in 1999, and one of the poet Lord Byron, Byron in Love (2009). House of Splendid Isolation (1994), her novel about a terrorist who goes on the run, marks a new phase in her writing career. Down by the River (1996) concerns an under-age rape victim who seeks an abortion in England, the “Miss X case.” In the Forest (2002) deals with the real-life case of Brendan O’Donnell, who abducts and murders a woman, her three-year-old son, and a priest, in rural Ireland.

O’Brien now lives in London. She receives the Irish PEN Award in 2001. Saints and Sinners wins the 2011 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the world’s richest prize for a short story collection. Faber and Faber publishes her memoir, Country Girl, in 2012. In 2015, she is bestowed Saoi by the Aosdána.


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Death of Richard Harris, Actor & Singer

richard-harrisRichard St. John Harris, Irish actor and singer, dies in London from complications of Hodgkin’s lymphoma and pneumonia on October 25, 2002.

Harris is born to a farming family on October 1, 1930 in Limerick, County Limerick. He is the son of Mildred Josephine (Harty) and Ivan John Harris. He is an excellent rugby player with a strong passion for literature. Unfortunately, a bout of tuberculosis as a teenager ends his aspirations to a rugby career. He becomes fascinated with the theater and skips a local dance one night to attend a performance of Henry IV. He is hooked and goes on to learn his craft at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, followed by several years in stage productions.

Harris makes his film debut in 1959 in the film Alive and Kicking, and plays the lead role in The Ginger Man in the West End in 1959. His second film, Shake Hands with the Devil (1959), quickly scores regular work in films, including The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959), The Night Fighters (1960) and a good role as a frustrated Australian bomber pilot in The Guns of Navarone (1961).

Harris’ breakthrough performance is as the quintessential “angry young man” in the sensational drama This Sporting Life (1963), for which he receives an Academy Award nomination. He then appears in the World War II commando tale The Heroes of Telemark (1965) and in the Sam Peckinpah-directed western Major Dundee (1965). He next shows up in Hawaii (1966) and plays King Arthur in Camelot (1967), a lackluster adaptation of the famous Broadway play. Better performances follow, among them a role as a reluctant police informer in The Molly Maguires (1970) alongside Sean Connery. He takes the lead role in the violent western A Man Called Horse (1970), which becomes something of a cult film and spawns two sequels.

As the 1970s progress, Harris continues to appear regularly on screen, however, the quality of the scripts vary from above average to woeful. His credits during this period include directing himself as an aging soccer player in the delightful The Hero (1971), the western The Deadly Trackers (1973), the big-budget “disaster” film Juggernaut (1974), the strangely-titled crime film 99 and 44/100% Dead (1974), with Connery again in Robin and Marian (1976), Gulliver’s Travels (1977), a part in the Jaws (1975) ripoff Orca (1977) and a nice turn as an ill-fated mercenary with Richard Burton and Roger Moore in the popular action film The Wild Geese (1978).

The 1980s kick off with Harris appearing in the silly Bo Derek vanity production Tarzan, the Ape Man (1981) and the remainder of the decade has him appearing in some very forgettable productions.

However, the luck of the Irish once again shines on Harris’ career and he scores rave reviews and another Oscar nomination for The Field (1990). He then locks horns with Harrison Ford as an Irish Republican Army sympathizer in Patriot Games (1992) and gets one of his best roles as gunfighter English Bob in the Clint Eastwood western Unforgiven (1992). He is firmly back in vogue and rewards his fans with more wonderful performances in Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (1993), Cry, the Beloved Country (1995), The Great Kandinsky (1995) and This Is the Sea (1997). Further fortune comes his way with a strong performance in the blockbuster Gladiator (2000) and he becomes known to an entirely new generation of film fans as Albus Dumbledore in the mega-successful Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002). His final screen role is as “Lucius Sulla” in Julius Caesar (2002).

Harris is diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in August 2002, reportedly after being hospitalised with pneumonia. He dies at University College Hospital in Fitzrovia, London on October 25, 2002 after spending his final three days in a coma. His body is cremated and his ashes are scattered in the Bahamas, where he had owned a home.


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Bloody Sunday 1887 in London

Bloody Sunday takes place in London on November 13, 1887, when a march against unemployment and coercion in Ireland, as well as demanding the release of Member of Parliament (MP) William O’Brien, is attacked by the Metropolitan Police Service and the British Army. The demonstration is organised by the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and the Irish National League. Violent clashes take place between the police and demonstrators, many “armed with iron bars, knives, pokers and gas pipes.” A contemporary report notes that 400 are arrested and 75 persons are badly injured, including many police, two policemen being stabbed and one protester bayonetted.

William Ewart Gladstone‘s espousal of the cause of Irish home rule has split the Liberal Party and makes it easy for the Conservatives to gain a majority in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. The period from 1885 to 1906 is one of Tory dominance, with short intermissions. Coercion Acts are the answer of British governments perturbed by rural unrest in Ireland, and they involve various degrees of suspension of civil rights. Although one purpose of the November 13 demonstration is to protest about the handling of the Irish situation by the Conservative government of Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, it has a much wider context.

The Long Depression, starting in 1873 and lasting almost to the end of the century, creates difficult social conditions in Britain, similar to the economic problems that drive rural agitation in Ireland. Falling food prices create rural unemployment, which results in both emigration and internal migration. Workers move to the towns and cities in thousands, eroding employment, wages and working conditions. By November 1887, unemployed workers’ demonstrations from the East End of London have been building up for more than two years. There have already been clashes with the police and with the members of upper class clubs. Trafalgar Square is seen symbolically as the point at which the working-class East End meets the upper-class West End of London, a focus of class conflict and an obvious flashpoint.

This attracts the attention of the small but growing socialist movement – the Marxists of both the Social Democratic Federation and Socialist League, and the reformist socialists of the Fabian Society. Police and government attempts to suppress or divert the demonstrations also bring in the radical wing of the Liberal Party and free speech activists from the National Secular Society.

Some 30,000 persons encircle Trafalgar Square as at least 10,000 protesters march in from several different directions, led by Elizabeth Reynolds, John Burns, William Morris, Annie Besant and Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, who are primarily leaders of the Social Democratic Federation. Also marching are the Fabian playwright George Bernard Shaw and Charlotte Wilson. Two thousand police and 400 troops are deployed to halt the demonstration. Burns and Cunninghame Graham are arrested and imprisoned for six weeks. Annie Besant, who is a Marxist, Fabian and secularist, speaks at the rally and offers herself for arrest, but the police decline to do so. Of the 400 arrested, 50 are detained in custody.

In the fighting, many rioters are injured by police truncheons and under the hooves of police horses. There are both infantry and cavalry present. Although the infantry are marched into position with bayonets fixed, they are not ordered to open fire and the cavalry are not ordered to draw their swords.

The following Sunday, November 20, sees another demonstration and more casualties. According to a report in the partisan Socialist Review, among them is a young clerk named Alfred Linnell, who is run down by a police horse, dying in hospital a fortnight later from complications of a shattered thigh.

The funeral of Linnell on December 18 provides another focus for the unemployed and Irish movements. William Morris, leader of the Socialist League, gives the main speech and advocates a holy war to prevent London from being turned into a huge prison. A smaller but similar event marks the burial of another of those killed, W. B. Curner, which takes place in January. The release of those imprisoned is celebrated on February 20, 1888, with a large public meeting. Henry Hyndman, leader of the SDF, violently denounces the Liberal Party and the Radicals who are present.

(Pictured: Bloody Sunday, 1887. This engraving from The Illustrated London News depicts a policeman being clubbed by a demonstrator as he wrests a banner from a female protester.)