Dictionary of Irish Biography

The Oedipal archbishop, two "damned Sapphists" and the sage of Maidenhall

2010-03-18T19:17:00.000-07:00

The DIB has 99 pages of Butlers. Like the Burkes, an ancient family, Norman, who arrived in the 12th century to conquer, succeeded and multiplied. And like the Burkes, many of them to me are somewhat interchangeable, ruling, fighting and scheming through the centuries with success but without firing the imagination. Then an interesting one pops out of the page. Edmund Butler, archbishop of Cashel from 1524-1551, a schemer with a good helping of Oedipal rage.

His father, Piers Ruadh Butler, 8th earl of Ormond and 1st earl of Ossory was, the DIB will tell us (I'm jumping ahead to page 164), "perhaps the best exemplar of the use of naked ambition and political skill to achieve personal goals in late medieval Ireland." Edmund was Piers' illegitimate son, although he received a papal dispensation declaring him legitimate. He was named by the pope to the archdiocese in 1524, and the appointment was approved by Henry VIII, the English king, who had not yet broken with Rome. But his consecration was delayed, most likely because Edmund had irritated his father by seeking to enforce a disused charter exempting church property from taxation from the feudal lord, a/k/a daddy. Piers needed the money because he was building his military strength to thwart Irish rivals, and took Edmund's tax-dodging very badly. While Piers tried to promote rival candidates for the archbishopric, Edmund began to team up with the very rivals his father was trying to resist. Edmund was not anti-tax: he just wanted the money for himself, and proved ruthless in shaking down the faithful for funds. As the DIB points out, the main reason Piers and Edmund didn't get on was that they were so similar.

As Piers grew in power, the English crown increased its support of Piers as a counterweight: this included giving his archdiocese extra land and brushing aside meritorious accusations of oppression, robbery, and the like. In gratitude, Edmund supported Henry when he split from Rome. As the crown suppressed the monasteries, abbeys and priories, sources of important revenue for Edmund, he was offered very generous land deals to make up the lost income. Once Piers died, Edmund teamed up with the successor, his half-brother James, and was co-opted to make peace with their father's enemies, helping James levy further taxes and giving false evidence against the recalcitrant. He also supported the elevation of Henry VIII from lord to king of Ireland in 1541. After Henry's death, Edward VI attempted to impose outright protestantism on the Irish church, to which Edmund responded first by trying to stay out of the weigh and then by doing what he was asked. Whatever civil wrongs he committed in his life were pardoned in 1550, just before his death.

Eleanor Butler is described by the DIB as "recluse of Llangollen" but that's too weak-watered. She was born in France around 1739 to a Tipperary family that moved back to Ireland. Her father and brother were earls of Ormond, although they do not appear to have used their titles. (The DIB says that the brother, James was the 16th earl: I believe he was the 17th, although I've already made clear my lack of interest in the genealogical punctilios of the peerage.) They were impoverished by the standards of the gentry, and Eleanor (for whatever reason) was not apparently a candidate for marriage. When she was about 29, a 13 year-old girl named Sarah Ponsonby moved to Kilkenny; she and Eleanor formed a close friendship. Both came under pressure from their families: Eleanor was being pushed to enter a convent, while wolves seemed to have circled Sarah. Some time in 1778, Sarah declared that she would "live and die with Miss Butler" and the two attempted to elope, dressed as men: they were caught and sent back. However, at some point, their families appear to have given in and the two set up home in Llangollen in Wales, where they lived out their lives.

The DIB entries on the two women are not exactly congruent. The account of Eleanor, by Frances Clarke, speaks of her, as I mentioned above, as a "recluse" and states that she and Sarah "made a deliberate decision to retire from the world". Sarah's entry, by Noreen Giffney, takes issue with such claims, and a contemporary newspaper report describing the two as "female hermits": she points out that their many visitors included Wordsworth, Coleridge, Edmund Burke, Walter Scott, the Duke of Wellington and Charles Darwin. (Clarke adds Charles' two grandfathers, Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood to the visitors' book: I wonder if they all arrived together?) Clarke and Giffney take quite different tacks as to the nature of their relationship. Clark is noncommittal, citing Eleanor's taking of legal advice (from Edmund Burke) over a newspaper article that implied that their relationship as "unnatural" (Clarke's word, not in quotes). Giffney, more assertive, states that "their lesbianism was not widely recognized", while acknowledging contemporary opinion that went in both directions, one describing them as the most celebrated virgins in Europe and another condemning them as "damned Sapphists" (on reflection, these aren't mutually exclusive). They wore their hair short and "semi-masculine dress". Whatever, they appear to have been prized for their conversation and learning, the Gothic refurbishment of their house and the beautiful gardens that they laid out. Although they rarely left Llangollen, they seemed to know everything that was going on everywhere. Fame may have tarnished them a little: Eleanor was said to be "haughty and imperious" from "incessant homage". They are buried, together with their devoted servant Mary Carryll, in Llangollen church.

I can't remember when I first came across Hubert Butler, but it was some time after his first collection of essays, Escape From The Anthill, appeared in 1985. He was 85, and had been virtually forgotten for more than a generation. The essays, on Ireland, literature and the Balkans, were revelatory, the work of a man raised in Kilkenny where, apart from time at school and university, and extensive travel in Russia, Yugoslavia and Austria, he spent his entire life. A protestant who embraced the independent Irish state, he worked for a while as a librarian, but principally, as the the DIB's entry by Kate Bateman puts it, at "having no career". From the 1940s on, when he inherited the family home at Maidenhall, Co. Kilkenny, he applied himself mainly to writing and travel, and revived the Kilkenny Archaeological Society, which had roots back to the 1840s. After the success of the first book, three more collections of essays appeared: The Children of Drancy and Grandmother and Wolfe Tone, before Butler's death in 1991 and In The Land of Nod, posthumously. They were all extraordinary, an amazing literary output from someone that hardly anybody had previously heard of.

One of the reasons that Butler had been largely forgotten was an incident that occurred in 1952. At the time, much attention was given in Ireland to the plight of faithful catholics in Eastern Europe, particularly in Hungary and Yugoslavia. Public opinion was enlisted by the church and politicians in support of the cause. Butler had no truck with the persecution of catholics by communists. But he knew Yugoslavia very well and spoke fluent Serbo-Croatian. He knew that during the Second World War, elements of the catholic church in Croatia had collaborated with the fascist Ustaše movement in atrocities against, and forced conversions of, the Orthodox population. He publicized this fact, and the fact that some of the very people being lionized in Ireland for their resistance to communism were linked to the crimes perpetrated in Croatia. For this, he was attacked in the press, ostracized and removed from the minor public offices he held. He retreated to Maidenhall, and although he was by no means cut off from the world, he effectively ceased to be a public figure for more than 30 years. Happily, late in life, he was rediscovered and finally enjoyed the approval he always deserved. What made him special? He wrote the truth, elegantly, spinning wise stories often from small local observations. He believed in the richness of an Ireland formed from all of its traditions, including the small southern protestant one to which he belonged. He promoted peace and unity, and damned violence and tyranny. He knew all about the world in which he lived, and described it well, so that we could understand it, too.

A great doctor, an alpine photographer, two revolutionary consorts, a ravaged painter and a rescued singer

2010-03-17T01:10:00.000-07:00

Son of Dracula (1943) is the one where Lon Chaney plays the cunningly-named Alucard, who travels to America. Obviously, nobody was going to work out his true identity from such a sophisticated word-jumble. So, equally clearly, none of you will be able to identify the true location of Lirenda, or its antagonist neighbor Angolea, as depicted in Henry Burkhead's 1646 play A tragedy of Cola's furie, or Lirenda's miserie. In a past life, to which I've previously referred, I spent quite a lot of time in the Bodleian library in Oxford, among whose advantages were holdings comprising virtually every book ever published in English. In my efforts to find something new to say about very well-mined material in 16th and 17th century drama I read some very obscure plays, which would arrive at my desk, dust-encrusted, inspiring science fiction fantasies about 400 year-old plagues preserved in the Bodleian stacks whose spores would be unleashed, fatally, on unsuspecting researchers. Unfortunately, most of these plays did not provide even that distraction: it turned out that they had been rightly consigned to the dust all those years ago, and did not really merit the temporary disinterment that I arranged for them. I suspect that Cola's furie is in that category, although I never got to read it at the time, it having been published six years after the unyielding cut off date for my studies. We don't know much about Henry Burkhead: the DIB thinks he may have been English. But he was somehow connected to the confederation of Kilkenny, which, as I mentioned yesterday, I'm not much interested in writing about. (Two days in a row: how much more uninterested can I be?) In it, the "catholic gentry of Lirenda ... defend their rights against brutal, treacherous Angoleans". That at least, seems to be an illustration of recognizable emotions, similar to those on display in my local pub the other week when Ireland thrashed England at rugby. That Lirendan-Angolean thing is always a rich vein to tap.

Denis Parsons Burkitt was a remarkable scientist. He came from Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, and after studying medicine at Trinity College Dublin he ended up in Africa - he had a parallel interest in missionary work - where he wrote papers on epidemiology and pioneered inexpensive prostheses for amputees. His first major work was on cancer: he first described a form of the disease in African children that came to be known as Burkitt's lymphoma, and his 1958 paper on the subject became a "citation classic", which I understand is a term of art for a widely-cited scientific work. He took a 10,000-mile safari through Africa to identify the coincidence of lymphoma and malaria, which resulted in the first connection between a cancer and a virus. Still working in the challenging conditions of Africa, he also pioneered the use of chemotherapy to treat lymphoma: the DIB says that Burkitt's "work is considered to be one of the most significant contributions to cancer research in the twentieth century."

Upon his return from Africa, he make a second major discovery: the correlation between the lack of dietary fibre and the incidence of colon and rectal cancer: his 1971 paper on the subject is another citation classic. This discovery is cited as the cause of a fundamental change in western diets. He was serious about his christianity and of his own work, he quoted the apostle Paul: "what do you possess that was not given to you? If then you received it as a gift, why take all the credit to yourself"?

It's a bit difficult to keep up with the names of Elizabeth Burnaby. Born Elizabeth Alicia Hawkins-Whitshed, she successively married Gustavus Burnaby, John Frederick Main and Francis Bernard Aubrey Le Blond, taking her husbands' names as appropriate. Since she published photographs, this means her works are listed variously as those of Mrs. Burnaby, Mrs. Main, and Mrs. Le Blond, which can make them difficult to track down. I found a copy of her book High Life and Towers of Silence, in which she's separately described as Mrs Fred. Burnaby and Elizabeth Main. But it's worth persevering because she was truly a remarkable woman, a pioneer of both mountain climbing and photography. She went to the Alps to improve her health, and they clearly had a good effect: she climbed Montblanc and the Matterhorn and many others during a 20-year alpine career, for obvious practical reasons in short skirts. She brought a camera with her from the beginning - first a cumbersome wooden affair with bellows and a tripod, later a smaller roll film camera - and took thousands of photographs, many of which were widely sold and appeared in books: in addition to High Life, she authored Hints on Snow Photography and contributed the photos to E.F. Benson's Winter Sports in Switzerland. (Follow the link to High Life to see some of her pictures.) She was from Greystones in Co. Wicklow, a lovely seaside village, now somewhat suburbanized but still attractive, which I've visited all my life and where my father now lives. The name of her first husband, Burnaby, is prominent in the area: his family had substantial estates there.

Mary and Lizzie Burns, were also impressive women. (Lizzie is in the picture.) Their father emigrated from Ireland to Manchester, and Mary worked as a teenager in the mill owned by the family of the socialist Friedrich Engels. They met in 1842, and she introduced him to the condition of the working class in England - which presumably had some influence on his book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844, which the DIB does not mention. They cohabited without marrying, which somewhat comically earned the disapproval of Karl Marx and his wife Jenny. She took Engels to Ireland in 1856, and he wrote an interesting letter to Marx about their trip. She died suddenly in 1863, around the age of 40: when Engels told Marx, he offered passing sympathy while complaining how short of money he was. Engels then became involved with Lizzie, who had already been living in his and Mary's household. The Marxes seem to have been warmer to her: Eleanor, Karl's daughter, became wedded to Irish nationalism thanks to Lizzie, and they both accompanied Engels on his second visit to Ireland in 1869. They enjoyed themselves, but Engels lamented that the Irish peasant was turning bourgeois. As Lizzie's health began to fail, they moved around England, Scotland and Germany in the hope of her recuperation. The day before her death in 1878, Engels and Lizzie married: she was buried in a catholic cemetery in London: I hope she hadn't turned bourgeois as well.

I'm curious as to why Napoléon Bonaparte was attended by five Irish doctors during his final days in Saint Helena. One of them, Francis Burton, from Tuam, Co. Galway, observed his post mortem and made the mould from which the emperor's death mask was struck - although there was an undignified quarrel over this when a Corsican doctor claimed credit. Burton's nephew was the fascinating and notorious explorer and orientalist Richard Burton.

This picture probably does not do justice to the work of the artist Letitia Bushe, a Kilkenny watercolorist and miniaturist. Trinity College Dublin has archived some paintings, but these 18th century public domain works have been locked behind a password-protected wall to which a copyright notice has been attached! For shame ... She was a teacher of many artists, a great conversationalist and a beauty, who was saddened the loss of her former admirers after her looks were ravaged by smallpox.

Eddie Butcher came from a musical family: his father sang, as did nearly all of his siblings. He stayed close to his home in Magilligan, Co. Londonderry, where he worked as a farm laborer and road worker and sang, but never professionally. He had a huge repertoire of folk songs, and fortunately the collector Hugh Shields found him and recorded more than 200 works. He made many more recordings and broadcasts and was greatly appreciated by the 1960s generation of Irish folk singers. I found a recording of a wonderful unaccompanied song, Another Man's Wedding, here. (Legal streaming: do you have a problem with that, Trinity College Dublin?)

A fenian colonel, a hapless explorer, a bonesetting politician and a pair of serial killers

2010-03-16T00:23:00.000-07:00

Ricard (no 'h') O'Sullivan Burke was about 18 when he deserted from the Cork militia - whose name I can never hear without thinking of Percy French's comic song Slattery's Mounted Fut, now somewhat disfavored for its paddywhackery - went to New York, then Central and South America, then California (gold mining), then Chile (joined the cavalry), then back to New York just in time for the civil war. He enlisted in the union army and fought at Bull Run, Yorktown, Fredericksburg, and Petersburg, among other places, and was eventually discharged in 1865 with the rank of brevet colonel, "having gone through the war without a scratch". In his spare time, he organized the Fenian Brotherhood in the Army of the Potomac, preparing himself for peacetime, when he was sent to England to buy guns for the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Like his probably distant relative Thomas Francis Bourke, who fought on the conferederate side, Burke was dispatched to Ireland to provide military experience in the 1867 Fenian uprising. The revolt was something of a fiasco: in Waterford, where Bourke was placed in charge of the Fenian rebels, only around 50 turned out and Bourke sent them home. He went back to England to buy more arms, was arrested and sentenced to 14 years penal servitude. Broken physically and mentally by harsh treatment while incarcerated, he was ultimately released from a prison for the criminally insane in 1871.

Back in the United States, he perked up, wrote patriotic verse, became a well-regarded public speaker, and advised the Fenians on engineering matters, including the extraordinary attempt to finance the building of the submarine designed by John P Holland (more on that when we get to the Hs). He built a railway in Mexico and became assistant city engineer in Omaha, all the while engaged in republican politics - introducing Charles Stewart Parnell to the house of representative and campaigning for James Garfield. What else? When he was 43 he eloped with a 20 year old: he lived to 84.

Many years ago, back in my journalist days, I wrote a magazine feature about a British television series, The Last Place on Earth, written by Trevor Griffiths, about the polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott, based on a book by Roland Huntford. The series caused no end of trouble, principally because it took the view that if everybody on an expedition dies, its leader may be incompetent, not heroic. This seemed to be demonstrably the case given the successes of contemporary polar venturers such as Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton in returning to Europe with their expedition parties largely intact (in Shackleton's case, after masterminding some quite extraordinary rescue and escape plans). All those years later, people seemed to prefer the myth of Scott the doomed hero to Griffiths' depiction of a useless upper class twit (I exaggerate: although that was the gravamen of the case, the portrait was much more nuanced and Scott was finely played by the actor Martin Shaw). All of this came back to me when I was reminded of the Australian equivalent of Scott's expedition: the cross-continental trek of the explorers Robert O'Hara Burke (pictured) and William Wills.

Burke was the Irishman, born in Co. Galway, educated in Belgium and London. He was a Hungarian army officer and an Irish policeman before emigrating to Australia, where he became a well-regarded recruit to the Victoria constabulary. Perhaps because he was liked or politically connected - certainly not for any ability to do the job - he was placed at the head of a trans-continental expedition in 1860. (There were two other Irishmen on the trek, John King and Charles Gray.) Burke made a series of eccentric decisions - dumping some supplies, leaving others behind, walking instead of riding the 25 camels they had brought with them - and fought with other expendition members. After one tiff, Wills was promoted to number two. Nearly six months after setting out from Melbourne, the three Irishmen and Wills reached the northern coast in February 1861. They they tried to go back, with insufficient food. Gray died first, in April. The three others reached their supply post to discover it had been abandoned by other expedition members who had fallen ill and had not received promised resupply. They spent two months reeling around the bush, cadging occasional food from aborigines, who Burke attempted to encourage by firing off gun rounds in their vicinity. He died in June, a day or so after Wills. King, perhaps more prudently, joined an aboriginal group and survived.

Naturally, Burke was proclaimed a hero and given a state funeral and a fine statue in Melbourne. (Irrelevantly, a parliamentary inquiry found that he had acted recklessly.) The DIB places him nicely in two contexts: "his trek forged a myth of heroic failure that has helped shape Australian culture" and "also revealed to more perceptive contemporaries the great skills of aboriginal tribesmen, able to fend for themselves in a landscape that defeated white colonists with every material asset."

As I've mentioned before, I'm skipping interminable Burkes who were earls, lords and baronets, all of whom were unquestionably weighty in their own way, but whose lives somehow merge together in my own insensitive mind. For instance, there was major Burke activity during the Confederation of Kilkenny from 1641-1649, a brief period during which Ireland, or significant parts thereof, freed itself from English rule, before being utterly crushed by Oliver Cromwell. It's an extremely important period of Irish history, characterized by the most byzantine political machinations and of course ending in abject defeat, although not without its moments of glory. I just can't engage with it: I think it's because I made the mistake of flipping the pages to the end of the story, so I know how it turns out. After that, wading through the machinations that lead to the inevitable denouement is just too hard for me. Sorry Burkes, Ormonds, Rinuccinis and others.

Now here's a Burke I can do business with: Thomas Burke, "politician, farmer and bonesetter". He was from Co. Clare, and built his popularity as a setter of broken bones, although the local establishment was less keen on his avocation: one judge chewed out the people of Clare for being too mean to pay for doctors. His paramedical skills propelled him into politics, first as a local councillor, then in the Dáil, where he sat for 14 years. He was dropped from the farmers' party, the Clann na Talmhan, because he refused to pay a levy on his parliamentary salary: in danger of losing his seat, he told Clare voters that he deplored "people so ungrateful as to forget what I have done for them when they were ... only a mere bundle of shattered bones." To send the message home, in the box for party affiliation on the ballot, he inserted the word "Bonesetter". He was re-elected comfortably.

And who wouldn't want to read of William Burke the murderer? Maybe the Burkes work best in pairs, for after Burke and Wills, we have Burke and Hare, the cadaverists. Both were Irish - Burke from Co. Tyrone and William Hare from Newry or Derry - and both ended up in Scotland. The two men and their consorts found themselves in the same boarding house in Edinburgh, run by Mrs. Hare, also from Ulster. Their new business started innocently enough. A lodger died, owing money, and they sold his body to an anatomist, Dr. Robert Knox, for £7 10s. - a lot of money and nearly twice what they were owed. They decided to go into the corpse business, but also to skip the awkward time waiting for people to die, preferring sedation with liquor followed by manual suffocation. In all, they killed 17 people, all of which were sold for good money to a grateful Dr. Knox. Eventually, they were arrested and charged with murder. Hare gave evidence against Burke and managed to escape with the Scottish verdict of "not proven" - not an acquittal but sufficient to secure his release. Burke was hanged in public before a jeering crowd of 20,000. Hare, Mrs. Hare and Burke's lover Helen McDougal all slipped away. When he wasn't practicing mass murder, Burke was apparently "rather jocose and quizzical", "enjoyed music" and "was friendly and affectionate towards local children". That wouldn't include the 12 year old boy he killed for money.

Gentleman John's son, the wearer of Miss Daly's dress, a continental painter and the great melodist

2010-03-14T17:52:00.000-07:00

You know you're on a journey when you read that the subject was "eldest of the four illegitimate children of Lt-gen. 'Gentleman' John Burgoyne". Gentleman John isn't in the DIB (he's in the Oxford DNB), although his military career took him briefly to Ireland; as a soldier, he is chiefly famous for having commanded the British force that surrendered at Saratoga during the American revolutionary war. He was gentlemanly enough to father his illegitimate children by the same woman, the singer Sarah Caulfield, and to wait until his wife was dead to do so. He was in his 60s, and had switched from the military to a career as a playwright. After his death, his brother-in-law, the Earl of Derby, provided for the upbringing of the four children, including our DIB entry, Sir John Fox Burgoyne, who had a career as a military engineer, based in part in Ireland. (This Derby is the Derby who gave his name to the Derby of horseracing.) Burgoyne was in charge of administering the soup kitchen scheme introduced during the great Irish famine, which briefly provided some form of - barely adequate at best - nutrition for up to three million people but which was swiftly phased out.

Less gentlemanly but perhaps more interesting is John Daly Burk, who crammed a lot into his 36 or so years. He was expelled from Trinity College Dublin for blasphemy (he was a deist) and wrote a defense, The Trial of John Burk (available online for those, not alas including me, who belong to a subscribing library), in which, according to the DIB, he "compared his persecution to that of Priestley, Galileo and Socrates." He moved in radical circles in Dublin, and escaped arrest by decamping from a bookshop surrounded by soldiers in the clothes of a Miss Daly, whence his middle name, adopted in gratitude. (The more I think about that story, the less I believe it). On his way to America, he wrote a play, Bunker Hill, or the Death of General Warren, which according to the DIB was regularly staged on July 4 for over 50 years and made Burk much money, despite bad reviews (one critic appoved only of the fact that it was short). He also wrote an epic on the revolution titles The Columbiad (not to be confused with the Joel Barlow poem of the same title), which remained unpublished ("bombastic and poorly-written", says the DIB), although Burk thought highly enough of it to send extracts to Thomas Jefferson, to whom he later dedicated his History of Virginia. In America, he seems to have been on the better side of most issues: against the alien and sedition acts, anti-slavery, for humane treatment of the Indians, and so on. However, he couldn't prevent himself from living to extremes: he was kicked out of his job as a college principal for adultery, was ordered to leave the United States after being accused of sedition (he didn't, but hid out in Virginia) and finally died in a duel following a row in a tavern: he insulted France, and a Frenchman called him out and shot him.

Augustus Nicholas Burke was a painter from Galway. He was only around 25 when he first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London. When he was about 30, he moved to Dublin with his artist sister Dorothy (the subject of this portrait) where he became a successful landscape artist and portraitist. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Irish painters were drawn to the north Atlantic coastline of mainland Europe: Brittany, northern France, Belgium and Holland. Burke was one of the first, and in his later role as professor of painting at the Royal Hibernian Academy, may have encouraged others to do the same. His brother, Thomas Henry Burke, was the leading civil servant in Ireland and was assassinated by a nationalist group, The Invincibles, in Dublin in 1882. Augustus was devastated by his death and left Ireland shortly afterwards, living in London and Italy. He is buried in the English cemetery in Florence. He was a rather fine, if academic and occasionally sentimental painter. A wide selection of his work can be found here.

Edmund Burke is of course one of the truly phenomenal Irish figures of the 18th century, as philosopher, pamphleteer and politician, and accordingly rates a huge entry in the DIB of more than 6 pages, by Eamonn O'Flaherty. I've noticed before that academic historians tend to be rather sniffy about Conor Cruise O'Brien's wonderful portrait of Burke, The Great Melody: it's not mentioned in O'Flaherty's bibliography. O'Brien never wrote anything without an axe to grind, so of course his account is partial, speculative and tendentious. It's also fabulous, including close readings of Burke's writings that are constantly informed by the shrewd intuitions of both the critic and the politician that O'Brien was. (I may say more about O' Brien at some other time - his death was too late to qualify him for the DIB. At this stage, I'll simply say that I'm an admirer, but by no means an unqualified one. I'm fiercely critical of some of his actions in government, as well as some of the political positions he took, particularly in his later life. But I hugely like his book on Burke, warts and all.) W.B. Yeats, in his poem The Seven Sages, had written of the "great melody" of Burke's lengthy and laborious campaigns over America, Ireland, France and India, and O'Brien picked up on the lines to support his conviction of a "profound inner harmony" embracing Burke's approach to these subjects.

O'Brien sees Burke fundamentally as a product of Catholic Ireland, of the Norman gentry that was progressively gaelicized and which by the 18th century, when laws acted as barriers to catholic advancement, was faced with the challenge of how to maintain its declining positions and to compete with the protestant gentry. O'Brien argues that Burke's father, Richard, "conformed" to the established protestant church in order to maintain his practice as a lawyer. (O'Flaherty notes this as merely a possibility, although O'Brien's archival researches on the question seem to have been quite thorough.) His mother, Mary Nagle, remained a catholic, and Burke's early upbringing at home until the age of 11 was, O'Brien believes, in a catholic environment; this ended when he was sent to a quaker school in order, it is argued, to prepare him for entry to the protestant world and the advancement that would be possible for him there. (He also married a catholic.)

One consequence of this experience, according to O'Brien, led Burke to detest the arbitrary exercise of power. This visceral, personal impulse is the strand that ties together his attack on anti-catholic laws in Ireland, his defense of the rights of the American colonists, his onslaught against the excesses and corruption of the East India Company, and his recoil from the violence of the French revolution.

I first encountered Burke at school, where perhaps naturally I was less impressed by his Reflections on the revolution in France, than I was by its riposte, Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man. Temperamentally, as well as politically, I think I still side with Demos against Basileus, but there's no question - and subsequent events everywhere confirm this - that revolt in the name of abstract ideas tends, perhaps inevitably, towards the victimization of thoughtcrime and the institutionalization of new tyranny. Later, as a student, I was very taken with his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which I was advised to read as an entry-point to the understanding of the gothic in literature and art; shorn of its ultimate grounding in God's providence, its psycho-cultural analysis of the vying influences causing pleasure and fearfulness is an antecedent to Freud's opposition of eros and todestrieb/thanatos. Once one follows O'Brien's fundamentally psychological view of Burke, it is hard not to read into this opposition another key conservative anxiety, at the fissure between culture and anarchy, or between order and oppression.

Thus, Burke saw the enactment of progressive catholic relief laws both as justifiable in itself and as a means of staving off revolutionary elements in Ireland - elements, that of course revolted in 1798. He denounced coercion of American colonists both because it was wrong in itself and would have undesirable political outcomes. He attacked the East India Company (in its day, an even more powerful Halliburton or Blackwater) both because its treatment of India was intrinsically wrong and because its actions injured the British imperial interest in the subcontinent. And his strictures on the French revolution, while foreseeing its descent into tyranny and terror, were also aimed at the geopolitical consequences of so significant an upheaval in a great power.

I think that, ultimately, the reason I can't join the Burke cheering section, at least not wholeheartedly, is because, despite the fact that he about as principled politician as you can get, he was, au fond, a politician. He wanted to preserve the empire and could not comprehend that the very idea was fundamentally despotic. I think that Irish writers such as O'Brien, who quite rightly turned away in horror from the terrible violence of the troubles, wanted to posit an alternative history, whereby Ireland would have evolved painlessly into a modern nation-state, part of the empire/commonwealth, in the same manner as such other white "kith and kin" republics as Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Such a view allows for the rejection of the entire "physical force" tradition, dating back at least to 1798, and maybe further. It attacks the undoubtedly self-serving mythologizing that at times evolved into "undisputed historical facts" in recounting elements of the movement for independence. Burke's foresight, intelligence, restraint and conservatism seems superficially to stand against the "bad" Ireland for the "good" (if imagined) one. I'm not so sure. As O'Flaherty points out, in the tense times of the 1790s, when fear of French revolutionary contagion pushed the British government towards repression, Burke supported firm action against domestic radicals and opposed increased toleration of unitarians - laws discriminated against groups that denied the holy trinity in ways similar to discrimination against catholics - suggesting pragmatic limits on his embrace of liberty. He was also strident in his calls for war with France a strategy that arguably led to the domination of Europe by Bonaparte, domination that was only finally undone, after more than 20 years of conflict, by imperial overreaching and then, only thanks to what Burke's fellow Irishman the Duke of Wellington called "the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life", as he described the battle of Waterloo. If you want to get counterfactual, you can enlist Burke for a bad version of history as well as an ideal one.

O'Flaherty concludes of Burke: "Central to all of his concerns was a political theory founded on a combination of pragmatic justice - utilitarian in the tradition of natural law - and a belief in the historical evolution of human society." The first strikes me as inherently suspect: one person's pragmatism is another's self-serving justification. The second is really a fantasy: that the permanent lurches and upheavals of life can be smoothed over by benign forces. The problem with this is that one usually doesn't get to control these forces, and whoever does tends to have motives that are less than benign. So, either as an exemplar of an imagined Ireland, or a founder of certain conservative traditions, these proposed Edmund Burkes don't really persuade me. But he's fascinating and always worth revisiting: one for the ages, if not the pantheon.

The source of bunburying, the harp antiquarian, an expensive architect and the first of the De Burghs

2010-03-13T00:53:00.000-08:00

Selina Bunbury is one of those writers you've never heard of who turn out to have been quite important in their time. She published more than 100 books. A few have come back into print through public domain publishers and there's been some academic study of her, but I doubt she'll be a big rediscovery. She wrote like this:

In the gloomy turret-chamber of a strong tower, near to the coast, lay a wounded English knight who, after having won his spurs by early and valiant service with the noble Sir Philip Sidney, and afterwards with the gallant Essex, was reduced to the sad mortification of having had not only his life endangered, but his good looks, for the time at least, very seriously damaged, by the rude stroke of an Irish club.

Much more of that, and you'd want to take a rude stroke of an Irish club to Selina. I only mention her at all because of her surname, and its connection to a bettter Irish writer, Oscar Wilde. In The Importance of Being Earnest, "bunburying" is, of course, the diplomatic excuse for leaving town, on account of the illness or near-death of a friend called Bunbury. While there's a story that the so-called "wickedest man in the world", Aleister Crowley, claimed that Wilde had coined the word through a conflation of the English towns Banbury and Sudbury, it seems far more likely that he was well acquainted with the name, which is not particularly uncommon in Ireland (it has Norman roots). Wilde's fabulous mother Speranza was very well plugged into the Irish literary scene and it seems improbable that Oscar would have been unaware of Selina, or of the mellifluous name on which he conferred immortality.

By the early part of the 19th century Edward Bunting, from Armagh, was already a prominent musician, church organist, piano teacher and performer. He had become fascinated by the Irish harp through his participation in the Belfast Harp Festival in 1792, whereupon he traveled around Ireland collecting tunes which might otherwise have been on the verge of extinction. He published three collections of the "ancient music of Ireland", all of which are miraculously available, for free, on the internet. He tussled with Thomas Moore over the political significance of traditional Irish music but above all preserved the best for all of us. Derek Bell's recordings of the great blind harpist Turlough Carolan, whose work Bunting notated extensively, are sublime examples. I also found a nice harp version of a Carolan piece here.

And with Edward Bunting, I end the first volume of the DIB. 'Flu has pushed me quite far behind schedule, but it's not as if these lives are going away. I turns out that volume 1, at 989 pages, was just a minnow. Step forward volume 2, a muscular 1148 pages! Much work to be done.

It's not explained in the DIB what "legal reasons" prevented the burial at St. Fin Barre's Cathedral, Cork of its architect, William Burges, and I'd really like to know. He won a competition for the commission in 1863; even though the cost of building the cathedral was capped at £15,000: not unusually for major architectural works, the actual building vastly overran its budget, and eventually cost more than £100,000. Burges, who was English and a leader of the gothic revival, sounds like a sympathetic figure: he dressed like a medieval architect, liked pubs that mounted rat hunts (maybe not so sympathetic) and "often greet[ed] his friends with a parrot on either shoulder" (not sure if this means one parrot alternating shoulders or two, split between each shoulder). Even though he didn't get his funeral in Cork, there was a memorial service: according to the DIB, all the church bells were silent on that day.

I imagine that when William de Burgh was en route to Ireland in 1185, bent on conquest and the acquisition of more wealth, at both of which he proved very successful, he little imagined that 800 years later his direct descendant would become famous for composing and performing Patricia the Stripper, surely one of the most dismal attempts at commercial salaciousness of all time. Chris de Burgh isn't in the DIB, although I suppose he will be one day, but there are plenty of William's direct and indirect progeny - de Burghs, de Burgos, Burghs, Burkes and the like - to take us through 74 pages of volume 2. A lot of them were in the conquering and subduing business, and tend to merge together in my mind. But there are some other pleasures to be found, among them Thomas Burgh, a military engineer and architect, who built the magnificent library at Trinity College, one of those sights that all guide books steer you to see but which never disappoints. He also wrote a book on how to measure the areas of rectangles. (I thought you multiplied one side by the other, but it's obviously more complicated than that.)

The "moron" bishop, the bishop's antagonist, another botanist and the spycatcher

2010-03-12T00:27:00.000-08:00

Michael Browne was catholic bishop of Galway in from 1937 to 1976 and seemed to exemplify everything that was wrong with the church. (I meant to write about him a couple of entries back, but overlooked it: he's accordingly a little out of alphabetical order.) He was among those who led the hierarchy's objections to Noël Browne's mother and child health scheme. He supported a boycott of protestant businesses in Co. Wexford during a dispute over a protestant woman married to a catholic man who refused to educate her children at the local catholic school. He described Trinity College Dublin as "a centre for atheist and communist propaganda". He forced the segregation of the sexes on Galway beaches. He seemed so perpetually angry that his episcopal signature - "† Michael" - was popularly rendered as "Cross Michael". He supervised the construction of a grandiose new cathedral in Galway that local wits dubbed the "Taj Micheáil" (pronounced Meehaul). And it was in connection with the Taj that my life path ever-so-slightly crossed with that of Michael Browne.

In 1966, my father appeared on The Late Late Show, a very long-running Saturday-night TV show that became an outlet for all sorts of discontent in Ireland. My dad contributed to a discussion of popular radio and TV series, one of which he wrote. After he'd left the stage, the real fun began (I was allowed to stay up to watch). A Trinity College undergraduate named Brian Trevaskis said some very rude things about Bishop Browne and his cathedral: one of the words he used was "moron". All hell broke loose - saying even politely critical things about the church was rare in public discourse in those days, and invectve virtually unknown. The papers were full of back and forth for days, and eventually Trevaskis returned to The Late Late Show to apologize. I was allowed to stay up and my memory is that Trevaskis cut a very unimpressive figure to my young eyes and ears - I basically thought he sold out, like Mick Jagger singing "Let's spend some time together" on Ed Sullivan. The record seems to suggest that Trevaskis wasn't as abject as I recall, and that he was quite rude again to Browne.

Of the two, Trevaskis turns out to be the more interesting figure. In 1966, he was quite an old undergraduate (26 or 27) and, contrary to the image of the Trinity student of the time, was both catholic and working class - he had been raised for at least part of his life in an orphanage. He became president of the Trinity debating society, the Phil, and wrote a couple of plays. He also failed his English exams and had to leave. My old undergraduate tutor, Nick Grene, who now has a chair at Trinity and who performed in Trevaskis' plays, kindly provided some memories of him:

Brian was a quiet spoken, heavy-set man with a red complexion, who was bent on defying all the orthodoxies. He supposedly failed his English exams because he determined to go to the zoo rather than attend the Anglo-Saxon exam, which he regarded as a waste of time; unfortunately he mixed up the timetable and therefore missed another of the literature papers, thereby failing more of the year than was acceptable.

In the wake of this setback, he moved to Cornwall (Trevaskis is a Cornish name), joined the church of England, went for a while to Bristol University, and eventually returned to Ireland. He engaged constantly in controversy; attacked, for instance, the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Easter rising in 1966, the inability of the Irish in Britain to vote in elections back home, the decision of the Abbey Theatre to stage a play by Boucicault that he deemed to be paddywhackery, and dubbing the ruling Fianna Fáil party "neo-fascist". He was hit by a train in north Dublin in 1980, and died. I've read accounts that he committed suicide, but have been unable to confirm these. He seemed to me in the spring of 1966 - I was not yet 9 - to be intelligent, articulate and very angry. As Nick Grene wrote to me: "I was very sad to hear of his later life and death: a waste of energy and talent." Bishop Browne had nothing to do with the death, but he was in a way part of the Ireland that Trevaskis couldn't live with. The old Ireland, I think: it all seems much longer ago.

I've found that I have a weakness for botanists. Here's another: J.P. Brunker worked for the Guinness brewery and spent weekends in Co. Wicklow, studying the local flora. After 30 years of what the DIB describes as "tramping", he published his master work, The Flora of the County of Wicklow (his DIB entry omits the second "the" and the "of", but I think that may be incorrect). He also contributed to a catalogue of the flora of Co. Dublin. I'd imagined that all of this sort of work had been completed in the 18th and 19th centuries, but it's clear there was still plenty to be done in modern times. Brunker died aged 85 after being injured by a car while conducting field work. I imagine he was descended from Sir Henry Brouncker, an Elizabethan soldier in Ireland I encountered a while back but didn't write about. Sir Henry was so zealous an anti-catholic that even the English privy council told him to tone things down. I'm glad his later relatives were given to gentler pursuits.

For quite a while, we've known about the attempts of German intelligence to place spies in Ireland during the Second World War. There was quite a good miniseries about it in 1984 called Caught in a Free State, which to my recollection depicted the nazi efforts as somewhat hapless, and the attempts of certain IRA elements to engage with them - the usual my-enemy's-enemy-is-my-friend stuff - as close to comical. Hapless, or not, they were spying in a neutral country, and thanks to the Irish intelligence service, G2, headed by Col. Dan Bryan, all 12 nazi spies in Ireland were identified and arrested by the end of 1943. Bryan, with the knowledge of the Irish government, cultivated close relations with British intelligence and exchanged extensive information with it: this did not prevent him from successfully recruiting an informant in the British intelligence operation in Ireland, whose activities he was able to monitor until the end of the war. One of the reasons Bryan was able to roll up the German spy ring was in part because he recruited a librarian-cryptographer, Richard Hayes, who cracked the code they were using. This success was initially withheld from Bryan by subordinates, who believed he would provide the information to MI5. When he got it, he did. Ireland's neutrality caused it serious political and diplomatic problems which the intelligence cooperation was intended to relieve. Unfortunately, even senior figures were unaware of what was happening in the secret world: I've previously written of how Irish diplomacy had to try to overcome the negative impact of the attacks on Irish policy by the wartime U.S. ambassador, David Grey. Bryan's own operation was rolled up at the end of the war, which distressed him no end.

Two Patrick Brownes, an impressionist photographer and the hardest of the hardliners

2010-03-10T23:53:00.000-08:00

Anti-catholicism was a constant issue for England from the time of the break with Rome in 1534. In Ireland, there was always a geopolitical aspect - fear that the recalcitrantly catholic Irish would make common cause with their co-religionists in Spain, and later France, and threaten England's western flank. It took 150 years for England - later, Britain - to subdue catholic Ireland through war and confiscation, followed by nearly the same amount of time during which catholics were subject to civil penalties of varying degrees of severity. The human dimensions of these policies are easily lost behind the sheer numbers of people affected, as well as by the many, many private histories that were never written. So, sometimes an exemplary life tells a lot. Patrick Browne was a Dublin merchant, a prominent man who supported the English government and was invited to become mayor of the city. He was also a catholic who refused to conform to the established (protestant) church. He began to be prosecuted for recusancy and was fined and imprisoned. His defiance continued and so did the fines and imprisonment. At one time he was offered a kind of buyout - purchase, presumably for a substantial sum, of immunity from prosecution. He refused. The jailings continued regularly. In 1614, after about 11 years of persecution, he caught an infection in prison and died. It's a small, sad story - the determination of a ruthless sovereign to impose conformity and the refusal to give in. Not being a person of faith, I know I would have paid the money. But I'm moved by Patrick Browne's death, perhaps because he seems to have been more awkward than histrionic: no big speeches or grand gestures, just the constant back and forth between freedom and incarceration until the end came.

There are kinder forms of immortality. Another Patrick Browne has a lovely genus of shrubs and trees named after him, the Brownaea. He was a Mayo doctor who pursued science in the classic 18th century manner, as an exalted hobby. He corresponded with Linnaeus, Joseph Banks and Hans Sloane, and collected the flora and fauna of the West Indies, writing a landmark book The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica (which, thanks to the internet, you can actually read, here.) He also described several hundred plants in Mayo and Galway and urged the establishment of an Irish botanical garden (one was eventually created, in Dublin). As a demonstration of the international reach of these corresponding scientific pioneers, the Brownaeai genus was named for him by the director of the Imperial Gardens in Vienna.

Here's another beautiful thing: an 1870s photograph of the Slieve Bloom mountains in Co. Laois by T.M. Browrigg, a policeman and amateur photographer. He photographed prodigiously for 50 years, exhibiting and winning prizes in Ireland and England for landscapes taken in those countries as well as France, Italy, Spain and Italy. From the 1870s on, he became identified with what were describe as both "naturalistic" and "impressionist" styes, experimenting with focus and paper to varying effects. His pseudonym as "Waterbaby", which cerrtainly fits this photo. He was also quite successful as a policeman, retiring as an assistant inspector-general of constabulary at the age of 54, leaving himself with a quarter-century of time to photograph unencumbered by the demands of paid work.

Cathal Brugha was born Charles Burgess, but like so many gaelicized his name during the politico-cultural fervor of the 1890s and early 1900s, during which he acquired a fluent command of Irish. Fervid, too, was his revolutionary outlook, causing him to leave a job for an English-owned business to set up his own company with fellow nationalists. (The new enterprise also gave him cover to enlist new recruits to the cause while traveling for it as a salesman.) He fought in the Easter Rising and was so badly wounded that the English released him from hospital to die, rather than hold him prisoner as they did so many others. He survived, but experienced considerable pain thereafter. Although he was a central figure in the war of independence, and the subsequent civil war, he has tended to get a bad press from historians. Mostly, his poor reputation has been self-inflicted: he burned with hatred for Michael Collins, resenting his success in and appeal to to the republican movement. He was hard-headed to the point of obstinacy, which even his friends found hard to bear. He died of wounds sustained during the civil war, characteristically fighting on when most of his comrades had surrendered. Ironically, Collins paid him a handsome tribute after his death.

The admiral of 1200 streets, the dead of foreign wars and the natural oppositionist

2010-03-10T10:33:00.000-08:00

The DIB doesn't say it, but Wikipedia claims, that William Brown has more than 1,200 streets named after him. I doubt that there's a Calle Guillermo Brown in Foxford, Co. Mayo, where he was born in 1777, but there is a rather nice bust in his memory. He joined the British navy, then shipped out in the merchant fleet, ending up in the West Indies and finally Buenos Aires. With his maritime training, he was hired by Argentine rebels to raid Spanish shipping and found himself in command of 19 ships, which he turned into a navy. He may have brought the fine Irish traditions of splits and begrudgery with him, because although successful in war, he was driven out of the navy, then brought back, then forced to retire, upon which he tried suicide - apparently one of his rare failures. Of course, once the new Latin American states stopped fighting the colonial masters, they started wars with each other. In 1825, Argentina began to fight Brazil and he was called back to service, in which he was again successful. He later fought in a civil war as well as in what a "stupid war" with Uruguay, before retiring to farm. If the story of the 1,200 streets is true, the begrudgers lost comprehensively.

As we've already seen, Irish military types, particularly soldiers, have turned up all over the world. For a while after the country was finally admitted to the United Nations (as a Second World War neutral that had maintained diplomatic relations with Germany, Italy and Japan, it was at first excluded), its small army was frequently put into service in peacekeeping roles. Which is how in 1960 Anthony Browne, not yet 20 from the Fatima Mansions council flats in Dublin, found himself in an infantry patrol in Katanga, which had attempted to secede from the rest of the Congo. Browne was one of more than 6,000 Irish troops who served in the Congo in an effort to maintain the unity of newly-independent state. As often in the fog of war, the details aren't clear. On November 8, Browne was a member of a patrol that entered the village of Niemba to examine a damaged bridge. There, they encountered a group from the Baluba people, who opposed the Katangan secession. They were armed with arrows, some of which were poison tipped, as well as possibly some guns. Gunfire broke out - according to one report, it was the Irish that fired first, but it's impossible to say. Arrows rained down on the Irish soldiers, and eight died, either from arrow wounds or subsequently beaten to death. The Irish fought back and killed around 25 Balubas. Trooper Browne was one of three Irish who survived the encounter, but, cut off from the rest of his patrol, he was killed by Balubas some days later while trying to obtain food. Browne was posthumously decorated for his gallantry in the skirmish, in particular for having endangered his own life while attempting to protect those of others. However, in a strange coda to the skirmish, one of the two survivors, whose life Browne was claimed to have saved, later denied the official army account. (The DIB account glosses over this claim.). The Congo war was a murky one, with elements of a proxy war among Western powers over the country's hugely valuable mineral resources. The war claimed the lives of the revered United Nations secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld and the Congolese leader, Patrice Lumumba, both of whom died in questionable circumstances. Another Irishman in the Congo, Conor Cruise O'Brien, who served as Hammarskjöld's representative in the country, was recalled, he believed, because he opposed an alleged British plan to amalgamate Katanga with its then-colony Rhodesia. Murky times, into which Browne, not yet out of his teens, stumbled. (So alien and remote was the Congo to these cloistered, often ill-educated working class men that there's a story - probably apocryphal - that one soldier's wife believed her husband had been posted to Cong, Co. Mayo, and wondered why she hadn't seen him for six months.) More Irish soldiers died in the Congo, as they did on subsequent UN missions in Cyprus and Lebanon. Let's hope they did some good.

Noël Browne was one of the really interesting Irish politicians in the period following independence. He was a doctor who came from a family that had been ravaged by that great scourge of the pre-antibiotic days, tuberculosis: his father, mother and older brother all died of it, and he himself was a sufferer. It was his zeal to eradicate tuberculosis in Ireland that drove him into politics in 1948, as a member of the newly-formed Clann na Poblachta, a left-leading nationalist political party. Elected in Dublin, Browne joined an unwieldy coalition of Fine Gael, Clannn na Poblachta and several other parties as minister of health, from which position he launched a wide-ranging and largely successful anti-tuberculosis campaign, funded substantially by the legendary Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes (I was one of the beneficiaries of this scheme, receiving free vaccination at birth.).Browne came unstuck, however, in his next campaign, for what became known as the Mother and Child Scheme, to provide free maternity care to mothers, and free healthcare for children under 16. The catholic hierarchy opposed the scheme on the grounds of both principled opposition to state control of the health system and institutional self-protection of the widespread church involvement in healthcare provision. As in many other countries, including the UK, doctor opposition to state-controlled medicine was also massive. This opposition was bad enough, and potentially fatal to Browne's efforts. But his own combative character did not help, either, and Browne alienated his allies in government, including, ultimately, his party leader, Seán MacBride, who demanded and obtained his resignation. He left noisly, and was noisy ever after. He joined Fianna Fáil, then left it, started a new party, then joined the Labour party, was kicked out, started another new party .... all the time being re-elected (with a couple of brief gaps and a stint in the upper house, the Seanad) in Dublin. He continued to practice medicine, although ironically, his success against tuberculosis reduced demand for his specialist skills and his income suffered. He was perhaps a natural oppositionist - he never seemed to stay friends with his allies for long and was most effective when whichever party he supported was out of power. The DIB's entry, by Browne's biography John Horgan, neatly points out Browne's many contradictions: against then for contraception, republican then anti-republican, anti-communist then pro-Soviet, a devoted parliamentarian who later advocated extra-parliamentary action. Horgan shrewdly notes the Browne "paradox": "whichever position he happened to espouse at any particular point of time, he continued to act as a political magnet for Irish people of all generations and social classes who saw him as the apostle of social change."

A message from the biographiographer ...

2010-02-26T10:50:00.000-08:00

A whoreson tisick, a whoreson rascally tisick so troubles me … and what one thing, what another … and I have a rheum in mine eyes too, and such an ache in my bones that, unless a man were cursed, I cannot tell what to think on the blog. Normal (?) service will be resumed as soon as possible.

The loss-making landlord, the impoverished playwright, the famous left foot and a grim left footer.

2010-02-18T23:06:00.000-08:00

George Brooke inherited 6,500 acres in Kildare and Wicklow as well as a stake in the family wine business of which he was the nominal head (others did the actual work). Upon returning to Ireland from Cambridge (no degree), he rode to hounds and became an enthusiast for evicting his tenants. In two weeks in July 1887, he turfed out more than 70 families. Later, he spent £20,000 trying to install "suitable" (i.e., non-militant) tenants to replace those who had been evicted. Upon the failure of this effort, he declared victory and wore down the government in his efforts to obtain a baronetcy: it succumbed and elevated him in 1903. The title survives, as attested by this self-parodying entry at a website called thepeerage.com:

Sir Francis George Windham Brooke, 4th Bt. was born on 15 October 1963. He is the son of Major Sir George Francis Cecil Brooke, 3rd Bt. and Lady Melissa Eva Caroline Wyndham-Quin. He married Hon. Katharine Elizabeth Hussey, daughter of Marmaduke James Hussey, Baron Hussey of North Bradley and Lady Susan Katherine Waldegrave, on 8 April 1989. Sir Francis George Windham Brooke, 4th Bt. was educated at Eton College, Eton, Berkshire, England. He succeeded to the title of 4th Baronet Brooke, of Summerton, Co. Dublin [U.K., 1903] in 1982.

(I've just realized who the father-in-law is: "Duke" Hussey, the newspaper executive and chairman of the BBC. I've actually read his autobiography. Strictly for professional reasons.)

George Bernard Shaw, an Irishman, famously wrote (in his preface to Pygmalion) that it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. The Irish shouldn't be so smug. A few years ago, my solicitor in Dublin committed suicide when he was about to be exposed for serious financial irregularities. One of the national newspapers, not even attempting to hide its its schadenfreude, wrote that he "seemed to be the epitome of protestant respectability". Do I note similar slippage in the DIB's entry on John Brougham the actor-playwright: "born ... in what appears to have been a respectable protestant family"? Let it pass: Brougham (pictured) is more interesting. A rival of Dion Boucicault, he claimed to have co-written one his his hit plays, London Assurance, although he lost a lawsuit pressing his claim. Like Boucicault, he had hits in Dublin, London and New York, and was a prolific writer, responsible for more than 160 plays and other stage works. He performed oratory by Daniel O'Connell and the temperance campaigner Father Mathew, dramatized popular novels such as David Copperfield and created hit burlesques. The DIB believes that in one burlesque, PO-CO-HON-TAS, this southern anthem Dixie was "introduced" but I believe it predated the show by a couple of years. Regardless, PO-CO-HON-TAS was a big and long-running hit: it even opened Dublin's Gaiety Theatre, still standing, in 1872. His personal life was less complicated than Boucicault's, although he is described as being "[g]enerous, extravagant, and improvident, and noted for helping others get rich while he got poorer."

We're probably all familiar with the story of Christy Brown, from his memoir My Left Foot and Jim Sheridan's film of the same title with Daniel Day-Lewis. It's worth recalling though: one of 22 children of a Dublin bricklayer, of which 13 survived, he was paralyzed from birth, except for the use of the famous foot. He began using it to write with chalk, then started painting at the age of 10. His memoir, published when he was 22, was followed by novels and poetry and his painting were widely exhibited. Not surprisingly, he could be "moodily cantankerous and obstinate", although he could also be "witty and gregarious".

I've mentioned before that the cutoff date for the DIB is 2002, by which you have to be dead to be considered for inclusion. This generally means that you have to be antique, but still leaves room for a few who died before their time. Thus we have a contemporary figure, Jimmy Brown, "republican socialist and drug-dealer". The Northern Ireland Troubles through up a toxic mixture of guerrillas, politicos, gangsters and psychopaths, sometimes all incarnated in the same person. Brown's breakaway Irish Republican Socialist Party and its military wing, the Irish National Liberation Army, engaged fully in killing unionists, as well as those nominally on its own side who had committed ideological or other crimes. They took up drug dealing to raise money for arms, and had the bright idea of recruiting people who knew how to deal drugs, i.e. criminals. This of course caused them huge problems in the communities were the drugs were dealt, notably their own. Certain loyalists did the same thing, and the war of national liberation descended into something much uglier: a gangsters' turf war. Jimmy Brown was finally liquidated by the IRA, which had lost patience with the various splinter groups. The DIB's Patrick Maume writes well that he was a "devious man who deceived himself [and] provided an ideological veneer for sectarian murder and criminality". Ugly times.

The Lithuanian revolutionary, a family of artists, the upper-crust hardliner and the shoe-burning paterfamilias

2010-02-18T21:24:00.000-08:00

Robert Emmet Briscoe. The first two names are those of a venerated Irish patriot, executed after an abortive uprising of 1803 but celebrated for a fine parting speech. The last name: it's interesting. The dictionaries say that Briscoe is a Yorkshire-Cumberland name, derived from the Norse, meaning the place of birch wood. But Robert Emmet Briscoe's people probably never went near Yorkshire or Cumberland: they were Lithuanians, from a shtetl in the province of Kovno, in the tsarist pale of settlement in which Jews were concentrated. I don't know the Lithuanian original of Briscoe, but it may well have been closer to its Irish version than my surname, Grantham, which my father took from a book to supplant his Hungarian-Jewish name, Gross (originally Grosz). Robert's father Abraham arrived in Dublin at the age of 14, part of the great late-19th century migration of Jews from the pale of settlement, of which a number wound up in Ireland. (Between 1871 and 1911, the Jewish population of Dublin rose from 189 to 2,965: the total population of the city in 1911 was around 350,000.) Somewhere along the line, Abraham added Irish nationalism to his fairly strict religious observances, which resulted in Robert's patriotic name, as well as that of his brother, Wolfe Tone Briscoe.

After the Easter rising, Briscoe embraced physical force nationalism and returned to Ireland from the USA, where he had run a Christmas light business. He rose in the nationalist movement, but his origins were not always overlooked: we've already seen how another leading nationalist, Charles Bewley, expressed his anti-semitism openly to Briscoe. It can't have been easy: another important nationalist, George Gavan Duffy, attempted to enlist the support of the Vatican behind the independence movement by informing it that "Jews and Masons were united against us in foreign press in support of England." But Briscoe stuck it out, and was elected to the Dáil for a Dublin constituency in 1927: between Robert and his son Ben, the family held the seat for 75 years. We've also seen how Robert advocated the admission of Jewish refugees to Ireland before, during and after the Second World War, with some limited success.

After Ireland, his biggest enthusiasm was for Zionism, which leads to some interesting parallels. One thing Briscoe knew a bit about was revolutionary war. He embraced Ze'ev Jabotinsky's ideology of revisionist zionism (the DIB refers to Jaboinsky's Revisionist Party, but the political body was called the New Zionist Organization) and advised its military wing, the Irgun, on military matters, including the conduct of a guerrilla war. Although this war in the years up to the foundation of the state of Israel was in part being waged against the British, the principal victims of Irgun attacks were Palestinian arabs: abaout 500 dead between 1937 and 1948. According to the DIB, after the Second World War, Briscoe advised the Irgun leader Menachem Begin to emulate De Valera and embrace parliamentary politics: in that sense, Likud is the Fianna Fáil of modern Israel.

Late in life, Briscoe became a sensation in the USA, where he toured during his tenure as Lord Mayor of Dublin. Even now, more than 50 years later, alter kockers still bring up Briscoe as one of the few Irishmen they've ever heard of. Improbably, Briscoe's American reputation was so high, that an episode of CBS's legendary Playhouse 90 series was devoted to him, directed by John Frankenheimer with, even more improbably, the very goyisch Irish-American Art Carney in the leading role. Apparently at one point in the play, he recites the prayer for the dead, the kaddish, in Hebrew. That, I would have liked to see. (By the way, my attempted embrace of Yiddish is completely phony: Hungarian Jews largely spoke ... Hungarian.)

I'm indebted to a website called the Irish Comics Wiki for this 1810 illustration, by the caricaturist Henry Brocas, Sr., who produced lively political stuff as well as more formal portraiture, including of Robert Emmett, who bestowed his names on Robert Briscoe, above. He found employment running an art college in Dublin, but was fired for being "erratic", unpunctual, insubordinate and disobedient. The family was very gifted: Henry's brother, Arthur, was also an artist, as were his four sons, including Henry junior, who emulated his father in another respect: he rose to take charge of the same art college, the Royal Dublin Society's School of Landscape and Ornament, only also to be dismissed for his failings in the post.

It's striking how many high-bred Irish women embraced nationalism at the turn of the 20th century. We've already encountered the Gore-Booth sisters; among many others was Albinia Brodrick born in London, daughter of Viscount Midleton. She came to know Ireland through visits to the family's estate in Co. Cork; her brother William was a leading unionist. I had forgotten that I encountered Albinia once before, in Hubert Butler's marvelous essays - in her case, in the autobiographical one called "The Auction" collected in his book Grandmother and Wolfe Tone - in which it was said of her that she

[C]onceived it her mission to atone for the sins of her ancestor, exacting landlords of the south-west; she dressed as an old Irish countrywoman and ran a village shop, while behind her on a stony Dunkerron promontory rose the shell of a large hospital which she had built for the sick poor of Kerry, but which, because of its unsuitable though romantic site, had remained empty and unused.

Butler made her seem a merely local curiosity; in fact, she plunged into national politics, supporting the Easter rising and visiting republican prisoners. She took the name Gobnait Ní Bhruadair, opposed the Anglo-Irish treaty, and during the civil war was shot in the leg by Free State forces. At the same time, she was a stalwart of her local protestant church, where she played the harmonium (while requiring her catholic employees to attend mass. The DIB says that she was "difficult and eccentric"; she left most of her estate to republicans "as they were in the years 1919 to 1921" - a bequest that a court ruled was "void for remoteness". Butler, writing of her failed hospital, could have been summing her up as well:

There is a labyrinthine story of idealism, obstinacy, perversity, social conscience, medicine, family, behind this empty structure. The man who could unravel it would be diagnosing the spiritual sickness of Ireland ...

The Brontë sisters had a Brontë father, and he was Irish. Patrick Brontë started out as Patrick Prunty (the DIB also has Brunty, which I hadn't previously seen), a farm laborer's son from Co. Down. He seems to have been lucky in his clerical friends: one presbyterian minister tutored him and found him a job as a teacher (he was fired for an affair with a pupil) while an anglican one obtained a scholarship to Cambridge for him, where he changed his name in recognition of Admiral Nelson, who had been named Duca di Bronte by King Ferdinand of Italy. Once ordained, he found himself eventually in Yorkshire, where according to Elizabeth Gaskell he lost all traces of his Irish accent. The DIB entry doesn't mention this, nor Mrs Gaskell's claims that Brontë burned his children's brightly-colored boots because they were too showy, or that he fired pistols outside the back door of the Haworth parsonage to dissipate his "volcanic wrath". He bore the death of his wife and all four of his very talented children before dying at the age of 84.

The Brookes received their estates first in Donegal as a reward for military service in the early 17th century and then in Fermanagh following the 1641 rebellion. They were soldiers - 53 of them served in the First and Second World Wars, one, Alan, as the chief of the imperial general staff. They were politicians in the protestant interest, and Orangemen, and the family's unionism became more strident as militant nationalism grew in the late 19th century. Alan's nephew, Basil, was a typical Brooke, who served in the army and became increasingly involved in Irish affairs on his trips home to visit the family estates, which he had inherited. When he settled down in Fermanagh in 1918 he had, as the DIB puts it, "been elsewhere for most of the previous twenty-two years." He organized militias to oppose the emerging IRA military campaign, and after partition was elected to the Northern Ireland parliament, ultimately serving as prime minister for 20 years until 1963. He embraced the sectarianism that was essential to the career of any successful unionist politician, telling supporters "to employ good protestant lads and lassies" only. While he was prime minister, catholic grievances festered: as the DIB describes them, "the restricted local government franchise, gerrymandered electoral boundaries, religious discrimination in public bodies and private firms, and perceived shortfalls in the funding for private schools." He also resisted modernizers in his party who wished to recruit catholics. "It is difficult not to conclude," writes the DIB's Brian Barton, "that he lacked that higher quality of leadership that does not simply reflect and pander to its supporters but dares to challenge and dispel their prejudices." Naturally, he was ennobled, knighted and otherwise lavishly honored in recognition of his service.

An effective diplomat, two legends of Hollywood and two legends of history

2010-02-11T18:26:00.000-08:00

(A quick word about pictures. I do my best to find pictures that are, first, actually of the person discussed and, second, in the public domain. Neither of these tasks is straightforward. In the case of the adjacent photo, I'm really proceeding on faith and it might be a dentist from Dusseldorf: read and view at your own risk.) Maeve Brennan's father, Robert, like so many in the DIB, started out quite conventionally and found his life transformed by revolution. He was from Wexford, worked for the county council and became a local newspaper reporter. As a 35-year-old revolutionary, married with two children, he was sentenced to death for his part in the 1916 rising , and when his sentence was commuted, served time in prison in England and upon his release became involved in international relations for the revolutionary government, travelling to the United States and France. After starting the Irish Press newspaper, he joined the Irish Free State's diplomatic service in 1934 and was posted to Washington DC, where he rose to the rank of minister. This became a very tricky job after 1941, when the USA entered the Second World War while Ireland remained neutral, with German, Italian and Japanese diplomats remaining in Dublin. In 1944, at the behest of the U.S. Amabssador David Grey, who was - unfortunately for Ireland - both close to Franklin Roosevelt and unsympathetic to the Taoiseach, Eamon De Valera, delivered a diplomatic note calling for the expulsion of Axis diplomats from Ireland, which note he immediately leaked to the press. The note caused uproar in Britain and America, and Ireland's reputation in public opinion sagged. However the note caused a much bigger problem: the U.S. and British security services were at the time highly satisfied with the sub rosa cooperation they were receiving from their Irish counterparts and were horrified that this diplomatic démarche might undermine it. Brennan worked in Washington to educate the State Department - whose officials were not always abreast of security matters - to the extent that Grey had to admit that he had not known of the degree of cooperation at the time he delivered the note. (Not everybody will agree with this assessment, but recent archival research tends to support it.) On top of all that, Brennan published novels and memoirs, and wrote two plays, one of which was performed at the Abbey.

My friends, the late journalist Steve Brennan and his wife Bernadette O'Neill put together a very good book, Emeralds in Tinseltown: The Irish in Hollywood, that begins its story in the earliest days of the film business. Hubert Brenon from Dublin, virtually forgotten today, was directing Mary Pickford films for Carl Laemmle before Hollywood even existed: it's been claimed he directed more than 300, most of them lost. He gave early leading roles to Theda Bara, Pola Negri, Ronal Colman, Clara Bow and Lon Chaney. According to Emeralds in Tinseltown, but not the DIB, Brenon sued the mogul William Fox when his directing credit was removed from the over-budget (but smash hit) Daughter of the Gods (1916): he was unsuccessful but the lawsuit emboldened directors to insist on credit in their studio contracts. Like so many, including his great countryman the director Rex Ingram, Brenon's career did not survive the transition to sound, although he made a steady stream of films in England until 1940. He died in Hollywood in 1958.

More Hollywood: the DIB's a little hard on George Brent (pictured here with his second wife Ann Sheridan). Born George Nolan in Co. Galway, he played at the Abbey Theatre but skipped out to Canada when suspected of IRA activity (you never know how true these stories - he appears to be the source for this one). While he was never a screen legend like Clark Gable, he was leading man to a host of the best Hollywood actresses including Greta Garbo, Merle Oberon, Olivia de Havilland, Barbara Stanwyck and, above all, Bette Davis, with whom he appeared 11 times, including in the sublime Jezebel and Dark Victory. The DIB is a little quick to push him off his pinnacle: even though he obtained fewer leading roles as he grew older, he still had large parts in major studio pictures until the late 1940s, and some the work of his "severe decline" is nonetheless interesting, including The Last Page, Terence Fisher's first film for Hammer Pictures, with a script by Frederick Knott (Dial M For Murder, Wait Until Dark) based on a play by James Hadley Chase (No Orchids for Miss Blandish). His post-movies television career was distinguished enough to earn him a second star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Still, as it must to all actors, obscurity finally descended on George Brent: after a spell of horse breeding, he died of emphysema in 1979.

Remember what I said about pictures? I don't claim that this is actually a picture taken from life of the High King Brian Boru, or Brian Bórama, as he's more accurately known (it means Brian from Bórama, a place near Killaloe in Co. Clare). He died in 1014 at the Battle of Clontarf at which the Irish defeated the Vikings outside Dublin. I still have my history textbook from national school 45 years ago, by "D. Casserley, M.A.", an interesting woman I would have like to have seen in the DIB. She tells the story all Irish children learned, and maybe still learn: how Boru united the Irish under a single High King and then broke the political power of the Viking invaders, dying at the moment of his triumph. It's quite a nuanced account for a book aimed at elementary schoolchildren (for instance, wondering if Boru felt any pangs of conscience about overthrowing his nearest rival - "we can only hope he did"). The DIB gives him his due - "an outstanding success" and "the most powerful of rules in his day" - while noting shrewdly that the image that grew after his death was one he himself had begun to cultivate beforehand.

Another legendary Irish figure: St. Brigit. This is what D. Casserley, M.A. had to say about her:

Bridgid, who was the daughter of a nobleman, was born at Faughart, near Dundalk, a few years before St. Patrick's death. When she grew up, she determined to devote her life to God's service, so she became a nun, and did splendid work among the poor, as well as converting many of the pagan Irish, of whom there were still a great number. The monastery which she founded was called Cill Dara (the Church of the Oak Tree), and it is from it that Kildare gets its name. Many stories are told of St. Brigid's goodness to the poor, and her love of children and animals. Under her wise and gentle rule the monastery and convent of Kildare were renowned throughout Ireland.

The DIB harshes this buzz. Here is how its entry begins: "BRIGIT (Brighid, Brid, Bride, Bridget) (possibly c.450-524), reputed foundress and first abbess of Cell Dara (Kildare), is the female patron saint of Ireland, but it is uncertain whether she existed as a person." Oh well. She is posited as more likely a "ghost personality", founded a pagan goddess, also Brigit, who was used as an exemplar in the transition to Christianity. This did not prevent - or perhaps is the reason for - her cult becoming widespread and her name being given to a large number of places, churches, wells and the like in Ireland and in places where the Irish went. I always liked her feast day, February 1, since it marked the beginning of the end of winter, when snowdrops would push through the melting snow, the first sign of the renewal of spring. It's a long time since I've seen a snowdrop, but I always think of them at this time of year, so here's a picture. A real one, I think.

Two film censors, a long-winded lady and the first Irish bandmeister

2010-02-11T11:59:00.000-08:00

The newly-independent Irish state threw itself with heroic energy into banning anything that would undermine its leaders' sense of what the nation should be. That sense was very, very narrow, catholic, conservative, anti-sex and anti-cosmopolitan. My father wrote a very popular series, The Kennedys of Castleross, for Irish radio beginning in the 1950s, and there were certain subjects that simply could not be mentioned. Pregnancy, for instance, despite it's being a subject which which most Irish families were readily and frequently familiar. But on the radio, it was only to be broached by implication. E.g., "I've just been to see the doctor." "What did he say?" "Well ..." "You're not! You are? How wonderful!!!" Cue music.

In the first 70 years of the state, Ireland's censors banned 2,500 films and between 10,000 and 11,000 more were cut. (According to the critic Ciaran Carty, by 1961, Ireland's separate banned book list contained more than 10,000 titles, including works by Faulkner, Sartre, Thomas Mann, Hemingway and Steinbeck.) At the outset, the censors had no background in film. Martin Brennan, the third such, appointed in 1954, had had a "good war" during the independence campaign, became a doctor and went into politics. In office, he banned Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados and Laughton's Night of the Hunter, among many others. He banned Edward Dmytryk's adaptation of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, citing "theological implications which are far above the normal cinemagoer's ability to grasp." He also refused to permit depictions of the Eucharist, even in newsreels.

Dermot Breen, appointed in 1972, was a man of the cinema, having founded the Cork Internaitonal Film Festival. He banned Pasolini's Decameron, Ken Russell's The Devils, Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and Fellini's Roma. (To be fair, at the time many of these ran into censorship trouble elsewhere, including in the UK.) Like Brennan, his piety also found some film depictions of catholicism troubling, a sentiment that influenced his official actions. Yet Breen's period as censor was considered to be an improvement on those of his predecessors, and it probably was. It took until 1992 for a year to pass in which no film was cut or banned by the Irish state.

Maeve Brennan was scarcely known in Ireland until after her death in 1993. She had lived in the USA from the age of 17, when her father was appointed secretary of the Irish legation in Washington DC. After graduating from college, she moved to New York to become a librarian. But she crossed into journalism, first at Harper's Bazaar and then at the New Yorker, during the golden age of its great editor, William Shawn, who recruited her in 1949. Her non-fiction essays under the title "The Long-Winded Lady" are deft miniatures of city life where small details - how to eat broccoli in a restaurant, for instance - become slyly indexed to big questions, such as how to live. Her short stories, first collected in a volume entitled In And Out of Never-Never Land, similarly build from small observations and events - a child finding a book of damp matches, say - to dramatic and emphatic discoveries. Many of her stories were about Ireland, including Wexford where her parents were born and Dublin where she was raised, as well as about the Irish in America. She was beautiful, footloose, self-isolating, alcoholic and, ultimately and sadly, mad.

I've mentioned the Irish nazi thing a couple of times before, and said I'd return to it, this time just in passing. A small Dublin pleasure during the short Irish summer is to sit in St Stephen's Green park at lunchtime and listen to the Army No. 1 Band. The music is mellow and good-natured, and, as befits the representatives of a very small army, does not seem to prefigure a massive fire attack by squadrons of helicopter gunships. The first officer to command the Irish army school of music, through which the band was organized, was Wilhelm Fritz Brase, who had been a leading bandmaster in the imperial German army and the Berlin police. He was very effective, recruiting performers, giving recitals, getting involved in the early days of radio broadcasting and training enough musicians that he was able to create three further bands. (I wasn't able to find examples of Brase's own compositions, which included six fantasias on Irish themes, but I did uncover a recording that he conducted of German military music before he moved to Ireland, which is quite jolly, as well as his official arrangement of the Irish national anthem, performed by the Army band - don't forget to stand when you listen to it.) The nazi party's overseas organization, the auslandsorganisation, invited him to be chairman of its Irish branch, but the army refused him permission to do so. Hitler did, however, confer on him the honorific title of Professor. Fritz Brase died in 1940. Whatever else he stood for, he did a great job on the Army band, for which I thank him.

The lost tribesman, a fugitive from abstract expressionism, the senior Steptoe and the Hitler-loving cop

2010-02-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

During the Troubles, it was always striking to me how many of the most strident voices belonged to clergy. My mother was very keen on the Sermon on the Mount, and I always took seriously such Christian invocations are "love thine enemy" and "blessed are the peacemakers". So, I found it bothersome that these elemental principles seemed to be lost on so many of the dog-collar-sporting leaders of Northern Ireland politics. Ian Paisley, of course, was the most prominent. But then there was Robert Bradford. He had briefly been a professional soccer player after which he studied for the ministry - as a methodist, not a presbyterian like most other protestant hardliners. (He was ultimately removed by the church from his position.) His political success depended on refusing any accommodation with the catholic minority and was generally out on the fringes of a wide range of issues. (The DIB does not repeat the apparently documented claim that on one occasion Bradford provided a written expression of solidarity to the UK neo-fascist party the National Front.) For a while he made, but subsequently trimmed, the claim that Ulster protestants were descended from the lost tribe of Israel. His crazy extremism was said to be expressed with a "mild, shy demeanour." The IRA assassinated him in 1981, triggering a horrible escalation of inter-communal violence: his seat in the British parliament was won by another clerical extremist, Martyn Smith. With apologies to my mother (and Christ), I'm afraid that Robert Bradford stretched all my efforts to love enemies to - and beyond - the limit.

For the first time so far in the DIB: someone I knew. Charles Brady - Charlie to us - was an Irish-American painter who moved to Ireland in the 1950s and stayed. A New Yorker like my father, the two formed a real bond. I remember one night when I was about 17, and Charlie was over in London, visiting. It was a Sunday, and I was meant to be cooking dinner. The two of them became roaring drunk at the Chelsea Arts Club and got themselves into a scrape shinning up drainpipes, climbing ivy or some other form of vertical scaling to get into an upstairs window - the stairs being for some reason unavailable to them. They finally turned up giggling two or three hours late with the dinner cold: I began to see the world for the first time from my mother's point of view. Charlie, who became an honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy, was a very fine painter. He had studied in New York at the Art Students League and was the contemporary of Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, all of whom he knew. He told my father that one of the reasons he left New York was that he felt crowded by the ascendancy of abstract expressionism. Instead, he was interested in figuration, painting series of simple scenes, such as wire hangers in cupboards, envelopes leaning against walls, or balls of wool on the floor. However, as the DIB entry, by Rebecca Minch, shrewdly points out, the flat simplicity of Charlie's work owed more than a little to his abstract expressionist classmates. (I was a little severe on Minch's account of W.H. Bartlett: this entry, excellent, is of a different order.) He was an exotic figure to me: gaunt, redfaced, always smoking long American cigarettes. He was very kind, and gave my father three wonderful paintings which hang in the house in Greystones. I was told that he refused to price his work high, even when, late in life, there was serious collector interest in it, including from the politician Charles Haughey, whose utter corruption did not efface quite good taste in art. Charlie - Brady, not Haughey - preferred that people could afford his paintings and insisted that his dealer price them accordingly.

For years in my childhood, the funniest show on TV, at least in my household, was Steptoe & Son, a BBC comedy about a father and son running a rag and bone business. The father, Albert Steptoe, was an insanitary, grasping, manipulative monster, while Son, Harold, was a footloose, fantasizing co-dependent, dreaming of cutting family strings that would always remain uncut. They were a sublime double act, a delirious cross between Samuel Beckett, kitchen sink drama and the Ealing comedies. Living on the east coast of Ireland in the 1960s, we were able to pick up BBC transmissions from the UK and would rarely miss an episode; we kept it up once we moved to England. Families still gathered to watch television then, and Steptoe was a pleasure we always tried to take together. Albert Steptoe was played by Wilfrid Brambell, a Dublin actor who became successful in England in old man roles, even when he was quite young - he was only 50 when he began to play Albert, in 1962. (He was a memorable old man in Richard Lester's Beatles film, A Hard Day's Night.) Apparently, he was really impossible. He drank too much and hated his co-star, Harry H Corbett, who hated him back. He was so difficult, that serious thought was given to sacking him in 1965, despite the huge success of the series. A gay man at the time when homosexual practices were illegal, his Ortonesque lifestyle also carried risks of arrest and exposure that he did not often skirt well, although he found love later in life. (A 2008 BBC film, The Curse of Steptoe, dramatized the story.) We viewers, fortunately, knew none of this: we just laughed like drains at one of the funniest things we'd ever seen. Harold's absurd hipster pretensions, driving his horse and cart through Swinging London, constantly brought down by the malign machinations of his father, brilliantly captured the contradictions and pain of the age, and life.

"Lugs" Branigan. They don't make coppers like him any more, thank God. He took up boxing to fend off bullies, and became an international heavyweight, although not a particularly good one: during a fight in Germany in 1938, in the presence of Goebbels and Goering, he was knocked down nine times and got up after every flooring. I wonder if it was the good-natured applause of the crowd that endeared the nazi regime to him: the DIB reports that while "he disagreed with Hitler's anti-semitism he kept a scrapbook of his career and regarded him as 'a great man'". The DIB's indulgence continues: "Rather than charging offenders, he admitted that he usually gave them 'a bit of a going over' and sent them on their way to avoid excessive paperwork". He hated the nickname "Lugs", an ear-related slur, and those who uttered it could expect "a few clips". (He preferred "Jim".) Upon his retirement, he received a gift of cutlery and Waterford crystal from Dublin prostitutes, many of whom, it says here, "regarded him as a father figure". In retirement, he bred budgerigars.

The cheating escheator, the physical lawgiver, the strict disciplinarian and the lying climber

2010-02-07T18:49:00.000-08:00

I was watching the England-Wales rugby march today (it happened yesterday, and I recorded it) and noticed something unusual. It was attended by a British princeling - I think it was the one called Prince William - and whenever Wales scored, he stood up, cheered and applauded. Now, I understand that PW is a patron of the Welsh Rugby Union and that his full title is Prince William of Wales. But I think it goes deeper than this: I'm persuaded that he actually believes he is Welsh. His father, of course, as well as being the Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Chester, Earl of Carrick, Baron Renfrew and Lord of the Isles is the Prince of Wales. But he's not exactly Welsh, really, being of direct descent from a German aristocratic family into which occasional vials of English and Scottish DNA have been mixed. William has a spot of Irish, since his grandmother was a Roche whose people hailed from Cork a while back. But there's very little Welsh in the PW family line, at least not since Henry VII (d. 1509), who was born in Wales of a Welsh family. The Welshness of the Waleses is of quite recent vintage: it was that old Cambrian dog Lloyd George who dreamed up the idea of an investiture ceremony in Caernarfon Castle in 1911 for the future Edward VIII and even taught the young prince a few words of his thrust-upon-him native language. The present occupant of the post went through a similar pageant in 1969, for which he studied somewhat more intensively than his great-uncle. PW is thus only the most recent in an invented tradition of Welshification (or maybe mascotification).

I was thinking about this while reflecting on how people became Irish. The DIB, as we've already seen, is full of various arrivistes. This isn't surprising: Ireland is a small place, close to lots of big places, and you'd expect there to be lots of race-mixing to and fro. In fact, despite continuing self-identity as a highly homogeneous people, the Irish are as mongrelized as any: in my own family tree, other than the Hungarians on my father's side (and leaving aside the Greek gods of which I've previously spoken), I'm aware of Huguenot and Scottish heritage diluting my pure Paddytude, and there are probably other, unknown, miscegenating strains. This is fine by me and completely typical. But at the same time, reading Irish lives makes you very aware of those who elbowed their way in, particularly since so many make the kind of impact that gets them an entry in a dictionary of biography.

That's Richard Boyle in the picture: the first earl of Cork, who moved from England to Ireland in 1588, when he was about 22. He got himself a really great job: deputy escheator. Escheat is a feudal concept that still exists in common-law jurisdictions: essentially, it means that if the owner of title to land or other property cannot be found, that land or property "escheats" to the feudal lord, or these days to the state. In late 16th century Ireland, there was a lot of escheating going on, as the English crown looked for reasons to confiscate land from the established Ireland. Boyle was very good at this, and found all sorts of reasons to take land away from people who mistakenly believed they owned it. But once confiscated, he then skimmed, building himself a considerable fortune on the side. He then married another fortune, covering up the fact that his wife's late husband had committed suicide, which was another grounds for escheatment to the crown. His wife then obligingly died, leaving him owner of everything. Not unsurprisingly, these activities annoyed people. It was claimed that some Irish rebels took up arms against the English crown because of Boyle's corrupt activities and accordingly he was charged, convicted and jailed. But by this time he had friends in high places: he was released, pardoned, given a new job, fixed up with a second wealthy wife and a deal to buy Sir Walter Raleigh's estates in Cork for a knockdown price - Raleigh apparently needed the money because he was in prison at the time. (We've come across the Raleigh estate once before: the artist Edith Blake lived in his house near Youghal.) Boyle set about building up his fortune again, breaking Raleigh's leases, either to squeeze more money from the tenants or to put in new ones, usually English soldiers and entrepreneurs keen to loot Munster's rich natural resources. Boyle used the money to buy even more estates in Ireland and England; he also obtained the usual titles to go with his wealth and influence - first a knighthood, then a barony and finally an earldom. Hie second wife obliged him with 15 children of which at least 11 seem to have survived to adulthood. Boyle was energetic in obtaining them wealth and preferment, too, building estates and seeking out advantageous marriages. He lived to the age of 74 and died of natural causes. His family motto was "God's providence is my inheritance." I'm not sure what God had to do with it: the substantial inheritance of his family depended in great part on Boyle's dark genius for business, including a filing system that could keep him up to date on his tenants and their payments "at a moment's notice."

His third son, Roger, was similarly gifted. (The heir, also Richard, merely held on during the political upheavals of his lifetime, adding a second earldom and a viscountcy to his tally of titles.) Roger managed to navigate the turbulent politics of early 17th century Ireland with sinewy talent, switching from monarchy to Commonwealth to restored monarchy with great success. His father obtained for him the title Baron Broghill. The elevation to the earldom of Orrery was all his own work: he married the daughter of the earl of Suffolk and rose and rose and rose. Like his father, some of his wealth was obtained corruptly, although maybe not enough: the cost of his lavish lifestyle consistently exceeded his income. His friends praised his "devising head and towering wit". To these virtues the DIB adds "vanity and deviousness". He played the anti-catholic card whenever he had a chance.

The really talented Boyle was the first Richard's 14th child, Robert, who was born in Cork and became one of the outstanding natural philosophers of an outstanding era. He is the Boyle of Boyle's Law - the one about the proportional relationship between the pressure and volume of a gas - who worked tirelessly in experimental science, particularly chemistry and physics, while also seeking to lead an demanding religious life. Michael Hunter of the DIB nicely links the two strands, stating that "his laboratory practice can in many ways be seen as an extension of his indefatigable examination of his conscience."

The professional descriptions of the DIB continue to be illuminating: thus, you have to read the life of Samuel Boyse, once he's presented as "poet, translator and hack writer", and it's well worth it to discover the life of one whose "destitutions and extravagance were considered infamous even by the standards of eighteenth-century literary bohemia. (He once pawned his clothes and his bed linen and sat in bed writing, wrapped in a blanket.) Similarly, it's irresistible to learn about Reginald Brabazon (pictured) once he's been situated as "landowner, philanthropist and disciplinarian." He founded something called the Duty and Discipline Movement (as well as the Lads' Drill Association), whose aims, according to the DIB, were "to combat softness, slackness, indifference, and indiscipline in young people and to give reasonable support to all legitimate authority." Irresistible or not, I think that reading about him is probably preferable to having been in his company.

Finally, Brendan Bracken, a quintessential Mick on the Make, to use Roy Foster's terminology. He left Tipperary at the age of 14, moved to Australia and seems to have spent the rest of his life lying about everything. Less important than the many who disliked and mistrusted him was the small number of influential people - notably, Winston Churchill - who liked him immensely. He ended up a cabinet minister, chairman of the Financial Times and all-round political fixer and charmer, despite an appearance that combined a "mop of read hair and pale freckled skin" with "black teeth". He reaped the usual rewards, including a viscountcy. He downplayed his connections to his father, a monumental sculptor and founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association, as well as all things Irish, although he once produced his birth certificate to refute the claim that he was a Polish jew: in the British society that he embraced there were, after all, some things worse than being Irish. From the non-Welsh Welsh to the non-English English: this identity thing is very complicated.

The first Boycott, the Belfast charioteer, a scarcely-known composer and little-known writer

2010-02-03T01:07:00.000-08:00

I have a distant memory of the 1947 film Captain Boycott, one of many black and white features that used to be staples of television viewing in the days before color television. Principally, I recall the great Scottish actor Alastair Sim playing an Irish priest Father McKeough - based on the real life Father John O'Malley - who led the popular ostracism in 1880s Co. Mayo of Charles Cunningham Boycott, an English land agent who while no "brutal tyrant" according to the DIB, believed that "the Irish peasantry were prone to idleness and required firm handling." In gratitude, said Irish peasantry meted out some firm handling of their own, partly inspired by the Irish political leader Charles Stewart Parnell, who had advocated the ostracism policy. (In the film, Parnell is played by Robert Donat, which at least is an improvement on the Hollywood biopic in which the great man was incarnated by Clark Gable, with Myrna Loy as Kitty O'Shea.) I do recall Sim getting the stirring closing speech, in which he describes what will be done to all others in the future who attempt to do what Boycott had done: "We shall boycott him!" It turns out that Father O'Malley actually did come up with the idea of turning the surname into a verb, helped by a journalist pal who popularized the term. The real Boycott's case became a cause célebre: the government brought in blacklegs to harvest crops at a cost of 30 times their actual value. Boycott, completely intransigent, believed the cure to Ireland's agrarian problems was emigration and industrialization. Happily for him, he got a job back in England, although he used to return to Ireland to holiday and, who knows, to gloat.

Stephen Boyd. Hollywood turns up so many one-hit wonders, and this Belfast man (Glengormley, near Belfast, as it happens) was one of them. But his one hit was a considerable one, Ben Hur, where he played the charioteer Messala to Charlton Heston's eponymous hero and became a huge, if somewhat short-lived star. He started out in amateur dramatics, and the DIB suggests that his pre-Hollywood career was somewhat perfunctory: in fact, he appeared in nine films in three years, including opposite Brigitte Bardot in Roger Vadim's 1958 melodrama Les Bijoutiers du clair de lune (The Night Heaven Fell). Post-Hur, the DIB records mainly his disappointment with his roles, without mentioning that he nonetheless appeared in films by John Huston, Edward Dmytryk, Richard Fleischer, Anthony Mann, Jean Dellanoy and Romain Gary. (I'm beginning to think the DIB isn't completely sure footed when it comes to film and television.) He dropped dead on the golf course at the age of 49.

I found the tiniest fugitive clip of the music of Ina Boyle, taken from a 1948 live recording with authentic coughing in the background. She was from Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, not far from where my mother grew up and my father now lives. She studied under Ralph Vaughan Williams, who counted her as a favorite student, and composed widely, including an opera, three ballets, orchestral, chamber and choral works. She spent five years setting an Edith Sitwell poem to music, only for the poetess to refuse to let her have the rights. Much work went unperformed and unrecognized. Once, she grew peas to pay the bills. I couldn't find any of her music currently recorded, which makes the short, haunting clip even more precious. I'd like to hear more.

I wasn't familiar with the writer Patrick Boyle, but the DIB entry sent me to a short story of his in the Field Guide Anthology of Irish Writing. The story, Myko, is a nice little dark account of a publican's attempt to defraud a tinker over the sale of a coffin, and has a good sting in its tale, Roald Dahl-style. Boyle was a bank employee (he declined to follow his family into the law because of his stammer) "who struggled to write in between working and drinking." In 1965, he sent in 14 short stories to an Irish Times literary competition and took the first 5 places. The DIB says his "reputation receded somewhat in later years", but based on Myko, he's certainly worth a read, and I shall seek him out.

The bigamist, the Balkanist, the banker, the big speech and the big house

2010-02-02T00:26:00.000-08:00

The Dublin-born actor-playwright Dion Boucicault's bigamous marriage to a 25 year old Australian actress - he was 65 at the time - landed him much attention and helped fill theatres in America while he disentangled himself from his prior entanglement. One play of his at this time was called Lend Me Your Wife. Given the fate of the first Mrs. Boucicault - it was said he pushed her off a mountain-top in Switzerland - the wronged second was probably lucky to get things sorted out in the courtroom. He was very familiar with the legal system, having been declared bankrupt three times, but in his chaotic life, now largely forgotten, he pulled off some real achievements. He wrote around 150 plays, and some of them were big hits in London and New York. He is credited with the invention of the theatrical matinee, obtaining royalties for playwrights in the English and American theatres and changes to the U.S. copyright law that gave the authors the right to print and publish their work. He had a very public affair with another actress Emily Jordan, that culminated in a farcical encounter with her husband. Boucicault was visiting Emily in her rooms (she had moved out of her husband's home) when Mr. Jordan turned up. Boucicault hid in the rooms of another lodger, a Colonel Gibbon, who was out. As Col. Gibbon returned home, the marital brouhaha was in full swing, and the colonel was asked to intercede, which he did by calling the police and having Jordan arrested. Jordan sued Gibbon for false arrest and in the ensuing court case, Boucicault's adultery was made very public, although it took the then-Mrs. B another 19 years to get around to divorcing him. (The DIB calls the wronged husband Gibson, but I think that's incorrect.)

The DIB has a standard format for presenting its entries: surname, forename (birth year-death year) and professional description. It's the last piece that so often makes you want to read on: thus, "BOURCHIER, James David (1850-1920), journalist and Balkan intermediary". If I'd known I could have been a Balkan intermediary I would have studied harder at school. (A fellow postgraduate student ended up as head of the Bulgarian service of the BBC, so even then I should have known it was feasible.) Bourchier, a Limerick man, became a journalist because he went deaf following an attack of measles and had to stop teaching. The DIB entry has a segue that begs a thousand questions: "Having engaged in some journalism - the Globe published some articles he had written on evictions in Ireland - he was offered in 1888 the post of Balkan correspondent of The Times." Of course he was. In Byronic fashion, he threw himself into advocacy of anti-Turkish independent movements, which in a journalistic sense somewhat vitiates the "honesty and disinterestedness" with which the DIB credits him, although that refers more to his relations with the independence-seeking locals. It's claimed he won "the trust and affection of presidents and peasants alike", which sounds like gilding the lily. Regardless, he appears to have been indefatigable in the Bulgarian cause, and was very disappointed when it sided with Germany and Austria-Hungary in the First Wold War; despite this, he believed that the post-war Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine, which forced Bulgaria to pay substantial reparations and hand over land to Greece, Romania and the newly-formed Yugoslavia, wss unfair. The Bulgarians certainly appreciated his efforts: declared national mourning when he died, named a street in Sofia after him and put his face on three different stamps. If he hadn't caught the measles he probably would have died a schoolteacher.

The de Burghs arrived in Ireland with the Normans around 1175 and spawned a vast array of surnames: de Burgo, de Burca, Bourke and Burke. There are 17 pages of Bourkes in the DIB, but I couldn't get involved with many of the predictable procession of aristos and clergy. However, one such, Patrick Bourke, interested me a lot. His father, a grocer and publican, lost his business and Patrick had to leave school at the age of 14, whereupon he joined the civil service. Two years later, he transferred to the Inland Revenue, and two years after that, he entered Trinity College Dublin, while continuing to hold down his full time job. (Ironically, Trinity was regarded as the establishment - Protestant - college, while University College Dublin, more broadly based and Catholic-identified turned him down because it didn't believe he could make the lectures.) He won a foundation scholarship, three gold and four silver medals. He graduated in four years, began training as a barrister and topped his class in the final exams. All the while, he continued to work as the Inland Revenue, where he became the youngest-ever full inspector of taxes, at the age of 22. He crossed over into the private sector and became a banker, where he oversaw the consolidation that created Allied Irish Bank, one of the country's major retail banks. Just his c.v. made me exhausted.

Thomas Francis Bourke had one of those lives which seems impossible but which in the nineteenth-century revolutionary movement was almost typical. His family was uprooted from Tipperary by the famine and moved around north-eastern American and southern Canada. He became a peripatetic house painter and found himself in New Orleans at the outbreak of the civil war. He joined the confederate army, fought at Antietam and Gettyburg, was wounded, taken prisoner and spent the rest of the war in Fort Delaware, or rather the swamp by the fort, in which more than 2,000 prisoners died. After the war, he returned to New York, joined the revolutionaries of the Fenian movement and was sent back to Ireland to take command of the Tipperary district in the 1867 rebellion. His health was so poor that when he was interviewed by the police upon arrival, they believed his story that he wanted to see friends before he died. The rising was a fiasco, and Bourke was taken prisoner, tried for treason and sentenced to death (the sentence was later commuted). His speech from the dock was considered by contemporaries to be one of the great ones, to rival that of Robert Emmett, another leader of a doomed rebellion:

I have ties to bind me to life and society, as strong as any man in this court. I have a family I love as much as any man in this court does his. But I can remember the blessing received from an aged mother's lips, as I left her the last time. She spoke as the Spartan mother did—" Go, my boy. Return either with your shield or upon it." This reconciles me. This gives me heart. I submit to my doom, and I hope that God will forgive me my past sins. I hope, too, that inasmuch as He has for seven hundred years, preserved Ireland, notwithstanding all the tyranny to which she has been subjected, as a separate and distinct nationality, He will also retrieve her fallen fortunes—to rise in her beauty and her majesty, the sister of Columbia, the peer of any nation in the world.

God, mother, nation: the pillars of old-style Irish nationalism, particularly in the physical force tradition that Bourke embraced. How alien all of that would have been to Elizabeth Bowen, born in Dublin but with a family seat in Kildorrey, Co. Cork, less than 40 miles from Thomas Francis Bourke's birthplace. Although identified in so many ways with England, where she was mainly raised, educated and lived, she was connected umbilically to Bowen's Court, the Big House built by her family following the Cromwellian settlement and which she strove to preserve, despite huge financial strain, into the 1960s, when she finally yielded and sold the site for later demolition. In her last years, she remained nearby and was buried in the church next to where the house had been. In one cultural sense, Bourke's story is the quintessentially Irish one, with displacement, burning national identity, anger, resistance and the embrace of martyrdom. But Bowen, like so many others of her class and background, was also yoked to the place, the land, the culture and the country, sometimes with ambivalence, but ultimately with a similar determination.

The lucky pirate, the unschooled geniuses, the beautiful girls in kimonos and the floating politicians

2010-01-31T18:38:00.000-08:00

Anne Bonney is everybody's favorite pirate.(The slovenly-attired doxy in the picture probably looks nothing like the real thing.) You can find a version of her story in Daniel Defoe's A General History of the Pyrates, which includes the observation, based on Bonney's origins and career, that "Bastards have all the Luck." He makes a good point: she was said to have killed her servant with a knife and severely beaten an importuning swain. When she married a loser, her lawyer father, by now translated from Cork to South Carolina, kicked her out of their home and impelled them off to the Bahamas, where she ditched the loser and hooked up with Calico Jack Rackham, the designer of the Jolly Roger. They set off together on a pirate spree: she seems to have embraced the life wholeheartedly, as well as giving birth to one child by Rackham and conceiving another before finally getting caught. Her pregnancy saved her from the rope, and her father pulled strings to get her released, although Rackham was executed. She was only 23. Free of that particular encumbrance, she returned to South Carolina, delivered of Rackham's second child, married again, had eight more children and lived to the age of 84. Luck indeed.

George Boole we know about because of Boolean logic, used by all of us however imperfectly to frame search requests in databases. He was English, from an impoverished family, and basically self-taught; however, he managed to establish connections with leading mathematicians and to publish research papers. When new universities were established in Ireland, Boole was encouraged by the future Lord Kelvin to apply for a chair at Queen's College (now University College), Cork. He had no degree - had not even completed secondary education - but was appointed professor of mathematics in 1849. His work on logic and probability theory was controversial and apparently wrong in many respects - difficult for me, who hasn't tackled a mathematical problem in 35 years and wasn't much good at them back then - to say, although it appears that his approached were influential even if his results were flawed.

George's daughter Alicia, born in Cork, became a distinguished mathematician in her own right (although the DIB refers to her "mathematical hobby"), pioneering research on four-dimensional shapes (she coined the term "polytope", still in use, to describe them). The closest she came to the academy was an honorary degree from Groningen University. Here sister Lucy also never attended university, but became a distinguished chemist: It's reported elsewhere (but not in the DIB) that she became the first woman professor of chemistry at the Royal Free Hospital in London. Another sister, Ethel Voynich, became a successful knowledge The best conclusion to be drawn from the Boole family careers is that a university education should be avoided at all costs.

I discovered a new profession in today's reading: "sailing butler". This title was conferred on one Thomas Kilagallon, who began serving Sir Henry Gore-Booth and his family at the age of 11 and continued for more than 70 years. He became waterborne because Gore-Booth was fond of sailing expeditions, including to the Arctic and he had to accompany his master on these life-threatening voyages. Gore-Booth eventually died of the flu, although only in Switzerland. A scion of a Big House family in Ireland since the 17th century, he had a train named after him following his death. More substantial were Henry's daughters Constance the revolutionary (whom we'll hear more about when we reach her married name, Markievicz) and Eva, described enticingly by the DIB as "poet, mystic, trade unionist and suffragist." (In the picture of the two of them, Eva's on the right.) She campaigned for the rights of the poor, particularly women, including for "pit brow workers, women acrobats, barmaids and Oxford Circus flower sellers." (Explanation: pit brow workers were women who performed manual work above ground at coal mines; Oxford Circus is a busy London intersection, not a circus.) She campaigned, successfully, for her sister's reprieve from execution after the Easter Rising and believed that she remained in post mortem communication with her. After the deaths of Eva and Constance, Yeats, who used to visit their home in his youth, wrote a poem in their memory, Two girls in silk kimonos, both /Beautiful, one a gazelle" (Eva was the gazelle). It's an odd, poignant poem, ambivalent about their political causes but aflame with what they meant, back in those lost days. (An oddity of the DIB: people with double-barrelled names are listed alphabetically by their second such: thus, the Gore-Booths are listed under the "Bs", where I think nobody would go to look for them first.)

I took a shine to Achmet Borumborad, né Patrick Joyce, the "quack and fraud" who promoted Turkish baths in Dublin in the 18th century. He said he was from Constantinople, but probably hailed from Kilkenny. He walked around Dublin in what he said was Turkish dress, including "an immense turban". He was successful in obtaining public financial support for his baths, based on their supposedly health-improving qualities. However, in a hilarious account of a party thrown for Irish parliamentarians, Jonah Barrington describes how the assembled power-brokers became roaring drunk and went tumbling into the baths: Borumborad "espied 18 or 19 Irish Parliament men" in the cold salt-water bath "floating like so many corks upon the surface or scrambling to get out like mice." That was pretty much it for Achmet, although there's a bizarre coda: one William Gregg of Antrim mentioned him in his will, asking that if he should "at any time change his name that he will take the name of William Gregg in remembrance of me." Sometimes, there's so much more you want to know from the shards left to us by these incomplete histories.

The red rose renter, the librarian soldier, tennis wrapped in the flag and the decline of a dynasty

2010-01-30T17:55:00.000-08:00

They must have been ferocious times, those 150 years or so from the mid 16th century on when so much Irish land was confiscated by the British crown (and, for a while, Commonwealth) and reallocated to faithful servants brought in to quell the natives. One thinks of this period in terms of constant violence and upheaval, although there were a few dark jokes along the way. I thought one of those was the grant during the Munster plantation of Gerald FitzGerald's confiscated lands to an English grandee, Thomas Blennerhassett, for a an annual rent of one red rose. At law school you learn about paying rent in peppercorns, so the idea isn't completely alien. That said, it suggests that the spoils came pretty cheap to those who were in the right place at the right time: in fact, it appears not quite as cheap as the DIB has it, since the Blennerhassett family history says he also had to pay six pounds a year. Still, they must have had great laughs every time the red rose thing came up.

At one point, I spent a lot of time sitting in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where I liked to look at girls and occasionally read ancient books. (On one such, an 18th century pamphlet by an Oxford don, a prior reader had written next to the author's name. in impeccable script akin to Bodoni type, "A Dull Rogue!" I felt his pain.) Thomas Bodley was the Merton College fellow who re-organized the library that now bears his name. His youngest brother Josias was also at Merton, but didn't graduate. Instead, he became a soldier, and wound up in Ireland, fighting a further stage of the wars that so benefitted the Blennerhassetts. He was a talented engineer who excelled in the siege of Kinsale on 1601. The book thing seems to have been in the blood, since the conquering army showed its gratitude by subscribing funds to the new library at Trinity College Dublin. Robert also gave the Bod an astronomical quadrant and an armillary sphere (not the one pictured, but like it).

There are quite a number of Bolands in the DIB, so I expected to find something about the greatest of them all, the founder of Boland's Biscuits, still hanging on in Ireland as part of the conglomerated Jacob Fruitfield Group. Boland's Mill in Dublin was also a major site of the Easter Rising, so it wasn't unreasonable to hope for something. Well, I was disappointed. There is a passing reference to Patrick Boland, "a prosperous milling merchant", but none to his biscuit empire that, unlike regular empires, brought peace and pleasure to the people of Ireland. Fortunately, there are other pleasures to be found among the Bolands. John Pius Boland, Patrick's son, won gold medals in the men's single and doubles tennis at the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. He was visiting and was "persuaded to take part". Scandalously, he insisted that the Irish, not the Union flag be raised at the medal ceremonies and the Greeks complied. I'm not sure what Irish flag that would have been - more likely a harp on a Green background or even St Patrick's saltire, not the modern Tricolour. The gesture propelled him into political life, where he served as an Irish party MP at Westminster until 1918.

Most of the other DIB Bolands are a clan that epitomize one historical sweep of Irish life and politics, from fomenting revolution through civil war, the forging of a new state and, ultimately, the discontents of becoming the new political establishment. The story begins with Jim Boland, Manchester-born (in 1856) of parents from Roscommon and Galway. Although he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood and was an early leading light of the Gaelic Athletic Association, his activities were as much intra-nationalist as anti-British: he died from head wounds received in a confrontation with other nationalists, reputedly protecting Charles Stewart Parnell.

Jim's sons Gerald and Harry (pictured) inherited their father's revolutionary fervor. Gerry was disciplined, sea-green incorruptible: during the war of independence he renounced meat, dairy, alcohol and tobacco, the better to serve the cause. He claimed that his yoga regimen helped him get through the 40-day hunger strike conducteed by anti-treaty prisoners during the civil war. Harry was wilder, a singer, sportsman, drinker and womaniser who rose steadily in republican ranks as he caroused with Michael Collins (they finally fell out, over a woman, Kitty Kiernan, as well as politics). Harry was killed by his former comrades during the civil war, while Gerald survived, perhaps fortunate to have been interned during the worst part of the fighting. Entering politics, he became notorious for cracking down on nationalists who clung to the gun - 15 IRA volunteers died during his time as justice minister - and for instituting censorship during the Second World War, while Ireland was neutral.

Yet he was "a man of comparatively liberal instincts, according to the DIB, for instance pushing back the power of the catholic church despite his personal devoutness. His son Kevin went into the family business, becoming a government minister and interning IRA members. Like his father, he deplored the activities of Taca, which channelled funds from businessmen to his Fianna Fáil party, but unfortunately in his government role he took planning positions similar to that of the Taca beneficiary, Neil Blaney, which led to the destruction of important parts of Dublin's Georgian architecture in the 1960s. (Boland dismissed the conservationists as "belted earls and their ladies and left-wing intellectuals.") On another occasion his red-baiting included an assault on "Conor Cruise Castro God Bless Albania O'Brien." He became isolated in the party as the Troubles progressed, particularly for his attacks on the arms trial. He founded his own completely unsuccessful party (loyally supported by his father, and wrote a number of increasingly blimpish books with title like Fine Gael: British or Irish?) He went on hunger strike against a planning decision (ironic, that). One commentator said that politics was "the last vocation that he should have considered." The DIB tries to be kind, elegantly: Kevin "combined rigid arrogance with a strange innocence; unable to reassess his family's ideological inheritance, he was destroyed by it, raising a limp flag in a sad hour." The problem is that Fianna Fáil, having abandoned anachronistic ideologies, hasn't found a raison d'être to replace them, apart that is from the acquisition and retention of power, at which it continues to excel.

The steeplechaser, the pretend cannibal, the glory-seeking footballer and the glory-seeking politician

2010-01-27T21:12:00.000-08:00

I'm not really a believer in foundation stories. It strikes me as unlikely that anybody actually invented the sandwich, let alone the nocturnal gambler, the Earl of that ilk. Years ago, somebody once spun me a story about mayonnaise being named for the Balearic city of Mahón (which may be the case, although the Larousse Gastronomique thinks otherwise), and that Mahón was named for an Irishman named Mahon (it's probably named for a Carthaginian named Mago, as it happens). But the stories stick, like mayonnaise to a spoon, and we seem to like them, if not need them. Mercifully, nobody says the steeplechase is named for Mick Steeple. But it's claimed to be a product of the Irish genius, all the same. In 1752, one Edward Blake raced a Mr. O'Callaghan on horseback from Buttevant church in Co. Cork to the steeple of the church in Doneraile, four and a half miles away. The DIB says that the church is named for St. Leger, but I think it's actually St. Mary's, Viscount St. Leger having built it. One notable feature of the church as pictured: no steeple. Apparently, it blew down in 1825. I'm not sure that I believe that Mr. Blake was responsible for the steeplechase: it seems obvious that people would race towards a well-known place that all knew, and that a village church is an obvious choice. But there's a plaque for Blake and O'Callaghan in Buttevant; who am I to argue with lapidary history?

Colin Blakely, from Bangor, Co. Down, was an actor of the highest order. I was watching him the other night in Billy Wilder's late film, The Private Lives of Sherlock Holmes, in which Blakely played Watson to Robert Stephens' Holmes (and Christopher Lee's Mycroft). It's an uneven film, partly because of studio interference - there are legends about missing footage that are probably, sadly, untrue. But the best parts are wonderful, and one of the very best is the visit of Holmes and Watson to the Russian Ballet, where Watson/Blakely, unleashed by the nearness of so many beautiful women in the corps de ballet, slowly realizes that Holmes, to avoid an unwelcome proposition, has circulated the story that the two of them are a couple. Blakley's performance as the male dancers close in on him, pushing past the gorgeous, disabused, departing danseuses, is a gem of comic rage. I saw him twice in one of his finest stage roles, in a Barry Collins play called Judgement, a three-hour solo piece in which Blakely played a Russian military officer abandoned in a cellar for two months who turns to cannibalism and addresses the audience as his judges. I was about 17 and was so impressed by his performance at the ICA theatre in London that I went to see it again when it transferred to the Old Vic, which was then home to the National Theatre. I used to buy the cheapest tickets back then - I think they were only 40 pence - so found myself down in the front row of the Vic with my friend Neil Haines. Neil was - and is - a wonderful man, but not, shall we say, a lover of heavy theatre. As Blakely worked his way through his - for me - mesemerizing performance (there was no interval) on a bare stage with just one prop, a human bone, Neil fell asleep. (We were in the front row, remember.) After a while, he began to snore. I was mortified, but also in a crisis. If I nudged Neil, I was worried he'd wake with a start, maybe let out a bellow. So I elbowed him gently, disturbing him just enough to stem the noise. I shouldn't have worried. I read that some time later, somebody had a heart attack during a performance. Blakely saw it, jumped off the stage, gave the man CPR, waited for the ambulance to arrive, then climbed back on and resumed his discourse on cannibalism. I'm pretty sure I also saw Blakely play Christ in Dennis Potter's Son of Man on the BBC in 1969, a rough-hewn, demotic Messiah. As I say, he was a wonderful actor.

The least of Danny Blanchflower's achievements was the 10 months he spent managing my team, Chelsea, in 1978-79. It was an abject time for the club, with poor players and no money, and Blanchflower probably did no worse than anybody else would have with the same raw material. His playing career, notably winning the championship and couple double with Tottenham Hotspur in 1961, was just before my time, and distinguished: 56 caps for Northern Ireland, playing in the 1958 World Cup quarter finals, twice footballer of the year. As the DIB puts it, his philosophy was that "football was about glory and that the game should be about beating the other team with style rather than boring them to death." That's still the big issue in Irish football (soccer): how to play well and win? After his playing days, he was a good football journalist, on television and in print. His brother Jackie was also a top-flight player, 12 international caps and one of the legendary Busby Babes of Manchester United that were all but wiped out in the terrible Munich plane crash of 1958 (Jackie received the last rites on the airport runway but survived, his career shattered.)

Our paths have already crossed a couple of times with that of the politican Neil Blaney: his fellow party-member Frank Aiken excoriated the business-friendly cronyism that Blaney championed. And the civil servant Peter Berry blew the whistle on Blaney's efforts to run arms to Northern Ireland in the early years of the Troubles. Blaney was an extraordinary politician, who built a political machine in Donegal - based on that started by his father, Neal - that was so successful that he was able to detach it from his own party and run it independently for several years. Patrick Maume's entry on Blaney in the DIB is quite magisterial - maybe the best I've read so far. His summation is marvellous, writing of "the ruthless authoritarianism which marked his career ... [t]he volatile mixture of calculation, resentment, sophistication, provincialism, ruthlessness, and nostalgia which he displayed is reminiscent of other political figures of his intermediate generation: he might well have become taoiseach but instead became a catalyst for the formation of the Provisional IRA." It convincingly establishes the need for a full biography of Blaney.

An inquiring doctor, two fine artists and a classic account of a ravaged Anglo-Irish family

2010-01-24T17:31:00.000-08:00

I always liked the story of Robin Warren, the Australian hospital doctor who shared the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2005 for his work on the pathology of gastric ulcers. It appealed to me that someone based for far outside the big centers of learning could make such a big impact on science. Samuel Black was of a similar ilk: a physician in Newry, Co. Down from 1788 on, he began to report on cases that he encountered of angina pectoris, which had been first described in 1772, publishing details of 21 cases in all, 18 of which were accompanied by dissections that he conducted. He noted that clogging of the arteries - he called it "ossification" - was the visible feature that connected his patients, and predicted, correctly, that the "application of chemical principles" might permit the removal of these "deposits". (Others, including the English vaccination pioneer Edward Jenner, made similar observations independently of Black.) Black also became interested in the epedemiology of coronary disease, and was the first to comment on what became known, much later, as the "French paradox" - the fact that ischaemic heart disease - was comparatively rare in France. He believed that lifestyle, climate and stress conditions could explain this. There's a plaque commemorating Black over the Oxfam shop in Marcus Square, Newry, where he lived until his death in 1832.

Dorothy Blackham was a Dublin-born artist who exhibited constantly from the 1920s until her death in 1975. She worked on posters, linocuts, book illustrations and paintings, while teaching in Dublin schools. Her principal subjects were Irish landscapes, such as the illustrated Blossoming Chestnuts, first exhibited in Dublin in 1939. I'm descovering so many Irish artists through the DIB, particularly women. I've probably seen Blackham works at some time - they're apparently at the Dublin City Gallery and the Hugh Lane - but they're never previously registered with me. Even reproduced, you can see that she was a very fine artist and her work is worth seeking out, which I will.

Another fine discovery: Edith Blake - Lady Edith to the deferentially inclined - who eloped with her policeman husband and ended up in Canada with him where be was governor of Newfoundland. She had quite outstanding gifts as a scientific illustrator, such as this study of the sphinx moth, made in 1892. She also wrote plays and spoke nine languages. It's claimed that while in the Bahamas, she painted with a pet snake draped around her waist. A large collection of her work is in the Natural History Museum in London; her notebooks are at Myrtle Grove, near Youghal, the 16th century house built by Walter Raleigh in which she died in 1926.

Caroline Blackwood's Irish connections were both thorough and attenuated. Her father was the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, descended from 17th century Scottish planters in Co. Down. Her mother's family were Guinnesses. She was born in London, and raised by nannies on the family estate near Belfast, after which her homes were in England, France and the USA. Instead, and more significantly, she became first muse to others, than a considerable artist in her own right. Her first husband, the painter Lucian Freud, painted her. Her third, the poet Robert Lowell, apostrophized her - "I love you every minute of the day; / you gone is hollow, bored, unbearable" (They divorced and Lowell remarried, but when he died in a New York taxi, he was holding a picture of her, done by Freud.) Lowell's mania distressed and ultimately defeated her, but it was during this marriage that she bloomed as a writer, including of Great Granny Webster, that fantastic account of life in a lunatic Anglo-Irish family. The description of Big House Irish life is marvellous: a ludicrous recreation of the English aristocratic grandeur in a landscape that can't support it, where the roof leaks perpetually and the servants wear wellington boots, where the menus are written in French by Ulster cooks who can't cook and where the narrator's grandfather never reads the Irish papers and refuses to hire catholics. It has something of the English comic gothic of Stella Gibbons and Mervyn Peake. but it depends for much on the madness - sometimes, literal madness - of being transplanted for generations to this unwelcoming place. She describes a ravaged family, and ultimately became ravaged herself although you sense that for her, like the suicidal Aunt Lavinia she describes in Great Granny Webster, that spiritual and emotional extravagance was her way of staving off death, while she could.

The typographer, the textual scholar, the unlucky Lucans, and the unluckier chief secretary

2010-01-23T19:03:00.000-08:00

I have a fondness for typography, which I first learned about in printing classes at school, and then from my father. Michael Biggs was inspired by the great Eric Gill, like him a sculptor and stonecutter as well as typographer. Biggs designed the Irish script typeface for Ireland's pre-Euro banknotes. He carved altars, fonts and other features for churches all over Ireland, including at St Michael's in Dun Laoghaire, whose predecessor was destroyed in 1965 by a huge fire that I remember clearly. In this massive work of so many "great" lives of people who ruled, controlled, killed and otherwise had reign over the lives of others, it's a pleasure to see recorded the contribution of one who wrought many fine ordinary things that form part of our everyday visual furniture. Every time you took out your wallet, you saw something beautiful. The DIB says that Biggs was "a gentle man, affectionate and generous." As George Eliot said, " the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts."

We probably had enough of Charles Bewley yesterday. In between his two ghastly stints in Berlin as a representative of the Irish state, there was a genuinely fine diplomat, Daniel Anthony Binchy, a fluent German speaker who made an impact in the right way - to the extent that any representative of a small country could make an impact in a big one - and received a signed portrait from Hindenberg upon his departure in 1932. He returned to academia, where his was one of the founding appointments of the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, a distinguished but somewhat eccentrically-constituted institution in that its fields of research are limited to Celtic studies and physics. In the narrow areas of ancient Irish legal history, palaeography and philology, Binchy became a giant. My copy of Fergus Kelly's A Guide to Early Irish Law, published by the DIAS, contains six pages of bibliography; more than one of these consists of works by Binchy. More unhistoric acts.

Another big family: the Binghams. The most famous of these for my generation doesn't figure in the DIB, since other than his family title, the Earldom of Lucan - named for a town west of Dublin - "Lucky" Lord Lucan the nanny-murderer had scant connection to Ireland. Things started well: the first Earl of Lucan, Patrick Sarsfield, was one of the Irish commanders who gave William of Orange's armies a hard time during the 17th century Williamite wars. The title died out, but a distant relative of Sarsfield's arranged for it to be revived in 1776. This new first Earl, Charles, was said to have been regarded with "great respect" by his tenants; this did not protect his home in Castlebar from being ransacked by rebels during the 1798 rising. Otherwise, he was a landed parliamentarian who did his bit for the interests of which he was a part. Sometimes, the details of such people are rather inconsequential: according to the DIB, "he was regarded as an amiable man, respected both in parliament and in Mayo ... [m]usically inclined, he was reasonably proficient on the German flute." Less proficient was the third earl, George (pictured), famous for a historic act: he ordered the catastrophic Charge of Light Brigade at Balaclava during the Crimean War. The DIB tells us that Lucan "lacked all common sense, and his severity and pettiness made him deeply unpopular with his officers and men." Although his military career formally ended then, he continued to accumulate military offices and titles, even being appointed field marshal in his 88th year.

Harold Binks was a Northern Ireland trade union leader. Unusually, he attended a multi-denominational infants school, an experience he later said influenced his anti-sectarianism. He was a classic working-class autodidact who left school at 14, started reading on politics and economics, was drawn into the union movement by both local and global conditions - the Spanish civil war had its impact, as well as poverty in Belfast - and rose and rose. He strove, successfully, to reunite the northern and southern trade union congresses and had his finest hour during the the unionist strike of 1977 which attempted, unsuccessfully, to bring down the Northern Ireland administration. He condemned the strike as a "fascist coup" and tried to mobilize the union movement against it. As so often with historic union moments, his was a gallant failure. But he was not wrong to regard it as "our finest hour."

Augustine Birrell was possibly the most interesting and capable British public servant to rule over the Irish. He was chief secretary in Dublin Castle in the early years of the 20th century and was more sympathetic to Home Rule in particular and catholics in general than most of his predecessors. I've recently been reading Leon Ó Broin's terrific 1966 biography of Birrell, a rich portraint of a genuinely interesting man. In the early part of his tenure, he successfully reorganized the university system and introduced important land reforms. Like many before and after him, he had problems with Irish traditions of political violence. His instinct to avoid coercion - a key element of the policy of his predecessor Balfour - steered him away from confrontation both with Ulster unionists when they began to militarize and the nationalist militias who organized in reponse to them. (Although his confrontation with the union leader Jim Larkin was more typically coercive.) His reputation was largely destroyed when the Easter Rising occurred on his watch: although the intelligence failures before the rising were largely those of other agencies, not of his, he nevertheless took - and accepted - most of the blame. The DIB's entry - by Kevin Barry's grand nephew Eunan O'Halpin - probably strikes the right balance in stating: "Had Birrell retired as he wished in 1913 or 1914, his political obituaries would undoubtedly have been kinder." He strove to do the right thing, which is more than you can say of most of his parliamentary predecessors - and successors in northern Ireland.

One final delight: John Birchenshea, the 17th century musicologist who devised a mathematical system for composition, which he claimed could teach a beginner to compose seven-part harmony in seven months. Deaf people could also learn the system. He helped Samuel Pepys set a couple of poems as songs, and was well paid for it.

Harmless drudges, bad and good Bewleys and Billy in the Bowl

2010-01-22T18:54:00.000-08:00

I'm sure that many you have been asking, why has nobody previously compiled a dictionary of Irish biography? I'm sure you have. Well, as it happens, they have, and I've been looking at all three of them. They're one volume affairs, each compiled by a single person, which makes them rather impressive. The first, published in 1878, was A Compendium of Irish Biography: Comprising Sketches of Distinguished Irishmen and of Eminent Persons Connected with Ireland by Office or by their Writings, by Alfred John Webb, a nationalist politician. It's a monumental work, with some 1,500 lives over nearly 600 pages, citing 350 authorities as source for the information. The next, published 50 years later in 1928, was A Concise Dictionary of Irish Biography, by John Smyth Crone, a Belfast-born physician who moved to London where he explored his Irish antiquarian interests. Dr. Crone amassed more than 4,000 lives, although in the fewer than 300 pages published, they're capsule entries, albeit useful. Another 50 years on, in 1978, came A Dictionary of Irish Biography, by Henry Boylan, a writer and civil servant, who provided just over 1,000 elegantly-written lives, in under 400 pages. Now comes the DIB, an upstart just 32 years after Boylan's work. It's obviously an enterprise in a different league from its forbears, but also following in their footsteps. All hail these harmless drudges! Enthusiastic amateurs, like myself.

I don't mean to go on about this Irish nazi thing, but there's something about being a "B" that seems to bring it out. I read Charles Bewley's "unreliable" autobiography Memoirs of a Wild Goose a few years back,and while it's full of wit and naughtiness, it can't paper over the deep unpleasantness that lies underneath. He was from an establishment family (of which more later), and he was very bright. He was also a contrarian, so to the consternation of his staunchly unionist and quaker family, he became equally staunchly nationalist and catholic. He was a successful barrister, among other things serving prominently in the courts set up by the Dáil in parallel to the British ones during the war of independence. He was a talented linguist, whose skills included excellent German. Another prominent Sinn Feiner with excellent German was Robert Briscoe, whose Jewish family had moved to Dublin from Lithuania. It was accordingly sensible to send both of them to Germany on an unofficial Irish trade delegation during the war of independence. It did not go well. One night, Bewley turned up drunk at a Berlin cafe and hurled anti-semitic insults at Briscoe and the cafe's Jewish owner. He was thrown out. (Bewley's own account of the incident included the admission that a waiter had asked him if Briscoe was the Irish consul, to which he relied "that he was not, and added that it was not likely that a Jew of this type would be appointed.") He kept it up. When Briscoe attempted to buy a ship for smuggling fugitive IRA men out of Ireland and weapons back in, Bewley told Dublin, falsely, that Briscoe was motivated by financial gain. Bewley tried to obtain premises for the Irish delegation, and told Dublin that he had rejected an offer from a Mr. Loewi and a Mr. Jacobowitz, adding "I think it likely that in any bargain with gentlemen of their ancestry we would not get the best of it." On other occasions, he told Dublin that Briscoe was "out on the make" and "a decidedly ... shady character." To some extent Bewley was pushing at an open door: the minister of external affairs, George Gavan Duffy, to whom he reported, once wrote that Briscoe was "an undesirable person". (Briscoe served for 38 years in the Dáil and became lord mayor of Dublin.)

Worse was to come. After a break, Bewley rejoined the diplomatic service in 1929 and four years later was posted .... back to Berlin. Upon presdenting his credentials to President von Hindenburg he made a point, as the DIB put it, of praising "the rebirth of the German nation under Hitler." He regularly attended nazi rallies, which were avoided by diplomats of other democratic states. Because of his proximity to nazi circles - including Hermann Goering, on whom he later wrote a book that is quoted in Holocaust denial circles - his descriptions of anti-Jewish measures were most thorough and informative. He also added his own spin: that "no Jew is bound by any duty towards a non-Jew", or "bound by the ordinary moral law ... in his relations with non-Jews" and that "the Jew ... strives to destroy [non-Jewish patriotism and religion and morals] when allowed into positions of power or influence." He went on to say that if these precepts were true, it was "only logical for the [German] government to take steps to eliminate an influence ... so fatal to the race." He told a German newspaper in 1937 that "your Reich and its leaders have many admirers among our youth."

One of the the results of the steps that Germany took to "eliminate" this "influence" was that many European Jews became refugees, particularly after the Munich crisis of 1938. Bewley created harrowing scenarios of these Jews turning up on Irish doorsteps, perhaps sneakily slipping first into Britain from which they could easily take the Holyhead ferry to holy Ireland. Dublin accordingly asked Bewley for a report on the state of anti-semitism in Germany, Italy, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia - akin to asking Hannibal Lecter for his views on anthropophagy. His report, in the words of the historian Dermot Keogh, "uncritically mirrored the central Nazi ideas on anti-Semitism" and, after lengthy exposition, concluded:

It is ... clear that if the Irish press and public opinion indulge in paroxysms of moral indignation at the teratment of Jews but remain blind and deaf to atrocities committed on Christians in other parts of the world, they lay themsleves open to a charge of ignorance or hypocrisy, and scarcely contribute to an amelioration of the general international situation.

After this, even Dublin had had enough, and Bewley was recalled. Instead, he stayed in continental Europe throughout the Second World War, in Germany and Austria and, having narrowly escaped execution as a collaborator, moved to Rome, where after a period of silence, he was eventually permitted to attend St Patrick's day celebrations at the embassy until his death in 1969. The DIB thinks he desired "to be diametrically different to established conventions and to be awkward." True enough, although supporting the nazis in 1937 Berlin wasn't exactly the sign of a maverick character.

Fortunately, when most Irish, including me, hear the name Bewley, they have much happier associations that the revolting Charles. In particular, they revere Ernest Bewley, a cousin of Charles (they shared a grandfather), who founded the legendary Bewley's Oriental Cafes in Dublin. Bewley's - particularly the remaining branch in Grafton Street (pictured) - has simply been the best place for a cup of tea in everybody's living memory. The flagship Grafton Street branch was in fact the last (1927) of four cafes, the first of which was opened in 1896. Spread over several floors with different rooms of varying function and character, it's a place I still visit whenever I'm in Dublin and eat the cherry buns that my mother introduced me to as a treat on our visits to town. Proust had his madeleine and I (no comparison of literary worth intended) have my Bewley's cherry bun - a vivid taste memory that takes me back to early, fondly-remembered times. To be truthful, the place has had its ups and downs: the cherry buns became heartbreakingly poor in the 1980s (imagine biting into a stale madeleine). Commercial vicissitudes have led to all sorts of transformations and tinkering, not to mention the closure of the Westmoreland St and Great Georges St branches. But on my last visit in 2009 with my mother's sister, it was still as wonderful as ever, and the cherry buns were completely up to scratch. My mother always spoke reverentially of the Bewley family: "quakers" - always a term of approbation with her - and "good to their employees". Ernest's son Victor in particular, who turned around the business and paid off its debts, was always referrred to with great respect.

Some short lives: you'll have gathered by now that the DIB - and I - have something of an antiquarian bent. So it's a pleasant surprise to find a lengthy quote from Shane MacGowan in the middle of an 18th century life. The subject is the Dublin beggar Billy in the Bowl, whose name matched his appearance: he had no legs and moved around in a large bowl with wheels attached. He was apparently a charmer and somewhat successful with women. He was also a robber and ended up in jail, where worthies would come to take a look at him. He's mentioned in Finnegans Wake (the book not the song) and in The Pogues' The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn: the following lines are quoted in full in the DIB: "You remember that foul evening when you heard the banshees howl / There was lazy drunken bastards singing 'Billy in the Bowl' / They took you up to midnight mass and left you in the lurch / So you dropped a button in the plate and spewed up in the church." Fabulous stuff. I haven't been able to find the song MacGowan refers to, although there's a Dubliners' song, The Twang Man, which also mentions it. Charles Bianconi (pictured), an Italian artisan, started a coach service in Tipperary in 1815 with one horse; by the 1840s, he had 100 coaches, 1,400 horses and served 120 cities. Before the railway, it was how you got around Ireland, and even later the Bianconi service remained significant, offering feeder coaches to the main train stations. He embraced nationalist politics and organized monster meetings in Tipperary for Daniel O'Connell; a daughter married the Liberator's nephew and a son his grand-daughter. Isaac Bickerstaff, now all but forgotten, but a formidable dramatist in the 18th century: after a towering 12 years on the London stage, he had to take the conventional route of blackmailed gay men and flee to "the continent", where he died "in poverty and exile" about a century before Oscar Wilde endured a similar fate.

The tar-water bishop and the go-slow civil servant

2010-01-21T13:37:00.000-08:00

I studied law at Berkeley (pronounced Burke-ley), which is named after George, Bishop Berkeley (currently pronounced Barclay). I've long suspected that he pronounced his name the Californian way, based on this circumstantial observation: the pejorative Cockney epithet "berk" (pronounced "burke") is an abbreviation of "Berkshire Hunt" (it rhymes; work it out). It's not pronounced "bark". Anyway ...

Berkeley is called Berkeley because of a poem by Berkeley, called Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America, which contains the line "westward the course of empire takes its way." Berkeley, a Kilkenny man, tried to start a university in the Americas - Bermuda was one possible location, Rhode Island another. The venture failed, but the precepts that he expounded influenced the foundation of other new world colleges, including Columbia and Yale. More than 100 years later, when it was planned to locate the new University of California in a dull place near Oakland called Ocean View, one of the trustees, a lawyer named Frederick Billings (the Montana city is named for him), recalled Berkeley's poem, with its appeal to the manifest destiny of the westward push, and suggested the writer's name for the new institution. (The pictured allegorical image, named for the same stanza, is by Emanuel Leutze and hangs in the House of Representatives. Can't get more manifest than that.)

Berkeley, after a career at Trinity College Dublin and his American sojourn, became Bishop of Cloyne in east Cork. It's a small place, not much more than a crossroads, really, with a pub at each corner, close to the more substantial town of Midleton, home to Jameson and Paddy's whiskeys. There's a round tower and the cathedral, St Coleman's, which is more the size of the parish church that it now is. That's about it. When Berkeley moved to Cloyne, in 1734, at the age of 49, he had already had two careers, as an an acclaimed philosopher and, as the DIB puts it, the "social idealist" behind the American university project. He threw himself into his work, particularly into alleviating the poverty of so many within the diocese. While writing theoretically on economics he engaged in practical intervention, encouraging local industry and distributing money to the poor during times of hardship. I own the second edition of his best-seller from this period, Siris: a Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar Water, And divers other Subjects connected together and arising one from another (1744), which bears the epigraph from Galatians, "As we have opportunity, let us do good unto all men." As the DIB explains, Berkeley extolled the virtues of tar water - apparently learned from the Narrangansetts of Rhode Island - as a panacea for a suffering population that otherwise had scant access to medical care: "his claims for the substance were modest; he found it good for alleviating his own health problems, and found that others reported similar results." The wits mocked him, and tar water sales soared. The medicinal use of tar water apparently lasted a long time, although by 1911 the Encyclopedia Britannica would state that "taken in large quantities it causes pain and vomiting and dark urine, symptoms similar to carbolic acid poisoning." Did I mention that Berkeley was a great philosopher? Of course, you knew that already. The DIB's entry, by Paul O'Grady, is both thorough and touching, culminating in a fine tribute from another Irish philosopher, A. A. Luce, "who remarked that one initially thinks on reading him that Berkeley is building a house, but subsequently discovers that he has built a church."

I mentioned a couple of days ago the anti-semitism of "Two-Gun" Pat Belton, the politician and businessman.
Writing the day prior to that about Samuel Beckett, I didn't refer to his role as a witness on behalf of a Jewish cousin ny marriage, Henry Sinclair, who sued the writer Oliver St John Gogarty (of whom more when we get the the Gs), who had written some derogatory and anti-semitic lines which Sinclair claimed, successfully, referred to him. Beckett was roundly blackguarded by Gogarty's barrister, and accused of belonging to a "coterie of bawds and blasphemers". This was in 1937. In 1953, a civil servant at the Department of Justice named Peter Berry responded to a request by Robert Briscoe, a Jewish senior member of the governing party, 1916 combatant and future Lord Mayor of Dublin, that Ireland admit 10 Jewish refugee families from continental Europe. In his memorandum, Berry wrote:

In the administration of the alien laws it has always been recognized ... that the question of admission of aliens of Jewish blood presents a special problem and the alien laws have been administered less liberally in their case ... there is a fairly strong anti-Semitic feeling throughout the country based, perhaps, on historical reasons, the fact that the Jews have remained a separate community within the community and have not permitted themselves to be assimilated, and that for their numbers they appear to have disproportionate wealth and influence. [emphasis added]

Berry also referred to our old friend "international Jewry" using money to obtain preferential treatment of Jewish refugees. In fact, the cabinet, to which the memorandum was submitted, overruled Berry and decided that 5 of the 10 families should be admitted. Berry - who also owned up to pursuing a "go-slow policy" in dealing with Jewish refugee applications - showed a civil servant mentality typical of his peers in many countries before, during and after the Second World War, including the USA, UK and France. And this unquestionably ugly stuff should not diminish the fact that I'm writing about him today because he ended up a hero in one of the biggest Irish political scandals following independence.

In 1969, when violence in Northern Ireland had reached a very significant and dangerous level, Berry, by then a senior Department of Justice officer, learned that an Irish cabinet minister - later revealed to be Charles Haughey (pictured) - did a deal with the IRA that allowed it to use the Republic of Ireland unmolested for cross-border operations. He also learned that the IRA had been meeting with Captain James Kelly, Ireland's director of military intelligence. Berry later learned that Kelly promised the IRA money to purchase arms, and that Haughey, together with another cabinet member, Neil Blaney, had connived in this scheme, diverting funds from a civilian relief project administered by Haughey. The then-taoiseach (prime minister) Jack Lynch was unaware of this maverick operation by his subordinates. Berry was tipped off that weapons, allegedly acquired by a Flemish ex-nazi restaurateur named Albert Luykx, were due to arrive in Dublin, en route to the North. Berry brought in the police to prevent entry of the weapons and confronted Haughey on the telephone; the shipment was called off. (Ironically, Berry had approved Luykx' admission to Ireland in 1948, during the period he was "going slow" on Jewish applications.) Berry's life was threatened by republicans for his role in the affair, and for testifying against Haughey, Blaney, Kelly and Luykx, among others. The trials, poorly handled by the prosecution, ended in the acquittal of all defendants (or dismissal of charges): Haughey, of course, went on to be taoiseach on two occasions; his utter personal and financial corruption, although widely known, was not officially confirmed until after his retirement.

The DIB's Partrick Maume does a very nice balancing act on Berry, giving space to the significant arguments for both positive and negative assessments. Maume quotes another Irish maverick (and hardly a fan), Noel Browne on Berry: "a main of obsessional type, preoccupied with the minutiae of his job, but a man of extraordinary dedication in his way to what he felt were the best interests of his job." Damned a little with faint praise, but praiseworthy still, up to a point.

The Irish nazi party, the tribune of women workers and assorted lucky colonists

2010-01-19T22:12:00.000-08:00

I didn't expect to see these words in the DIB: "... co-founder (1934) of the Irish branch of Hitler's National Socialist Party." I knew that various Germans in high positions in Irish academic and cultural life were nazi sympathizers and worse, but hadn't known that this amounted to a branch. Were there meetings? Membership cards? Agendas, motions moved and seconded, and so on? And what did they talk about? Where Celts fit into racial theory? Which Dublin hotel would be used as Gestapo headquarters? Straight-arm salute techniques? The referenced co-founder will be back again when we get to the "M"s: Adolph Mahr turned up today because, as director of the National Museum, he discouraged a Jewish donor, Albert Bender, from making donations of his father Philip's art collection. However, the correspondence between the two was spread over 7 years and is described as "friendly". Generally, Nazi policy was to "accept" all art "donations" from Jewish clients, so I'm not sure what Mahr's problem was.

Louie Bennett was on one of those activists whose energy leaves you exhausted, just on the page. Starting in the women's suffrage movement, she went on to reorganize a trade union, the Irish Women Workers' Union (IWWU), became a peace campaigner, served in public office and travelled the world in support of a wide range of causes. Partly because of her commitment to non-violence, she kept her distance from the alpha males of the Irish labor movement, notably James Connolly and James Larkin; however, in the aftermath of the Easter Rising, she campaigned against British excesses, speaking against the Black and Tans both in America and to Lloyd George personally. During the Irish civil war, she served on the Women's Peace Committee as a mediator.Protecting the rights of women in the workplace wasn't easy in conservative Ireland: even within the IWWU there was debate in the 1930s over whether it should admit married women with working husbands. She led a successful strike of laundry workers to obtain two weeks' paid holidays and, as the DIB states, "consistently condemned colonialism, fascism and armaments expenditure." I liked this detail of her character: "she often used threatened resignations as a means of controlling her colleagues." Great people aren't always easy to be around.

It's in the nature of colonial matters that dynasties come to dominate. We've seen a few of these families before and the latest are the Beresfords, who carve out 10 pages of the DIB. The first appears to be Tristram Beresford, a Kentish man sent to Ireland to build and fortify Coleraine. He annexed land and looted timber and even the London companies that installed him rebuked his corruption. It was said of him that his "tyrrany in Coleraine equalled that of the Spanish inquisition" but he successfully resisted all efforts to remove him. His son was created a baronet, and his great-great grandson, Marcus, became the Earl of Tyrone. Marcus' son George became Marquess of Waterford. And so on. So entrenched were the Beresfords that Marcus' grandson, also Marcus, was named joint-taster of wines for Dublin port at the age of 9, a position he enjoyed for 24 years (his brother John Claudius succeeded him in this onerous position). I have no idea what this job entailed, but I see from this that in 1734 the job was worth three hundred pounds per year. The Beresfords were politicians, soldiers, churchmen - in other words, enjoying all of the the usual trappings of the entrenched ruling families.I felt a little sorry for George Thomas Beresford, who clearly had no idea of how the tide was turning: He was sent to Eton and rose in the army to the rank of major-general, after which he was installed in various parliamentary seats controlled by his elder brother. He "rarely spoke in parliament, but consistently voted against catholic emancipation" while continuing to accumulate colonial offices: governor of Co. Waterford, colonel of the county militia, and so on. Then - there being 41 catholic voters in his constituency of Waterford for every protestant - in 1825 somebody have the bright idea of fielding a candidate against him (sundy Beresfords had held the seat for 70 years). Of course, he was swept aside - he stood down before the election - although it's unfortunate, if understandable that among his opponents' election slogans was "down with the protestants". He was apparently bitter about the experience, but the family learned something: it changed its mind about catholic emancipation, voted for it, and saw poor George returned unopposed for Waterford in the 1830 election.

The Beresfords still hang on. The Wikipedia entry on the present Marquess of Waterford is so irresistibly ludicrous that it must be quoted in full:

John Hubert de la Poer Beresford, 8th Marquess of Waterford (born 14 July 1933) is an Irish peer. He succeeded to the marquessate in 1934. He was educated Eton, and later served as a Lieutenant Royal Horse Guards Supplementary Reserve. The Marquess married, in 1957, the Lady Caroline Olein Geraldine Wyndham-Quin, daughter of 6th Earl of Dunraven and Mount-Earl and has issue. The Marquess' family seats are Curraghmore, Portlaw, County Waterford and Glenbridge Lodge, Valleymount, County Wicklow. Additionally, the Marquess' club is White's. Lord Waterford's heir apparent is Henry Nicholas de la Poer Beresford, Earl of Tyrone (b. 1958).

This picture, of the present Marquess and family before their Curraghmore home, suggests the depths into which a once-great dynasty has fallen.

Lyrical, physical, horizontal and despicable

2010-01-18T22:27:00.000-08:00

I stopped the harpist Derek Bell in the street once. It was on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, and there he was, minding his own business, on his way back to the Bancroft Hotel. He was very gracious at the interruption and accepted my platitudes about how much I liked his music and that of The Chieftains, with whom he played from 1975 until his death in 2002. He had been a child prodigy, a multi-instrumentalist (piano and dulcimer, as well as the harp), a distinguished composer and a musician of tremendous range, who could as easily handle the classical repertoire, music hall songs and collaborations with Roger Daltry, Van Morrison and Sting. This recording, of Women of Ireland from Stanley Kubrick's film Barry Lyndon, shows Bell at his most lyrical. I also love The Chieftains' album with Van Morrison, Irish Heartbeat, which is informed by Bell's musical sense of humor displayed towards his fellow-Ulsterman, most outrageously when The Star of the County Down segues into the Orange anthem, The Sash My Father Wore. (You'll have to find the album yourselves, but here's a lovely recording of The Star by the great John McCormack.)

I've been struck how many important scientists turn up in the DIB. I blame my own ignorance, but I had no idea how many Irish had made such significant contributions to scientific and mathematical enquiry. I've previously mentioned some naturalists, but major figures turn up in the "hard" sciences, too. My difficulty is that I am completely unequipped to do more than repeat what the dictionary says, given the complexity of their work. Thus, we have John Stewart Bell, the Belfast man whose paper On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox is decribed as "his greatest contribution to quantum theory" and whose conclusions came to be known as "Bell's Theorem". My researches reveal that this is of a class of theorems known as "no-go theorems", which show "that an idea is not possible even though it may look attractive". This, essentially, is what I feel about life. You can try to understand it here, and I wish you luck. It's dispiriting that a quantum physicist could quite easily understand history, literature or law, but in the humanities or social sciences we can't even begin to grasp what goes on in advanced physics.

Now for something I can understand. As will already be clear, there aren't that many women in the DIB. And of those that have appeared so far, there has been a concentration on nuns and nurses, although artists and social activists have also had their due. Laura Bell was none of those things: she was a grande horizontale, a 19th century courtesan - the DIB rather decorously uses the Greek word "hetaera" - who caused all sorts of trouble. Difficult to get a sense of her from her portrait, although she seems very pretty. She graduated from work in in a Belfast draper's to acting in London to ... well. She was "a sparkling and intelligent companion" who cut a swathe through London culminating in an affair with the "Nepalese ambassador to London" (if this is Jang Bahadur, with whom Bell was linked, it's not quite right to say he was ambassador - he was already head of the government he represented whyen he visited England). She married Augustus Thistlethwayte when she was about 22. After six months she went off with his younger brother. The brother died, and Laura returned to Augustus: his having recently inherited the family fortune was surely unconnected. She embraced Augustus' evangelical faith and threw herself into the movement, preaching in Scotland and London and holding dinners for statesmen, including Gladstone. She had a liking for guns: she apparently would summon servants by firing one. This habit was of course entirely unconnected to the unfortunate death of Augustus, in his bedroom, from a pistol shot. After her own death, Gladstone retrieved his letters to her and burned them, "for fear of their being misunderstood".

Patrick Belton - "Two-gun Pat, the Drumcondra financier" - was an otherwise unremarkable person with the fortune to be thrown into prominence by the birth of the Irish state, alas. As a young man, he became involved in the republican movement - he later claimed to have recruited Michael Collins - and went successfully into business. Decribed as an "able but erratic individual with no use for discretion", he was also "hysterically anti-communist", supporting Ireland's Blueshirt movement and Franco during the Spanish civil war, for whom he raised substantial amounts of money. He was "loudly" anti-semitic, opposing a Dublin corporation attempt to permit kosher animal slaughter as follows: "If the Jews do not conform to Christian ways, let them go back to Palestine." He started a political dynasty: three sons and a grand daughter followed him into politics.

Becketts and Behans

2010-01-17T13:56:00.000-08:00

I once wrote Samuel Beckett's obituary. I was working for Variety in Paris at the time, and the managing editor in New York wanted to start a morgue - newspaper slang for a collection of advance obituaries, ready to be rushed into print with a few updates whenever the dark day comes. It was about 1987, and Deirdre Bair's biography had recently appeared, so I relied quite heavily on it - although, as it turned out, it came in for quite heavy criticism for the quality of its factual research. I also made quite extensive use of John Lahr's Notes on a Cowardly Lion, a memoir of his father Bert, a great clown who (as the title suggests) played in The Wizard of Oz. Lahr played Estragon in the first two American productions of Waiting For Godot. The premiere, as it were, was at the Coconut Grove Theatre in Miami. Vladimir was played by Tom Ewell, the light comedian who starred opposite Marilyn Monore in The Seven Year Itch. The production was billed in advertising as "The Laugh Sensation of Two Continents!" Beckett had quite a sense of humor, but I imagine he didn't find this funny. Despite this, Godot went to Broadway in April 1956, with E.G. Marshall replacing Ewell. (There's a famous Richard Avedon photo of Lahr as Gogo, which I won't post for copyright reasons, but which you can find here.)

The DIB entry is thorough. It preserves what I think is a misspelling of the name of his wife, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil - see her gravestone here. It doesn't recount Deirdre Bair's claim that Beckett suffered a nervous breakdown upon his return to Paris from the Vaucluse in 1945 - indeed, this biography doesn't even appear in the list of DIB sources, which I think is a mistake, whatever its faults. It also implies that Beckett's resistance work was confined to his time in Paris, whereas it appears that he remained on active service after he fled south. It seems to believe that Kenneth Tynan's use of the sketch Breach in his revue Oh! Calcutta! was unlicensed: in fact, Beckett wrote it at Tynan's request; his objection was that, following the opening direction "an empty stage", Tynan had interpolated "with naked people". It doesn't mention the agreeable factoid that Beckett was the only Nobel laureate to have his athletic distinctions recorded in Wisden Cricketers' Almanack (he played a couple of first-class games while at Trinity College Dublin). He remained a cricket fan: friends would videotape English cricket matches and send them to him in Paris; I heard that he once took a big shine to an English cricket fan that he met in a bar, despite the fact (or perhaps because) the man had no idea who Beckett was.

An uncle of Sam's, Jim Beckett, is also listed. Like his nephew, he was a keen athlete; a swimming Olympian and member of the national water polo team and keen on athletics, hockey, rugby, tennis and boxing. He suffered from diabetes, which led to the amputation of his legs; the DIB suggests Sam's "obsession with infirmity and limbless bodies" may have been related to his uncle's experience.

A friend of my father, Reena McDermott, grew up in the Crumlin council estate in Dublin, where a neighbor was Kathleen Behan. (Mrs. Behan's Crumlin home was known as "Kremlin" to the local wags.) Her brother, Peadar Kearney, had co-composed and written the original English lyrics for Amhrán na bhFiann, which became the Irish national anthem. According to Reena, Mrs B would offer sixpence to any child who could recite the whole thing. (Kearney's English song was later translated into Irish - not by him - and this version became the official anthem. I learned it at school first in English and the Irish version only later: it appears that these days children are taught just the Irish words.). They were quite a family: including Kearney, there are 6 of them in the DIB: Kathleen, her three sons Brendan, Dominic and Brian, and Brian's long-suffering wife Beatrice, an artist in her own right. Brendan was the star, of course, albeit one that has waned somewhat since his days of fame and notoriety in the late 1950s and 1960s of which the photo, with the comedian Jackie Gleason, is a mild example. The facts are well-known: he joined the republican movement at the age of 8, was caught in England at 16 with explosives and sent to Borstal (juvenile detention). Back in Ireland, he was arrested for shooting at policemen and sentenced to 14 years in prison. He was 19. He started writing in jail, and when he was released in a general amnesty after serving less than 5 years, began to write poetry in Irish and short stories in English. His first produced play, The Quare Fellow, was produced in Dublin and then in London, where it was a hit and later made into a film. The effect of success on Behan was not a happy one. He already had a weakness for the drink and there were plenty, particularly in Britain and the USA, who were happy to egg on a garulous and bibulous Irishman to greater stereotypical outrages. His next play, The Hostage (originally written in Irish) was another hit, to be followed by what the DIB calls his "masterpiece", his memoir Borstal Boy, which he had been working on since his time in prison.

My mother couldn't stand him. This was principally because of the time, shortly after my parent's marriage, that he turned up at their flat in Wellington Lane, Dublin in the small hours of the morning, drunk. He hammered at the door and shouted loudly, insisting on being let in. Although my parents knew him slightly - everybody in Dublin's small bohemia knew each other slightly at that time - it turned out that he was at the house because some IRA friends of his used to live there. Later, my father discovered some nasty anti-Semitic leaflets that had been left behind: during the Second World War, there were a few IRA types whose support of Nazi Germany was more than merely tactical. He had another run-in with family friend, Anna Gallagher (wife of the journalist J.P. Gallagher), a catholic from Belfast. Drunk (of course), he ripped into her as a "Scotch hoor". "I'm NOT Scotch!!" came the indignant reply.

All of this is so much folderol, of course. He was a fine writer and his best work still holds up. I recently saw the movie adaptation of The Quare Fellow, which was not much liked at the time, principally because of the liberties it took with Behan's play. It's a very good film, and you can see the best of Behan in it. His brother Dominic wrote some great folk songs, notably The Auld Triangle (sometime attributed to Brendan, since it featured in The Quare Fellow), sung here by the great Luke Kelly, The Patriot Game and Liverpool Lou. A third brother, Brian, was also a writer. He was a political activist in England and was expelled from the Socialist Labour League by fellow-Irishman Gerry Healy (I"m disappointed to see that Healy doesn't rate an entry in the DIB: he's in the British DNB).

Atlases, amputations and anchoresses

2010-01-15T16:58:00.000-08:00

I was a little disappointed with the DIB's entry, by Rebecca Minch on the artist W. H. Bartlett (which is how he signed his work - the DIB gives him as William Bartlett, no middle name). Bartlett did landscape scenes in Europe, the Middle East and North America, and his work was widely published in books of engravings. His The Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland (1840 - the DIB incorrectly gives 1844) captured Ireland - particularly rural Ireland in 120 or so engravings and was a bestseller in its day. You can pick up a good quality copy for around $1,000, but relatively few of them are still about, since dealers realized years ago that they could make much more money from breaking down the books and selling the individual prints, often hand-colored. The DIB sniffs that Bartlett was not as good an artist as his contemporary J.M.W. Turner - who on earth was? - and unduly narrowly puts his "strength" in "the accuracy of man-made structures". You can see all of his Irish pictures here, and I think they show that his range was greater than that of the mere "topographical draughtsman" that the DIB states Bartlett to be. I'm very fond of this one, of Killiney Bay (in south Dublin) looking out towards Bray Head (in Wicklow) before the Vico Road and the railway were punched through along the coast. Bartlett prints are part of my Irish mental clutter, as I think they are for many people: the entry could have better explained his success and popularity.

Sadly, nothing appears to have survived of the work of another Irish artist. Francis Stewart Beatty was producing photographs within a week of the publiction in English of Louis Daguerre's manual in 1839. Beatty set up his own studio in Belfast and subsequently moved to Dublin. While he seems to have had considerable scientific ingenuity - he developed improvements to the Daguerre system and obtained a patent for a chromolithography process - he was not successful in business and died a pauper in the North Dublin workhouse and was interred in an unmarked grave.

As anyone knows who's read Patrick O'Brien 's Aubrey and Maturin novels, the skill of a naval surgeon during the Napoleonic wars was measured not so much by his diagnostic abilities than the speed with which he could amputate a limb or trepan a skull. William Beatty, from Derry, was one of the best. During the Battle of Trafalgar, where he served on the flagship, HMS Victory, he excelled at his job, treating more than 100 wounded and, together with his assistants, performing 11 amputations. The most celebrated of the wounded, of course, was Horatio, Lord Nelson, who saw his fleet sink or disable 22 French and Spanish ships without the loss of one on his side. Nelson was fatally wounded by a sniper late in the battle, and Beatty was at his side as he died. In his Authentic Narrative of the Death of Lord Nelson with the Circumstances Preceding, Attending, and Subsequent to, that Event; the Professional Report of His Lordship's Wound, and Several Interesting Anecdotes, Beatty reported, maybe not completely authentically, that Nelson's last words were "Thank God I have done my duty." As the words he spoke immediately prior to this helpfully life-summarizing statement were reported by others to have been "'fan, fan ... rub, rub ... drink, drink", Beatty's account seems improbable. But it did him no end of good; subsequently he rose high in the naval and scientific establishment, became personal physician to the future King William IV and received a knighthood. He served on the committee to erect Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square in London. (He had nothing to do with its Dublin counterpart, Nelson's Pillar, blown up in 1966.)

Daniel Augustus Beaufort was a parson in various parts of Ireland (although he spent five years laying low in Wales, hiding from creditors). What he was good at , however, was architecture and map-making. His A New Map of Ireland Civil and Ecclesiastical (1792), from which this map is taken, was full of unprecedented detail, painstakingly accumulated from Beaufort's travels around the country. Like Francis Stewart Beatty, he seems to have been wretched in his money deailings: the DIB says that "he barely avoided dying in prison for debt." His son, Francis Beaufort, excelled as a chartmaker, hydrographer and meteorologist: he developed the Beaufort scale of wind speed, which is named after him.

I've previously indicated my scant interest in matters ecclesiastical. I have an especially hard time with anchorites and anchoresses. St. Becga was a Leinsterwoman, who is alleged (but not by the DIB) to have declined an unwelcome marriage proposal and fled to England, where she is said to have founded a community in Northumbria.It's always seemed unlikely to be that God would want any of his people to brick themselves up in a small cell as proof of their piety and faith, but it was certainly popular for a while. The place of Becga's foundation is now called St. Bees, which reminds me of an entirely irrelevant anti-limerick, attributed to W.S. Gilbert: "There was an old man of St. Bees,/Who was stung in the arm by a wasp; /When they asked, "Does it hurt?" /He replied, "No, it doesn't, /But I thought all the while 't was a Hornet."

I'm nowhere near my self-imposed ration of pages for today. But the next pages of the DIB comprehend the Becketts and the Behans ... and deserve a new page on a new day.

Marginal men, vintners, brewers and the best tax exile ever

2010-01-15T01:42:00.000-08:00

In the early 1990s, the historian R.F. (Roy) Foster published a bravura essay, Marginal Men and Micks on the Make: The Uses of Irish Exile c. 1840-1922. The "marginal men" were Englishmen (and women) who found in Ireland "dreams or ideas or insecurities too uncomfortable for home", whle the "Micks on the make" were Irish who succeeded in England. Foster was on to something: there's a class of English person who finds in Ireland an opportunity to invent (or reinvent) him or herself. Politicians have done it, from Lord Randolph Churchill to Enoch Powell, both English parliamentarians who wrapped themselves in the Orange flag (it was Churchill who coined the phrase "Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right"). More benign examples can happily be found: Micheál Mac Liammóir abandoned his original persona, Alfred Willmore, an English child actor, and transformed himself into one of the foremost Irish (and Irish speaking) actors of his era, with an international reputation. And then there was Arnold Bax, the composer. He was from suburban London with no obvious Irish connections. But in 1902, when he was 19, he read Yeats' The Wanderings of Oisin and, as he was to put it in his memoirs, "the Celt within me stood revealed." He moved to Dublin in 1911, where his then-wife gave birth to two children, Dermot and Maeve. He knew Yeats, George Russell and Padraic Colum, and embraced the nationalist cause. Although his romantic life took him back to England after a few years, he remained close to Ireland; he was on a trip to Cork when he died in 1953, and is buriend there. Among his Irish-inflected works is Moy Mell (from Maegh Meall, or a delightful plain), a lovely tone poem for two pianos. In 1992, Ken Russell made a television movie called The Secret Life of Arnold Bax, in which he himself played the composer; I recall the film, and Russell's performance, as endearing and charming.

Foster's delineation of maverick men gets a bit wobbly as the essay proceeds and the blow-ins get a little less English and a little more Irish. Thus, Robert Barton, a leading figure of the war of independence and born in Co. Wicklow, starts to get slipped in as an Anglo maverick on the apparent grounds that he went to public school in England followed by university at Oxford. Well, so did I, and I don't think the face fits. Ironically, Foster, whose historical revisionism has, quite properly, insisted on extending Irish identity beyond narrow nationalistic confines, falls into his own trap, and starts classifying as English mavericks those whose identification with Ireland flows naturally from their own lives, family and experience without conforming to a certain narrowly-constructed concept of nationality. Barton underwent a political transformation - his Irish family was strongly unionist and he switched sides - but his Irishness, in the sense of being wedded to people, place and culture, does not appear to have been adversely influenced by his education. I admit to being a bit sensitive about this: twice in my adult life, I've dealt with other Irish questioning whether my surname - Grantham - was "really" Irish. As I've previously explained, it is and it isn't, but the question is essentially irrelevant. Consider the leaders of Irish independence: Pearce (English father), Connolly (born in Scotland), De Valera (Spanish), Lemass (Huguenot) and so on: we're as mongrel as the next race and thus have to have a big tent, racially speaking. Foster is on to something: some people, like Bax or Mac Liammóir, fasten on to the place without any previously striking connection (although the outcomes of their fantasies seem to me to be wholly positive). But there are attenuated or semi-attenuated connections to the country that give rise to suspicion even from those, like Foster, who would tend otherwise to be big tent Irish. In this, I think the revisonists' suspicion of nationalism overpowers their sense of inclusion. Thus, Barton's embrace of revolutionary politics, combined with his time in England, pushes him into the "marginal man" category. The same goes for his first cousin, Erskine Childers (author of The Riddle of the Sands) whose pre-revolutionary Irish connection consisted of beign Barton's first cousin and, as the DIB says, their growing up "together almost as brothers." Childers took the hardline anti-treaty position that fomented the terrible civil war of 1922-23 - not a position I agree with. But his execution by the Free State government on trumped up charges - pour encourager les autres - was one of the low points in the emergence of modern Ireland. I don't think he deserves Foster's condescension.

Many of the Bartons were in the wine trade, associated with the still-active Barton & Guestier house in Bordeaux. They were among the so-called "wine geese", a play on "wild geese", meaning the Irish who exiled themselves to continental Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. In addition to the Bartons, the wine geese included such families as Lynch (of Lynch-Bages), Kirwan, Phelan (of Phélan Ségur) became leaders of the trade in Bordeaux, while the Hennessy family established itself next door in Cognac. It's an odd ripple in cultural history: why did the Irish get claret while the English got sherry and port?

I realize I'm not the first person to be drawn to the name Narcissus Batt - Paul Muldoon has a children's poem that uses it. The DIB describes a completely unremarkable Belfast banker of the late 18th and early 19th century who rejoiced in this florid praenomen, but doesn't explain why. His brothers were named Samuel, Thomas, William and Robert. Who was smoking what the day Narcissus was born? (I swear I was at national school in Killiney with a boy named Bambi McKay: I've been unable to trace him, and sometimes wonder if he de-exoticized his name, the way Zowie Bowie became Duncan Jones.)

The Bartons were to claret what the Beamishes were to beer. Beamish stout has been brewed in Cork since 1792, although I confess to preferring its formerly crosstown rival Murphy's. (Formerly because, as a result of corporate consolidation, it's now manufactured at Murphy's brewery, which is owned by Heineken.) As was customary for such grandees, their commercial activities were a springboard to politics and other public service. For some reason, the family had Scandinavian connections: one North Ludlow Beamish, married to the daughter of a Swedish minister, devoted his retirement to the study of Nordic antiquities; another, Richard Henrik, studied agriculture in Denmark and wrote a treatise entitled An Improved Method of Feeding Milch Cows based on his researches as well as one on the "content of butter."

The Chester Beatty Library in Dublin Castle is one of the joys of the city, an amazing repository of East Asian, Islamic and European manuscripts, pictures and objects, assembled by one of the great collectors of the 20th century. The collection arrived in Dublin in 1950 when Beatty, an American with Irish roots and a mining fortune, baled from the agressive tax regime in the UK to find a sympathetic ear from an Irish government eager to loot the patrimony of the old enemy. My mother, a great lover of Asian art, was a regular visitor to the old library in Shrewsbury Road. Beatty gave his immense collections to the Irish people (as well as the library, there are holdings in the National Gallery and the military museum at the Curragh). We were grateful, and still are. He was the first person born outside Ireland to receive a state funeral and the only private citizen to do so. God bless such marginal men.

More Barrys: Kevin, Tom, Maggie, Philip and Spranger

2010-01-13T22:57:00.000-08:00

Kevin Barry. A tricky one. First, some background. The 1916 Easter Rising was unsuccessful, destructive and very unpopular in Ireland. But the British managed to turn victory into defeat through the vengefulness of their response to it. The leaders of the revolt believed that they would fail, but that through their "blood sacrifice" they would galvanize Ireland and start a process leading to independence. Thanks to the British, they turned out to be right: the executions of the rising's leaders disgusted public opinion and pushed it away from Home Rule - a form of limited self-government within the British system - towards full-blown separatism, at least in some quarters. By 1919, the main separatist political party, Sinn Féin, had supplanted the establishment Irish party and swept elections for the British parliament. Instead of sitting in London, the SF MPs opened their own assembly in Dublin and declared themselves the democratically-elected government of an independent Ireland. War conditions evolved: an asymmetrical war between relatively small numbers of Irish guerrillas taking opportunistic hit-and-run actions and the militarily- and numerically-superior British. The British specially enlisted new hard men - including the notorious Black & Tans - to suppress it. Sinn Féin's military wing, the Irish Republican Army, attacked soldiers of course, but also unarmed policemen and informants and at times attempted small-scale "ethnic cleansing". It was an ugly, nasty little war that took the initiative away from the British while never threatening to remove them from the country.

Kevin Barry was 18 in 1920, a decent lad who had attended Belvedere College, a middle-class Jesuit school in Dublin and gone on to University College Dublin as a medical student. He had been involved in the republican movement since school and was in an active service unit of the IRA, one of which functions was to take arms away from British soldiers. One such attempt against a detachment picking up bread in Dublin, went horribly wrong. Most of the British soldiers had been disarmed. Then, a gun went off, possibly fired by one of the remaining British. The IRA men overreacted and started firing at the soldiers. Barry attempted to shoot but his gun jammed. One British soldier was killed and two others wounded fatally. The three were around the same age as Barry. Most of the IRA party escaped, but Barry, who had been separated from the others, was captured and tried for murder as a civilian. He was roughed up during interrogation - threatened with a bayonet and his arm twisted behind his back - but did not divulge information.

The IRA, for understandable reasons, viewed themselves as soldiers who were entitled to be treated as prisoners of war upon capture (although they didn't wear uniforms, as required by the international conventions of warfare). The British were determined to treat them as common criminals and accordingly subjected them to criminal penalties. Since Barry had been part of a criminal enterprise, he was complicit in the deaths of the soldiers even though he had not fired any of the fatal shots. Instrumentality, of course, there was another agenda. The British appear to have been concerned about the effect on army morale if Barry were not executed. He was not tried in a criminal court, but by army court-martial. On November 1, 1920, three months short of Kevin Barry's 19th birthday, he was executed by hanging.

In my early childhood, "rebel" songs like Kevin Barry and The Boys of Kilmichael (of which more below) were part of the background noise of the culture, a gesture towards the past, embraced but not fully assimilated in all their implications. (In similar vein, it's unlikely that all French citizens singing La Marseillaise actually desire that their gutters be inundated with the impure blood of their enemies, although you never know.) By the late 1960s, the "troubles" had broken out again and for many of us the atavistic link had been broken. I recall a family friend giving me an LP of rebel songs when I was about 12 or 13: she was a gentle, American professor of Irish literature who was over visiting and hadn't really registered how the times had changed. I was embarrassed by the present and kept it tucked away out of sight.

There are Irish historians - good ones - who argue that the Easter Rising was a terrible mistake. In their view, Ireland would have received dominion Home Rule - with partition - at the end of the First World War, and in time, full, functioning independence would have emerged as it did for the other British dominions Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The Rising, they claim, ennobled the physical force tradition because of its ultimate success: a war was fought, the British left, self-government arrived and within a generation the very nominal constitutional connection to Britain was severed with the proclamation of a republic in 1949. The same logic, they say, was applied by Irish nationalism to the Northern Ireland situation from the late 1960s on, and the result was nearly 40 years of conflict, 3,000 dead and a constitutional settlement under which nationalists essentially abandoned their key goal: the reunification of the country. I can see the logic of this argument, but am not completely persuaded by the schematic neatness of this revisionism. Atavism cuts all ways, and it wasn't just the nationalists who were inflamed by their own mythology. And ultimately, we have to live with the horrid oppositions and accommodations of conflict and politics: many feel an Animal Farm-like revulsion at contemplating the leaders of extreme unionism and nationalism in coalition together in Belfast, driving around the place in their ministerial cars, cutting ribbons. But it's better than what went before.

In the end, I still can't really stomach the rebel songs, unless they relate to an earlier, still mythic period; songs like Arthur McBride and the Sergeant (play the link - it's the magnificent Paul Brady version), which is about a political, if physical confrontation that doesn't leave anybody dead. Am I just a faintheart, enjoying my present liberties but denigrating the sacrifices of others that made it possible? Maybe. A bit. But not entirely. In the end, I think I believe that we may sometimes have to fight wars, but would be better off not singing about them afterwards.

Then there's Tom Barry (no relation to Kevin, or at least not a close one). He's the one they're singing about in The Boys of Kilmichael. He was a Kerryman, from Kilorglin, and a really talented guerrilla leader during the war of independence. He was trained by the British army - he played this down later - and saw service all over the place: Mesopotamia, "Asiatic Russia", Egypt, Italy and France. He was mentioned in dispatches, a commendation usually for gallantry which would have allowed him to wear an oakleaf on his campaign ribbon, were he ever to have worn his medals. Back in Ireland, the IRA, after some hesitation, allowed him to join and put him in charge of a flying column to carry out ambushes. On November 28, 1920, three weeks after Kevin Barry's execution, Tom Barry's column ambushed a British patrol in Co. Cork, killing 18. Four months later in Crossbarry, on March 19, 1921, Barry's column, now numbering more than 100, broke out of an encirclement attempted by a British force 12 times greater in size and escaped largely intact. It was a highly impressive tactical victory and the largest engagement of the war of independence. He was combative in other ways, too: he would later claim that "all Kerry did during the war was to shoot one decent police inspector at Listowel races".

A Barry who sang songs rather than have them written about her. In the old days, Maggie Barry was known as "queen of the tinkers", a title that today would be unacceptable and which the DIB tactfully (but perhaps mistakenly) omits. (Ireland's landless itinerant population, now "travellers", were called "tinkers" because many of them mended pots and pans. It became pejorative.) Barry was from a musical family and supported herself from the age of 16 by singing, accompanying herself on the banjo. As the DIB points out, she played everywhere, busking: "at markets, fairs, football matches, race meetings ... outside small-town shops and cinemas ... at wakes, weddings and all-night house parties." To satisfy requests, she assembled a huge repertoire of songs. By her late 30s, she had been noticed, and was recorded by, among others, the American folklorist Alan Lomax, who had recorded Leadbelly, Muddy Waters and others. She formed a long partnership with the Sligo fiddler Michael Gorman. This recording, of My Lagan Love, is sublime.

Nearly all the Barrys in the DIB - 37 pages of them - come from or are associated with Cork. The entry for Philip Barry (d. 1177) explains. The de Berris came from Wales and Philip was among the first Norman invaders in 1169. He failed to obtain enough of the spoils from storming Wexford, so headed over to Cork, where he succeeded in grabbing large estates and established a dynasty. One non-Corkonian I liked was Spranger Barry, a leading actor in Dublin and London (pictured here playing Romeo to his lover Maria Isabella Nossiter's Juliet). He was regarded as a serious rival to the great David Garrick and sufficiently successful to be buried in Westminster Abbey in London.

Athlètes maudits, hubristic painters and a damn fine cup of tea

2010-01-12T10:39:00.000-08:00

There's something of the poète maudit about some Irish athletes. George Best, of course, one of the most talented football players of any generation, died aged 59 of multiple organ failure brought on by alcoholism. His famous quote "I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered" is very funny, until you consider the price he paid. (Best isn't in the DIB yet, since he died in 2005, three years after the cutoff date for the print edition. He will be, I'm sure.) John Joe Barry, the "Ballincurry Hare", had more than a touch of the Best about him, alas. A middle distance runner of great ability - he held the world record at a mile and a half, and thrashed a world class field in a three mile race in Dublin - he blew his chances in the 1948 Olympics, in part at least because he hadn't trained hard enough, failed to make the 1952 team and retired before the 1956 Olympics, in which his countryman Ron Delaney won the 1500 metres gold. Drink, drugs and three unsuccessful marriages brought him down, alas. But he was an inspiration for those who followed him and avoided his mistakes - Delaney, Eamonn Coghlan and Sonia O'Sullivan among them. (Yesterday, I failed to mention another great athlete, Edward Barrett, who won a gold medal for tug-of-war and a bronze for wresting at the 1908 Olympics and also had an all-Ireland senior hurling medal.)

James Barry (not obviously related to John Joe but possibly distant kin - it's a Norman surname) also had self-destructive gifts. He engaged in ferocious disputes with his opponents - "real and imaginary" as the DIB puts it - which led to his being kicked out of the Royal Academy in Britain, "withdrawal from society" and descent into "increasing depths of introspection and alienation". Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was drawn to portrayals of victims, such as the pictured Philoctetes on the Island of Lemnos, which hangs in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna. Philoctetes, alone, abandoned by his former comrades-in-arms and afflicted with a suppurating wound, suggests the artist's powerful identification with his theme. At the same time, the wounded subject has also been correlated with the condition of Ireland, and there's evidence that Barry saw things that way, as well. He combined mythology and actuality in so complex a way that it's challenging to peel away all the layers.

In his Portraits of Barry and Burke in the Characters of Ulysses and his Companion fleeing from the Cave of Polyphemus, which hangs in the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, Barry portrays himself as the wily Odysseus - ironically the one who abandoned Philoctetes on Lemnos, making for a strange double-identificaiton on Barry's part - leaving the cave of the cyclops Polyphemus with his companion and friend Edmund Burke warning him against the hubris that in the original story brings down Poseidon's anger on Ulysses/Odysseus' head. It's a fascinating glimpse of someone who, like Ulysses, had prodigious talent but knew he couldn't constrain himself from exercising it without compromise. The DIB entry, a model of fact, background and appraisal, is by the art historian Peter Murray, who irrelevantly, also compiled a catalogue of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, which until recently was part of the same foundation as my old school.

Another James Barry, also from Cork, was a bird of a different feather. Barry's real name was probably Margaret, and she managed to pass as a man from at least the age of 17 until her death at 73 (she's on the left of the photo). Remarkably, she spent these years first as a medical student, then as an army and colonial doctor, in which role she pioneered hygeine standards, vaccination, limitations on the sale of prescription drugs, enlightened treatment of lepers, the caesarean section and much more. Like her painter namesake she partook in furious rows, including with Florence Nightingale, and fought at least one duel. One or two people may have known her secret, including her patron Lord Charles Somerset, who may have fathered her child and who was ironically accused of homosexuality because of the relationship. Her "true" gender was only revealed after her death in 1865, the same year as the "official" first woman in Britain to receive a medical degree, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, graduated.

One more Barry. We islanders in America have one thing on which we're all agreed: it's really hard to get a good cup of tea here. The water is rarely boiled and the raw material is generally weak and insipid. The robust, heroic Irish tea is strong, masculine and contemptuous of the effete versions offered on this side of the Atlantic. Accordingly, we seek out obscure ethnic stores for the real thing, of which to me the locus classicus is that made by the great family firm Barry's of Cork. The founder of the firm, James J Barry, doesn't rate a DIB entry - for shame! - but his eldest son, Tony, does. Tony was said to be "one of the foremost tea tasters in these islands" and steered Barry's to the Empire Cup in 1934 (when we were still nominally part of the Empire). He really rates his entry because of his distinguished political career, which is all very well, but his true fame surely lies in bringing a great cup of tea to the breakfast tables or the world, including mine, daily.

Big House grandees, gentlemen adventurers and a pickpocket

2010-01-11T23:53:00.000-08:00

I don't think I've ever met - or even heard of - a Barnewall. But there are 9 of them in the DIB, and following a bit of investigation, I've established, unsurprisingly, that they're all related. (Since the DIB only includes people felt to be significant, generations are skipped and genealogical dots not always connected - fair enough.) Different branches were endowed with a viscountship, barony and baronetcy (apparently, the baronetcy is still in existence). They were mostly called Patrick, Christopher and Nicholas, which also complicates identification. I found an Australian-based Patrick Barnewell on Facebook, but once you've seen his photo you'll understand why I decided not to check his bona fides. They're said to be Norman - Barneville, Berneville, Berneval and Barneval seem to be variants. They were once really big wheels, owned a lot of land in Meath, held major positions, were involved in big wars, prominent in parliament, and so on. And now they're gone: I checked the Irish phone book, and there are no Barnewalls listed today (suppose they could be ex-directory, but ...). There' s also a Harry Barniville in the DIB, a distinguished surgeon who became a senator in modern Ireland, and presumably distantly related to the others. I mentioned previously the issue of those who stayed and those who left after independence: for whatever reason - and it appears some of their lines died out - the Barnewalls moved on.

Maybe I'm unfair. Another "Big House" grandee who took off for Britain at independence had every reason to do so. Sir Charles Barrington is principally celebrated for having codified rugby in Ireland while a student at Trinity College Dublin. He lived a life not untypical of his class in late 19th and early 20th century Ireland - dabbled in local politics, provided administrative service - justice of the peace, high sheriff and so on - patronized the hospital founded by his grandfather, led the freemasons, and the like. In 1921, his daughter Winefred was shot dead by the IRA: she was travelling with the intended victim, a Black and Tans major named Henry Biggs; he survived the attack. The Barringtons had also been in Ireland a long time. The first baronet, Joseph, was born in Limerick in 1764. After the death of Winefred, Charles left for England and did not return. Even as he departed, he offered his home to the new Irish state as a residence for the governor-general: the generous offer was declined on cost grounds, and the house eventually became the site of a Benedictine community, Glenstal Abbey. The New York Times report of Winefred's death - is a compendium of the appalling bloodshed that took place at the time, just one killing among many. But it's still very poignant, a story of a family lost to us.

Alongside the sad stories today are plenty of remarkable characters. Richard Barrett was a campaigning journalist who managed to alienate pretty well everyone: the nationalist paper he edited, The Pilot was dubbed "a torpid viper which only awoke to inflict a wound". The author of that slur - a fellow-nationalist - was later denounced by him to the British authorities against whom Barrett had campaigned. We had John Asgill, the "eccentric writer" a few days ago. Today we have Jacky Barrett, the "eccentric scholar". A fellow of Trinity College Dublin and distinguished Hebrew scholar, it was said that he was so unworldly that he could not identify a sheep. Filthy and cheap, he had managed to save £80,000 - a colossal sum - by the time of his death in 1821. He left the money to "the hungry" and "the naked".

Then there was Charles Barrington - the epitome of the old-style gentleman adventurer. He was the first recorded climber to reach the summit of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps, in 1858 (pictured - it's been hard to find portraits today). He decided to do it as a lark, and took the route that the local experts expressly advised against. He was nearly caught in an avalanche on the way down, and went straight home to Ireland since he had run out of money. Later he trained the winning horse in the first Irish Grand National. Quite a man.

George Barrington - at last, a picture, albeit a bad one - was a celebrated 18th century pickpocket. He apparently started to provided funds for his otherwise impoverished travelling theatre company. He was finally caught stealing from the pictured Russian Count Orlov, but managed to talk his way out of a prosecution. When finally jailed for his crimes, he managed to obtain a pardon by attempting suicide and winning the sympathy of a "distinguished" visitor. He ended up, like so many, in New South Wales, where he obtained another partner by informing on his fellow prisoners and got a job as superintendant of convicts. (Interesting how many DIB subjects ended up in Australia on one or other side of the locked door - Barrington was unusual in finding himself on both sides.) He was ultimately declared insane.

We previously encountered Jonah Barrington in his comments on the bizarre Beauchamp Bagenal. He's famous for his Historic Memoirs of Ireland, but infamous for nearly everything else. As a judge - a political appointee with little obvious aptitude for the job - he misappropriated court fees. He pawned the family silver, the persuaded the pawnbroker to bring it over for a dinner party, got him drunk and absconded with it. He fled his creditors but was allowed, through his political connections, to keep his paid judgeship in Ireland. Eventually, in his 70s, he was removed from the bench by parliamentary action, apparently the only judge to have been so dismissed.

One more 18th century politician: Isaac Barré (worth including for the portrait alone), a huguenot who went into politics after a distinguished military career. It was an amazing era for Irish political oratory: Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan were so effective that at times they actually changed the minds of parliamentarians over major issues. Barré wasn't in their league but he was good enough to impress Hazlitt and Jeremy Bentham.

A family of Balls, the father of mass-entertainment and the greatest of all the Barnacles

2010-01-10T22:49:00.000-08:00

Mary Ball, yesterday's naturalist of the day, was part of a massive family business. Her brother, Robert, gave 7,000 specimens to the Dublin University Museum, whose zoological and ethnological collections he also organized. He also helped develop the Dublin Zoo. His eldest son, also Robert, was astronomer royal of Ireland and later director of Cambridge University's observatory (he's the one in the picture). The next son, Valentine, participated in the Indian geological survey before becoming director of the Institutions of Science and Art, an umbrellas for what are now the National Museum, National Library and botanical gardens. The third son, Charles, was an eminent surgeon who pioneered antiseptic operations and the rectal valves known as "Ball's valves". That makes five Ball family members with DIB entries - a sixth, Ann (or Anne), sister of Mary and Robert senior, is twice mentioned as herself being a noted naturalist. Also, a grandson of Robert junior, Henry Barcroft, who held a chair of physiology at Queen's University, Belfast. A remarkable family.

One of the books I enjoyed reading at school was Balzac's Le Père Goriot. It is set in Paris in 1819 and opens in a boarding-house where some residents have a running joke of coining words with the suffix "-orama". Panoramas - large curved paintings viewed inside specially-constructed buildings - were popular entertainment at the time, hence the joke. The original panorama was invented by an Irishman, Robert Barker, who displayed landscape pictures inside a circular building, specially lit to create an illusion of reality. He was credited with using "a false perspective, a proper point of view, and unlimiting the bounds of the art of painting." Once his patent expired, the panorama became an international phenomenon. The DIB, reasonably, credits Barker with creating "an extremely popular form of mass entertainment which is the ancestor of many types of entertainment still current 200 years later," citing photography, cinema, IMAX and virtual reality games.

My birthday is June 16, or Bloomsday, the date on which James Joyce's Ulysses takes place and also when he met his wife Nora Barnacle. (I sometimes think Leopold Bloom is my closest living relative; apart from the June 16 thing, we both had Hungarian Jewish fathers and Irish catholic mothers. On the other hand, my father is alive and well, having never committed suicide in a hotel in Ennis.) Thanks to Brenda Maddox, we knew a lot already about Nora. She was an extraordinary companion to a very difficult though brilliant man. She had considerable character: she once told Joyce that if he didn't curb his drinking, she'd have their children baptized. Another story I like (although not in the DIB): Snobs considered her ill-educated and an unworthy consort for the great man. One such, during an interview, sought to trap her by asking who was her favorite writer. She replied, "when you've been married to the greatest writer in the world, you don't have much time for the little fellows." (I quote from memory.) I love that.

Wanderings and resentments, kneelings and knockings, coercion and conciliation

2010-01-09T23:42:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, we met Alfred Aylward, the Fenian whose global military career included a spell fighting with Garibaldi during his 1860 Sicilian campaign. Today, we have Thomas O'Malley Baines, a Fenian who fought against Garibaldi and his Sardinian allies in defense of the papal states. He believed that the upsurge of nationalism in Europe at this time had been orchestrated by the old Fenian enemy, the British (whose navy did, admittedly, help Garibaldi across the Straits of Messina after he conquered Sicily). Back in Ireland and Britain, he was arrested, imprisoned and transported to Australia, whence he departed for San Francisco, where he was active in working class and Fenian movements. Aylward had a taste for insurgency, Baines for nativism. These two elements have lived side by side in the Irish "physical force" tradition to this day, and are not easily reconciled. The DIB generally avoids editorializing, but the author of Baines' entry, Patrick Maume, is right to emphasize that "his career reflects the worldwide wanderings and resentments of many post-famine emigrants, the ambivalent relationship between nineteenth-century Irish nationalism and catholicism, and the fact that oppression does not automatically produce sympathy for other marginalized groups."

As a student, I read John Bale's King Johan (King John), considered to be important as the first English history play, albeit with an improbable premise: that Bad King John was a proto-protestant and hero of the struggle against the Whore of Babylon. Bale, a Carmelite friar turned married protestant priest had all of the classic zeal of the convert, which he exercised energetically when translated by King Edward VI to the see of Ossory, based at Kilkenny. The DIB doesn't mention King Johan (which it should) but it does touch on his autobiographical The vocacyon of Iohan Bale to the bishoprick of Ossorie in Irelande his persecucions in ye same, &; finall delyueraunce (1553), which is unsparing of the local religious scene when he reached Kilkenny:

In beholding the face and order of that city, I saw many abominable idolatries maintained by the priests for their worldly interests. The communion of the supper of the Lord was there altogether used like a popish mass with the old apish toys of antichrist, in bowings and beckonings, kneelings and knockings ...

Unsurprisingly, Bale didn't have a great time in Ireland, although it provoked much lively writing of this sort. When the news came that Edward VI has died, to be replaced by the Catholic Queen Mary, Bale describes how the priests of Kilkenny went on a pub crawl round the town, drinking "Rob Davie and Aqua Vitae" (I don't know what Rob Davie is) and toasting Bale's imminent departure.

My mother loved opera and thanks to her I love it too. At home, we had an edition of Kobbé's Complete Opera Book edited by the impresario the Earl of Harewood, apparently a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II. It really annoyed me that the section on 19th-century "English" opera included the Dubliner Michael William Balfe and the Wexford man William Vincent Wallace. (We'll give them Arthur "Gilbert and" Sullivan, since he was only the son of an Irishman. Julius Benedict, composer of the hit opera Lily of Killarney, based on Dion Boucicault's play The Colleen Bawn, was from Stuttgart but also co-opted by Kobbé/Harewood into the "English" section.) Balfe was a huge figure in his day, a very successful violinist and singer who went on to compose a string of big operas. The biggest of them all was The Bohemian Girl, from which the came the hit I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls. He also set the Tennyson lines Come Into the Garden, Maud for voice and piano - another key Victorian musical work. I've been nitpicking about odd omissions in DIB lives, but it's really inexplicable that the long Balfe life mentions neither song, although The Bohemian Girl is given its due.

Another heavyweight. Arthur James Balfour, the chief secretary of Ireland from 1887-91, a major step in his political ascension to the prime ministership. Balfour's Conservatives had taken over after Gladstone's liberals faltered and attempted a new Irish policy that still has considerable resonance. Balfour proposed a combination of "coercion" - cracking down hard on extra-parliamentary agitation, particularly over land issues - and "conciliation" - addressing the core concerns of Irish dissatisfaction - including land (again) and rural poverty. In Irish lore, he became "Bloody Balfour", after the deaths of three demonstrators at the hands of the police at Mitchelstown, Co. Cork in 1887. Balfour like other imperialists, believed that even limited home rule for Ireland would in time evolve into full separation from Britain, and that this would be but the first step in the disintegration of the British empire. In this, of course, he was quite correct. The "conciliation" aspect of the policy sought, by removing the fundamental grievances of the mass of Irish people, to neutralize devolutionary aspirations. The coercion/conciliation approach had considerable resonance a century later, during the more recent Troubles in Northern Ireland, where both approaches were attempted, often, as with Balfour, in tandem. Received wisdom, in Britain particularly, argues that the "peace process" triumphed in Ireland because "coercion" - particularly the penetration of the IRA by the British security services - convinced nationalism that a "military solution" could not be achieved, while "conciliation" drew the two communities into a shared political process that they could both embrace while defusing nationalism. The judgment of history on Balfour is accordingly, in a sense, a reflection of views on more recent events. The DIB's long Balfour entry has been written by the executive editor, James Quinn, which suggests that it had some importance for the enterprise. Quinn judges that the "coercion" part of Balfour's policy was quite effective in reducing agitation, which the "conciliation" strand was highly successful in some respects, less so in others. He concludes that "Balfour's record establishes him as one of the most effective chief secretaries during the union" It's certainly true that Ireland was not the graveyard of his career, as it was for so many politicians sent from London before and since. And in making his case, there's nothing aberrational about Quinn's position: nearly 40 years ago, the great F.S.L. Lyons described "Balfour's achievement" as "enough to rank him among the most successful Chief Secretaries", albeit not a "record of unmixed success". Interestingly, Balfour is not much discussed by those who might be exepected to echo this view - by R. F. Foster (Lyons' intellectual heir in some sense) in his Modern Ireland 1600-1972, or Paul Bew (these days identified with unionism) in Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006, although Bew agrees that coercion was effective. The tide of opinion has not always run in this direction. In 1940, the Irish historian Nicholas Mansergh - who favored Ireland's remaining a self-governing dominion within the Commonwealth - described Balfour's policy as one of "miscalculation" and "failure". The major history of the conciliation/coercion period, by L. P. Curtis, Jr., points out that Balfour, in common with his fellow-Tories, completely failed to understand - or even acknowledge - the existence of genuine Irish nationalism that shaped the political process (a point echoed by Quinn in his entry). And yet another major Irish historian, J.J. Lee (in The Modernisation of Irish Society 1848-1948) is contemptuous of Balfour's coercion policy and his claim that he would introduce "repression as stern as Cromwell's." For Lee, coercion amounted to "little more than William O'Brien losing his pants in jail and three people losing their lives in Mitchelstown ... a derisory haul which must have left Cromwell turning in his desecrated grave." My point is not that the DIB entry is wrong; it's that some of the judgments, while of the mainstream, may nonetheless be contestable. You want an entry to take a view, not to be blandly factual; at the same time, you also want the richness of the historical debate to be reflected. The Balfour entry's very good, in fact: I'm saying this now in part to put down a marker for future discussion.

A couple of smaller entries: Edward Ball, the murderer, is given a nice piece. (He killed his rich mother when she refused to give him £60 to go on holiday.) It's an interesting story, but if there hadn't been a good book written about him (by the historian Richard Cobb) it hardly seems likely that he'd rate a place in the DIB. And my fondness of naturalists continues to grow: Mary Ball, a Cork woman, was the first to describe "stridulation" (making a sound by rubbing together legs or wings) in corixidae (water bugs); she had a mollusc and a seaweed named after her. An admirable life.

Adventurers, picaresque heroes and a great painter

2010-01-09T02:27:00.000-08:00

The Irish turn up in a lot of places. The circumstances of Irish life from the mid-sixteenth century on, when the British consolidated their rule of the island, sent many off to continental Europe for education, soldiery or other adventure. The emergence of the British empire additionally created a paradoxical situation for the Irish: on the one hand, they were the subjects of empire, conquered, colonized and displaced; on the other, they were the agents of empire, enlisting in the imperial army or civil service, administering to other colonized peoples the same law that had been imposed on them. Subject or agent, they ended up all over the world.

William Aylmer, for instance. He started out, conventionally, in in 1794 as an officer of the Kildare militia, a servant of the British crown. Resigning his commission, he enlisted in the United Irishmen, and served as a colonel in the 1798 rising against British rule, for which he was banished following the defeat of the rebels. He then engaged in the Austrian army as a cavalry officer, fighting against Napoleon's armies. After a few years back in Ireland, he raised and commanded an Irish legion to fight in Simon Bolivar's rebellion agains the Spanish; he was severely wounded in 1820 in Venezuela, from which he was shipped to Jamaica, where he died.

Alfred Aylward, a 19th-century Wexford man, similarly slaked his revolutionary longings across the globe. Somehow, at the age of 17, having graduated from a Jesuit school in Co. Offaly, he found himself in Sicily, fighting alongside Garibaldi. He then went to America, where he spent four years as a suregon in the Union army during the civil war (his medical knowledge was apparently acquired in Guy's Hospital in London - when he was a patient). Upon his return to Ireland, he was jailed for suspected Fenianism, and upon his release went to South Africa, where he led an unsuccessful revolt of diamond diggers against the colonial administration. Later, he led the Lynchburg Volunteer Corp, a Boer-sponsored mercenary army that fought against the Marota king Sekhukhune. During the first Boer War, he fought for the Boers in Transvaal. Then he went to Canada, where he took part in Louis Riel's North-West Rebellion of Métis - descendants of marriages between indigenous and Europeans - against the domnion government. He died in an accident in New Hampshire a few years later. The facts alone are exhausting.

Pausing to mark the end of the As after 208 pages - Alexander Ayton, a Scottish photographer active in Derry in the late 19th century brings up the rear - we plunge back into the picaresque. Beauchamp Bagenal (I'm not making this up) left Cambridge without taking a degree and embarked on the 18th-century grand tour in grand style according to his near-contemporary Jonah Barrington:

He ... fought a prince, jilted a princess, intoxicated the doge of Venice, carried off a duchess from Madrid, scaled the walls of a convent in Italy, narrowly escaped the Inquisitiion at Lisobon, concluded his exploits by a celebrated fencing match at Paris; and returned to Ireland with a sovereign contempt for all continental men and manners and an inveterate antipathy to all despotic kings and arbitrary governments.

He was later MP for Enniscorthy; was there something about the place that attracted the crazies?

You could of course attempt a more conventional route. The flour mill builder John Bagwell from Clonmel shinned up the greasy pole of preferment, switching from presbyterianism to establishment anglicanism, suppressing rebels during the 1798 rising and backing the British line on the union of the two kingdoms in 1800 (bribery came into it). Having dutifully supported the government party as an MP, he sought a peerage, only to be turned down by the viceroy on the grounds that his "vulgar" nicknames - 'Old Bags' and 'Marshal Sacks' - denoted a "low man". Maybe the grand tour would have served him better.

For some reason, I always imagined that Waterford Crystal continued an ancient artisanal tradition, like Sheffield silverware. Wrong. There had been a crystal business in the city from the late 18th-century on, but it closed in 1851. The famous company we all know dates all the way back to 1947 when a Czech refugee, Charles Bačík, opened the original factory. (I question the DIB's use of accents here: his name was generally written "Bacik" in Ireland, and I imagine that in Czechoslovakia [as it then was] he was Karel - his father's name - not Charles. For consistency, he should be Karel Bačík or Charles Bacik, but not the mishmash used by the dictionary.) Now that the Waterford Wedgwood company is in receivership and the Waterford factory closed down, it's sad to reflect that an institution so thoroughly associated with Ireland throughout the world was so short-lived.

Finally, an artist. Francis Bacon, Dublin born of English parents, never seemed in his lifetime to be strongly associated with Ireland: he left when he was 16 and doesn't appear to have returned often, although there was an exhibition of his work at the Hugh Lane gallery in 1965. Yet his lover John Edwards, the principal beneficiary of Bacon's will, bequeathed the contents of the artist's studio to the Hugh Lane, while the Irish Museum of Modern Art has exhibited works attributed to Bacon from the collection of another friend, Barry Joule. (The DIB doesn't mention these, nor the controversy that has raged over their authenticity.) So, whether Irish by conviction, or just anointed by his next of kin, Bacon has joined the pantheon of Irish lives, and we're delighted to have him.

The eccentric writer, the Gothic builder and the debonair disaster

2010-01-08T00:37:00.000-08:00

It may be that the smuggest bumper sticker I ever saw was the one that read "In case of rapture, this car may be unmanned." (The link is to a website where you can buy it, along with "Bush/Cheney '04/Get Used To It!") It refers, of course, to the belief of certain Christians that at some time, certain believers will be physically translated into heaven - this is the Rapture - leaving the rest to deal with the Second Coming, Apocalypse and other sensational events. Well, it turns out that the Rapture has an Irish connection, sort of. John Asgill, both in 1659, was English, and a member of parliament. In 1700, he published An argument proving, that according to the covenant of eternal life ... man may be translated ... without passing through death, although ... Christ himself could not be thus translated till he has passed through death. Upon publication, he promptly moved to Ireland and engaged, unsuccessfully, in land speculation. In 1703, he became member of the Irish parliament for Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford. On his first day in office, a vote was passed denouncing his book as "wicked and blasphemous"; it was ordered to be burned by the official hangman, the standard way of registering official anathematization of disfavored works. Two weeks later he was expelled from parliament and permanently banned from seeking re-election. He was later expelled from the English parliament, but apparently only partly for his religious views: he was also bankrupt. His profession is given in the DIB as "eccentric writer and politician". Jonathan Swift described his work as "trumpery". But the Rapture industry he helped to start keeps going, unabated.

William Ashford was another Englishman to try his luck in Ireland, where he became a successful and prolific artist. He toured the country for his job inspecting armaments stored in forts and barracks, and started recording the landscape, as in this French-inflected rendition of a scene in Co. Kildare. He was first president of the Royal Hibernian Academy. George Coppinger Ashlin, an architect went further and shaped the landscape. Following Catholic emancipation in 1829, there was an explosion in church building across the country, a movement that attracted many artists and artisans from inside and outside Ireland (including the English stonemason father of the revolutionary Patrick Pearse). Ashlin was born in Cork, but educated in Belgium and England, where he as apprenticed to to the architect Edward Welby Pugin, son of the pioneer of the Gothic revival, Augustus W. N Pugin. Pugin and Ashlin were responsible for a large number of Gothic-style Catholic churches in Ireland, such as the beautiful St Colman's cathedral in Cobh, Co. Cork (pictured).

On a less heavenly scale, but arguably as significant, the English architect Charles Herbert Ashworth designed houses in the late 19th century for the Dublin Artisans' Dwelling Company, which attempted to provide low-cost housing for the working classes as a small corrective to the hideous slums - said to be among the worst in Europe - in which so many lived. The DIB says "he gave meticulous attention to the smallest details of design, construction and maintenance", which may be true given that so many are still standing, such as these in Holles Row in central Dublin, a stone's throw from Trinity College. The condition of the urban poor preoccupied many; remarkable that in a few pages of of each other in the DIB one finds Ashworth, the philanthropist Sarah Atkinson, who founded schools and hospitals around the city in the nineteenth century, and Ernest Aston, a journalist and town planner who championed improved housing for the working classes while denouncing "mediocrity and procrastination". There was - and still is - much of it about.

So often, the official British in Ireland seemed out-of-place to virtually anybody, regardless of community. Humphrey Atkins was the first of five Secretaries of State for Northern Ireland in the eleven years during which Margaret Thatcher was the British prime minister. He had an almost absurd colonial pedigree - his coffee planter father was killed by a rhinoceros in Kenya - and spent most of his life in politics following naval service and a brief stint as a linoleum executive. When he was parachuted into Ireland - the intended Secretary, Airey Neave, having been murdered by the Irish National Liberation Army shortly before Thatcher's election in 1979 - he knew next to nothing about it, and didn't pick up much on the job. I largely observed the Troubles from England in the 1970s and 1980s, and was constantly dismayed how London governments, Labour and Conservative, managed to send successions of nobodies to take on a titanically difficult job: Merlyn Rees, Roy Mason, Humphrey Atkins, Tom King, Peter Brooke ... all dreadful. Atkins was one of the worst. Maurice Hayes, one of the very few Catholic high-flyers in the Northern Ireland civil service, called him "totally invisible and lazy" and "a disaster." The IRA hunger strikes, during which 10 prisoners starved themselves to death, occurred on his watch. Atkins was a hardline supporter of the Thatcher government's hardline stance over the strikes, which alienated and radicalized even moderate Catholic opinion and caused damage that took years to repair. He returned to London to even higher office, in which he was equally ineffective: he assured parliament in April 1982 that Argentina had not invaded the Falkland Islands. Unfortunately, it had. His resignation was followed by the inevitable rewards of knighthood and enoblement, although the DIB suggests he "continued to display his phlegmatic and debonair mien." I think that means this.

Inaccurate antiquarians, doomed outlaws and bird psychologists ...

2010-01-07T01:27:00.000-08:00

The problem with ecclesiastical history is passages like this:

He was curate of Howth (1750-53), and of Kilgobbin and Taney, also in Dublin (1753-8), rector of Nathlash in the diocese of Cloyne (1749-58), and from 1758 domestic chaplain to Richard Pococke (qv), bishop of Ossory. In 1761 Pococke gave him the livings of Agharney and Attanagh in Ossory which Archdall held until 1785, when he became rector of Slane in the diocese of Meath; he was also prebendary of Cloneamary (1762-4) and or Mayne (1764-72), both in Ossory.

Well, I'm glad we got that straight. Mervyn Archdall, the Dublin divine with the fascinating c.v. just quoted, was in fact quite an interesting antiquary who said of his own work what should be the motto of us harmless drudges everywhere: "I have left that inaccurate which could not be exact, and that imperfect which cannot be completed." I feel his pain.

On the left foot, as it were, of canonical hardship was Richard Archdekin, the 17th century Jesuit who adopted the nom de plume MacGiolla Cuddy (yes, McGillicuddy, the joke name of so many characters in Hollywood screwball comedies). He knew English, Irish, Latin, Hebrew and Flemish, fled for his life before Cromwell's armies, taught scripture, Hebrew and moral theology in Flanders (Louvain and Antwerp) and published prolifically, in Irish and English. Seven years after his death, in 1700, "an error was discovered in his teaching on philosophical sin, and as a result his book" - a guide for missionary priests in Ireland - "was placed on the prohibited index." No Archdall-style diffidence for him: the "error" was "corrected" in subsequent editions, the "inaccurate" and the "imperfect" being ruthlessly eliminated in his absence.

There are worse ways of correcting error. In 1798, a Ballymena presbyterian, Tam Archer (called "Tom" in the DIB, but I think the Ulster-Scots version may be demotically correct), reacted to the failure of the United Irishmen's rebellion, in which catholics and presbyterians joined forces against the mostly anglican establishment, by engaging in a number of outrages against loyalists, including robbery, torture, rape, murder and arson before being executed in 1800. He's since been romanticised as a pioneer of Ulster protestant resistance and a "glamorous, doomed outlaw." Naturally, a plaque has been erected to his memory in Ballymena.

After that, it's a relief to turn to the apparently more peaceful Armstrongs. Arthur of that ilk, a Belfast artist who moved to Dublin, was late to be recognized - he was 48 when he became a full member of the RHA - but he was finally acknowledged as a significant landscape painter. Then there were Edmund John and George Francis Armstrong, brothers and forgotten poets: I found them both in my copy of the 4-volume revised edition of the Cabinet of Irish Literature (1902). Dated, fusty stuff in the main, but I found myself quite liking this verse from Edmund's Mary of Clorah:

She was all alone, sweet Mary
Tripping lie a winsome fairy
Through the woods at break of morn
Laughing to herself, and singing
Rustic snatches that went ringing
Through the glens like laughs of scorn.

(It's the "Rustic snatches ... laughs of scorn" bit I somewhat like, not the "winsome fairy" stuff.) As for George, I'm sorry the Cabinet chose to reproduce an extract from his verse tragedy Ugone - "favourably received by the chief organs of criticism" - than the more promising-sounding Songs of Wicklow. Some sub-Shakespearean lines from Ugone:

Poor fallen king of men, my own Ugone,
Thou on whose shoulder I hav elaid my head
How many a time, when tears o'erran by face,
And the child's heart withinin me ached for grief,
Touched by the world's indefinite agonies,
Liest thou thus? . . . O, blind my eyes, great Heaven!

Oh dear. Still, they don't appear to have raped, tortured or murdered anyone. I also warmed to Edward Allworthy Armstrong, author of Bird display: an introduction to the study of bird psychology, and Reg Armstrong, winner of 7 motorcycle World Grand Prix events, including the Isle of Man TT. He had the Honda motorcyle distribution franchise in Ireland in the 1960s: I remember my mother being taken for a spin in Killiney village on one of the first models; always demure, she asked if she could ride sidesaddle. Henry Armstrong, an otherwise apparently conventional Ulster unionist politician, who provided funds for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Europe (at a time when the government in the Republic behaved in a less than exemplary way in dealing with the issue).

Also, Robert Williams Armstrong, co-founder of the legendary Belleek pottery. Although a lot of the company's current output, while commercially successful, is somewhat clunky and kitsch, the old stuff can be quite beautiful. I have a small collection of the Tridacna line, much like those illustrated, which is very delicate and lovely. It always makes me think of home.

A slug, a slimeball and a slugger ...

2010-01-06T01:50:00.000-08:00

To begin with, I'm very happy today to have made the acquaintance of William Andrews, the naturalist who "discovered a new slug species, the Kerry slug". In fact, I think I met a Kerry slug in a bar in Dingle last summer, when even my highly limited Irish could understand the words "Oh he's from Dublin ... a jackeen." Andrews was also Brazilian consul in Dublin. Why? If the DIB doesn't tell us, I suppose we'll never know. Love of nature almost redeems the 5th Earl Annesley. (The DIB has him as Earl "of" Annesley, but I think that's a confusion with his relatives, the Earls of Anglesey, who were also Annesleys. British peerage trivia: my favorite.) You start reading his entry, and you wonder why he's there at all: "an indifferent, reluctant politician ... spoke infrequently, tersely and only on army matters ... only voiced Irish concerns were over law and order ..." Half a column later, we get to the point: he was a tremendous gardener and laid out magnificent grounds at his Co. Down estate (apparently he couldn't get by with the 24,000 acres he also owned in Cavan). He "owned one of the largest collections of exotic trees and shrubs in the UK." That's worth remembering.

The Annesley's peerages brought other complications. One of the complicators, Richard, "5th Baron Altham, 7th Viscount Valentia, 7th Baron Mountnorris and 6th Earl of Anglesea" - you couldn't make this stuff up - dealt with a bothersome (and apparently legitimate) nephew who laid claim to his titles by having him sold into indentured servitude - little better than slavery - in America. He later tried, unsuccessfully, to influence witnesses to find the nephew guilty of murder so that he could be hanged. Richard was excommunicated by the ecclesiastical courts for failing to pay alimony to his second wife: his defense had been that his marriage was invalid because it was bigamous, his first wife still being alive.

I also enjoyed the effortless ease with whihch Richard Sydney Anthony lived with paradox. Despite having been a Labour Party TD (member of the Dáil) and trade unionist, in 1939 he congratulated General Franco "on concluding his war against communism and anarchy in Spain" and told the Irish Trade Union Congress that "he would prefer fascism to a dictatorship of the proletariat." Having expelled him in 1932, the Labour Party readmitted him 16 years later. Had he changed his view of the dictatorship of the proles?

Lastly, two adjacent Andrews who are also among the astonishingly long list of distinguished past puplis of the Christian Brothers' School in Synge Street, central Dublin. Todd Andrews was a revolutionary who reaped the rewards of victory in post-independence Ireland, winning leading positions in such state-owned enterprises as Bord na Mona (the nationalized turf [peat] fuel business), CIÉ, the state transport authority and RTÉ, the public broadcaster. Although apparently "quite liberal by the standards of his time" and "anti-clerical" (something to do with his having been excommunicated), he was also, in the lapidary prose of the DIB, "a man of direct and even violently held opinion." Bord na Mona was said to have employed someone to prevent strikes Andrews almost started. He started one of independent Ireland's many political dynasties: I remember his son David knocking on our door in Killiney in 1965, canvassing for his first, successful, Dáil election. He was young and good-looking. My mother was very impressed. I think she voted for him.

The other Andrews is Eamonn, a fantastically successful broadcaster in Ireland and the UK from the 1940s to 1980s. A carpenter's son, one of six children, who became a champion boxer, he could present anything - sport, game shows, children's TV, business programs, the lot. His biggest hit was the British version of the U.S. hit This Is Your Life, which Andrews hosted on and off for more than 30 years. There's an interesting question as to why so many Irish broadcasters have been successful on British television when the country as a whole - at least until recently - has not been entirely hospitable to its large Irish population. It's been suggested that the Irish accent is less susceptible to being identified by class as its British counterparts. (It was an Irishman, after all, who pointed out that one Englishman couldn't open his mouth without making another one hate him.) Whereas the BBC used to get protest calls and letters if it used voices with regional British accents in "authority" roles, such as newsreaders. Andrews, among other Irish, escaped this nonsense. He was also allowed to appear in publicity shots with a glass in his hand.

Painters, printers and mythical kings

2010-01-04T23:44:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I discovered that I'd misstated the size of the DIB by 400% - it's 10 million words, not 2 million. The daily page rate is the same, though the mountain now seems steeper. But it's still more pleasure than pain. Here's a painting by Henry Allan, a Dundalk man who exhibited this at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1889. He studied at the Académie Royale in Antwerp, where he may have overlapped with Vincent van Gogh. This scene is of a country road near the city. The RHA is still a wonderful, unstuffy place: a couple of months ago, while refurbishments were going on, member-artists took over upper rooms as temporary studios, and could be seen, paint-stained, drinking tea in the café.

It's been a day of artists and artisans: Harry Allberry, the Liverpool-born architect who fitted out Leinster House in central Dublin as a home for the Dáil (parliament) following independence. David Allen, the Belfast printer who with his sons built up one of the biggest poster-printing businesses in the world, of which one is shown here. Mary Martha Alment, who benefited from the first art classes for women at the Royal Dublin Society and went on to exhibit at the RHA over a period of 50 years. (A sad note in the DIB: "Few of her works can now be located.) Bryan Gerard Alton, "physician, politician and goldsmith" - who sat in the Dáil, was a pioneer of gastroenterology, drove around Dublin in a Rolls-Royce smoking cigars and was "an authority on graphics, ceramics, silver and paintings, and was twice master warden of the Goldsmiths' Company of Dublin". (This doesn't actually make him a goldsmith, but let's hope he was.) Charles Frederick Anderson, architect, who left Ireland during the Famine and contributed to the extension of the United States Capitol in the 1850s, although his participation in the project was not always acknowledged. Maybe because of this, he "kept a brace of pistols on his desk". William Allingham, "poet and customs official", who wrote:

  Up the airy mountain,
  Down the rushy glen,
  We daren't go a-hunting
  For fear of little men;
  Wee folk, good folk,
  Trooping all together;
  Green jacket, red cap,
 And white owl's feather!

And, my personal favorite, the great Sara Allgood, who was the original Widow Quin in Synge's Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey (her sister Molly - stage name Máire O'Neill - played Pegeen Mike), the original Juno in O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock and the original Bessie Burgess in the same playwright's The Plough and the Stars. The DIB mentions her film role in John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, for which she received an Oscar nomination, where she performed alongside other Abbey Players Barry Fitzgerald and his brother Arthur Shields as well as the adorable Maureen O'Hara. But it doesn't mention her two major roles (pre-Hollywood) for Alfred Hitchcock: in 1930 as Juno alongside Fitzgerald (the film was lasciviously renamed The Shame of Mary Boyle) and in the first British talking picture, Blackmail (1929).

One thing I forgot to mention yesterday. As if 9,700 actual Irish lives weren't enough, the DIB decided to include Ailill Ólom, a "mythical Munster king." Now, I live with a Munster woman, and know they can be quite fierce in defending their prerogatives. But still, when did non-persons get a pass into the dictionary? The apparent justification: the "historical significance of Ailill lies in the number of dynasties that claimed descent from him." Well, those of you who've been paying attention know that last week I made a convincing case for my direct descent from Zeus. So can a rackload of FitzGeralds who appear in the DIB. On this reasoning, the head Greek god should also be profiled. I think this was a mistake.

Hymnists, code-breakers and masonic eavesdroppers

2010-01-04T00:38:00.000-08:00

Ireland has a lot of history for a small place. And a lot of history writing. I'm aware of at least 6 multi-volume histories (not all yet completed) of the country since the 1970s, three of which have come from the same publisher. I own a mere 8 one-volume histories that follow the full timeline from prehistory to the modern day: judging from the books available online, there must be dozens of these. Since F.S.L. Lyons' landmark Ireland Since the Famine in 1971, histories of modern Ireland have poured forth from major historians - among them, R.F. Foster, J.J. Lee, Alvin Jackson, Paul Bew and Diarmuid Ferriter - alongside monographs on every conceiveable topic, with legions of them on the big subjects (Parnell, anyone?). For an amateur with a day job such as myself, it's quite impossible to keep up, no matter how motivated; I imagine it's hard even for the professional historians. The current population of the entire island, north and south, is currently around 6.2 million. Do countries of comparable size have as much written history or as many professional historians? Laos? Jordan? Denmark? Maybe, but I'd bet against it.

A massive project such as the DIB contends with the incredible weight of all this history. For many Irish, the lives of others seem to take place in a parallel universe. While many are comfortable with, say, the influx of West Africans or Poles that have transformed the look and feel of the place in the past 20 years, you'll still hear in polite conversation terms of denigration towards the Irish-born that are throwbacks to the colonial period - "West Brit", "Castle Catholic" and the like. (As recently as the 1990s, I heard the leader of Fine Gael described as the latter by someone who [a] was under 40 and [b] wasn't drunk at the time.) I mentioned Daniel Corkery a couple of days ago: while he was a considerable literary and cultural critic, he certainly had a few blind spots, as Roy Foster and others have rightly pointed out. In his book on the playwright John Millington Synge, he says of Synge's protestant family, which came to Ireland in the seventeenth century, that (and I quote from memory) it was "in Ireland, if not of it." Well, I sort of get the point, but it doesn't really reach the complexity of the question. Quite a lot of people whose families had been in Ireland for generations of course shot off to Britain in the 1920s after independence, but there were others, such as the Protestant nationalist Hubert Butler, who roundly criticized them for it.

The DIB reflects this. Many 19th- and 20th-century lives start in Ireland and end in Britain, usually England. And they often evade our casual definitions of Irishness. Nothing could be more English, could it, than the choir of King's College, Cambridge singing Once in Royal David's City at its annual Christmas festival? Indeed not, and properly so. Except it's no secret that the author of the carol and other canonical hits such as All Things Bright and Beautiful, and There is a Green Field Far Away, Cecil Frances "Fanny" Alexander was born in Dublin, lived in Wicklow and Tyrone and died in Derry (this is what the DIB calls the city, as do I, but strictly it's incorrect since the legally-required peition to make the change from Londonderry to Derry has not yet been submitted to the Privy Council in Britain). So, Irish through and through, but not in a way Corkery would have acknowledged.

Or Hugh Alexander (full name Conel Hugh O'Donnell Alexander, a truly outstanding chess player from Cork, son of an Irish-born engineering professor at Queen's College (the predecessor of the present University College), who once beat Botvinnik (one of the best ever) and who also worked during the Second World War as a cryptanalyst with Alan Turing during the Second World War as part of the team that cracked the Enigma ciphers. However, CHO'D, as he was known for his chess writing, moved to England when he was 11, completed his education there as well as his entire professional career. He played chess many times for England, and declined an invitation to play for Ireland. So, how Irish is that? I think the answer is, as much as he felt. He also features in the British Dictionary of National Biography and his inclusion in both volumes seems right to me.
It's interesting to me that these contradictions have kept coming up in the first few days' reading of the DIB. I think they're not going to go away, because they're instrinsic to Irish history and the Irish (I almost said "national" before slapping my own wrist) condition. Last summer, I took Liam to the excellent Wicklow Gaol, which has a very touching set of material on the transportation of Irish convicts to Australia. It's a familiar story touching on poverty, class and colonialism and resonant of the state of Ireland and Irish life at the time. However, meeting the unlucky convicts off the boat in Van Diemen's Land (modern day Tasmania) might have been Antrim man James (later Sir James) Agnew, who went on to be premier of his state. (Of course, the people who arrested, charged, tried, judged and sentenced the convicts, as well as the captains and crews of the ships that took them away were most likely Irish as well.) If nothing else, the DIB puts any atavistic victimhood in which one might indulge in its proper context, not least by putting Irish people on both sides of the equation.

Some other gems from today's reading: Josie Airey, the battered wife whose courageous and lonely court battle culminated in victory before the European Court of Human Rights (her barrister was the future President and United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson) and forced the Irish government to provide legal assistance to similar claimants, a step towards a more comprehensive of the country's antiquated family laws. (The DIB entry relies on mainly second-hand sources, and its bibliography does not reference the text of the ECHR's judgment, which is available on the internet.) Thomas Allan, an eighteenth-century politician whose large fortune was kick-started by a lottery win of the enormous sum of £9,000 - a nice change from the usual exemplary tales of hard graft and dedication.

Also, John Aird, the Scottish civil engineer who was resident engineer and later chief engineer responsible for building the harbor at Dun Laoghaire (my birthplace), an enormous project whose piers still offer one of the nicest walks in south Dublin. The DIB doesn't mention (at least not here) that the harbor was built in response to an appalling shipwreck in 1807 that claimed the lives of 380 people: it was called the "Asylum Harbour" because its initial role was less a commercial enterprise than a means of providing ships with shelter from the severe conditions in that part of Dublin Bay. And, Elizabeth Aldworth, an 18th-century Cork woman who was threatened with death because she eavesdropped on her father's masonic lodge meeting. The solution: make her a mason, apparently one of the few women ever to be a regular lodge member. You think the Irish have inclusion issues? Ask the freemasons ...

Stammering Hugh, sundry antagonizers and a really important scutcher

2010-01-03T01:05:00.000-08:00

My son Liam was born and is being raised in America. His mother was very understanding of my wish to give him an Irish forename, and set just one condition: it had to be capable of pronunciation by los gringos. This reduced the available choices to an amazing extent. It put paid to Muirchertach and nearly everything else. Fortunately, thanks in part to the fame of the Ballymena man Neeson, Liam has proved to be a manageable name for Yankee friends and family. My own command of Irish names is nothing special, mind: having been diasporized before my early promise in Irish bore full fruit, I've had to rely on a few basic rules. The most important is: virtually no consonant is pronounced as it is written. Second, and related to the first is: if you don't know how a consonant is meant to be pronounced, try "v", "w" or leave it silent. The third, and maybe most practical rule is: when in doubt, ask a gaelgoir, since you're never going to work it out for yourself.

In the DIB, I've just reached the Áeds, which illustrates the challenge. Áed is cognate with the English name Hugh (although that doesn't help you speak it at all). It's prounounced "ay" as in "day".(Remember what I said about the silent consonant?) There are 11 pages of them in the DIB, followed by two of their close cousins Áedán (Ay-dawn). And they're all ancient, dating from pre-surname times, so finding themselves positioned alphabetically in volume 1, although some of them have descriptive second names such as "dub" (dove), for "black [haired]" and "menn" for "stammering". Stammering Hugh is a good person to start with, since his entry gives you a good sense of how ancient lives, drawn from ancient chronicles, always end up sounding like 1066 and All That:

... son of Colcu, king of south Leinster and contender for overkingship of the province, was a member of the Sil Cormaic lienage of Uí Chennselaig. His father Colcu (d. 722) had held the relatively minor kinship of Ard Ladrann, the caput of which was located at a site identified as the 'moat of Ardamine' (townland of Middletown, parish of Aramine, Co Wexford) ...

What you don't learn about is his stammer, which, once again showing my shallowness, is what I really to get to grips with. It must have been quite something to rate inclusion as part of his permanent name.

I think my problem with the Áeds is that they fall into two categories of people I'm not very interested in: ancient Irish kings and early Christian clergy. The chronicles from which the DIB entries are mainly constructed generally relate the stories of incessant battles with some downtime in between. The kings appear never to have stopped fighting, which may be why the country was periodically invaded by outsiders (Danes, Normans, etc.) since the local forces were too busy to notice until it was too late. The early Christians weren't too different, arguing vigorously among themselves, with Rome, with the English church, etc., on such essential topics as the correct date of Easter. Then one day they looked up from their disputes to find that the Pope had given Ireland to Henry II. In pointing this out, I realize that I may have appeared intolerant of the early presbyterians in yesterday's post. Well, I was, but I want to point out that they're not alone. The classic tropes of modern Irish life - begrudgery, the split and their ilk - seem to ooze from the ancient sap of our tribe. All those Áeds - the warlike, the light-grey, the undutiful, the seal-like (the animal, not the wax impression), of the eyelid, of the spiked helm - for me, at least, add up to much the same thing.

But then you turn a corner - or a page of the DIB - and everything changes. Pausing briefly to encounter Affraic the dominatrix - in this context, a medieval Latin word for abbess, alas - we start to connect once more with some flesh and blood. James Agar, a feisty eighteenth-century Kilkenny politician, feuded openly with a more talented rival, Henry Flood, finally challenging him to a duel. Having fired the first shot and missed, Agar's last words in life were "Fire, you scoundrel!" Agar's better-natured nephew, also James, followed in the family tradition and was elected to parliament from Kilkenny. A contemporary pronounced him the "best of all the Agars, who had not the best of characters."

Don Juan del Águila commanded the Spanish contingent that surrendered at Kinsale, Co. Cork in 1601, signalling the complete military defeat of the native Irish against the forces of the English Queen Elizabeth - possibly the key date in Irish history. Âguila was not at all incompetent and gave the English a hard time during a long siege. But it turns out that the reason he went to Ireland was because the alternative was to stay in prison for having coruptly managed Spanish crown funds during a previous campaign. Following the comprehensive defeat of the Irish forces, Don Juan negotiated the surrender of his army, which was allowed to return to Spain unharmed. Thanks.

Tim Ahearne and his younger brother Dan Ahearn were astonishing athletes in the early 20th century. They were from Dirreen, near Athea in Co. Limerick which is where Patricia's mother's family - Aherns - come from. Tim won the triple jump (then hop, step and jump) gold medal at the 1908 Olympics, setting an Olympic record that stood for 16 years. Because of the First World War, Dan didn't get to compete in the Olympics until he was too old, but held the world triple jump record (surpassing his brother's mark) for 13 years. The Ahearnes - spellings vary - seem to be to the DIB's sporting coverage what the Áeds are to kingship and religion: Balty and Gah Ahern figure as champion hurlers, while another Limerick man, Bud Ahern, played soccer for both the Republic and Northern Ireland.

The first really substantial entry in the DIB - four-and-a-half double-columned pages by the historian Ronan Fanning - is on the politican Frank Aiken, mainly forgotten today, but an absolutely pivotal figure in the country for 65 years until his death in 1983. Chief of staff of the IRA, cabinet minister and the engine of Irish foreign policy from the time the country joined the UN where he strongly supported decolonization and the dismemberment of the European empires and was invited to be the first to sign the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in recognition of his ten-year effort to bring it into effect. Imperious, stubborn and infuriating - much like his political patron Éamon de Valera - and with a penchant (fortunately largely contained by his civil servants) for crackpot theories such as Social Credit, Aiken nevertheless towered over his time. And he spotted - but sadly could not obstruct - one of the most baleful directions taken by his own political party, Fianna Fáil in the second half of the twentieth century: the nexus of money and cronyism between it and business, particularly the construction industry, that corrupted the entire fabric of the party, and still does. He spotted early on the true character of the future Taoiseach and Fianna Fáil leader Charles Haughey, the most talented and corrupt of them all, but was unable to stop him. Fanning makes an elegant and convincing case for Aiken's importace, and rightly laments the absence of a decent biography of the man. Aiken was also keen on something called flax scutching and held patents for a beehive and a sprung heel for a shoe: fabulous details of no significance that I hope will continue to be plentiful. Better than Stammering Hugh any day.

Planters, photographers, phrenologists and a "lady" golfer

2010-01-01T22:18:00.000-08:00

It's the Dictionary of Irish Biography, not, as in Britain, the Dictionary of National Biography. Because, of course, in Ireland the word "national" evokes the "national question" and the fact that two sovereign nations exercise jurisdiction on our small island. Maybe inspired by rugby rather than soccer, the DIB has opted for the only sensible approach and made itself an all-Ireland affair - after all, the political partition of the country has only existed for 90 years, a few grains of temporal sand. (There is, in fact a Dictionary of Ulster Biography, happily dedicated to all nine counties of the ancient province, not just the six of the present Northern Ireland.)

But other fissures exist of course, without the need for anybody to draw lines on the map. In Barry Levinson's enjoyable comedy film about a cross-community pair of toupée salesmen in Belfast, An Everlasting Piece, the Protestant is called George O'Neill, a name ambiguous enough to evade automatic classification by faith. Stopped by an RUC - and therefore likely Protestant - policeman, he makes a point of identifying himself as George ENOCH O'Neill, with loud emphasis on the middle name. No doubt there. Coming from Dublin, I haven't had to contend much with the name game, even though my own surname, for the historically alert, is definitely "planter" - Grantham Street in Dublin is named for a minor baronial title of Earl De Grey, lord lieutenant from 1841-44. (This is pretty funny, since my father got the name out of a book when he traded in his Hungarian surname for something that he thought would blend in better. I may return to this.). But the moment you open the DIB, you realize that in a way, it's a segregated work.

Take the A's. Once you get past the first two exotica - a huguenot divine, Jacques Abbadie, and the sixth-century Saint Abbán - it's planters and blow-ins all the way: Abbot, Abbott, Abell, Abercorn, Abercrombie, Abercromby, Aberdeen, Abernethy, Abrahams, Abrahamson ... no obvious Celts until page 25 when the seventh-century Abbot Abdomán makes his appearance. If Daniel Corkery was right in locating "true" Ireland among the rural, Catholic and Irish-speaking (he wasn't), he wouldn't have found much to cheer for in this long procession of urban Protestant English-speakers (and one can only imagine what Corkery would have made of the Ukraine-born Irish-speaking physician Leonard Abrahamson, possibly the only vice-president of the Christian Brothers' Schools Past Pupils' Union to be buried in a Jewish cemetery). I expect the flow will go in the other direction when we get to the O's, but it's arresting to be reminded right up front, as it were, that the richness and range of lives will lead us to all kinds of places, and also posit some very different worlds trying to co-exist in the Irish space.

The early A's leading us to Scottish and Anglo surnames and therefore often to El Norte, there are some surprises and treats for this parochial Leinsterman. I hadn't known that the legendary suspected (and acquitted) serial killer Dr. John Bodkin Adams, who was, er, implicated in the deaths of 132 patients who left him money in their wills and a couple of dozen others, was raised by strict Plymouth Brethren in Randalstown, Antrim and took his medical degrees in Belfast at Queens. The DIB entry relates the salient facts of his life, but avoids speculation, of which there was very, very much back in the day. So his likely gayness, friends in high places and the like, don't make it into the DIB's account. Maybe out of considerations of space, but regrettably in terms of describing a colorful life, the DIB also omits the fact that Adams was President and Honorary Medical Officer of the British Clay Pigeon Shooting Association, all the more relevant since he apparently died as the result of a clay-pigeon-shooting-related accident.

Another Ulster sporting legend - now there's a segue - was also new to me. Rhona Adair from Cookstown may have been the best woman ("lady" as they used so say) golfer in the world, playing from the age of eight and still lady president of Royal Portrush at her death at 82 or 83 in 1961. My mother remembered going to Portrush in 1951 to see the British Open with her father, who played serious stuff for Portmarnock; maybe their paths crossed. Again, a bit of color might have helped: the New York Times' 1903 account of Adair's conquest of the U.S. is full of wonderful detail, heaping praise on her while pointing out that her play was often casual and lackadaisical - contrasted favorably to the high seriousness with which her American opponents conducted themselves.

The other Ulsterperson who charmed me among the early A's is the studio photographer William Abernethy, who expanded from his original Belfast location to Bangor, Newry and Dundalk and claimed to have taken 18,000 photographs in 1894. This lovely portrait, apparently taken by Abernethy in the 1920s (I say "apparently" because it might have been done by one of his employees), illustrates the quality of his work, or at least his house style. (It seems odd to have a biographical dictionary without pictures, particularly of artists and their work, but one can imagine the space and costs that prevented that. Thankfully, the internet turns up all sorts of wonderful things, like this, just one of a host of Abernethy studio portraits, on Flickr.)

It may be my own lack of high seriousness that draws me to the offbeat details. Worthy entries on a pair of Abell brothers from Cork, antiquary Abraham and philanthropist Joshua, each mention a third brother, Robert, a phrenologist, without further detail. I'm happy to learn about Abraham's distiguished antiquarian enquiries, sadly evidenced by a single extant work, "Origin of St Patrick's Pot." I'm also highly impressed by Abraham's earnest activities in promoting peace and attacking slavery. But couldn't there also have been a paragraph or two on the activities of a leading nineteenth century Irish phrenologist? It's such a lost practice, and there's much I'd like to know.

Some early trends (?) The fantastic disputatiousness of presbyterian clergy seems inevitably to portend the fractious fissiparousness of modern unionism. John Abernethy, Robert Acheson, Patrick Adair ... we've barely reached page 19 and there seems to be no end to the investigations, hearings, recriminations, expulsions, reinstatements, re-expulsions, all rotating angelically on theological pins. Also, querulous soldiery. General Sir Ralph Abercromby, the commander-in-chief of government forces in Ireland, declaimed in 1798 that his own army was "in a state of licentiousness which must render it formidable to everyone but the enemy." General Sir William Adair, who served in the British Army while running guns for the UVF in 1914. And the Dubliner William Augustus Adams, soldier and poet, who took an action against the British army - he claimed that adverse reports that blocked his promotion violated regulations - all the way to the House of Lords, and lost. Sweetest detail? The Coleraine-born surgeon James Johnston Abraham set a chicken's broken leg when he was child. Most revolting person so far? John George Adair, whose capsule DIB description - land speculator and evicting landlord - says it all. The small life whose telling justifies its inclusion? Charles Acton, who reviewed more than 6,000 concerts for the Irish Times. Happiest rediscovery? To be reminded of Max Adrian, né Bor in Enniskillen, whose 50 year career on stage and screen embraced everything from Shakespeare to Up Pompeii! Unaccountable that the DIB mentions his movies for Ken Russell, including The Devils and The Music Lovers but not his greatest Russell performance of all, as the composer Frederic Delius in 1968's Song of Summer. So much left out already, and we're only on page 28.

Gods, deserters and other representative Irish lives

2009-12-31T15:50:00.001-08:00

The new Dictionary of Irish Biography is a monumental work, seeking to provide brief lives of “those names which seem most likely to be the objects of enquiry in the twenty-first century.” It was my Christmas present from Patricia. I plan to read it all the way through, roughly 27 pages a day for a year.

According to family legend, a Dillon forbear was made pregnant a long while back by her employer, a Duke of Leinster. (I’ve yet to find any corroboration for this story, but a surprising number of Dillon family legends have turned out to be true.) So, I’m possibly related – by rape, maybe – to what used to be called “the quality”. Which, thanks to the writing of Irish lives, turns out to involve a kind of apotheosis.

The Dukes of Leinster are FitzGeralds, who came to Ireland as Norman invaders in the late 12th century. They believed themselves – maybe still believe – to be related to the Gherardini of Tuscany (and therefore scions of the Mona Lisa, among other dignitaries). The Gherardini in turn allowed themselves to be persuaded by ancient flatterers that they were descended from Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome. Perhaps out of Christian tact, they passed lightly over Aeneas’ own lineage, in direct descent from the god Zeus. (“A pagan god. I might have known,” my devout great uncle Brendan Dillon sniffed when I gave him the news.)

Another relative, on the McCormack side, is said to have distinguished himself during the Easter Rising of 1916. He was a deserter, or so it’s claimed, having failed to turn out for the Irish Volunteers when ordered, although it has to be said that the conflicting military instructions that week seem to have bamboozled loftier personages than my great-great uncle. Whatever the reason, he deemed it prudent to depart the country shortly afterwards, using the name of his brother, who obtained a laissez-passer from the military authorities based in Trinity College and gave it to his combat-shy sibling.

As far as I can tell, none of my relatives is in the DIB. They were not the kind of people who become “objects of enquiry”: tram conductors, rent collectors, marine engineers, dentists, travelling salesmen, waiters and the like. But even my obscure Dillon and McCormack ancestors can claim some connection to great persons and great events. The lives of representative – if not necessarily exemplary – Irishmen and women are in that sense the lives of us all. As a demigod, I understand these things.