On October 23, 1914, near Ypres, Belgium, Drummer Kenny rescues wounded men on five occasions under very heavy fire. Twice previously he saves machine guns by carrying them out of action, and on numerous occasions he conveys urgent messages under very dangerous circumstances over fire-swept ground.
On March 20, 1999, Kenny’s grave receives a new headstone, arranged by The Gordon Highlanders London Association (Lt. Col. M. H. Burge). He is not otherwise commemorated. His Victoria Cross and other medals are on display at the Gordon Highlanders Museum, Aberdeen, Scotland.
Geddes is born on her maternal grandparent’s farm at Drumreilly Cottage in Leitrim, County Leitrim, on May 25, 1887. She is the eldest of four children, three girls and a boy, of William Geddes and his wife Eliza Jane Stafford. The family, who migrates to Ireland from Scotland, has mainly been farmers. Her father, a Methodist, who is born near his father’s farm at Tandragee, County Armagh, emigrates to the United States as a young man, working as a labourer for the railway construction business. This serves a useful purpose as he had worked as a site engineer at the Cavan, Leitrim and Roscommon Railway Company. When she is still an infant her parents move to their native home in Belfast, so her father can set up in business as a building contractor.
Geddes begins drawing subjects from life and nature from the age of four. She learns first how to draw from the school mistress in Ayrshire, where her father occasionally goes shooting. She begins her studies at Methodist College Belfast along with her three younger sisters. She later moves to the Belfast School of Art. She is encouraged by Rosamond Praeger, a sculptor from County Down, to continue with her studies. She is accepted as a student to study at the Belfast School of Art, Ulster University. This is where she adapts and improves her style and is introduced to a professional standard of art work.
While still studying at the Belfast School of Art, Geddes takes part in the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland‘s fourth exhibition. For this exhibition, she contributes a glowingly coloured illustration of the book Cinderella Dressing the Ugly Sister (Dublin City Gallery), which she had created. It is at this exhibition that her work is spotted by Sarah Purser, a well established painter seeking newly trained students to introduce to stained glass artistry. Purser, who goes on to be her lifelong mentor, invites the young Geddes to join her in Dublin, working under the established stained glass artist William Orpen.
Geddes contributes a watercolour illustration of a Ballad Seller with the Belfast Art Society in 1907. She is elected as an Associate of the Belfast Art Society’s successor, the Ulster Academy of Arts, in 1933 before promotion to Honorary Academician in 1935. She shows five illustrations in the 1911 Oireachtas Exhibition. It is some twenty-one years before she returns to the Oireachtas when she exhibits three cartoons and three sketches for stained glass in 1932.
Geddes joins Purser at the acclaimed stained glass workshop called An Túr Gloine in 1910. The workshop is held in Dublin’s Metropolitan School of Art. It is here that she discovers her passion for the craftsmanship of stained glass artistry and creates her most important works.
During her early years at An Túr Gloine, Geddes’s originality shines, and important commissions come from St. Ann’s Church, Dawson Street, Dublin and the Presbyterian church in Rathgar. Dogged by illness, she returns to Belfast before 1916 and lives between there and Dublin until moving in 1925, as she has long wanted, to work in London at The Glass House, Fulham. While working at The Glass House, she instructs the Irish painter and stained glass artist Evie Hone.
Geddes’s work is considered pioneering and represents a rejection of the Late Victorian approach. She creates a new view of men in stained glass windows, portraying them with close-shaven crew cuts. The muscularity and tension of her portraiture is matched by the radical design of her constructions. Ambitious large-scale projects, as at the cathedral in Ypres, are equalled by the drama of smaller-scale work at Wallasey (Lancashire) and Wallsend (Northumberland), or war memorial windows in obscure country churches.
Despite the hardships of living in London during World War II, poverty, and ill health, Geddes designs seventeen full-scale stained glass masterpieces, sixteen of which she completes.
Geddes dies on August 10, 1955 in London of a pulmonary embolism. She is buried in CarnmoneyCemetery, County Antrim, along with her mother and sister Ethel. Even after moving to London, she claims that her native identity never wavered as she says she was always “a Belfast woman.”
Roupell is born into a military family. His father, Francis Frederick Fyler Roupell, having served with the British Army in the 70th (Surrey) Regiment of Foot and commanded the 1st Battalion, East Surrey Regiment from 1895 to 1899, is promoted to colonel in 1901. He had married Edith Maria Bryden at Kingston in 1887.
At the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914, the 1st Battalion the East Surreys are deployed as part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) into northern Belgium. Roupell commands a platoon in the BEF’s first major action, the Battle of Mons, in August 1914. He keeps a diary throughout the war, which has since been a, sometimes humorous, source of insight and observation on the events that he witnessed and participated in. In the trenches at Mons, he recounts how he had to hit his men on the backside with his sword in order to gain their attention and remind them to fire low as they had been taught.
Soon after, following the retreat from Mons in September 1914, Roupell leads his platoon in the First Battle of the Aisne. Once again, he comes under heavy fire, this time while crossing the Aisne on a raft. The Surreys’ advance is pushed back with heavy casualties.
On April 20, 1915, during the continued fighting around Ypres, Roupell is commanding a company of his battalion in a front trench on “Hill 60,” which is subjected to a most severe bombardment throughout the day. Although wounded in several places, he remains at his post and leads his company in repelling a strong German assault. During a lull in the bombardment, he has his wounds hurriedly dressed, and then insists on returning to his trench, which is again being subjected to severe bombardment. Toward evening, his company being dangerously weakened, he goes back to his battalion headquarters, represents the situation to his commanding officer, and brings up reinforcements, passing back and forth over ground swept by heavy fire. With these reinforcements he holds his position throughout the night, and until his battalion is relieved next morning. For these actions he is awarded the Victoria Cross.
Roupell is presented with his VC by King George V on July 12, 1915. In addition to his Victoria Cross, he is awarded the Russian Order of St. George (4th Class) and the French Croix de guerre and is mentioned in dispatches. He is retrospectively appointed temporary captain with effect from December 29, 1914, to April 20, 1915, inclusive, and again later the same year.
Roupell is aboard TSS The Queen when it is captured and sunk in the English Channel in October 1916. He is appointed acting brigade major on December 29, 1917. On May 9, 1918, he is seconded to the general staff with the rank of temporary major.
Following the end of hostilities in Europe, Roupell, still an acting major, is promoted to acting lieutenant colonel in charge of a battalion from December 1918 to March 1919. His appointment to the general staff is confirmed on July 1, 1919. During this time, he is attached to the allied force under Edmund Ironside and sent to support Tsarist Russians as part of the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. On a visit to a Tsarist unit, they mutiny, and he and others are taken prisoner near Arkhangelsk, sent to Moscow, and finally repatriated in 1920.
Early in 1921, Roupell marries Doris P. Sant in Paddington. Daughter Phoebe and son Peter are born in 1922 and 1925, respectively.
Roupell’s inter-war military career continues with appointments as staff captain (1921), brigade major (1926), and promotion to substantive major (1928). During the inter-war period, he serves in Gibraltar, the Regimental Depot, India and the Sudan and he attends the Staff College, Camberley. As major (GSO2), he spends two years from 1929 at the Royal Military College of Canada, and in 1934 a year with the British troops in China. Following his return, he is promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1935.
At the outbreak of World War II, in September 1939, Roupell is promoted to colonel and made an acting brigadier, placed in command of 36th Infantry Brigade from October 7, 1939. His brigade is deployed as part of the 12th (Eastern) Division in April 1940 and becomes part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), taking part in the Battle of France. The German thrust near the river Somme toward Abbeville eventually cuts off the BEF, northern French and Belgian forces from the rest of France. His brigade headquarters near Doullens is attacked by enemy troops and, on being told of the threat, he exclaims, “Never mind the Germans. I’m just going to finish my cup of tea.”
When the brigade headquarters is overrun on May 20, 1940, Roupell gives the order for the survivors to split up into small groups and endeavour to re-contact Allied troops. He, with a captain and French interpreter, avoid capture, hiding by day and walking at night for over a month. They arrive at a farm near Rouen where the two officers remain for almost two years, working as labourers. With the help of the French Resistance, they are moved through unoccupied France into non-belligerent Spain, finally boarding a ship in Gibraltar and returning to the United Kingdom.
Following his return, Roupell is appointed commanding officer of the 114th Brigade, part of the 38th (Welsh) Infantry Division, on March 18, 1943, a command he holds until November 2 of that year. The brigade is not destined to see battle, however, and he is soon appointed as garrison commander at Chatham, where he remains until retirement.
In 1946, Roupell is formally retired from the army on retirement pay and granted the honorary rank of brigadier and, at the age of 58, is excused from the reserve list of officers in 1950. He is appointed a Deputy lieutenant of Surrey in 1953.
In 1954, Roupell is appointed Colonel of the East Surreys, succeeding Lieutenant General Arthur Dowler, and is to be the last Colonel of the East Surrey Regiment, relinquishing office in 1959 when amalgamation with the Queen’s Royal Regiment (West Surrey) takes place to form the Queen’s Royal Surrey Regiment. He is appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath in 1956.
Roupell dies at the age of 81 in Shalford, Surrey, on March 4, 1974. His body is cremated at Guildford Crematorium, where his ashes are scattered.
O’Sullivan’s father, John, is originally from Bantry, County Cork, and moves to London as a young man where he eventually becomes a successful tailor. His mother, Mary Ann O’Sullivan (née Murphy), is born in Inniscarra, County Cork. He is the youngest of thirteen children, all born in London, although only eleven survive to adulthood. As a boy he attends St. Edmund’s College, Ware. On January 25, 1915, his eighteenth birthday, he enlists into the Royal Munster Fusiliers, and later transfers to the London Regiment and serves with the rank of lance corporal during World War I, losing a leg at Ypres in 1917.
Upon being discharged from the army in 1918, O’Sullivan is employed by the Ministry of Munitions and, when the war ends, is transferred to the Ministry of Labour where he works as a messenger. The Ministry of Labour is located in Montagu House, adjacent to Scotland Yard, and later demolished and replaced by the present-day Ministry of Defence.
O’Sullivan becomes a member of the IRA detachment in London and is named by Rex Taylor as being responsible for the execution of Vincent Fovargue as a British spy at the Ashford Golf Links, Middlesex, on April 2, 1921. Fovargue is left with a label pinned to his body stating, “Let spies and traitors beware, IRA.” Fovargue had been an officer in the Dublin brigade of the IRA.
O’Sullivan’s brother, Patrick, is the first Vice-Commandant of the London IRA during its early days in 1919 but is seconded to the Cork No. 1 Brigade during the Irish War of Independence. Patrick also serves in the London Regiment during World War I, along with another brother, Aloysius, who is discharged from the army in 1916 suffering from shell shock. Patrick is also wounded in a gas attack during World War I. He fights with the Anti-Treaty IRA during the Irish Civil War and is wounded ten days after his brother is executed. Shortly before that, he crosses over to England to participate in an abortive attempt to rescue Dunne and his brother.
In 1923, John O’Sullivan tries to have the remains of his son and Dunne released for a funeral Mass. But it is not until after the abolition of capital punishment in the United Kingdom that Patrick O’Sullivan, with the assistance of the Irish RepublicanNational Graves Association, is able to arrange for the bodies of O’Sullivan and Dunne to be sent to Ireland for burial. In mid-August 1929, Irish Republicans in London unveil a plaque commemorating Dunne and O’Sullivan. In 1967, after some political and diplomatic debate by the British and Irish governments, the British Government allows the bodies of Dunne and O’Sullivan to be exhumed. They are subsequently reburied in Dean’s Grange Cemetery, County Dublin.
(Pictured: Photograph of IRA member Joseph O’Sullivan taken before his 1922 execution)
William Ireland de Courcy Wheeler, surgeon, is born on May 9, 1879, in Dublin, fourth son among six sons and four daughters of William Ireland de Courcy Wheeler, a distinguished doctor, and Frances Victoria Wheeler (née Shaw), cousin of George Bernard Shaw.
Wheeler is educated at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and loses an eye as a result of an accident but overcomes the disability. He wins a moderatorship, a medal, and prizes and graduates BA (1899) in anatomy, natural science, and experimental science and, following postgraduate study in Berne, an MB, B.Ch., and MD (1902). The following year he receives the Dublin University Biological Association’s medal for his paper Deaths under chloroform. He is appointed demonstrator and assistant to the professor of the TCD anatomy department before becoming honorary surgeon (1904–32) to Mercer’s Hospital, Dublin. He is also attached to several other institutions including the Rotunda Hospital and the National Children’s Hospital. An outstanding teacher, he attracts large numbers to his clinical classes and lectures in surgery to postgraduates at TCD.
Ambitious and abounding in self-confidence, Wheeler dedicates all his indomitable energy and time to his work, is a frequent visitor to foreign clinics, becomes a skilled general surgeon and a specialist in orthopaedics, and earns an international reputation. During World War I he serves in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) and from 1915 converts his private hospital, 33 Upper Fitzwilliam Street, into the Dublin Hospital for Wounded Officers and makes it available to the St. John’s Ambulance brigade and the British Red Cross. He acts as honorary officer in charge and is also surgeon to the Duke of Connaught‘s Hospital for Limbless Soldiers, and honorary surgeon to the forces in Ireland.
In 1916, Wheeler visits the western front, tours the hospitals in Boulogne, and is attached to a casualty clearing station at Remy Siding near Ypres. Returning to Dublin on the request of Robert Jones, he organises the Dublin Military Orthopaedic Centre, Blackrock, where he serves as surgeon (1916–21). His advice is widely sought, and he serves on several committees, including the War Office Council of Consulting Surgeons (1917) and the Ministry of Pensions Medical Advisory Council on Artificial Limbs. Promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1918, he receives the General Service Medal and is twice mentioned in dispatches, having courageously treated wounded soldiers under fire during the 1916 Easter Rising. Appointed surgeon-in-ordinary to the lord-lieutenant, he is knighted in 1919.
Principal founder of the Dublin Hospitals’ Club (1922), Wheeler publishes two textbooks, A Handbook of Operative Surgery (1906) and Selected Papers on Injuries and Diseases of Bone (1928). He contributes numerous authoritative papers on a variety of surgical subjects to professional journals and edits the chapter on general surgery in the Medical Annual from 1916 to 1936. Inspector of examinations for the Medical Research Council of Ireland, he is external examiner to universities in Ireland and Scotland. Interested in hospital policy and nursing, he advocates the federation of the smaller hospitals and is chairman of the City of Dublin Nursing Institute. Fellow (1905) and council member (1906), he follows in his father’s footsteps and is elected president (1922–24) of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. He is also president of the Dublin University Biological Association and of the surgical section of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland and is awarded an honorary ChM from Cairo University in 1928.
Troubled and bewildered by the political situation in Ireland, Wheeler is persuaded by Rupert Guinness, 2nd Earl of Iveagh, to accept the position of visiting surgeon (1932) to the new hospital at Southend-on-Sea, Essex, to which Iveagh had donated £200,000. The departure of such a leading figure in Irish medical circles is widely regretted. His posts in London include surgeoncies to All Saints Hospital for Genito-Urinary Diseases and to the Metropolitan Ear, Nose, and Throat Hospital. The diversity of his interests and his general competence make him a valued member of the editorial staff of several journals including the British Journal of Surgery, the British Journal of Urology, and the American Journal of Surgery, Gynaecology, and Obstetrics. He is also a member of the American Editors Association. He enjoys many affiliations with America, where he is well known and honoured by being elected honorable fellow of the American College of Surgeons and selected as their John B. Murphy orator (1932), and by election as honorary member and president of the Post Graduate Assembly of North America. An active member of the British Medical Association, he is president of the Leinster branch (1925–26) and of the Orthopaedic section (1933), vice-president of the Surgical section (1930, 1932), and chairman of the council and president of the Metropolitan Counties Branch (1938). President of the Irish Medical Schools and Graduates Association, he is awarded their Arnott gold medal in 1935.
During World War II Wheeler serves as consultant surgeon to the Royal Navy in Scotland, with the rank of rear admiral (1939–43) and is posted to Aberdeen. Strong-minded, unconventional, and often controversial, he has a gift for friendship, is charming and good-humoured, and excels in the art of the after-dinner speech. Immensely proud of Dublin’s medical and surgical traditions, he always eagerly returned to Ireland, where he planned to retire and write his memoirs.
Wheeler dies suddenly on September 11, 1943, at his home in Aberdeen and is cremated at the Aberdeen crematorium. As a memorial to his father, he bequeaths his library and that of his father to the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and also leaves a fund for the Sir William Wheeler memorial medal in surgery.
Born on August 19, 1887, to a poor family in Slane, County Meath, Ledwidge starts writing at an early age, and is first published in a local newspaper at the age of fourteen. Finding work as a labourer and miner, he is also a trade union activist and a keen patriot and nationalist, associated with Sinn Féin. He becomes friendly with a local landowner, the writer Lord Dunsany, who gives him a workspace in the library of Dunsany Castle and introduces him to literary figures including William Butler Yeats and Katherine Tynan, with whom he has a long-term correspondence. He is elected to a local authority post and helps organise the local branch of the Irish Volunteers, while Dunsany edits and helps him secure publication for a first volume of his poetry.
Having sided with the faction of the Irish Volunteers which oppose participation in the war, he enlists in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in October 1914, and continues to write poetry on assignment, sending work to Lord Dunsany and to family and other friends. The poems he writes on active service reveal his pride at being a soldier, as he believes, in the service of Ireland. He often wonders whether he would find a soldier’s death.
On July 31, 1917, a group from Ledwidge’s battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers are road-laying in preparation for an assault during the Third Battle of Ypres, near the village of Boezinge, northwest of Ypres.
According to Irish author and lecturer Alice Curtayne, “Ledwidge and his comrades had been toiling since the early morning at roadmaking. The army’s first need was men; their second, guns; their third roads. These latter consisted mainly of heavy beech planks bolted together, which could be rapidly laid down. No advance could be supported in that sodden land without a sufficiency of these communications tracks, six or seven feet wide. Supplies were conveyed by pack mules over the wooden paths. Survivors concur in placing the road work done by B Company that day one mile northeast of Hellfire Corner, so called because it was very exposed to German shelling. There was a violent rainstorm in the afternoon, shrouding the region in a gray monochrome. Sullenly, the enemy’s long-range guns continued to fling their shells far behind the lines. Roadwork could not be suspended, however, as the tracks were in use as fast as they were laid down. Tea was issued to the men and, drenched to the skin, they stopped to swallow it. A shell exploded beside Ledwidge and he was instantly killed.”
A Roman Catholicmilitary chaplain, Father Devas, is the first on the scene. That night, Father Devas writes in his diary, “Crowds at Holy Communion. Arranged for service but washed out by rain and fatigues. Walk in rain with dogs. Ledwidge killed, blown to bits; at Confession yesterday and Mass and Holy Communion this morning. R.I.P.”
Ledwidge is first buried at Carrefour de Rose, and later re-interred in the nearby Artillery Wood Military Cemetery, at Boezinge, where the Welsh poet Hedd Wyn, who was killed in action on the same day, also lies buried.
Dunsany arranges for the publication of more of Ledwidge’s poems, and a collected edition in 1919. Further poems, from the archives at Dunsany Castle and some material held by family, are later published by Ledwdige’s biographer, Alice Curtayne, and by one of the Ledwidge memorial societies. Ledwidge is selected as one of twelve prominent war poets for the exhibition Anthem for Doomed Youth at the Imperial War Museum in London in 2002, and memorialised at an event in Inchicore, Dublin, in 2017, with his work set to music by Anúna. A museum of his life and work is opened in his birthplace cottage in 1982. Some of his manuscripts are held in the National Library of Ireland and more in the archives of Dunsany Castle.
seamus dubhghaill 