Last week John
Coulson Hannon passed away in his 88th year. He was a native of Athy, the eldest son of
Rex and Grace Hannon of Ardreigh Cottage.
His father Rex was well known in Athy where he died in 1961. The Hannon family had links with Athy and
South Kildare going back to the 1690’s and as mill owners at Plumplestown,
Ardreigh and Athy town provided employment for many local people at a time when
full time work was rarely available. John
Coulson Hannon was named after his uncle who was killed in France during the
First World War. That uncle was one of
four Hannons, two brothers and two cousins who as young men were killed in the
four year massacre which we have come to call the Great War.
Just a short while
before John Hannon’s death I received a copy of a recently published biography
of his uncle, Gordon Hannon. Gordon and
Rex Hannon were brothers, brought up with two other brothers and four sisters
in Ardreigh House where I am tonight penning these lines. Rex was the eldest member of the family,
while Gordon was two years younger, having been born in 1891. It was their two younger brothers, John
Coulson (known as Ion) and Norman Leslie who were sadly killed in France in
1915 and 1916.
The story of
Gordon Hannon is told by his son David Hannon in a book with the title “Gordon Hannon, Some Parson! - Some
Man”. Gordon went to Trinity College
where he excelled at sports and having gained his B.A. in 1913 he entered the
Divinity School. His ordination came
just over a year after the death in May 1915 of his younger brother, Norman
Leslie, who had joined Gordon as a Trinity student just two years
previously. Professor J.F. Gwynn, Regius
Professor of Divinity at Trinity, then in his 89th year, wrote to
Gordon Hannon on the eve of his ordination.
“You enter the Holy Office of Priest I know
in a humble spirit of self devotion and trust in the grace about to be given
you to guide and strengthen you for its discharge”.
Just two months
after his ordination Gordon Hannon suffered the loss of yet another
brother. This time it was Norman Leslie
Hannon who fell, as did thousands of other Irish men, at the Battle of the
Somme. The loss of two younger brothers
who had shared with him the delights and pastimes of youth on the River Barrow
at Ardreigh played heavily on Gordon Hannon and memories of their shared youth
would forever be recalled in the photographs of the two lost brothers which
would thereafter grace his writing desk.
In 1917 Gordon
took up the position of head of the Belfast T.C.D. Mission, an institution then
just five years old based in the Shankhill Road area of Belfast. It was a Church of Ireland Mission to the
working class people of the area and presented a new and perhaps a unique
challenge for a newly ordained curate from the South of Ireland whose social
background differed hugely from those amongst whom he intended to
administer. Living and working in the
very heartland of Ulster, Protestantism presented the Kildare man with his
first major challenge when a decision had to be made as to whether he should
join the Orange Order. His son David
tells us that his father thought long and hard about his decision and
eventually decided that being able to accept the greater majority of its
written objectives, his acceptance of membership of the Orange Order would help
him identify with the men of the Shankhill Road. Later in life when he moved to Lurgan,
unhappy with the divisive elements of the Orange Order, he resigned his membership. He was to spend three years and eight months
in missionary work on the Shankhill Road before he took up the rectorship of
Ballymoney Parish. It was in Ballymoney
that he met his future wife, Hilda Denny, and 67 years later she wrote of
travelling to meet her future in-laws in Athy.
“Gordon’s mother was such a warm
motherly person with a terrific sense of humour. His father was a charming gentle old man,
with failing eyesight and an air of sadness about him. He had lost his two youngest sons in the War”.
The young couple
married on 11th April 1923, but tragedy again marked the otherwise
happy occasion when Gordon’s father died tragically of gunshot wounds in his
house at Ardreigh just a few days beforehand.
The following year Rev. Gordon was appointed Rector of Lurgan where he
would remain for the next 16 years.
Lurgan then, and some would say, remains today, a town whose people are
highly critical of anything that smacks of “popery”
but under the Southerns astute rendering of Church affairs Gordon Hannon’s
rectorship attracted and maintained high congregations.
In 1932, a year
before his appointment as Archdeacon of Dromore, Gordon Hannon came in contact
with the Oxford Group founded by an American, Frank Buchman in 1921 as an
evangelising group which in 1938 was renamed “Moral Rearmament”.
Described by Hannon as “a
Christian revolution for remaking the World”, Moral Rearmament became an
important part of his life thereafter and just months after the outbreak of
World War II he resigned the Rectorship of Lurgan in order to concentrate on
the Moral Rearmament Campaign in Ireland.
Moving to Belfast with his wife and six children he threw himself into
the war effort through his work in Moral Rearmament, encouraging Protestant,
Catholic and Dissenters alike “to listen
to God and to do what he says”. Thus
was a Christian philosophy to be created to underpin industrial and
international relationships. After 14
years at the helm of Moral Rearmament in Ireland Gordon Hannon returned to
parochial work when in 1954 he took charge of Kilbroney Parish in Rostrevor,
County Down. His arrival there was later
recalled by Cardinal Cathal Daly who described him as showing “a prime example of reaching out across the
traditional divisions of the area. It was as a result of his work in the
Kilbroney Parish, that since that time, ecumenism has been accepted as part of
every day life.”
In May 1960 Gordon
Hannon preached his farewell sermon and retired to North Antrim where with his
wife Hilda they lived in a house they called Ardreigh, the same name as the old
family home in Athy. Archdeacon Gordon
Hannon, the Kildare man who spent his entire ministry, apart from a short
period in Dublin, amongst Northern folk, died in Dalriada Hospital in
Ballycastle in October 1977. He was 86
years of age.
His son Brian
followed his father into the Church Ministry and in recent years retired as
Church of Ireland Bishop of Clogher.
Another son David has now written a biography of his gentle and caring
father who travelled North from Ardreigh, Athy while the First World War raged,
and where sixty years later he would die after a lifetime devoted to living out
the Christian message.
John Coulson
Hannon died last week in Galway and with his passing another long standing link
with Athy has been lost. The Hannons,
once an important part of the social fabric of our town, made an immeasurable
and vital contribution to the economic life of local community. Despite the decades which have passed since
the Hannon family left Athy, they are still remembered with fondness and
affection by the people of Athy and South Kildare.
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