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

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Birth of Richard Orpen, Architect, Painter & Illustrator

Richard Francis Caulfield Orpen, Irish architect, painter, illustrator and designer, is born on December 24, 1863.

Orpen is born to Anne (née Caulfield) and Arthur Herbert Orpen, a solicitor of Oriel, Blackrock, Dublin. His maternal grandfather is the Bishop of Nassau, Charles Caulfield. He is the eldest of four brothers and two sisters. His youngest brother is William, the painter. He attends St. Columba’s College in Whitechurch, Dublin, and graduates from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) with a BA in 1885. While attending St. Columba’s, he publishes an Irish comic alphabet for the present times in 1881, which is a mix of cartoons and verse mocking Charles Stewart Parnell and the home rule movement.

Orpen wants to pursue painting, but “for family reasons” he becomes an architect. He spends eleven years with Thomas Drew, initially as a pupil, and later as a managing assistant from 1885 to 1892. From around 1884, he attends the annual excursions of the English Architectural Association. Around 1890, he establishes his own architectural practice in Drew’s offices at 22 Clare Street, Dublin. In 1896, he moves his office to 7 Leinster Street. In 1888 he is elected as a member of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI), serving as a council member from 1902 to 1910, as honorary secretary from 1903 to 1905, and as president from 1914 to 1917. He designs the institute’s official seal in 1909. In 1904, the Irish Builder describes him as the “originator of the bungalow in Ireland.”

From 1888, Orpen exhibits with the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), with watercolours and architectural drawings. He continues to exhibit with them until 1936. He collaborates with Percy French on a number of projects, including illustrating Racquetry Rhymes (1888) and The First Lord Liftinant and Other Tales (1890). He provides cartoons for French’s periodical, The Jarvey. His architectural illustrations are included in H. Goldsmith Whitton’s Handbook of the Irish Parliament Houses… (1891). He is one of the original members of the Architectural Association of Ireland, serving as its first president in 1896, and as vice-president in 1910.

Orpen is appointed the architect to St. Columba’s from 1897 to 1938, following a fire at the college in 1896. He becomes a fellow of the college, and the sanatorium becomes known as the Orpen building. He is an active member of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland, serving as secretary in 1895, on the committee in 1904, and in 1917 sits on the organising committee for the fifth exhibition. In 1906, he is a founding member of the Arts Club. In 1906 he moves his architectural practice to 13 South Frederick Street, and moves into a house he designed, Coologe, Carrickmines, County Dublin.

At the 1907 Irish International Exhibition, Dublin, Orpen exhibits a number of chalk drawings. The same year he designs the cover of a satirical pamphlet, The Abbey row, not edited by W. B. Yeats, which mocks The Arrow and the riots at the first production of The Playboy of the Western World. He unveils a bust of Hugh Lane at the opening of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art on Harcourt Street in 1908. He is appointed secretary to the municipal gallery committee by Lane. In 1910, he is appointed architect to Christ Church Cathedral, as well as architect to St. Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. In 1911 he is elected an associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy, a full member in 1912, and was the academy’s secretary from 1925 to 1937.

From 1910 to 1914, Orpen is in an architectural partnership with Page Dickinson, with the two collaborating on plans for the new Dublin municipal gallery and conversion of the Turkish Baths, Lincoln Place. Lane rejects his and Dickinson’s gallery plans, leading to him refusing to work with Lane’s choice of architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens. In 1914, he is appointed a guardian of the National Gallery of Ireland, and lectures at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art on architectural history in 1914 and 1915. He is involved in the design of a number of memorials including the setting for a bronze relief by Beatrice Campbell for the members of the Royal Irish Regiment killed in the Second Boer War and the war memorial at the Rathgar Methodist church. He serves as president of the arts and crafts section of the Royal Dublin Society (RDS). He is also a governor of the Royal National Hospital for Consumption for Ireland in Newcastle, County Wicklow.

Orpen marries Violet Caulfield in 1900. They are both descended from William Caulfeild, 1st Viscount Charlemont. He dies on March 27, 1938, at his home, Coologe, and is buried in Dean’s Grange Cemetery.

Orpen features as one of the many portraits in Seán Keating‘s Homage to Sir Hugh Lane. St. Columba’s College holds a portrait of Orpen by his brother, William, as well as a memorial stained-glass window to him by Catherine O’Brien.


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Birth of Novelist & Poet Annie M. P. Smithson

Annie Mary Patricia Smithson, Irish novelist, poet and Nationalist, is born into a Protestant family in Sandymount, Dublin, on September 26, 1873.

Smithson is christened Margaret Anne Jane but takes the names Anne Mary Patricia on her conversion to Catholicism. Her mother and father are first cousins, and her father dies when she is young. About 1881 her mother marries her second husband, Peter Longshaw, who owns a chemical factory in Warrington, Lancashire, England. She dislikes her stepfather and refers to him always as Mr. Longshaw. There are five children of the second marriage.

Smithson abandons her ambition to become a journalist in order to train as a nurse and a midwife. She trains in London and Edinburgh, before returning to Dublin in 1900. In 1901 she takes up a post as district nurse in Millton, County Down. There she falls in love with her colleague Dr. James Manton, a married man. Deciding that a relationship is impossible, she leaves Millton in 1906. They keep up a correspondence until her conversion, when she burns his letters.

Smithson converts to Catholicism in March 1907 and becomes a fervent Republican and Nationalist. She becomes a member of Cumann na mBan and campaigns for Sinn Féin in the 1918 Irish general election.

Smithson takes the Republican side in the Irish Civil War and nurses participants in the siege at Moran’s Hotel. In 1922 she is imprisoned by Irish Free State forces and is rescued from Mullingar prison by Linda Kearns McWhinney and Muriel MacSwiney, posing as a Red Cross delegation. Her political views lead to her resignation from the Queen’s Nurses Committee and a move into private nursing. In 1924 she writes a series of articles on child welfare work for the Evening Mail newspaper, based on her work in tenements in the Dublin Liberties, one of the poorest areas of the city, where she continues to work until 1929.

Smithson is Secretary and Organiser of the Irish Nurse Organisation from 1929 to 1942. She writes for the Irish Nurses’ Magazine and edits the Irish Nurses Union Gazette.

In 1917 Smithson publishes her first novel, Her Irish Heritage, which becomes a best-seller. It is dedicated to those who died in the Easter Rising of 1916. In all, she publishes twenty novels and two short story collections. Other successful novels include By Strange Paths and The Walk of a Queen. Many of her works are highly romantic and draw on her own life experiences, with nationalism and Catholicism featured as recurrent themes. In 1944 she publishes her autobiography, Myself – and Others.

From 1932 onwards Smithson shares a house in Rathmines, Dublin, with her stepsister and her stepsister’s family. She dies of heart failure on February 21, 1948, at 12 Richmond Hill, Dublin, and is buried in Whitechurch, Dublin.

Smithson’s novels are featured in Brian Friel‘s 1990 play Dancing at Lughnasa. Between 1989 and 1990 the Mercier Press reprints several of her works.


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Birth of Brian Faulkner, Sixth & Last Prime Minister of Northern Ireland

Arthur Brian Deane Faulkner, Baron Faulkner of Downpatrick, the sixth and last Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, is born on February 18, 1921, in Helen’s Bay, County Down.

Faulkner is the elder of two sons of James, owner of the Belfast Collar Company, and Nora Faulkner. His younger brother is Colonel Sir Dennis Faulkner. He is educated initially at Elm Park preparatory school, Killylea, County Armagh, but at 14, preferring to stay in Ireland, is sent to the Church of Ireland-affiliated St. Columba’s College at Whitechurch, County Dublin, although he is Presbyterian. His best friend at the school is Michael Yeats, son of W. B. Yeats. He enters Queen’s University Belfast in 1939 to study law, but, with the advent of World War II, he quits his studies to work full-time in the family shirt-making business. He is the only Prime Minister of Northern Ireland to have been educated in the Irish Free State and one of only two to have been educated in Ireland.

Faulkner becomes involved in unionist politics, the first of his family to do so, and is elected to the Parliament of Northern Ireland as the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of East Down in 1949. His vociferous traditional unionist approach to politics ensures him a prominent backbench position. He is, at the time, the youngest ever MP in the Northern Irish Parliament. He is also the first Chairman of the Ulster Young Unionist Council in 1949. In 1956 he is offered and accepts the job of Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Finance, or Government Chief Whip.

In 1959, Faulkner becomes Minister of Home Affairs and his handling of security for most of the Irish Republican Army‘s border campaign of 1956–62 bolsters his reputation in the eyes of the right wing of Ulster unionism.

When Terence O’Neill becomes Prime Minister in 1963, he appoints Faulkner, his chief rival for the job, as Minister of Commerce. He resigns in 1969 over the technicalities of how and when to bring in the local government reforms which the British Labour government is pushing for. This is a factor in the resignation of O’Neill, who resigns as Prime Minister in the aftermath of his failure to achieve a good enough result in the 1969 Northern Ireland general election.

In the ensuing leadership contest, Faulkner loses out again when O’Neill gives his casting vote to his cousin, James Chichester-Clark. In 1970, he becomes the Father of the House. He comes back into government as Minister of Development under Chichester-Clark and in a sharp turn-around, begins the implementation of the political reforms that were the main cause of his resignation from O’Neill’s cabinet. Chichester-Clark himself resigns in 1971 as the political and security situation and the more intensive British interest proves difficult.

Faulkner is elected leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and Prime Minister. In his initial innovative approach to government, he gives a non-unionist, David Bleakley, a former Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) MP, a position in his cabinet as Minister for Community Relations. In June 1971, he proposes three new powerful committees at Stormont which would give the opposition salaried chairmanships of two of them.

However, this initiative (radical at the time) is overtaken by events. A shooting by soldiers of two nationalist youths in Derry causes the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), the main opposition, to boycott the Stormont parliament. The political climate deteriorates further when, in answer to a worsening security situation, Faulkner introduces internment on August 9, 1971. This is a disaster and causes the situation to worsen.

Despite this, Faulkner continues his radical approach to Northern Irish politics and, following Bleakley’s resignation in September 1971 over the internment issue, appointes Dr. G. B. Newe, a prominent lay Catholic, as Minister of State in the Cabinet Office. His administration staggers on through the rest of 1971, insisting that security is the paramount issue.

In January 1972, an incident occurs during a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march in Derry, during which paratroopers shoot and killed thirteen unarmed civilians. A fourteenth civilian dies later. What history has come to know as Bloody Sunday is, in essence, the end of Faulkner’s government. In March 1972, he refuses to maintain a government without security powers which the British government under Edward Heath decides to take back. The Stormont parliament is subsequently prorogued, initially for a period of one year, and following the appointment of a Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw, direct rule is introduced.

In June 1973, elections are held to a new devolved parliament, the Northern Ireland Assembly. The elections split the UUP. Faulkner becomes chief executive in a power-sharing executive with the SDLP and the centre-ground Alliance Party, a political alliance cemented at the Sunningdale Conference that year. The power-sharing Executive lasts only six months and is brought down by a loyalist Ulster Workers’ Council strike in May 1974. In 1974, he loses the leadership of the UUP to anti-Sunningdale elements led by Harry West. He subsequently resigns from the Ulster Unionist Party and forms the Unionist Party of Northern Ireland (UPNI).

The UPNI fares badly in the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention elections of 1975, winning only five out of the 78 seats contested. Faulkner wins the final seat. In 1976 he announces that he is quitting active politics. He is elevated to the House of Lords in the 1977 New Year Honours list, being created Baron Faulkner of Downpatrick on February 7, 1977.

Faulkner, a keen huntsman, dies on March 3, 1977, following a riding accident while hunting with the County Down Staghounds at the Ballyagherty/Station Road junction near Saintfield, County Down. He is riding at full gallop along a narrow country road when his horse slips, throwing him off and killing him instantly. He is laid to rest at Magherahamlet Presbyterian Church near Spa, County Down where he had been a regular member of the congregation. His twenty-four-day life peerage is thus the shortest-lived until the death of Lord Heywood of Whitehall in 2018 just nine days after ennoblement.